Wax (11 page)

“It's near Africa,” Poppy threw in.

As soon as she said it, she realized that she should have led with the A-word right off the bat. Relieved smiles drifted onto her parents' faces. At last:
Africa.
A continent full of culture. And exotic, healthy cuisine. And blood diamonds and genocides and all sorts of other atrocities for her parents to get all up in arms against.

“Come on, you guys. Pleeease? Can I keep him?” she begged, adding once more under her breath for good measure,
“Africa?”

“Well,” her father said, “as long as it's okay with the school, he can stay with us. Of
course
he's welcome,” he insisted, retroactively inserting goodwill and diplomacy into his tone. “Think of the education we'll get!”

“Have you learned anything from him so far?” her mom asked, now joyous. “Does he have any unique customs?”

As if in answer, the shrill, deafening shriek of a smoke detector blared from the living room.

∗ ∗ ∗

The television was aflame.

While her father dashed for the fire extinguisher and her brother screamed and her mother inexplicably searched for the remote control, perhaps hoping to find a “cancel fire” button, Poppy scanned the room for Dud.

He was gone. Her box of food was smushed into the carpet, the Nike swoosh rendered in butternut squash.

The fire was small, but the acrid fumes of melted technology were starting to choke the air. As her father battled the flames, Poppy grabbed handfuls of Owen and her mother and hauled them both out of the house​—​into equally smoky conditions, thanks to the fire on the other side of town. “What happened?” she shouted at Owen over the
whoosh
of the extinguisher.

Owen looked dazed. “I don't know. We were sitting there​—​he was eating his peas one by one, and then he sniffed at them, and then he sneezed, and then the television caught on fire.”

Poppy had gone her entire life without having seen a fire anywhere other than where fires were supposed to be, and today, within the space of four hours, she'd seen two? It couldn't be a coincidence. “He was just sitting there? Are you sure he didn't . . . I don't know, breathe toward the TV or anything?”

“Poppy,” her mother said dismissively, “Africans can't set things on fire by sneezing on them. They don't have magical powers. Don't be racist.”

Poppy dearly wanted to devote a hunk of time to dissecting that little gem, but Dud was now missing, and for all she knew, this particular flame-throated fake African
could
in fact sneeze things on fire. “Did you see where he went?” she asked Owen.

He shook his head. “He looked at the fire, then ran out the door.”

“Bad news, family.” Poppy's father emerged from the house and tossed some melted DVD cases into the front yard. “We lost a couple of throw pillows and
Dr. Steve's Cauliflower Hour.
”

“And the television,” Owen added.

“Well, yes. And the television.” He wiped a puddle of sweat from his forehead and glanced up at the sky, where the smoke from the factory still swooped up into a column, blocking out the moon. “Geez, two fires in one night? What are the odds?”

A faint whimpering issued forth from Mrs. Goodwin's bed of roses.

“Oof,” it said.

“Why would he run into a pricker bush?” Owen loudly inquired.

Poppy could see him now​—​a dark form hunched inside the shrub, trying not to move. “I'll get him,” she told her family. “You guys go back inside and open some windows.”

Dud was curled up in a ball again, his eyes wide and panicked as Poppy approached. She lifted a branch. “Dud?” she whispered. “Are you okay?”

“What happened?” he yelled.

“Shh!” She glanced at Mrs. Goodwin's windows. “We need to work on your volume control.”

“What?” he shouted again.

“Shh!”

“What?”

“
No​—​
okay, when I make that noise, that
shh?
That means you lower your voice. Whisper. Like I'm doing.”

Dud lowered his head, as if doing so would also help lower his voice. “Whisper like I'm doing,” he rasped in what was technically a whisper, but a loud one.

“Just stop talking until we get back into the house.” She grabbed hold of his forearms. “Come on, let's get you out of​—​oh, that feels
weird.
”

His skin wasn't . . . cold, exactly. But it didn't feel warm, either. Not even lukewarm.

He was precisely room temperature.

