“You’re probably right. I’m sure the ladies are flocking already.”
“Mmm.”
Poppy’s mom threw down her dishrag and leaned in to inspect her daughter’s face. “You just turned beet red.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Yes, you did.”
“It’s the hot water, Mom.”
“You like him.”
“I do not.”
“You realize that this is a tricky pickle, right? You’re living in the same house together. That could be a problem.”
“It will not be a problem, because I do not like him.”
“Like who?” her father said, breezing into the kitchen.
“Poppy likes Dud,” her mother said.
“Mom! I do not!”
“Ooh,” her father said, wincing. “That’s a tricky pickle.”
Poppy dropped the dish she was washing into the sink, sending a spray of water onto the floor. “You guys need to stop. It’s not a problem. It’s not a pickle. Because I. Don’t. Like. Him.”
Her parents exchanged knowing glances. “We said the same thing to our parents when we met.”
“That’s because you guys were freaks and losers and hopelessly devoted to each other’s acid-washed jeans. I, on the other hand, am disencumbered by the mind-fogging drug of lust. I am focused on getting into college. I am focused on not causing myself any more trouble or ‘tricky pickles’ than I already have this year. Why on earth would I add another potential calamity to the list?”
They nodded. They gave her sympathetic looks. Then her father leaned into her mother and said in a stage whisper, “The lady doth protest too much.”
“Dad!”
“Love isn’t a calamity, sweetie,” her mother said. “It’s a wonderful thing. But maybe put it on hold while you’re living in the same house. Once he goes back home, you two can stay in touch through the Internet, and then you can go visit him in Africa. Or maybe he’ll come here for college and you can hook up then!”
“She means get back in touch,” her father said. “Not hook up, hook up.”
“Right,” said her mother. “Although hey, once you’re living in a dorm, it’s not like we can stop you. Remember Walsh Hall? My goodness, the noises we heard. The noises we made.”
Poppy recoiled. “You have to stop talking.”
“We’re human beings too, Pops!”
“For the love of God. Cease and desist.”
Owen wandered in and looked at the puddle of dishwater on the floor. “What’s going on?” he asked his parents.
“Poppy likes Dud,” they said in unison.
Owen frowned. He looked at his parents. Then he looked at Poppy.
“I thought you were saving yourself for Mr. Crawford.”
“Oh my God OH MY GOD.”
∗ ∗ ∗
As she stomped out of the kitchen and up the stairs, Poppy was sure that every drop of blood in her body had been redirected to her face. She made a beeline for the bathroom, turned on the faucet, and proceeded to splash cold water on her cheeks until she’d returned to a conventional color.
“Poppy?”
“Gah!”
She flung herself backwards into the towel rack as Dud poked his head through the door. “Sorry to scare you,” he said. “I wanted to ask what a Tofurky is.”
“It’s . . .” The best definition Poppy’s addled brain could come up with was a fake bird made out of beans, but that didn’t really clarify anything. “It’s complicated,” she said, rubbing her temples.
“Are you okay?” he asked, deeply concerned. “You look sad. Is it because those people took your notebook?”
“Yes. Among a lot of other things.”
“Do I make you sad?”
“Not exactly. No.”
“If I don’t make you sad, do I make you happy?”
But Poppy had fallen too deep into her labyrinth of thoughts, rehashing all the things that had been yelled across the kitchen. She knew that as a girl of a certain age and a certain cocktail of hormones, any of her encounters with the opposite sex would be construed by her parents as experiments in wooing—and the more she denied it, the less they’d believe her.
But she really didn’t like Dud. Not in that way, at least. She liked him as a friend, as a confidant, as an adopted exchange-student brother.
As her only partner on Team Wax.
Dud gently raised his finger to the edge of her hairline. “What’s this?”
Poppy looked at their reflections in the bathroom mirror. “Oh. That’s a scar.”
“You have a scar too? Did someone carve their initials in you too?” he asked, poking apart her hair to see better.
“No,” she said, pushing him away with a laugh. “It’s not that kind of scar.”
