Wink Poppy Midnight - April Genevieve Tucholke Page 0,5

loose dress that still managed to hug her body in a way that whispered I paid too much for this. Poppy was the spoiled only child of two busy doctors who raked in money from the snowboarding celebrities-with-a-death-wish that bombarded Broken Bridge every winter. Her house was one of the biggest around, including the endless second homes owned by film stars and aging musicians.

She ran her hand through her hair and smiled at me. “Do you know how long it took me to walk here? I can’t believe I bothered.”

I didn’t look at her. I watched Wink walk down the steps, turn, and go back to her farm across the road without another word, quiet as a nap in the sun.

“My parents won’t get me another car until I graduate.” Poppy squeezed her perfect lips into a pout, oblivious to Wink’s departure, as if she were a ghost. “Just because I took the new Lexus without asking and then totaled it by the bridge. Fuck. They should have expected that.”

I ignored her. I stared off at the Bell farmyard, distracted by a bit of green and brown and red that was climbing a ladder attached to the big barn that stood off to the right of the white ramshackle farmhouse.

Wink disappeared into the dark square of the hayloft opening.

I’d known Wink all my life, but really, for all practical purposes, I’d only just met her.

Poppy snapped her fingers in my face, and my eyes clicked back on her. She looked annoyed and beautiful, as usual, but I wasn’t really noticing for once. I was wondering what Wink was going to do up in that hayloft. I wondered if she was going to reread The Thing in the Deep to the Orphans.

I wondered what it was going to be like, living next to a girl like that instead of a girl like Poppy.

I suddenly wished, with my whole damn heart, that I’d always lived in this old house, across the road from Wink and the Orphans.

“Midnight, Midnight, Midnight . . .”

Poppy was saying my name over and over in the drippy sweet voice that had once set me on fire and now just made me feel cold.

I yanked myself out of the peaceful, surreal feeling that Wink had cast, and finally focused on the girl in front of me. “Go home, Poppy.”

Poppy blinked her tart gray eyes. Slowly. She played with the expensive pockets on her expensive dress, and smiled at me—her gentle, sad smile that, with very little effort, she could make seem sincere. “We’re not over, Midnight. We’re not over until I say we’re over.”

I couldn’t even look at her. The peaceful Wink feeling was gone now, entirely gone. All I felt was anger. And melancholy.

Poppy reached up and put her hand on my cheek. Her eyes hooked into my skin and pulled my face down, toward hers, like a fish on a line.

I fought her. But not nearly as hard as I wanted to.

Poppy was used to getting what she wanted. That was the thing about Poppy.

She won. She always won.

LEAF DIDN’T TALK 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,