Wink Poppy Midnight - April Genevieve Tucholke Page 0,6

literally, me included. He shoved my face into the ground, right into the mud I’d been throwing, and told me that if I teased Bridget again he’d break my nose.

He meant it, we all knew he meant it. And when I forgot anyway and called Bridget The Tinkler two weeks later at lunchtime, Leaf found me after school, one hand, one punch, that’s all it took, my eyes crossing as his fist hit my face, crack, snap, blood, scream.

My nose was still crooked from it. Even my doctor parents couldn’t fix it, not perfectly. Midnight said it made me even more beautiful, the tiny imperfection, but he read poetry and his mind was soft, like his heart. I stopped listening to him years ago.

I didn’t let Leaf’s laughter deter me that day in the hayloft. I was confused because I’d never lost at anything before, but I was high on the challenge, and I wanted to try at something for once, really try. That’s how I felt, at first.

The day I turned sixteen I walked up to Leaf between classes. I leaned my body against his gray locker, back arched. I was wearing the shortest skirt I owned, the one that made my legs look ten feet long, the one that made Briggs start drooling at Zoe’s party the other night, he actually drooled, and had to wipe his mouth with his hand. I’d left my bra sitting on my bed, and I knew my nipples were showing through my black slub T.

“Hi, Leaf,” I said, using the low, breathy voice that brought boys to their knees.

And he looked at me. Not with lust, or craving, or greed. He looked at me in the same way I looked at the band nerds in their marching uniforms as they bumbled down the hall carrying their stupid shiny instruments. The same way I looked at the spineless boys in my class with their panting eagerness and pathetic over-confidence and wispy arms and spindly legs.

“Move.”

That’s all Leaf said. He stood there, tall and skinny and red-haired and barely caring and all he said was move.

I never cried, not even as a baby. My parents said it was because I was such a sweet little angel, but my parents are fools. I never cried because there are only two reasons people cry, one is empathy and the other is self-pity, and I never had any of either. I cried over that move, though, I cried, cried, cried.

REVENGE.

Justice.

Love.

They are the three stories that all other stories are made up of. It’s the trifecta. It’s like if you’re making soup for a bunch of Orphans. You have to start with onions, and celery, and carrots. You cut them up and toss them in and cook them down. Everything that comes after this is just other. Stories are that way too.

I told the Hero about the Orphans, and The Thing in the Deep.

I liked his eyes.

POPPY FOLLOWED ME through my new house, across the creaking hardwood floor, around jumbled-up furniture, under spiderwebs, over boxes, up the stairs, hands sliding over the smooth dark wood of the banister, down the narrow, dark hallway, to the high-ceilinged bedroom that I’d taken as my own, last door on the left.

There weren’t sheets on the bed, but the frame and mattress were up. I stepped over two boxes and then moved around the room and opened all the windows. All four had faded yellow curtains that smelled like dust.

I went back to the door and closed it. Dad wouldn’t bother me if my door was closed. He respected privacy. Privacy was like gold to him, as in worth-its-weight. He wanted it, and so he gave it to others freely and without question.

I had to push the door shut the last few inches, so it would latch. This house seemed to be leaning on its side, like an old woman with one hand on her hip, and it made everything off kilter. Later on, I would come to like it. Later on I would hear the creaks and moans and feel welcome, and comforted, like the house was speaking to me in its own gasping, rickety voice. I would be able to tell where Dad was, down to which corner of the room, just by the series of pops and shudders and squeaks that echoed down to me like the refrain of a song I knew by heart.

But back then, it was just an old house, two miles away from Poppy, across