Wink Poppy Midnight - April Genevieve Tucholke Page 0,58
truly committed. The water turned me round and round and just when I was about to open my mouth and let it fill my lungs, the river threw me against a dead old tree and I came to a stop.
I crawled out, black dress sticking to my body like glue. I fell on the riverbank and looked up, and never felt so alive.
After that it was just me and the Bell horses and the old Gold Apple Mine by Gold Apple Creek. I slept on hay and ate wild plums. I sang my heart out in the woods, all alone, like Leaf did that one day.
I thought I might be too spoiled and princess-and-the-pea to make it alone, so much had happened since that time I’d run off to my grandpa’s cabin. But Wink had faith in me and that gave me faith in myself, and faith was something I never knew I needed until I got it from her.
I caught Wink copying my handwriting once. I figured she was up to no good, but then, I was never up to any good either, so who was I to judge.
She visited every day, and night, and brought me a fishing rod, and coffee beans, and hardboiled eggs and fruit and sandwiches and cheese and books to read. And I read all her fairy books, every last one, I read them over and over, I read them until they started making sense.
I liked to make people dance. I liked shaking their strings and making them march up and down the stage to my own distinct Poppy tune.
But Wink did too.
More than me, even.
She promised.
She knew where he was. Leaf.
I had to be the wolf, she said. It was her idea, her plan, the unicorn underwear and the kissing contest and the calling her names and the vile Roman Luck house and the making Midnight into a hero. I had to get tied up to the piano and stay there all night and then disappear for a while and then she’d fetch him. She’d fetch him back. And I agreed, I agreed just like that, no hesitation, it was easy for me, as easy as the sun setting, as easy as thunderstorms, and rivers rising, and boys leaving, and two girls reading together in a hayloft.
I SPREAD THE rumor that Leaf was finding cures in the Amazon, but he really ran down to California, to the Red Woods. He was living in the forest with some other Heroes, sleeping in tents during the night and fighting the Loggers during the day.
Poppy wanted Leaf. She wanted him so badly that she risked cuddling up to me in the hayloft to find out where he was. The Temptress, gentle words and deliberate gestures. I was supposed to be flattered and shy and overwhelmed, and I was. But not enough.
She left the Temptress behind, eventually. She started using her normal voice. She talked about Leaf, but she talked about other things too. She told me about the Yellows. She told me that she wanted to scream every time her parents called her their little angel. She told me that she’d read all the Laura Ingalls Wilder books six times through in secret and she fantasized about cutting off Mary’s blond ringlets, right to the skull. She told me that she’d wished she had a younger brother or sister. She told me that she hated the way that everyone at school looked at her like she had all the answers.
She told me how she sometimes stayed up all night just to hear the birds start singing their hearts out come dawn.
I HAD THIS idea that maybe they’d all be better off without me anyway, at least for a while. Buttercup and Zoe, and Briggs and Thomas, and Midnight. Like, maybe if I disappeared everyone would be happier, and I’d be happier too, and it wasn’t just my self-destructive streak talking. Some people needed to be alone, Thoreau and Emily Dickinson and me. Leaf said that once, and then followed it by saying Thoreau and Emily were better people, way better, even though they were long dead and he’d never met either in person, only read their writing, and yet that still didn’t stop him from going on about their supposed shining characters, as compared to me, black and rotten to the core.
When Midnight finally found me at the Gold Apple Mine, I was wearing a kerchief in my hair, a blue one, and washing my clothes