Wax (3 page)

Poppy nearly laughed at the image of what a giant douchebag trophy would look like, but she reminded herself not to engage. Ever since senior year started, Blake had proved himself to be terribly adept at wreaking havoc upon the tatters of Poppy's once-pristine reputation, orchestrating a reign of mockery that was showing no signs of toppling. The whole school was still talking about the Halloween party debacle two weeks prior, of which Blake had been the chief architect. Poppy had exacted some measure of revenge with a well-timed pantsing in gym class​—​and the fact that he'd been wearing SpongeBob boxers was a nice bonus​—​but she'd never be able to top his level of malice.

To Blake, bullying was an art. And Poppy was his muse.

She would not give him the satisfaction of turning around. Yet her palms were getting sweaty, leaving gross condensation marks when she tapped them on the glass counter. “Let's hurry it up, Mr. Koz.”

“I'm trying to get rid of the pennies. Just a second.” After what seemed like eons, he shut the cash register drawer perhaps a little harder than was necessary and dumped the change into her waiting hands. “Here.”

“Thanks!” Without making eye contact with Blake, she whirled around and bolted for the door.

“Wait!” Mr. Kosnitzky called after her. “You forgot your turd!”

Poppy froze in her tracks.

Well. That ought to do it.

Blake promptly burst into a hyenalike fit of giggling. His lanky frame, stretched taut and tough like a piece of jerky, doubled over.
“Turd?”

Poppy slunk back to the counter and grabbed the trophy out of Mr. Kosnitzky's hand. “Yam.” She stuffed it into her bag and headed for the exit once more, glaring so hard at Blake that she missed the handle and slammed into the door, prompting yet another explosion of laughter.

Gritting her teeth, Poppy darted out of the shop, trying​—​yet not succeeding​—​to hold her head high.

2

“
GIVE
YOU
A TURD, JERKFACE,
”
POPPY MUTTERED,
returning to the school's main hallway just as the final bell rang. “Right in your stupid ugly
jerkface.
”

“Pardon me?”

She glanced up at Principal Lincoln, a tall, baggy-eyed, gaunt-cheeked, cheerless man whom Poppy liked to think of as Abraham Lincoln's less successful, undead twin. “Oh​—​nothing, sir,” she said, staring up the full length of his ski-slope nose. “Just talking to myself.”

“Mmm.” He turned his attention back to the masses, no doubt yearning for a bottle from the long-rumored wine rack under his desk, while Poppy struggled against the surging current of students as she made her way to her personal sanctuary: the Gaudy Auditorium.

Once upon a time, a well-intentioned benefactor had mistakenly come under the impression that Paraffin High had any regard at all for the arts, and consequently had donated a heap of money to build a hideous theater. (Had he done his homework, he might have learned that the school routinely sank ninety percent of its extracurricular-activity budget into sports programs and the other ten percent into the only arts group in service of those sports programs: the Paraffin High Marching Band. And that the surplus wax the Grosholtz Candle Factory had donated over the years had never been sculpted into masterpieces, but rather had taken up residence as a rarely used, unsightly gray lump in the art room closet.)

The Gaudy Auditorium immediately fell into disrepair, as it was only ever used for graduation and the occasional Giddy Committee performance; students graduating at the end of four years were surprised to find that their school even
had
an auditorium. So Poppy and her crew had full run of the place, using it whenever they wanted, for whatever purposes their theatrical minds could concoct. It maintained a constant temperature of a million degrees (two million onstage, as the space underneath the floorboards was directly connected to the furnace room), the curtains were disintegrating, the seats smelled of mold, and the slop room they used for storage was so full of past props and costumes that it threatened to plunge the school into a glittery sinkhole at any moment​—​but it was all the Giddy Committee had, so Poppy was proud to call it home.

She had her hand on the door and was about to push it open when a miraculous voice rose above the hallway clamor.

“Poppy?”

Oh, no.

She was in
no
condition, having run back from Mr. Kosnitzky's store, upset and flushed with embarrassment, to interact with Mr. Crawford right then.

Mr. Crawford, the Adonis of Paraffin High.

Mr. Crawford, the most beautiful high school biology teacher on the planet.

