Wink Poppy Midnight (17 page)

T
HE THING ABOUT
Briggs, the secret thing, was that he'd never hurt a fly. He was a bully, and like most bullies, like all bullies but me, he was a baby underneath it all. At least Midnight was a baby straight up, there was something to respect in that, there was. I said before that Thomas was the sad one, the sensitive one, but Briggs . . . I'd once seen Briggs cry over a spotted owl in the park that had broken its wing and kept hopping around because he couldn't fly. Briggs tried to hide his tears but I saw them, and heard the way he was sniffling too, on his knees in the grass, and his voice was thick and choked and he kept asking me over and over what he should do, as if I was some sort of spotted owl wing-healer.

And right before the bird, Briggs had been taunting a nerdy little kid about his thick glasses and the soccer ball he couldn't kick worth a damn, and the whole time it never occurred to him, the contradiction.

I used to meet the Yellows in the morning, not too early, at Lone Tree Joe. In the summer it was filled with wealthy, weasel-faced hipsters on break from school and staying in their parents' vacation homes until September, but I was
Poppy and had to have the best even if it meant rubbing elbows with the non-local trust-fund brat packs.

It seems like a million years ago, getting expensive lattes, shaken with ice, just the right combination of espresso to milk, just the right toffee color or I'd complain.

I once convinced Buttercup and Zoe to help me dig my own grave. We were bored and I was in a macabre mood and I wanted to see what it was like, to lie in the dirt six feet under like a dead person. We tromped out to the woods with shovels stolen from outside Loren's Hardware store. They whined and whined but eventually we got a good trench dug out between two trees. I plopped down inside and crossed my arms over my chest like Wednesday Addams, and Zoe leaned over the edge and said something about worms and spiders, but I didn't care, I stayed there for twenty minutes with my eyes closed. I wasn't scared, it didn't even feel that morbid, it just felt sort of peaceful, really.

Briggs caught me watching him in the woods.

He called out my name, kind of sad and desperate, but by then I was already gone, flitting through the night like one of Wink's fairies.

Briggs had been digging in the dirt and muttering about a
golden marble
like some half-crazed, sweating farm laborer, and I couldn't figure out why, not for a while. I had to sink down and lie on the dirt in the forest and put some pieces together before I got to the bottom of it.

I
SAW
B
UTTERCUP
and Zoe on Midnight's steps.

Buttercup, sleek as a selkie, smooth black hair and olive skin like the taciturn enchantress in
Lost Lies and Runaway Sighs.

Zoe, sparkly hazel eyes and thick black lashes and a small, pointed nose like the fay in
Rat Hall and the Broom Girls
. When she smiled at Midnight, her smile was as sparkly as her eyes.

All three talked for a while and then walked right through my farm, right into the forest, and down the path.

I got the Orphans out of bed and took them into town to get ice cream for breakfast. I did this sometimes in the summer, when Mim had her readings. We went to the little place by the library that was run by a witchie lady with long white hair. She opened the shop at ten in the morning because she believed that ice cream was sometimes for breakfast too. Bee Lee got strawberry, she always got strawberry, but you never could tell about Peach and the twins. Felix went for the pistachio, and so did I.

We were all sitting on the green benches in the park, eating in the sun, when I saw her, standing in a brick alley across
the road, the shadows surrounding her like a pack of wolves.

No one else could see her. I knew they couldn't. Just me.

I gave the rest of my waffle cone to Hops and walked across the street without another thought, like she was the blond, bloodthirsty siren in
Three Songs for a Drowning
.

I walked into the alley, bravely, right into the pack of wolf-shadows . . . but she was already gone.

I
STOOD I
N
the kitchen and listened. Dad was upstairs in his attic, on the phone. His voice drifted down through the cracks in the floorboards and settled on my ears like dust. He was speaking German with the occasional Latin phrase thrown in. I only spoke a bit of French, but Alabama was fluent in it, like our mom. My dad spoke four languages, if you counted Latin, which I did.

His voice was a song I didn't want to end. It made me feel safe. It made me feel . . . normal.

There was a knock on the front door. I'd been expecting it, somehow.

Peach was standing on the steps, red curls and bare feet.

“Follow me,” she said.

So I followed her, short strong legs pounding into the ground with focused, kid-like purpose. Across the road and into the garden. Wink was sitting in the strawberry patch, feet in the dirt, fat white clouds shielding her from the passionate noonday sun.

“I was up in the hayloft,” Peach said to both me and Wink, now that she'd gathered us together. “It didn't smell like hay. It smelled like tea, or flowers. And this was on the floor.”

She handed me a piece of black paper.

Wink watched me take it, face calm and passive, like it was nothing, just an ordinary thing, another note from a missing girl, left in a hayloft.

I felt Peach staring at me. “I can read,” she said. “I can read all kinds of things. I'm really good at it, better than you, probably.” I hadn't questioned her reading skills, it hadn't even occurred to me, but Peach wasn't the kind of kid to let that stop her from putting me in my place.

I didn't want to open the letter.

I wouldn't.

I had to.

I did.

My fingers were clammy. They left damp smudges on the page.

Midnight.

It's up to you.

Show me what you're made of.

Gather the Yellows.

Go to the woods.

Find me.

Find me in the mist.

