He told me to follow him and I did, dropping the tracing paper and the charcoal without another word to Zoe and Buttercup, I didn’t even think of them, they didn’t even exist anymore. We went to the woods and I told Leaf how I was trying to be better, how I wasn’t so bad, not really, not in my inner deeps, I was only bad when I wanted to be at least, I could help it, I could stop anytime. He laughed and said I was hopeless and sad. But when I pressed myself into his bony ribs he pressed back. He put his palms on my cheeks and his lips on my forehead and he just held me and held me and held me until the sky cracked and the rain started pouring.
I swore to be better then, to give it all I had, to put my whole heart in it until I felt it straining. I’d be nicer to my parents, try to be what they thought I was, I’d be a better friend to Zoe and Buttercup, I’d stop torturing all the boys and let them move on and find someone who could love them back. I could do it, I really could, keep it up, Poppy, keep it up, keep it up.
It would last a few hours, all the good intents, a few days even, but then I’d snap back, cruel, cruel, cruel, relishing every little lick of it on my tongue.
I SHOULDN’T HAVE kissed the Hero. The kissing was supposed to come at the very end. After the monster, and the fight. After the glass coffin and the pinprick of blood. But Midnight was lying there in the hay and his eyes were sad, and his hair was curling on the apple of his cheek. I wanted to hold his heart in my hand, reach into his chest and cradle it in my palm, like one of Nah-Nah’s newborn kittens with its frail tiger stripes and its eyes still closed.
I read the Orphans a fairy tale once called Giant, Heart, Egg. It was about a troll who kept his heart hidden in an egg in a distant lake, so he couldn’t be killed. I wished Midnight’s heart was hidden far away in a distant lake. I wanted to stand guard over it. I wanted to cast magic spells and train dragons to protect it. I wanted to make sure it would be safe until happily ever after.
Leaf said that reading a book out of order was dangerous, because things were supposed to happen one, two, three, four, five. And if they didn’t, if four went before two, the whole world spun upside down and bad things came in the night.
What would happen now that I had put the end of my story in the beginning? Would my world spin upside down? Would Midnight’s?
Leaf never talked. Almost never. He was like Pa. He was like the great horned owl with bloody talons in The Witch Girl and the Wolf Boy. He rarely spoke, and when he did, you listened.
Leaf once told me that there was absolutely no difference between the Orphans’ fairy tales and the nose on my face, because both were only as real as I thought they were.
SUNLIGHT ON MY cheeks.
The windows in my old bedroom, back at the house in town, faced west. So I woke to dim light even when the sky was blue.
But my creaky new bedroom was two big windows of full, dead east. I lifted my fingers and spread them out in the warm yellow sunshine, one behind the other, like I had superpowers. Like I was shooting sunlight laser beams.
My old bedroom had muted green carpet and white walls and a sensible closet.
My new bedroom had a warped old wardrobe that came with the house, a working fireplace, and a slanting hardwood floor that made a nice slapping sound when my feet hit it.
I’d taken down the dusty yellow curtains the day before and left the windows bare. So my room was just the bed, the bare windows, two black bookcases (full), and one dresser. Plus the aforementioned wardrobe. Nothing on the walls. I thought I might put up the map of Middle-earth that Alabama got me for Christmas, right over the bed, maybe. But nothing else. I liked the open space.
Mom used to say I was a minimalist. But Alabama was a pack rat like her, and their endless boxes of pack-rat things were now sitting in the musty brick basement, filling it to the brim. I wondered if they would ever come back for them, or just start acquiring new pack-rat things in France.
Dad didn’t seem to mind the boxes. He didn’t mind much of anything, concerning Mom and Alabama.
Dad loved my half brother just as much as he loved me . . . and maybe this should have pissed me off, since Alabama got most of my mom’s love, and half my dad’s as well. But I was sort of awed by my dad’s capacity for loving a son who wasn’t his blood. I think Alabama was too. He and Mom were of the same mind about pretty much everything, but with Dad . . . he always gave in, even when he didn’t agree.
I used to catch Alabama standing in the doorway of Dad’s office, watching him as he huddled over his rare books. He would have this soft look in his eyes, this small smile on his face, and the whole scene was kind of beautiful.
I missed my brother.
I went to the windows and put my palms on the sill and breathed in the green-smelling summer air, grass and dew and pine. The leaves on the apple trees twinkled in the morning sun like stars.
The light hit my bare chest, and I leaned into it.
I liked being out in the country. It suited me better than town.
Three red-haired kids were running around the Bell farm. The dogs were barking happily at a brown-and-white goat, and one of the kids had climbed on the goat’s back and was shouting, Tally-ho billy, tally-ho . . . but the goat was just ignoring everyone, standing still and eating some wildflowers growing near an old red water pump.
I didn’t see Wink.
I closed my eyes. That girl made me feel like I was dreaming. Broad daylight dreaming.