I’ve read a lot of books too. More than I let anyone know, except my dad. I read a lot in the last year especially. My days had been shuffling from class to class, driving all my damn friends away with my mood swings, and my nonstop Poppy-this-and-Poppy-that-spewing, and my love, love, love, love, always my love for this blond-haired girl who sometimes held my hand between classes and sometimes kissed me on the lips when people weren’t looking, but mostly, mostly ignored me, leaving me following behind, calling her name and her refusing to turn around.
But my nights, the ones where Poppy didn’t knock on my window, were spent with my books. I read a lot of science fiction and way more high dragon fantasy than is probably good for a person. I read the classics, like Dickens and Animal Farm and Where the Red Fern Grows. I even read some historical romance and some murder mysteries and horse-and-gun Westerns. I didn’t care. I read it all. Alabama was basketball and cross-country and leaning on things and jumping off things and all the girls liking him. But I was the reader brother who liked to swim in rivers and hike in the rain and sit under the stars but never, ever play organized sports. And I supposed I was all right with this.
Wink and I kept staring at each other. She was running this conversation, and I let her call the shots. She turned, and looked down at the books in the box I’d been carrying, so I got a chance to notice the soft-looking batch of freckles on her inner arms, and how small her nose was, like it belonged on a doll, and her short, stubby, faded-red eyelashes, and her pointed chin.
My dad walked by us at one point, tall, thick brown hair, wire-rimmed glasses, easy, soft stride. He liked to run, when he wasn’t reading or selling rare books to people in faraway places, and his running meant he moved like a cat. He reached in and got a lamp from the moving van, strode quietly back, smiled, and carried the lamp inside, letting us get on with our silence.
“Midnight.”
A girl’s voice shredded the breezy stillness. I jerked my head toward the sound.
Poppy.
She was standing at the edge of the woods, on the other side of the lane, at the edge of the Bells’ rambling farm.
I guess two miles wasn’t far enough after all.
Damn.
Poppy passed by the red barn, the four Bell outbuildings, and their old farmhouse with its red slouchy roof and tall windows with black shutters. She crossed the road that was really just gravel and weeds, wove between our four bright green apple trees, walked up the wooden porch steps, and stood in front of Wink as if she weren’t there. She was wearing a white loose dress that still managed to hug her body in a way that whispered I paid too much for this. Poppy was the spoiled only child of two busy doctors who raked in money from the snowboarding celebrities-with-a-death-wish that bombarded Broken Bridge every winter. Her house was one of the biggest around, including the endless second homes owned by film stars and aging musicians.
She ran her hand through her hair and smiled at me. “Do you know how long it took me to walk here? I can’t believe I bothered.”
I didn’t look at her. I watched Wink walk down the steps, turn, and go back to her farm across the road without another word, quiet as a nap in the sun.
“My parents won’t get me another car until I graduate.” Poppy squeezed her perfect lips into a pout, oblivious to Wink’s departure, as if she were a ghost. “Just because I took the new Lexus without asking and then totaled it by the bridge. Fuck. They should have expected that.”
I ignored her. I stared off at the Bell farmyard, distracted by a bit of green and brown and red that was climbing a ladder attached to the big barn that stood off to the right of the white ramshackle farmhouse.
Wink disappeared into the dark square of the hayloft opening.
I’d known Wink all my life, but really, for all practical purposes, I’d only just met her.
Poppy snapped her fingers in my face, and my eyes clicked back on her. She looked annoyed and beautiful, as usual, but I wasn’t really noticing for once. I was wondering what Wink was going to do up in that hayloft. I wondered if she was going to reread The Thing in the Deep to the Orphans.
I wondered what it was going to be like, living next to a girl like that instead of a girl like Poppy.
I suddenly wished, with my whole damn heart, that I’d always lived in this old house, across the road from Wink and the Orphans.
“Midnight, Midnight, Midnight . . .”
Poppy was saying my name over and over in the drippy sweet voice that had once set me on fire and now just made me feel cold.
I yanked myself out of the peaceful, surreal feeling that Wink had cast, and finally focused on the girl in front of me. “Go home, Poppy.”
Poppy blinked her tart gray eyes. Slowly. She played with the expensive pockets on her expensive dress, and smiled at me—her gentle, sad smile that, with very little effort, she could make seem sincere. “We’re not over, Midnight. We’re not over until I say we’re over.”
I couldn’t even look at her. The peaceful Wink feeling was gone now, entirely gone. All I felt was anger. And melancholy.
Poppy reached up and put her hand on my cheek. Her eyes hooked into my skin and pulled my face down, toward hers, like a fish on a line.
I fought her. But not nearly as hard as I wanted to.
Poppy was used to getting what she wanted. That was the thing about Poppy.
She won. She always won.