I read it again. And again. And then I gave the note to Wink.

Peach shook her curly hair, chin to the right and left. “I read the note and that's how I knew it wasn't for any of us Orphans.
Going into the mist
is what Mim calls contacting the spirits. If you're having a séance, I want to come.”

“No,” Wink said, softly. “Not to this. But later we can hold another séance in the hayloft, just us, and I'll let you be the medium this time, all right?”

Peach tapped her finger on the tip of her nose and started nodding. “I'll make a great medium. The best ever.”

Wink smiled, and the tips of her ears popped out between piles of red hair. “You will,” she replied, very serious.

Peach ran off, shouting to Hops and Moon, wherever they were, about how they were going to be so jealous because Wink put her in charge of a séance and soon she would be
bossing ghosts and spirits around, just wait until tomorrow in the hayloft.

Wink picked the last three ripe strawberries off their green stems, and gave one to me.

I fiddled with the strawberry, spinning it in my palm. “The flowery smell in the hayloft that Peach was talking about? It's jasmine.”

“Poppy wore jasmine oil.” Wink looked up, green eyes wide open and innocent, like always.

I nodded. I didn't tell her about my bedroom, about how the sheets and pillows smelled like Poppy at night. I just couldn't do it. It came too close to admitting that Poppy had been in my bed. And I didn't want Wink to know this.

“Buttercup and Zoe came to my house this morning. Buttercup found a black note from Poppy too.”

“What did it say?” Wink ate a strawberry, two small bites.

“Something about me and something about the time they went apple picking. I walked them home and we found Briggs and Thomas in the woods. I told them, Wink. I told them we're the reason Poppy is missing. I told them that we tied her up and left her in the Roman Luck house.”

Wink dug her small, pink toes into the black soil, past her heel, up to the ankle. “I think Poppy threw herself in the Blue Twist, Midnight. I think she drowned. And I think one of the Yellows is writing the notes.”

The world started spinning. I dropped my strawberry and pressed my hands to my eyes.
Stop with the blur, stop all the blurring, I can't take it, I can't . . .

I sat down in the dirt and Wink's arms went around me, tight. I took deep breaths and moved my hands away from my face so I could hug her back. She was wearing a fraying green cardigan over her overalls and she smelled liked strawberries and soil and jasmine.

I
WAS THERE
when Midnight found the Yellows down by the river, waiting for my body to wash ashore or something, though it never would, it never, ever would.

I watched them all and they didn't see me, not one damn speck of me. I liked being invisible, I was learning things, there were so many things I'd missed before, back when I always needed to be the center of attention.

Midnight told them all about some letter I supposedly wrote that said I wanted them to come together in the woods for a séance, as if I would ever ever ever ask them to hold a séance and contact my spirit, everyone knows that I don't believe in that crap, Grandpa never had any patience for the
mystical and neither do I. That stuff was for Wink and her mother and all their other fairy ilk, not for me.

Midnight got three of them to agree right off the bat. Thomas wanted to get out his Ouija board and ask it about the letter clues, and Buttercup and Zoe nodded in that twee twin way that used to drive me up a wall. Briggs just laughed, though, he knelt down and splashed cold river water on his face and just laughed, and went on and on about how I hadn't even been missing that many days, and I'd gone missing before, and it was nothing to get worked up about, the bastard. Midnight reminded him what he'd been up to lately, digging around in the forest for a marble like a lunatic, all because he'd gotten a letter too, and Briggs shut up after that.

I was there when they met in a little meadow near the Roman Luck house at midnight, flashlights dancing across the forest floor. I was watching. Thomas set up the Ouija board on the ground, right on the pine needles and dirt. He was so serious and careful and solemn about it that I half wanted to laugh and half wanted to put my hand on my heart and swear him my everlasting loyalty.

They set their fingers on the pointer and then started asking so many questions that the Ouija board could never have kept up, even if it actually worked, which it didn't. Thomas asked about Three Death Jack and the Greek gods and what it all meant and I remembered the time the two of us sat up on
the mountain watching the skiers and it made me kind of sad and nostalgic. Briggs asked about the gold marble and teacups and lemonade and it sounded like
Alice in Wonderland
gibberish, except it wasn't.

Buttercup and Zoe asked about apple picking and apple poems, and Midnight asked if the mist was a spiritual place or a real place and the pointer never moved, not once. Not even a flicker. Finally, finally, Midnight said they needed Wink, Wink could find me, if anyone could, and that was when it all really began, when it got aching and beautiful and palpable and true. They all started fighting, quiet at first, and then louder and louder until their voices echoed through the trees like the black-haired Bloodly Boys at one of their midnight feasts . . . oh hell, I was talking like her now, like Wink.

Anyway, anyway, you should have heard them, arguing about who knew me best, and why I really disappeared, why I would run away, why I would throw myself in the Twist. Thomas said I did it because I was sad, but that's because he's sad, and Briggs said I would never do it, because I'm a fighter, but that's because he's a fighter, and Buttercup said I felt guilty about all my past cruelty because she feels guilty about hers, and Zoe said that if I wanted to run away or throw myself in the river it was my right to do so, because she wants that to be her right too.

And none of them, not one, came close to the truth.

Except Midnight.

He repeated what he'd said earlier, about how they needed Wink, and off they went to get her.