Wink Poppy Midnight - April Genevieve Tucholke Page 0,62
when she did it that I got goose bumps.
“It’s so quiet,” I said. “Where is everyone?”
“Felix saw that white deer this morning and they all ran off to follow him. Wink packed a picnic for the Orphans, so they could be a while.”
I sat down at the table. There was a freshly shelled bowl of sugar snap peas and I picked up a handful of the little green guys and put them in my mouth.
Mim started filling clear glass jars with the dream balm, one careful teaspoon at a time. She paused for a second, hands on her hips. She turned away from the counter, leaned across the table, and moved the bowl of peas out of the way.
“I’m going to read the cards for you, Midnight.”
“All right,” I said.
“No, I’m going to read Wink’s cards for you.”
That got me. “But Wink told me that you won’t read your kids’ cards anymore, ever since you read Bee Lee’s once and learned she was going to die young.”
Mim looked at me and frowned, deep, lips tucking in at the corners. “Those weren’t Bee Lee’s cards. They were Wink’s.”
My heart stopped beating.
It did.
I put my palm to my chest and pushed in.
“I never told her,” Mim said. “But she started reading cards at twelve, and she learned it for herself. I thought knowing her future might help. Might make her embrace life, live it to the fullest. I was wrong. And then her father up and left too, and they were so close.”
I pressed harder, my whole hand into my chest.
“I don’t believe in tarot,” I said. “I don’t believe in fortune-telling.”
She pulled the cards out anyway, a quick tug of the hidden pocket. She laid them on the table.
A skeleton.
A dead man pierced with swords.
A cloaked figure, five gold goblets.
Two dogs howling at the moon.
A heart with three daggers, sunk to the hilt.
“Yes,” Mim said quietly.
I didn’t know what the cards meant, or what Mim saw in them, but there was sadness blazing in her Wink-green eyes.
“The cards could be wrong,” I said.
“Maybe.” Mim swept up the cards with one hand and put them back in her pocket. She turned to the glass jars and the dream balm, paused, and then looked at me over her shoulder. “Right or wrong, Wink believes them. And that changes everything.”
I FOUND WINK in the hayloft. The Orphans were put to bed at midnight and then it was just the two of us and a blanket on the hay and the moon shining in. We talked for hours. All truth, no fairy tales.
I was almost asleep when she kissed me. She kissed my neck and my chin and my ears and everything in between. She unbuttoned my shirt and I unbuttoned her strawberry overalls. She wrapped her bare arms around me and gripped my back, hard, and I swear I could feel her freckles pressing into my skin, every last one of them.
She didn’t arch her spine or flip her hair.
I pulled away. I looked at her, and she smiled. She smiled right into me—I felt it echo in my ribs, like a shout, like a deep, deep sigh.
Her body curved into mine, chest to chest, my face in her hair.
“Wink,” I whispered, sometime close to dawn, everything quiet but the sky still black. “Wink.”
I put my palm against her heart and waited for it to beat. And beat. And beat.
She squirmed and looked up at me. And I could see it in her eyes. She knew.
“Mim read my cards for you.”
I nodded.
I felt her shrug, her skin moving against mine.
“My heart might have two billion beats left in it, or two hundred.” She sighed. “But it doesn’t matter that much. It doesn’t. I used to think that I needed to be part of a story, a big story, one with trials and villains and temptations and rewards. That’s how I would conquer it, conquer death.”
She sighed again, and nestled closer into me. “All that matters, in the end, is the little things. The way Mim says my name to wake me up in the morning. The way Bee’s hand feels in mine. The way the sun cast my shadow across the yard yesterday. The way your cheeks flush when we kiss. The smell of hay and the taste of strawberries and the feel of fresh black dirt between my toes. This is what matters, Midnight.”
I SAW THE white stag on the way home. He was standing by the apple trees, gleaming like he was