Wink Poppy Midnight - April Genevieve Tucholke Page 0,39

is wandering the woods like Jennie.”

I moved my head, and her hands slid away. “I’ll never forget seeing her there, with her wrists tied to the piano leg and the dried blood on her face and the bright blue veins running down her white arms. It’s burned into my brain. Forever.”

“I know what a dead person looks like,” Wink said, after a while. “I know what a dead person feels like. I held Alexander, that day in the fog. Poppy was close to dying when we found her, Midnight. Her skin was cold and blue-tinted . . . she was clammy and stiff . . .”

“Who’s Alexander?”

“No one.”

“What day in the fog?”

Silence.

I got up and went to the hayloft opening. I stared down at the farm below, and watched Hops and Moon trying to climb the side of Wink’s house using nothing but their hands and feet, like monkeys, while Peach alternately yelled out encouragement and criticism.

I sat back down and Wink ran her fingertips over my scalp. She smelled like cinnamon. “Mim knows we did it. She knows we tied her up and left her there.”

Wink’s fingers stopped moving. “Yes.”

“Is she angry?”

“Yes.”

I turned, so I could see her face.

The summer sun was bringing out Wink’s freckles. They were darker than they had been just a few days ago. Her freckled skin was so different from Poppy’s perfect milky white. And I liked it. I liked it so much it hurt.

“Wink, I’m scared that the night in the Roman Luck house damaged Poppy in some deep way. I don’t think we did the right thing. I don’t feel, in my heart, that it was right.”

“She would have done the same to me, if you hadn’t stopped her. Sometimes the only way to fight evil is with evil.”

But I’d seen Poppy shivering and shivering and I’d still tied her up and left her in the Roman Luck house. And then I’d fallen asleep and not gone back to free her until dawn.

“You destroyed the monster, Midnight. That’s what the hero does.”

After Poppy, after all her lying and lying, I didn’t believe anyone about much of anything anymore. Except Alabama, and he was in France.

But I wanted to believe Wink.

Her eyes met mine, and I saw a cloud pass over them, like she knew. Like she’d just read the doubt in my mind.

And then she hugged me, tight, her arms around my neck, her cheek in its hollow, her skin nuzzling into mine. She wound her fingers in my hair, and her freckles flowed around me like a scarf and she was whispering things in my ear, hero things, Thief things . . .

Bee Lee started climbing up the hayloft ladder. I knew it was her because she was singing a little song to herself about chickadees and werewolves. When she got inside she went right up to me, like she sensed something. She ran sticky fingers over the back of my hand and smiled at me.

“Are you okay, Midnight?”

I shook my head.

“I have bad days too.” She pulled a strawberry out of her pocket, plucked the green stem off, and gave it to me. “But tomorrow will be better. That’s what Mim always says. You just have to eat a strawberry and then wait for tomorrow.”

I WENT TO Poppy’s house. I stood at the door for ten minutes, and never rang the bell.

It wasn’t until I finally turned to leave that I saw Thomas lurking in the shadows near the lilac bushes, watching me.

He didn’t say anything. I didn’t say anything.

I ate supper with my dad, late, which he liked. Tomato, mozzarella, and pesto sandwiches, sitting on our front steps, facing the orchard and the creek and the Bell farm.

There were fireflies.

If I was extra silent and he knew something was wrong, he didn’t ask me about it.

My bedroom smelled like jasmine. It hung on the air, thick and humid. I threw off my clothes and fell on the bed and closed my eyes and told myself it wasn’t real. Poppy wasn’t in my room. She’d never be in my room again. I’d seen to that.

I’d made my choice. I’d gotten my wish.

My mom used to make pumpkin hot chocolate every fall. She’d put milk, vanilla, cinnamon, maple syrup, and chocolate in a pan, and then when it was hot she’d whisk in a can of pumpkin puree. Alabama and I could drink whole mason jars of the stuff, and did. And now just the sound of my feet crunching on