“You protecting your new little girlfriend, Midnight? Wow, that’s adorable.” She put her hand on her hip and twitched her torso until her dress swung against her upper thighs, swish, swish. “How can you stand it? How can you stand kissing such a pasty, freckled, dirty thing? Is it just hormones? Is this some kind of Testament to the Male Organ? Should I be taking notes? Putting together an academic study?”
“You’re so mean.” I said it quiet, really quiet, but she was listening. “Why are you always so mean? What’s wrong with you? Were you born like this? Sometimes I think there must be a hole in your heart . . . one that hurts and makes you roar like an animal with its leg in a trap. Is that it, Poppy? Is that why?”
Poppy just stared at me. An evening breeze blew in and stirred the hay and we all just stood there.
She turned.
Walked to the ladder.
Climbed down.
Left.
And then Wink was at my side, slipping her hand into mine. “Let’s go to dinner,” she said.
And without even looking, I knew she was smiling. I could hear it in her voice, sense it in her fingers, strawberry tips pressing into my palm.
“YOU STARE AT Leaf Bell. You stare at him a lot.”
“A lot,” Zoe echoed, her stupid brown pixie curls twitching as she nodded her head, her and Buttercup both looking at me. The two of them lived next door to each other, had always lived next door to each other. They showed up in kindergarten doing the creepy, creepy twin thing, same clothes and repeating each other’s sentences and talking in unison. They have different hair and different skin and different eyes, and one’s tall and one’s tiny, but for a long time I could barely tell them apart. Though to be honest I never really tried.
We were sitting in the bleachers, done running, wet hair from the showers making damp trails down our T-shirts. Buttercup and Zoe ran in black shorts and black shirts, and striped socks pulled up to their knees, it would have been less laughable if they didn’t take it so seriously.
The boys were on the track, Leaf in front, he was always in front. He was the best runner at our 1,300-kid school, we took state the last two years and he was why.
“Leaf is vile.” Buttercup.
“All the Bells are vile.” Zoe.
“Aren’t they?” They said that last bit together, twinsy style.
“Shut up, Buttercup. Shut up, Zoe.”
And then they swapped a secret, knowing smile. I felt like slapping it off their faces but instead I told them that if they ever mentioned Leaf’s name again I would spread a rumor that I’d caught the two of them kissing the hot new math teacher Mr. Dunn in the cemetery, back by the Redding mausoleum, long grass hiding them from view. Details make a lie, it’s all in the details, Buttercup and Zoe knew this by now. I’d taught them.
And they never said his name again, even on the day he left, even after I told them about Midnight, and what I’d done.
When I found Midnight in the hayloft with his cheek against Wink’s stomach and her hands in his hair . . . the expression on his face . . . and Feral looking down at him . . . There was something happening between them, something not in the plan.
Leaf gone.
And now Midnight.
Not again. Not again, not again, not again, not again.
THE HERO DOES magic tricks. Not real ones, like Mim and Leaf, but the sweet kind that don’t have any true magic in them at all. He showed them to me and the Orphans in the hayloft.
Bee Lee stared at him all through dinner. Bee’s got a soft heart, like the red-eyed Banshee in Piety Shee and the Moonlight Dancers. Piety wandered the earth looking for a lost love, her nighttime wails like willows sighing in the wind.
Bee Lee’s been missing Leaf since he left, and Felix doesn’t pay attention to her in the same way—they’re too close to the same age, Mim says. But Midnight . . . she looked at him all dazzly-eyed and he didn’t mind a bit.
The Wolf came to the hayloft again, but Midnight did what he was supposed to do. He defended me, like a Hero. He drove her away, back into the darkness.
Mim read my tea leaves again, later, after Midnight went home. But she wouldn’t tell me what they said.
THE YELLOWS WERE standing in a semi-circle, eating plump red cherry tomatoes out of a brown paper bag.
Wink and I had gone into town to visit the Carnegie, and our backpacks were heavy with books. We ate olive oil ice cream from the little Salt & Straw stand on one corner, and got Parmesan and butter popcorn from Johnny’s popcorn Shack on the other. Dusk was coming on, and the shadows were growing long. The air smelled like wildflowers, and grass, and snow. In the mountains the air always smells like snow. Even in summer.
We walked down the click-clacking cobblestones of Dickenson Rose Lane, waved to my old house, ignored Poppy’s, petted a chill St. Bernard through a white fence, and then went through the Green William Cemetery, toward the woods.