Wink Poppy Midnight(5)

I suddenly wished, with my whole damn heart, that I’d always lived in this old house, across the road from Wink and the Orphans.

“Midnight, Midnight, Midnight . . .”

Poppy was saying my name over and over in the drippy sweet voice that had once set me on fire and now just made me feel cold.

I yanked myself out of the peaceful, surreal feeling that Wink had cast, and finally focused on the girl in front of me. “Go home, Poppy.”

Poppy blinked her tart gray eyes. Slowly. She played with the expensive pockets on her expensive dress, and smiled at me—her gentle, sad smile that, with very little effort, she could make seem sincere. “We’re not over, Midnight. We’re not over until I say we’re over.”

I couldn’t even look at her. The peaceful Wink feeling was gone now, entirely gone. All I felt was anger. And melancholy.

Poppy reached up and put her hand on my cheek. Her eyes hooked into my skin and pulled my face down, toward hers, like a fish on a line.

I fought her. But not nearly as hard as I wanted to.

Poppy was used to getting what she wanted. That was the thing about Poppy.

She won. She always won.





LEAF DIDN’T TALK in school, he didn’t stand around and yak about boy things with other stupid boys, none of the Bell kids talked, really, which is one of the things that made them so weird. Leaf was eerie and still and quiet, and he always looked bemused or angry. And when he didn’t look bemused or angry, he looked blank and distant and removed, like he wasn’t seeing anything or anyone else around him at all.

Bridget Rise was a pants pee-er. Her older brother had been a pants pee-er too. I guess it ran in the family, a genetic pants-peeing gene, like having bad eyesight or dry skin or thin hair, something that evolution should have bred out, Darwin style. The last time Bridget peed her pants was at recess in third grade. Some of the kids called her gross and started throwing dirt at her, little tight handfuls of it that got in her hair and down her shirt.

I might have thrown some of the dirt. I might have given the other kids the idea. Bridget was crying, sobbing, sobbing, and then out of nowhere Leaf was there. He was eleven or twelve, but he had the temper, even then.

He picked Bridget up, soaked jeans and dirt and everything, and carried her into school.

And then he came back outside and kicked the shit out of every last one of us, everyone with dirt on their hands, literally, me included. He shoved my face into the ground, right into the mud I’d been throwing, and told me that if I teased Bridget again he’d break my nose.

He meant it, we all knew he meant it. And when I forgot anyway and called Bridget The Tinkler two weeks later at lunchtime, Leaf found me after school, one hand, one punch, that’s all it took, my eyes crossing as his fist hit my face, crack, snap, blood, scream.

My nose was still crooked from it. Even my doctor parents couldn’t fix it, not perfectly. Midnight said it made me even more beautiful, the tiny imperfection, but he read poetry and his mind was soft, like his heart. I stopped listening to him years ago.

I didn’t let Leaf’s laughter deter me that day in the hayloft. I was confused because I’d never lost at anything before, but I was high on the challenge, and I wanted to try at something for once, really try. That’s how I felt, at first.

The day I turned sixteen I walked up to Leaf between classes. I leaned my body against his gray locker, back arched. I was wearing the shortest skirt I owned, the one that made my legs look ten feet long, the one that made Briggs start drooling at Zoe’s party the other night, he actually drooled, and had to wipe his mouth with his hand. I’d left my bra sitting on my bed, and I knew my nipples were showing through my black slub T.

“Hi, Leaf,” I said, using the low, breathy voice that brought boys to their knees.

And he looked at me. Not with lust, or craving, or greed. He looked at me in the same way I looked at the band nerds in their marching uniforms as they bumbled down the hall carrying their stupid shiny instruments. The same way I looked at the spineless boys in my class with their panting eagerness and pathetic over-confidence and wispy arms and spindly legs.

“Move.”

That’s all Leaf said. He stood there, tall and skinny and red-haired and barely caring and all he said was move.

I never cried, not even as a baby. My parents said it was because I was such a sweet little angel, but my parents are fools. I never cried because there are only two reasons people cry, one is empathy and the other is self-pity, and I never had any of either. I cried over that move, though, I cried, cried, cried.





REVENGE.

Justice.

Love.

They are the three stories that all other stories are made up of. It’s the trifecta. It’s like if you’re making soup for a bunch of Orphans. You have to start with onions, and celery, and carrots. You cut them up and toss them in and cook them down. Everything that comes after this is just other. Stories are that way too.

I told the Hero about the Orphans, and The Thing in the Deep.

I liked his eyes.





POPPY FOLLOWED ME through my new house, across the creaking hardwood floor, around jumbled-up furniture, under spiderwebs, over boxes, up the stairs, hands sliding over the smooth dark wood of the banister, down the narrow, dark hallway, to the high-ceilinged bedroom that I’d taken as my own, last door on the left.