Wink Poppy Midnight - April Genevieve Tucholke Page 0,49
her.” Buttercup put her hand on my forearm and rubbed her fingers up and down, from my wrist to my elbow. “What Poppy did to Wink at the Roman Luck party was unforgivable.”
“We helped Poppy do it.” The wind picked up and blew Thomas’s shaggy blond hair all around his head, like it was trying to get his attention. “We helped her humiliate Wink.”
Briggs kept staring at me, one blue eye, one green. “I saw someone out here in the woods last night. A girl that looked just like Poppy. I only saw her for a second, right before she disappeared back into the dark. You want to know what I think?”
No one nodded, but he went on anyway.
“I think Poppy is fucking with us.”
Long pause.
“Or she’s dead, and she’s haunting us.” Thomas said it kind of defiantly, chin up, like he expected us to start laughing.
Which Briggs did. “So she’s writing letters from beyond the grave? That’s so stupid. Poppy is a fighter, like me. She’s not a quitter.”
“Poppy is a lot of things,” I said. And meant it. “Look, Wink and I started this. Whatever happened in the Roman Luck house, whatever Poppy went through, it led to her going missing. I’m to blame.”
Buttercup turned suddenly and gave me a hug. Her arms were long and warm.
My mom had always said that fear brought out the truth in people. She based entire books on it. I guess Buttercup’s truth was better than I’d thought.
“I’m worried about Poppy,” she whispered in my ear. “I’m scared for her.”
“Me too,” I said.
“I’m going home.” Thomas started walking away, talking to us over his shoulder. “I’m going to study my letter and then I’m going to search every damn nook and cranny until I find her.”
“We’ll help you,” Buttercup said. And Zoe nodded. And Briggs followed behind.
THE 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