Putting that aside for now, Poppy pulled him up. For all the mass he occupied, he felt awfully light. She was able to lift him out of the bushes with hardly any effort​—​except for the thorns snagging on his clothes. “Careful!” Poppy said, watching one plunge into his shoulder and tear through his skin. But when it came out, there was no blood. No cut. Not even a scrape.

Dud looked at his arm. “Hmm.”

Poppy deemed this to be an understatement. “Did you feel that?”

He didn't answer.

“Hey. Did you feel that?”

“You said to stop talking until we get to the house.”

“I did! Good listening skills. But I'm giving you permission to answer this question: Did you feel that?”

“Yes.”

“Did it hurt?”

“What is ‘hurt'?”

“It's​—​‘hurt' means ‘pain.' Like something that feels bad.”

Dud looked down at his vegetable-covered shoes. “I feel bad about the squash.”

Poppy gave a little snicker but retracted it when she saw how sincere he was. “No, hurts​—​like this.” She gently pinched the skin on the underside of his arm. “Do you feel that?”

“Yes.”

“And it doesn't feel bad?”

“No. But I did feel bad when I felt the fire. It was hot and my face melted.”

It was hard to see in the darkness, but now that he mentioned it, his face did look a little melty.
Obviously,
she thought.
He's made of wax. Of course he'll melt in the heat.

“Is that not normal?” he asked.

Poppy hesitated. He
was
aware that he was made of wax, right? Because that was not a conversation she was up for at the moment. She reached up and smoothed out the skin that had sagged under his eyes. “There,” she said. “Good as new.”

“And new as good!”

Poppy sighed inwardly. Were all their interactions to turn into
Sesame Street
segments? “Let's go back inside.” She steered Dud toward the house. “Oh, and if anyone asks, you're from an island near Africa.”

“What's an Africa?”

∗ ∗ ∗

Poppy's parents somehow got it into their heads that a quality family dinner could still be salvaged after such a calamity. “So, Dudley!” her mother said, scooping some of her carrots onto a plate for Dud as the family hovered around the oft-neglected dining room table. They were so unfamiliar with the thing, they didn't know how to properly sit at it. “I hear you grew up on an island!”

Dud frowned. “Dud​—​
ley?
”

“It's just Dud, Mom,” Poppy said.

“Just Dud?”

“Yeah,” said Poppy, pulling her chirping phone out of her pocket. “It's a traditional . . . island . . . name.”

Jill had texted her:
we still on for ice cream now that you returned the mannequin for store credit?

Poppy replied:
i didn't return him, the factory was on fire

Jill, ever unflappable, said:
okay

well

might ice cream help you cope?

“You must have learned all sorts of fascinating nautical skills,” Poppy's father was saying to Dud. He'd perched one leg up on a chair and was balancing his plate on his pasty white knee.

for the love of god yes get me out of this house,
Poppy answered, putting the phone away. “Dad, he doesn't want to​—”

“Sure he does. How many knots can you tie, Dud?” Unsure, Dud held up three fingers, but the Question Train kept chugging. “How many words do you have in your native language for ‘sand'?”

“Dad.”

Then Owen started in. “Can you climb a coconut tree and get the coconuts down?”

“Oh, Dud, you
must
give me some new coconut recipes,” Poppy's mom said. “A few months back I was on a huge kick​—​did a blog series about it, ‘Cuckoo for Coconuts'​—​but I must have run out of steam after about sixty or so dishes because I stopped, and I can't remember why​—”

“Because you constipated us!” Poppy burst out, unable to take another second. “You constipated us all!”

Everyone stared at her.

“We have to go meet Jill,” she said, grabbing Dud's arm and dragging him out of the dining room.

“Don't stay out too late!” her mother called after them.

Poppy shoved Dud out the front door, but not before hearing her father say, “She's right, though. You put our bowels through the ringer.”

9

MOST SATURDAY NIGHTS, POPPY AND JILL DID WHAT ANY SELF-RESPECTING
high-schoolers without alcohol problems or criminal records did: they went out for ice cream.

