It seems like a million years ago, getting expensive lattes, shaken with ice, just the right combination of espresso to milk, just the right toffee color or I’d complain.
I once convinced Buttercup and Zoe to help me dig my own grave. We were bored and I was in a macabre mood and I wanted to see what it was like, to lie in the dirt six feet under like a dead person. We tromped out to the woods with shovels stolen from outside Loren’s Hardware store. They whined and whined but eventually we got a good trench dug out between two trees. I plopped down inside and crossed my arms over my chest like Wednesday Addams, and Zoe leaned over the edge and said something about worms and spiders, but I didn’t care, I stayed there for twenty minutes with my eyes closed. I wasn’t scared, it didn’t even feel that morbid, it just felt sort of peaceful, really.
Briggs caught me watching him in the woods.
He called out my name, kind of sad and desperate, but by then I was already gone, flitting through the night like one of Wink’s fairies.
Briggs had been digging in the dirt and muttering about a golden marble like some half-crazed, sweating farm laborer, and I couldn’t figure out why, not for a while. I had to sink down and lie on the dirt in the forest and put some pieces together before I got to the bottom of it.
I SAW BUTTERCUP and Zoe on Midnight’s steps.
Buttercup, sleek as a selkie, smooth black hair and olive skin like the taciturn enchantress in Lost Lies and Runaway Sighs.
Zoe, sparkly hazel eyes and thick black lashes and a small, pointed nose like the fay in Rat Hall and the Broom Girls. When she smiled at Midnight, her smile was as sparkly as her eyes.
All three talked for a while and then walked right through my farm, right into the forest, and down the path.
I got the Orphans out of bed and took them into town to get ice cream for breakfast. I did this sometimes in the summer, when Mim had her readings. We went to the little place by the library that was run by a witchie lady with long white hair. She opened the shop at ten in the morning because she believed that ice cream was sometimes for breakfast too. Bee Lee got strawberry, she always got strawberry, but you never could tell about Peach and the twins. Felix went for the pistachio, and so did I.
We were all sitting on the green benches in the park, eating in the sun, when I saw her, standing in a brick alley across the road, the shadows surrounding her like a pack of wolves.
No one else could see her. I knew they couldn’t. Just me.
I gave the rest of my waffle cone to Hops and walked across the street without another thought, like she was the blond, bloodthirsty siren in Three Songs for a Drowning.
I walked into the alley, bravely, right into the pack of wolf-shadows . . . but she was already gone.
I STOOD IN the kitchen and listened. Dad was upstairs in his attic, on the phone. His voice drifted down through the cracks in the floorboards and settled on my ears like dust. He was speaking German with the occasional Latin phrase thrown in. I only spoke a bit of French, but Alabama was fluent in it, like our mom. My dad spoke four languages, if you counted Latin, which I did.
His voice was a song I didn’t want to end. It made me feel safe. It made me feel . . . normal.
There was a knock on the front door. I’d been expecting it, somehow.
Peach was standing on the steps, red curls and bare feet.
“Follow me,” she said.
So I followed her, short strong legs pounding into the ground with focused, kid-like purpose. Across the road and into the garden. Wink was sitting in the strawberry patch, feet in the dirt, fat white clouds shielding her from the passionate noonday sun.
“I was up in the hayloft,” Peach said to both me and Wink, now that she’d gathered us together. “It didn’t smell like hay. It smelled like tea, or flowers. And this was on the floor.”
She handed me a piece of black paper.
Wink watched me take it, face calm and passive, like it was nothing, just an ordinary thing, another note from a missing girl, left in a hayloft.
I felt Peach staring at me. “I can read,” she said. “I can read all kinds of things. I’m really good at it, better than you, probably.” I hadn’t questioned her reading skills, it hadn’t even occurred to me, but Peach wasn’t the kind of kid to let that stop her from putting me in my place.
I didn’t want to open the letter.
I wouldn’t.
I had to.
I did.
My fingers were clammy. They left damp smudges on the page.
Midnight.
It’s up to you.
Show me what you’re made of.
Gather the Yellows.
Go to the woods.
Find me.
Find me in the mist.
I read it again. And again. And then I gave the note to Wink.
Peach shook her curly hair, chin to the right and left. “I read the note and that’s how I knew it wasn’t for any of us Orphans. Going into the mist is what Mim calls contacting the spirits. If you’re having a séance, I want to come.”