Wink Poppy Midnight - April Genevieve Tucholke Page 0,59

in the cold stream, my calves moonlight-white in the water. I know what I looked like, like a wholesome dairymaid or something from a pastel-hued painting, pink cheeks, slightly crooked button nose, working cheerfully in the sunlight. Midnight had been there for a while, I think, just watching me slap a soapy old shirt against a rock.

“You saved my life,” he said, when my eyes met his.

“I did,” I said back, cool as you please.

And he smiled.

ONCE UPON A time I thought I could change stories, make them go the way I wanted, instead of where they actually went. Leaf warned me against it. He told me I wouldn’t find my own story until I stopped messing with everyone else’s.

I planned to bring Midnight and the Yellows together at the Roman Luck house. I planned it all along. It was the Final Chapter.

The clues . . . the Yellows would have figured them out soon enough. Together they would have figured it all out, like when Percival Rust gathers the Orphan Bandits and together they crack the code and find the missing girl in The Grisly Kidnap.

But the clues were for Midnight, not the Yellows. They were for him alone.

The jasmine. I filled the dip of each candle with the oil, and then, when I lit the wick, the heat spread the smell throughout the room, easy, easy, easy.

I climbed through Midnight’s window every day and sprinkled the oil over his bed, easy, easy, easy.

Playing Poppy . . . that was easy too. I’d watched her. I knew her inside and out. I’d read her cover to cover, like The Thing in the Deep.

I SPENT THE day with Poppy.

I listened to her.

She listened to me.

I aged about twenty years.

Afterward, I found Wink in the hayloft. Just standing there at the edge of the opening, waiting for me, like she knew.

“You lied,” I said, the words out of my mouth before my feet left the ladder. “You plotted with the one person I wanted to leave behind. You manipulated me . . .”

Wink backed up, one step, two.

“You dangled Leaf in front of Poppy and then pushed her over the edge. You let people think she’d killed herself. And she almost did. How could you do it? How could you do it, Wink?” I put my hands on the floor and pulled myself inside. I stood. I towered over her, but she didn’t flinch this time, didn’t turn away. “Did you think that if you created a fairy tale and made all of us play along, made me defeat a monster and become a hero . . . you’d have a happy ending, like a princess in a hayloft story?”

Her red hair hugged her cheeks, long curls covering all the freckles, and the only thing I could see was her damn green eyes, beaming at me, innocent as ever.

She still didn’t move. Didn’t apologize.

I’d expected lies from Poppy.

But not Wink.

I put my hand to my heart, closed my eyes, tilted my head back . . .

I’d never yelled in my whole life. Never yelled at Alabama, or my parents, not even Mom when she said she was taking my brother and moving to France. Never raised my voice in anger. But I felt it building now. I was going to yell. I was going to yell until my heart burst open, blood spraying everywhere. I was going to yell until there was nothing left inside me, not one damn thing. The sound came, up my throat, buzzing at the back of my teeth . . .

I opened my mouth—

And roared.

It was shaky, and hoarse, and raw.

But it was a roar.

Three seconds and I was done. Spent. I sunk down to the hayloft floor and stayed there.

Wink came over to me after a while. She sat in the hay, knees tucked under her chin, red hair everywhere.

“Can I tell you something?” she asked.

I shrugged, and didn’t look at her.

The yelling had left me dark inside.

Empty.

Hollow.

“Pa was tall and lean, with deep brown hair and eyes,” she said.

I didn’t move. I didn’t say anything.

“He was beautiful. I knew this even when I was little. I used to weave my fingers through his hair when he read to me. I’d marvel at the smooth, olive skin of his cheeks next to my own pale, freckled hands. I remember running my thumb over his long eyelashes and liking how they tickled my skin.”

She paused.

I sighed.

She kept going.

“Pa first read The Thing in the Deep to