I shrugged back at her. “Normal.”
I didn’t go into it all, about Mom leaving with Alabama. I just didn’t feel like making myself sad. And Wink was bound to guess anyway, when she didn’t see my mom or brother around all summer.
The creepy mansard-roofed Roman Luck house came into view, four tall chimneys pressing at the dark sky. I stopped and caught my breath.
Maybe it was because we were in the middle of the woods, near an abandoned house, trees on all sides and no-one-to-hear-you-scream, but I got a bad feeling all of a sudden.
Everything was dark. Thick, thick silence.
And then I heard a laugh.
And another.
Muffled voices.
More laughter.
And then came the flames. Orange and silky, waving at the sky.
A kid stepped back from the pile of wood, smiling, the way boys do whenever they manage to start a fire.
I looked around.
Damn it.
We’d walked right into the middle of a Poppy party.
Poppy’s parties were quiet, secret things, made up of the Yellow Peril and a few sycophants. The parties moved around. Sometimes they were in Green William Cemetery, or on the overgrown main street of one of the nearby abandoned gold rush towns, or by the Blue Twist River.
Sometimes I was invited to her parties. Mostly not.
The Yellow Peril were Poppy’s inner circle—it was a reference to opium, because, you know, Poppy. But everyone just called them the Yellows. Two guys and two girls and none of them half as evil or as beautiful as her. Poppy liked to lead the guys on and would give all her attention to Thomas one week and then Briggs the next. Just to keep them on their toes. The girls were Buttercup and Zoe. They dressed like twins, though they weren’t. Always in black dresses, red lipstick, striped socks, and a twin set of cunning looks in their eyes. But Buttercup was tall and had black hair to her waist and Zoe was tiny and had short brown curly hair and both were pretty but definitely not sisters. I’d never spoken directly to them in my whole life. They didn’t matter. Not when there was Poppy.
Poppy.
The Yellows surrounded her like rays around the sun. She wore knee-high boots and a short, swinging yellow skirt that barely covered the parts it needed to cover. She had a blue silk scarf around her slender neck, and her thighs were long and so damn creamy it made me feel sick.
God, I hated her.
I longed to grab Wink and run back the way we’d come.
I shook it off, and kept walking.
The Yellows all looked at me in that pitying way, like usual, but I just gave Poppy a cool nod and marched right on by, Wink at my side, like we were welcome. Like we’d been invited.
The bonfire was now six-foot flames clawing up, almost reaching the sagging roof of the Roman Luck porch, but not quite. We went up to it and the heat hit my skin in a rush. It felt good. I looked down at Wink, and she had her eyes closed, facing the warmth.
I didn’t look back at Poppy and the Yellows.
I saw five or six non-Yellow kids from school. Perfect clothes and perfect shiny hair. The only time the Yellow-wannabes had ever noticed me was when Alabama was around. Then the girls would talk to me in a really sweet voice, to show Alabama how nice they could be to his unpopular brother.
Everyone was whispering instead of yelling and laughing, and there was no music playing—the Yellows wouldn’t stand for it. Poppy liked quiet at all her parties.
A girl named Tonisha was handing out mason jars of frothy, amber-hued beer from a nearby keg. I knew it was probably a micro-brewed IPA, because the Yellows didn’t drink anything cheap, but I declined to take one, and so did Wink. A wind came up out of nowhere and leaves rustled on the trees, whoosh, all at once, in that way that always gives me goose bumps.
Wink’s fingers tightened again. I looked down at her.
The contrast with Poppy was profound.
Straight, blond, shining hair.
Red, frizzy, curly hair.
Tall, thin.
Short, small.
I knew one’s body, every dip, every inch, every toe, every bend.
The other had her hand in mine and it was the first time we’d ever touched.
Both were a mystery.
“Wink?”
She glanced up at me.
“I think I’m going to like having you Bells as my new neighbors.”
She nodded, face very serious. “We’ll be good for you.”
I smiled at that.
“Your brothers and sisters ask a lot of questions.”
She nodded again. “They do that to people they like.”
We were speaking in short snappy statements, and it was nothing like before, on the steps of my house, when Wink was either sweetly talking on and on about The Thing in the Deep or being calmly silent, the breeze in her hair. I supposed she was hating it here, at Poppy’s party. I sure as hell was. What was so fun anyway about standing in the dark, whispering and drinking beer?