Poppy

Poppy is the daughter of a night-bus driver: she grew up on the bench seat behind the cab, doing her homework through the curves and watching the Suburbs, the Industrial Zone and Thirst Street slide past a fogged-up window. The school of the street on the full loop, one stop at a time: she knew the faces of the last service, the couples who fight at the terminus, the regulars who board without a word and step off with a nod. The city at night she learned sitting down, and it has remained her favorite working position.

By sixteen she could sleep anywhere — depot, bench seat, bus shelter — and always woke at the right stop, fresh as a first run. A House scout watched her three nights running at her favorite shelter: the girl with the red puffs everyone assumed was asleep would afterward describe the street better than a camera. Hired on the fourth pass.

Her method lives in her eyelids: half-closed. The world tells its stories in front of people it believes are sleeping, and Poppy lets it talk. Posted at a counter, a window, a bus shelter, she records everything — who comes in through where, who pays in large bills, which car passes once too often. Her worry never sleeps; in fact it’s her worry that stands the watch. But on the outside, nothing moves: the night the curtain came down on the club next door, Poppy noted the time, finished drawing her poppy in the fog on the glass, and gave the stable the exact route the patrol wasn’t watching.

Her other talent draws envy across the whole stable: she recovers like nobody else. Three minutes of true night, anywhere, head against a window — and she comes back whole while the others count their dark circles. The veterans call it sleeping poppy-style: closed by day, open when it matters. She doesn’t explain. She yawns, and somehow it sounds like an answer.

At four in the morning, Poppy is at her post, eyelids at half-mast, and that is precisely why everyone else sleeps soundly: nothing crosses a street she is watching without appearing in her report, delivered at first light in a slow voice, not one detail too many. Her free hours she spends at the terminuses, spotting the girls off the last bus — the ones coming home from somewhere they aren’t treated well. She saves them a seat, trades three words, leaves the House’s address. Her dream moves like her bus line: one day, a room of her own near a night stop, with deep bench seats, where you could close your eyes for three minutes in safety. She would check.