Mr. Crawford, a fully mature adult who did not engage in the cruelness of teenage boys, and therefore the only member of the male species to have attracted Poppy's lustful, unswerving attention, smoldering under it like an ant beneath a magnifying glass.

Mr. Crawford, who had been talking for a full minute while Poppy stared, and who had now paused, waiting for an answer.

Poppy said, “What?”

“I know, it's a big decision.” He flashed that irresistible smile.
He is made of MaaaAAAaaaGIC,
Poppy's fevered brain sang. “But give it some thought. I think you and your family would be wonderful candidates.”

“For the, um​—”

“Poppy, trust me.” He ran a hand through his hair, dispensing an intoxicating aroma of coconut, lavender, and whatever chemical was used to preserve the dissected animals in the biology lab. “My family hosted an international exchange student when I was in high school, and it was such an incredible experience. We're still friends to this day!”

She nodded. “Friends are great.”

His lips disappeared into his smile, pinching his mouth as he tried not to laugh. “They sure are,” he said, backing up and pointing at her as he left. “The letter should arrive today. Talk to your parents!”

No longer capable of doing anything but waving, Poppy waved at him, dove into the Gaudy Auditorium, and took a deep breath as the door shut behind her.

Silence. Emptiness. Lacquered hardwood floors.

Simply by standing there, breathing the space's distinctive air, she felt a sense of peace diffuse through her body. All the Blake unpleasantness and the Mr. Crawford infatuation drifted away with the current.

Theater calmed her. It sustained her. All was right with the world when viewed through a proscenium arch. And though theater had forsaken her, trampled her, and danced the lambada on the bloody corpse that had once been her budding career, it was nevertheless her one true love, and you don't throw away your one true love over something as silly as profound emotional scarring.

Plus, theater people were
her
people. They understood that the show must go on, even if you are bleeding from the head.

Performing still stung​—​a shallowness of breath choked her whenever she neared the wings of the stage or caught a whiff of pancake makeup​—​but her directorial talents had not suffered. When she was in the director's chair, the nerves and shame disappeared. She became focused and confident, a fearless Captain von Trapp rather than a helpless, writhing Maria.

And that's the mode she'd switched to when her theater people barged into the auditorium. They found their intrepid director already in position: third row, fifth seat from the aisle, notebook open, Sharpie poised, bullhorn on, staring expectantly.

“Well?” Poppy said to them. “Get on up there. Broadway isn't going to salute itself.”

As the Giddy Committee took their places, Jill sank down next to Poppy and threw her feet up over the seats in front of them. “Broadway does nothing
but
salute itself.”

“Don't you have a stage to manage?”

“Is the stage on fire? No? Then I've got everything under control.”

Jill Cho was Poppy's favorite person in the world. On their first day back to school after
Triple Threat,
Jill had got there early, opened Poppy's locker (they'd known each other's combinations since seventh grade), and cleaned up all the fake blood that she instinctively knew would be in there courtesy of Blake Bursaw. “Now it smells like a hotel pool,” she told Poppy once it had been bleached. “Pretend you're on a fabulous vacation at the Off-Ramp Burlington Ramada.”

And that was it. Aside from indulging Poppy in her weekend-long festival of self-loathing and the requisite gorging of every ice cream pint on the market, Jill had gone back to treating her the same as she always had. And Poppy was eternally grateful.

Poppy readied her bullhorn. “I want to run the
Jesus Christ Superstar
number first,” she blared, her tinny voice filling the auditorium. “Where's my Almighty Lord and Savior?”

A judgmental noise issued forth from Louisa, a tiny wisp of a person who always wore her dirty-blond hair in dual braids and looked as though the wind might blow her away at any moment. Her first love was ballet, but since Paraffin High didn't have a dance program, she was forced to settle for the only performing art available to her, no matter how lowly and base she deemed musical theater. And deem it she did. Aloud. And often. “Probably off performing miracles,” she sneered. “Turning a cask of water into a bong, and such.”

