Wink Poppy Midnight - April Genevieve Tucholke Page 0,41

He was staring off toward the gazebo and rambling, like I wasn’t even there.

“. . . Briggs and his temper, the things he said, that last time he caught me and her together. Poppy just laughed them off, like always, but they were so mean, so mean. He said she was a liar and a spoiled brat. He said no one would ever really love her, and she didn’t deserve love, she deserved to die alone. But no one deserves that, no one . . .”

Thomas put his hands over his eyes, and pressed. The rain started up again, and the drops hit his fingers and ran down his wrists and forearms. I zipped my jacket shut, and waited.

He moved his hands away from his face and looked at me, red, red eyes. “I’m scared Poppy might have run away. She did that once, last year. She was gone for three days. Did you know that?”

I did.

“We have to find her. We have to help her, Midnight.”

“Okay,” I said. “Okay, Thomas.”

“So you’ll help me? You’ll help me look? I don’t trust Briggs. I don’t trust any of the other Yellows. I don’t want them to know. They hate her. They follow her around, and do what she says, but they all hate her.”

I looked at the wet grass, and the edges of the lawn blurred, a blurry green swirl. I felt sick again for a second. I put my hand on my heart and took deep breaths.

Was Thomas right?

You must all really hate me, she’d whispered to me there on the sofa in the Roman Luck house. You must really, really hate me.

“What don’t you want the Yellows to know? That she’s missing?”

“No, they already know she’s missing. I don’t want them to know about the letter.” Thomas reached into the pocket of his hoodie and pulled out a black piece of paper. “I found this last night in our hiding spot. Mine and Poppy’s. It was in the hollow of one of the Green William Cemetery trees. No one knows about it except us.”

He handed it to me, and his eyes were kind of pleading.

I opened the letter, shielding it from the rain with my arm.

Silver letters, silver on black:

I’m scared, Thomas, I’m scared of myself, I’m scared what I’ll do.

When the time comes, I’ll jump, I know I will.

Don’t tell the other Yellows, they won’t understand, tell Midnight, only Midnight.

Remember when we hiked up to Three Death Jack at night and watched the skiers on Mount Jasper and the ski lift was lit up like Christmas? We felt like Greek gods, sitting on Mount Olympus. You said I was a natural, laughing at all the mortals and their maudlin, trivial lives . . .

This life, my life . . .

It’s not trivial.

It’s . . .

Mine.

Mine, mine, mine.

I held the paper up to my nose. It smelled like jasmine.

“It’s a clue,” Thomas said. “She meant it as a clue. We can use it to find her.”

And there was something about the way he said that, something in his voice, that made me doubt.

I looked over my shoulder, all around Poppy’s perfect green yard.

Nothing.

No one.

Was this another of Poppy’s tricks? Like when she hid in the forest and made the Yellows stop us and demand that stupid kissing contest? Was she going to step out from behind one of the lilac bushes, laughing her head off at me for being so gullible? Was this her revenge for what Wink and I did to her? An elaborate setup with letters and clues and Yellows?

Or maybe that wasn’t it. Not at all.

Maybe this wasn’t about revenge.

Maybe it was something else entirely.

Thomas took the letter back, put it away, and looked up at Poppy’s bedroom window, the one that faced the street. “I have this feeling that if we don’t find Poppy soon, we won’t find her at all. I’ve read and read the letter, twenty times, a hundred times. What does it mean? What’s the clue?”

I FOUND THE boy, the tall, dark-haired one with different-colored eyes, blue and green, one sky and the other sea. I was walking through the trees in the rain, thinking maybe I’d spot the solemn Strangers dancing to melancholy tunes in a woodland patch of dappled sun, like they did in Wild Edric and the Londonderry Girl. And that’s when I saw him, rooting around in the wilderness behind the Roman Luck house.

He didn’t seem surprised to find me standing beside him. He stared right through me