Unlike everyone else in the state of Vermont, however, Poppy's and Jill's loyalties lay not with Ben & Jerry's, but with Friendly's. This made them villainous traitors in their fellow residents' eyes, but they didn't care. They had their reasons, and their reasons usually came down to one thing: Friendly's served fried food and Ben & Jerry's did not.

Paraffin's outpost had all the trappings of every other Friendly's location in America​—​colorful menus, sticky carpets, and screaming children in highchairs amidst a sea of sprinkles and crayons. But Poppy and Jill's haunt of choice had one thing the rest did not: Greg.

Greg was the most enthusiastic Friendly's employee in the nation. Every guest was greeted with the goofiest-sounding “Well,
hi!
” uttered by a human, promptly escorted to a spotless table, and enthusiastically asked in short order about their day, their job, their kids, their grandkids, and their general goals in life. He was there
all the time.
No one could figure out if he had a family​—​though Jill's current hypothesis was that he did, and that it consisted of a merry band of pampered ferrets.

Every interaction with Greg led to smiles. He made everyone feel special. He was the embodiment of the concept of Friendliness. His panache led some to speculate that before coming to Friendly's employ, he may have worked as a clown who finally snapped, murdered a family of five, and was politely asked to leave the circus . . . but most people were decidedly fans.

“Well,
hi!
” he shouted excitedly at Poppy and Dud before giving the hostess a chance to greet them. “Party of two?”

“Three. And, uh,” Poppy said, noticing that Dud was staring at the children's menus, “can we have one of those place mats? And some crayons? He's foreign,” she added.

The corners of Greg's smile seemed to extend beyond the margins of his face. “You got it!” he said, gathering menus.

“What is ‘foreign'?” Dud asked Poppy as they were escorted to their table.

“A flimsy backstory that probably won't hold up for long,” Poppy muttered. Poppy's parents were laid-back, but not naïve enough to accept a total stranger into their house without some evidence of bureaucracy. She'd have to fake some documents, though they were likely to get “filed” in the messy box her mom kept on the dining room table for school stuff that was destined to be ignored.

“Can I get you started with some apps?” Greg asked once they'd been seated, placing menus in front of them with the amount of care required to handle Fabergé eggs. “Waffle fries, chicken quesadillas, mini mozzarella bites​—”

“I think we'll wait for my friend,” Poppy interrupted before Greg could finish reciting the menu in its entirety, as had happened on more than one occasion.

“No problem!”

Greg skipped off to the kitchen to sprinkle fairy dust into the deep fryer as Jill slunk through the entrance. Spotting Poppy, she stomped through the restaurant in her clunky boots, sank into the booth, and proceeded to stare a hole through Dud.

“Wow,” she said after a good full minute. “Lifelike.”

“Not life
like,
” Poppy insisted. “Life
real.
Life
actual.
”

“I'm Dud!” Dud shouted.

“Shh!” Poppy glanced around the restaurant, hoping that the sort of people who chose to spend their swingin' Saturday nights at Friendly's were too besotted with their SuperMelts to look up. “We're still working on volume control.”

“I see.” Jill performed a thorough eyeballing of Dud, starting with his poreless skin and ending with his incessant smile. “Creepy.”

Dud waved at her. “Hi, Creepy!”

“No,” Poppy said, shaking her head. “No. Erroneous.”

“Hi, Erroneous!”

“I'm Jill,” Jill said. “The best friend.”

Dud solemnly nodded. “
I
made friends with a rosebush.”

“How'd that work out for you?”

“Bad!”

Jill shrugged. “Looks human to me,” she told Poppy.

“I know. But when he got all torn up by the thorns, he didn't bleed, and it didn't hurt him. How can you explain that?”

“I can't and I won't.”

“And what about the flame in his throat? Look.”

Poppy grabbed his head and pulled his jaw open. Dud provided no resistance.

Jill squinted. “All I see is a throat.”

Poppy tsked and let go of Dud, who went right back to coloring his place mat. “It's too bright in here,” she explained.