Poppy wanted to scold her, as Louisa's constant negative attitude wasn't exactly an asset to a group that was already kind of depressing, but she was probably right on this account. The boy playing Jesus Christ was a freshman who had recently moved to Paraffin, and no one knew much about him, including his real name. He was deposited into rehearsal one day, sentenced to join the Giddy Committee by Principal Lincoln for either smoking pot or setting something on fire or bringing a paintball gun to school (he later claimed it was all three). Poppy couldn't help but feel insulted that her life's passion was being used as a form of punishment, but Principal Lincoln must have had his reasons​—​maybe he thought she'd set a good example​—​so she went along with it. But since the boy had never filled out an audition form, she'd never learned his name​—​and when she cast him as the Prince of Peace, he'd insisted that it would just be easier to call him Jesus. So that's what they did.

“Was he in school today?” Poppy asked Jill.

“Is he ever?” Jill got up. “I'll go find him.”

“Check the bathroom,” Banks advised on her way in, slinging her backpack onto an empty seat. “The tacos at lunch today were questionable.”

Aside from Jill, Banks was the only other nonwhite student at Paraffin High, and people simply didn't know what to do with her. Her father was Hispanic, her mother was black, her height was five foot eleven, and her opinion was that she did not care one bit about public opinion. So she joined the outcast repository that was the Giddy Committee​—​“because I don't fit in anywhere else, and why the hell not.”

A flash of satin entered the auditorium. “Hey, Connor,” Poppy said, waving him down, “come here a sec.”

The pudgy junior with the beautiful operatic voice whom Poppy had cast as the Phantom of the Opera skittered to a stop on his way to the stage. Though they were not yet in dress rehearsals, he was already wearing his cape. “Yes, my angel of music?” he boomed.

Connor liked to stay in character. It was equal parts charming and annoying.

“I've got something for you.” Poppy removed the trophy from her bag and handed it to him.

He cradled it to his breast. “Sweet, sweet yam!
‘You alone can make my song take flight!'”

“Okay, that's enough of that. Get onstage. We're doing your number right after​—​sweet
Jesus,
where
is
he?”

“Right here,” Jill said, pulling him into the auditorium by his ear. “Hanging out by the girls' locker room again.”

“Hey!” Christ protested. “Let go of me, woman!”

“You ‘woman' me again, and I will end you.”

“Why you gotta be like that? I wasn't doing anything wrong!”

Poppy tsked. “That's what the real Jesus said. And then he got arrested and put on trial and things didn't turn out too well for him, did they? Now
let's go.
”

Yet for all of Jesus's whining, the
Superstar
medley went well, the ensemble not even missing a beat when Connor, playing Judas, ripped his pants.

“Betrayed by a defective inseam,” Jill remarked. “The irony.”

∗ ∗ ∗

Several hours later Poppy burst through the front door of her home. “Sorry I'm late,” she said, dropping her backpack to the living room floor. “The
Annie
number turned into a fight over which orphan was the most pitiful. Hair was pulled, toes were stomped.”

Her mother and little brother were seated at their usual places on the couch, tray tables lined up in front of them, as her father bustled in from the kitchen. “Hello, family!” he boomed, plate in hand.

“Hurry
up,
” Owen insisted with the life-or-death intensity that only a five-year-old can bring to a conversation. “It's
starting!
”

“Food's on the stove,” Poppy's mother told her. “There's extra flax if you need it.”

Of course there was extra flax. The Palladino pantry looked like a Whole Foods had exploded​—​neatly, mind you, into color-coded Mason jars. The health nuttiness of Poppy's family didn't bother her, as she was the kind of person who ate anything and everything, but there were times she wished things could go back to the way they'd allowed her to eat the week she'd returned from
Triple Threat:
Ice cream. Every damn day. For every damn meal.

Poppy made her way into the kitchen and found a tofu menagerie waiting for her. Tofu shaped like a bird. Tofu shaped like an elephant. Tofu shaped like an octopus. There was also a camera lying askew atop the counter, as well as a handful of notes her mother had abandoned in her haste to get dinner ready on time. She'd no doubt pore over them later that evening, readying her blog post for the next day. Poppy, who had an uncanny knack for discerning what the title of her mom's posts would be just by inspecting the aftermath of the cooking frenzy, surmised that “Tofu Zoo!” was a strong contender that night.