“Oh.” He thought for a moment. “The other night you said a scar is ‘a mark that’s left over after you get hurt, once the wound has healed.’ How did you get hurt?”
Poppy propped her elbows on the bathroom counter and played with the toothpaste tube. “It’s a long story. One that involves my dreams being crushed. And it pales in comparison with the buffet of disasters we now find in front of us, so trust me, it’s not a big deal.”
“Dream crushing sounds like a big deal.”
Her thumbs sank deeper into the smooth plastic of the tube.
“Do you need to talk through your feelings?” he persisted.
Poppy sighed.
“It happened during a talent contest,” she relented. “I sang. I danced. I was on TV.”
He gasped. “Like Dr. Steve?”
“Yes. Without the medical quackery, but yes. I was on TV, and I fell and hit my head, and I bled all over the damn place, and it was humiliating, and it pretty much demolished my chances of ever making it to Broadway.”
“Why?”
“Because! That image of me covered in blood and singing like a psychopath is all people are ever going to see.” She did not want to get into this. She did not want to keep talking. “They won’t look any deeper than that. They won’t see me for my talent—if I had any to begin with. If I get cast in anything, it won’t be because I earned it. It’ll be because I’m a novelty, a gimmick they can splash onto billboards. Come see the freak! Hogwash, live and in the flesh! Twenty million hits on YouTube can’t be wrong!” She angrily flung the toothpaste onto the counter. “That’s not what I want. I don’t want to build a career on a foundation of pity. I don’t want to be a joke.”
Dud put his hands on her shoulders. “There, there,” he said, just like Dr. Steve. “It’ll be okay.”
“Honestly, Dud? I don’t think it will. I think I blew it.” She swallowed, but the growing lump in her throat didn’t go away. “And you know what the worst part is? Let’s say I really did screw my chances of pursuing a career in theater. Fine. I mean, it would suck—it would hard-core, flat-out suck—but I would accept it and move on. But move on to what? What else could I do? It’s the only thing I’ve ever been good at, the only thing I’ve ever loved.” She heaved a limp shrug. “I’d be lost.”
Dud’s eyes were worried. “That’s not a healthful benefit.”
Surely there were better ways of expressing all this—perhaps to a licensed therapist and not a freshly minted mannequin—but the dam had burst. “See, this is the thing that I haven’t been able to tell anyone. Not my shrink, not my parents, not even Jill. That the worst damage wasn’t to my skull or to my reputation or to my ego. Those are all things that can heal with time. The thing that terrifies me more than anything is—well, now the thing that terrifies me more than anything is that a ruthless army of wax pod people will infiltrate my town and destroy everything without anyone stopping them or realizing what they’re up to—but up until now, my biggest fear was living a life that didn’t matter.”
Dud widened his eyes. “You matter to me. You let me sculpt things and listen to the radio and eat ice cream and chase squirrel monsters
. I never did any of those things before I met you.”
She rolled her eyes. “You didn’t exist before you met me.”
“Exactly! You are the best.”
Poppy shrugged her shoulders out of his grip, but she couldn’t help smiling.
“What’s going on in here?” she heard her father say from outside the closed door.
“Orgy, Dad. Please leave us alone.”
“Ha, ha,” her father said, opening the door.
Poppy held her toothbrush aloft. “Just brushing my teeth.”
“Well, you don’t need Dud for that, do you?”
Poppy ran a hand through her hair and tried to banish all thoughts of murder from her head. “I suppose I do not. Actually, I’m going to take a shower, so both of you can leave.”
Her father gave a satisfied nod and disappeared down the hallway. Dud started to follow him, but Poppy called him back. “Dud?”
“Yes?”
“To answer your question: You do make me happy.”
He grinned. “Oh, good!”
“And Tofurky is a fake bird made out of beans.”
“Whaaat?”
17
Celebrate a local holiday
“SO THEY FINALLY KICKED HIM OUT?” ASKED JILL.
“Not out of the house. Just my bedroom. He has to sleep in Owen’s room now, even though we didn’t do anything.”
