Wink Poppy Midnight (3 page)

L
EAF DIDN'T TAL
K
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.

R
EVENGE.

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.

P
OPPY 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.

There weren't sheets on the bed, but the frame and mattress were up. I stepped over two boxes and then moved around the room and opened all the windows. All four had faded yellow curtains that smelled like dust.

I went back to the door and closed it. Dad wouldn't bother me if my door was closed. He respected privacy. Privacy was like gold to him, as in worth-its-weight. He wanted it, and so he gave it to others freely and without question.

I had to push the door shut the last few inches, so it would latch. This house seemed to be leaning on its side, like an old woman with one hand on her hip, and it made everything off kilter. Later on, I would come to like it. Later on I would hear the creaks and moans and feel welcome, and comforted,
like the house was speaking to me in its own gasping, rickety voice. I would be able to tell where Dad was, down to which corner of the room, just by the series of pops and shudders and squeaks that echoed down to me like the refrain of a song I knew by heart.

But back then, it was just an old house, two miles away from Poppy, across the road from the Bell farm.

I turned around.

Poppy stood in the dusty sunshine of my bedroom, wearing nothing but a thin white summer dress and the skin she was born in.

How could something so soft and supple and flawless as Poppy's skin hide a heart as black as hers? How could it show none of what was underneath, not one trace?

I'd read
The Picture of Dorian Gray.
I wondered if Poppy had a painting of herself locked in an attic . . . a painting that was growing old and evil and ugly and rotten, while she stayed young and beautiful and rosy-cheeked.

I sat on the bare mattress with a sigh. Poppy crawled into my lap. She kissed my neck. Her hands were on my shoulders, chest, stomach, down down down . . .

“No,” I whispered. And then louder
. “No.”

I picked up Poppy by her hips and moved her onto the bed beside me. Her dress was pushed up to her thighs, and she crossed her naked legs, looked up, and smiled. “So never
again? Is that it? You're done with me now? You move out to this rat-hole farmhouse and suddenly it's over?”

I met her eyes. “Yes.”

She laughed. She laughed, and it was hard and slick and cold, like chewing on ice. She got up from the bed and went to one of the two big windows on the east wall that faced the road, and the Bell farm.

“You're going to be living next to
her
now.” Poppy glanced at me over her shoulder, her eyes mean and sly. “Feral Bell. That should prove interesting for you.”

“Don't call her that.” I got up off the bed and joined her at the window. I looked past the three lilac bushes, past the old well, past the rope swing on the ancient oak tree, past the pine trees, past the fields of corn on the left that were rented out to a neighboring farm, past the apple orchard, across the road.

Our houses were close, even with the gravel lane between them. I could see everything. I saw chickens running around, following a rooster, and two goats in a white pen, and three kids playing with a dog, and another climbing the ladder of the red barn. I could hear shouts and laughter and crowing and clucking and barking. I could even smell gingerbread in the oven—the dark, sweet, spicy smell drifted right over the road straight to my nose.

It seemed so much nicer over there, in Wink's world. Much,
much nicer than being in this empty, foreign bedroom with a red-blooded Poppy.

“Don't call her what?
Feral?
It's better than Wink. Wink is like something from a children's book.
And then Wink and her pink horse, Caramel, rode off to Fairyland on a path made of clouds.
”

Poppy was watching the farm, closely, almost as if she'd forgotten I was there. “Look at all those kids running around. Why should Wink get so many siblings while I have none? Leaf said once that I would have been a better person, if only I'd had a sibling or two. He said I'd be ‘less selfish by half.' As if I—”

“Leaf?” I said. “Leaf Bell? You used to know him? People at school said he's down in the Amazon searching for a cure for cancer. They said he sleeps on the ground and eats nothing but nuts and berries and he speaks their Mura language like a local—”

“Shut up.” Her eyes were back on mine. “Just shut up, Midnight.”

She went to the door, opened it, left.

Came back.

She sidled up to me and put two fingertips on my heart. Pressed.

“You and the Bell girl . . . you looked good together.”

I said nothing, waiting for the punch line.

“I mean it, Midnight. You should get to know her better.” She moved her fingers to my cheek, and ran them down, over my jawbone, across my neck. “Wink is weird and quiet and so are you. You two should be friends.”

I flinched. “What are you up to, Poppy?”

“Nothing. I'm just trying to be a better person. I'm bored with being mean, bored, bored, bored. So I'm attempting to improve myself. I'm setting you up with the weird girl across the road. I want you to be happy.”

“No you don't. You don't even know what the word means.”

But she just shrugged, and laughed, and left.

I
SNUCK OVER
to the Bell farm once a few years ago, and just watched the goings-on from the shadow of the woods. I was there for a while, and they never even looked in my direction, not any of them, like I was invisible, like I was a ghost.

I had this idea that I'd catch Leaf off guard, and maybe a look would pass over his face, fleeting but there, really there, and then I would know. I would know that he thought of me.

He and Wink were outside with their siblings, they had a picnic and then played some game with a lot of hooting
and hollering, and he was different with them, so different, especially the pretty brunette sister, he was rowdy and loud and he laughed all the time. I'd never even heard his laugh, not his
real
laugh anyway. And after a while I started feeling bad about myself, standing alone in the woods while they all laughed and played together, and I'm Poppy, I never feel bad about myself, ever, so I went home and never did it again.

The eighth time I followed Leaf to the hayloft, I kissed him with my whole soul, all of me, all the bad parts and the good parts too. I kissed and kissed him, his thin straight nose, his freckled cheeks, his wide bony shoulders, his hard white torso, but his green eyes never even met mine, not once. So I got naked, I thought I would stun him with my stunning beauty, but he only shrugged his shoulders and said I could be the spitting image of Helen of Troy for all he cared, I was still not worth the breath I breathed.

His younger sister called out from somewhere in the yard and he went down to her without another word. I cried while I put my clothes back on, fast, fast, the hay caught up in the creases and scratching me all the way home, but it felt good, like the nuns and their hair shirts, a punishment on the path to redemption.