“She wore a dark dress,” Moon added. “And her hair was the color of stars.”
Wink blinked, and her face didn’t give anything away, not anything. “When was this? When did you see this girl?”
“Last night, after dinner. We were in the trees, playing Follow the Screams.” Peach leaned toward Wink, and put her mouth near her ear, and whispered loud enough for all of us to hear. “She saw me. She didn’t see Hops and Moon, because it was their turn to hide, but she saw me and told me she was a ghost and then asked me if I was scared. But I wasn’t. Ghosts don’t scare me.”
“That’s true,” Wink said, echoing Peach’s whisper-yell. “You’re not scared of anything.”
Peach nodded. “And then I shut my eyes and counted to ten, like you’re supposed to whenever you see a ghost or a fairy, and when I opened them she was gone.”
Hops yawned and rubbed his freckled nose with his palm. “It wasn’t just any girl, in the woods.”
Moon yawned too, and stretched his skinny arms over his shaggy red head. “We recognized her. It was that kissing friend of Leaf’s. She used to come to the hayloft sometimes.”
I stayed calm. I was so calm. I sat there at the kitchen table and just smiled and no way in hell would the kids have guessed that my heart had started screaming.
THREE OF WINK’S Orphans were playing in the woods, running between the trees in the dark. The girl would scream, very soft and believable, and the boys would follow.
The girl caught me. She snuck up fast and quiet. I told her I was a ghost. But she only shrugged, and looked like her older sister. I told her she should be scared, that she should run away. I told her I’d come to a bad end. I told her I was wicked to the core, and there was no hope for me now . . . but she just shook her head and went back to her screams.
I watched them, I watched them all later in the hayloft, I climbed the ladder and didn’t make a sound, not one sound. I watched Midnight count Wink’s freckles. I listened to her go on and on about The Thing in the Deep, she never shut up about that book, good god, but Midnight just ate it up, right up, he pushed her big ruby hair behind her ear and looked at her like Leaf never looked at me.
I was doing a lot of thinking lately, there was something about the dark, and the silence, and the being alone, it calmed me down and made me smarter. I was already smart, god knows I was smarter than all of them, but I was smart in a different way now, I took everything in and noticed it, really noticed it. When I stepped into the river I reveled in the cold, I savored the feel of the smooth rocks under my feet. I stopped thinking of myself. I barely thought of myself at all. I thought of myself so little that I began to worry that I’d been the only thing keeping myself in existence . . . and now that I wasn’t the center of my attention I’d disappear, poof into thin air, and no one would ever know.
WINK AND I went to the Blue Twist River, after the Orphans were tucked into their beds.
The moon was bright and blazing, and Wink showed me a shortcut. Down the gravel road between our houses, half a mile, then a quick turn to the left through the nearby cornfield. It was painted mountain corn, the only kind that would grow in our altitude.
The field belonged to a young, bearded organic farmer and Wink said he was always growing strange, new things like yellow beets and purple cauliflower and sweet chocolate peppers and watermelon radishes. The high-end restaurants in Broken Bridge loved it. They bragged about it on chalk sidewalk boards outside their restaurants, house-made capellini with organic farm leeks, chili flake and Parmesan or Colorado red quinoa with grilled white asparagus, pickled mushrooms, Romesco and parsley. The movie stars came to the mountains to romp in the snow and get away from Hollywood, but that didn’t mean they wanted to give up their expensive Los Angeles food.
I followed Wink, the cornstalks clutching at her hair and the hem of her acorn skirt with their grasping paws. The corn was only waist high, but it was already creepy as hell, rustling, rustling in the dark. I breathed a sigh of relief when we pushed through the last bunch of stalks and stepped out onto the bank near the river.
The Blue Twist was clean and cold and ran right down from the mountains, sparkling, churning, melted snow. We sat down on the grass by the edge, Wink across from me. I could no longer hear the rustling of the corn. It was drowned out by the sound of water rushing over stones, and I was glad for it.
“Don’t show the Orphans this shortcut, okay, Midnight? Mim thinks they’ll drown. I only go here when they’re asleep.”
I nodded.
Wink slipped off her red sandals and put one foot in the river.
She had small feet. They practically fit in my palm.
She reached into her pocket and took out a candle. She set it on a nearby stone, took out a matchbook, lit the wick.
She reached in again and took out a pack of yellow tarot cards.