Wink Poppy Midnight(48)

Night sky above.

Cold, dark water below.

I let myself sink down, down, down to the smooth river stones, down into the blackness, until the river ran over my head, and my hair fanned out like flames.

Wink wasn’t a villain.

She wasn’t a hero.

People aren’t just one thing. They never, ever are.

Wink was flesh and blood.

She was bad.

And she was good.

She was real.

And at least I was finally going to get to know her now. The real her.

The real living and breathing and thinking Wink.





MY PARENTS CAME home from their convention and tromped out to the Gold Apple Mine and demanded I return to civilization, just like they did before when I was out at Grandpa’s cabin. But I stood my ground this time, I just kept gutting the trout I’d caught earlier. My mom looked at my bloody hands and flinched, but I was stoic just like Anton Harvey, I was the spitting image. I told my parents I loved them but that living with them was no longer an option, catching fish and sleeping on the ground and being alone a lot was what I’d been built for, this was who I was, and doing the other things, being their little angel, it made me unhappy, and being unhappy made me mean.

My dad muttered something about knowing it all along, I’d had Anton’s eyes as a baby, I’d looked right at everyone in the same direct way and my dad knew it would come to this . . . though of course he hadn’t, the liar. My mom cooed and coaxed and when that didn’t work she sadly put her head in her hands, but I’d seen her do the same thing after spending the day with Grandpa, when he was alive, and she always bounced back just fine, so I wasn’t worried.

I watched their car as it left, and then stared at the ruts it made in the grass for a while.

They’d be back.

But until then I was going to enjoy the silence, every last peaceful, solitary splash of it.

It was almost sunset. I got my sleeping bag off the wooden mine floor, threw it on the grass, under the stars, so close to the river that I fell asleep with my fingertips in the water.





I TOLD THE Yellows about Poppy. I told them she was alive and living by herself out at Gold Apple Mine, and that she just wanted to be alone. I told them the letters were clues, but they’d been written by Wink, not Poppy—Wink left me clues so I could follow the story to the end, like Thief, when he plays Five Lies, One Truth with the old woman on the Never-Ending Bridge. I told them the séance had been a hoax, and Wink had been behind it all.

The Yellows disbanded.

I think that’s what Wink wanted, anyway.

Thomas found another girl to love, a sweet girl named Katie Kelpie who had nice curves and a nice smile and who was always laughing. She drove him around town on the back of her red Vespa and had started to teach him to play the tin whistle so he could join her Irish punk band. Katie talked a mile a minute, only pausing long enough to gaze up at Thomas and make sure he was happy, and he usually was.

I sometimes saw Buttercup and Zoe in the cemetery when I walked into town, taking gravestone rubbings and whispering in each other’s ears, like always, like nothing was missing.

Briggs.

I ran into him in the woods. It was a windy day, almost dusk. He was sitting beside a green tent and small fire, staring into space.

“If being alone out in nature is good enough for Poppy, it’s good enough for me,” he said, after a while.

I just nodded.

“She never loved us, you know. Not any of us.”

I nodded again. “How long you plan on being out here in the woods, Briggs?”

He shrugged. “As long as it takes.”

I left him by his fire.

I went over to the Bell farm and walked right through the kitchen door, no knocking, because that’s how things stood now. Mim was melting something over the stove, something that smelled like butter and honey and roses. Her red hair was tied back with a green scarf, and the sleeves of her black shirt were rolled up to her freckled elbows.

“Hold out your hand,” she said without looking up.

I did. She dropped a creamy dollop in the middle of my palm.

“It’s shea butter dream cream. It helps you sleep.”

I rubbed my hands together. “It smells good. What will it make me dream?”

Mim didn’t answer but she flashed me a mysterious smile over her shoulder. And she looked so much like Wink when she did it that I got goose bumps.

“It’s so quiet,” I said. “Where is everyone?”

“Felix saw that white deer this morning and they all ran off to follow him. Wink packed a picnic for the Orphans, so they could be a while.”

I sat down at the table. There was a freshly shelled bowl of sugar snap peas and I picked up a handful of the little green guys and put them in my mouth.

Mim started filling clear glass jars with the dream balm, one careful teaspoon at a time. She paused for a second, hands on her hips. She turned away from the counter, leaned across the table, and moved the bowl of peas out of the way.

“I’m going to read the cards for you, Midnight.”

“All right,” I said.

“No, I’m going to read Wink’s cards for you.”

That got me. “But Wink told me that you won’t read your kids’ cards anymore, ever since you read Bee Lee’s once and learned she was going to die young.”