Wink Poppy Midnight - April Genevieve Tucholke Page 0,17

that didn’t give a damn in all the right ways.

Once upon a time Zoe and Buttercup and I were rubbing gravestones in the Green William Cemetery because that’s what they wanted to do and I was trying to be more charitable and let them get their way sometimes. The weather had turned and the sun was gone and Leaf found me as I was scraping my charcoal piece over my thousandth Here lies the body of, the dark clouds bounding in.

He told me to follow him and I did, dropping the tracing paper and the charcoal without another word to Zoe and Buttercup, I didn’t even think of them, they didn’t even exist anymore. We went to the woods and I told Leaf how I was trying to be better, how I wasn’t so bad, not really, not in my inner deeps, I was only bad when I wanted to be at least, I could help it, I could stop anytime. He laughed and said I was hopeless and sad. But when I pressed myself into his bony ribs he pressed back. He put his palms on my cheeks and his lips on my forehead and he just held me and held me and held me until the sky cracked and the rain started pouring.

I swore to be better then, to give it all I had, to put my whole heart in it until I felt it straining. I’d be nicer to my parents, try to be what they thought I was, I’d be a better friend to Zoe and Buttercup, I’d stop torturing all the boys and let them move on and find someone who could love them back. I could do it, I really could, keep it up, Poppy, keep it up, keep it up.

It would last a few hours, all the good intents, a few days even, but then I’d snap back, cruel, cruel, cruel, relishing every little lick of it on my tongue.

I SHOULDN’T HAVE kissed the Hero. The kissing was supposed to come at the very end. After the monster, and the fight. After the glass coffin and the pinprick of blood. But Midnight was lying there in the hay and his eyes were sad, and his hair was curling on the apple of his cheek. I wanted to hold his heart in my hand, reach into his chest and cradle it in my palm, like one of Nah-Nah’s newborn kittens with its frail tiger stripes and its eyes still closed.

I read the Orphans a fairy tale once called Giant, Heart, Egg. It was about a troll who kept his heart hidden in an egg in a distant lake, so he couldn’t be killed. I wished Midnight’s heart was hidden far away in a distant lake. I wanted to stand guard over it. I wanted to cast magic spells and train dragons to protect it. I wanted to make sure it would be safe until happily ever after.

Leaf said that reading a book out of order was dangerous, because things were supposed to happen one, two, three, four, five. And if they didn’t, if four went before two, the whole world spun upside down and bad things came in the night.

What would happen now that I had put the end of my story in the beginning? Would my world spin upside down? Would Midnight’s?

Leaf never talked. Almost never. He was like Pa. He was like the great horned owl with bloody talons in The Witch Girl and the Wolf Boy. He rarely spoke, and when he did, you listened.

Leaf once told me that there was absolutely no difference between the Orphans’ fairy tales and the nose on my face, because both were only as real as I thought they were.

SUNLIGHT ON MY cheeks.

The windows in my old bedroom, back at the house in town, faced west. So I woke to dim light even when the sky was blue.

But my creaky new bedroom was two big windows of full, dead east. I lifted my fingers and spread them out in the warm yellow sunshine, one behind the other, like I had superpowers. Like I was shooting sunlight laser beams.

My old bedroom had muted green carpet and white walls and a sensible closet.

My new bedroom had a warped old wardrobe that came with the house, a working fireplace, and a slanting hardwood floor that made a nice slapping sound when my feet hit it.

I’d taken down the dusty yellow curtains the day before and left the windows