Poppy’s mom elbowed her away from the kitchen sink. “Poppy, get off the phone. Can’t we eat breakfast together as a family without the encroachments of modern technology? No offense, Jill!” she shouted toward the phone.
“None taken,” Jill’s tinny voice echoed back.
“Forget it,” Poppy told Jill. “I’ll see you at the parade.”
Ordinarily, Jill’s morning phone calls were like shots of espresso—Poppy always got dual bursts of energy and happiness when she saw her number pop up on the screen. But today grudges prevailed instead. She was still mad at Jill for kicking her out of rehearsal—twice!—plus Jill’s incessant apathy and skepticism were starting to wear on her. But she forced herself to put that aside for the moment. If the town was in real danger, she couldn’t risk dooming its citizens because of some petty best-friend drama.
And though Poppy was in a terrible mood for a variety of reasons, the main one was that the message candle had stopped delivering its message. With Madame Grosholtz’s ominous last words—but perhaps if this candle finds its way into the right hands, they can still be stopped—the tiny scratched letters had ended. After that, it was nothing but pure unetched stone.
Poppy put away her phone and glared at her mother. “It’s not enough to force us into dinner together, now you’re hijacking breakfast, too?”
Her mother shrugged innocently. “Dud seems to like it.”
Dud, seated at the kitchen table, held up a plate full of scrambled eggs and gave Poppy a smile that was also full of scrambled eggs. She sat down beside him and put some food on her plate, yawning repeatedly.
Dud watched her, confused. “Are you stretching your teeth?”
“No, I’m yawning. It happens when people are tired.”
“You’re tired?”
“Ha! Understatement of the year.”
Yesterday’s discoveries had kept Poppy up into the wee hours of the morning. She couldn’t stop turning the facts over, looking at them from different angles. Dud’s relocation to Owen’s room had turned out to be a blessing—at least with him gone, she could think without being pelted with more unending questions.
“Are you worried about the parade?” he asked.
“The parade is the least of my troubles.” She lowered her voice. “We have a crisis going on in this town—we don’t have time for a celebration! Things are moving too fast for us to stop them. And I don’t know how to stop them. Not to mention that our current mayor is an imposter, and the real mayor has been kidnapped, and she and Big Bob and Blake are all missing, probably hurt, and possibly dead!”
“What does ‘dead’ mean?” Dud asked.
Poppy yawned again. “I’m gonna take a rain check on that one.”
“Happy Paraffin Day, family!” Her father swept into the kitchen. “Pops, are you at the front of the parade or more toward the back? I want to have the camera ready.”
“Can you not?” Poppy dejectedly picked at her eggs. “It’s The Sound of Music, and it’s reliving my nightmare, and it’s going to be a train wreck. I don’t even want to be doing this in the first place.”
“Fraulein Maria didn’t want to be a governess in the first place either, and look how well things turned out for her!”
“Running for her life through the Alps in the dead of winter with seven slow-moving children in tow?”
Her mother lightly smacked her with the morning paper. “It’s in service to your town, sweetheart. Think of all the people you’ll be entertaining!”
“It’ll be good for morale,” said Dud.
Poppy glared at him. Where was he picking up this stuff? “Do you even know what ‘morale’ means?”
“It’ll be good for morale.”
Poppy chugged the rest of her orange juice and stood up, grabbing a few more slices of Fakin’ Bacon for the road. “We gotta go,” she said, motioning for Dud to join her. “See you guys afterward. Enjoy the festivities.”
Her father held up his glass of orange juice, as if delivering a toast. “Break a leg!”
Dud gasped. “That’s not nice!”
Everyone laughed except Poppy, who would have gladly welcomed a compound fracture at this point if it meant getting her out of the von Trappery. “It’s an expression, Dud,” her mother explained. “It means ‘good luck.’”
Poppy pulled Dud out of his chair. “We don’t have time for English lessons. We’re already going to be late.”
“Then you better shake a leg,” said her father. “Which is also an expression.”
“Goodbyyye!” Poppy shouted, slamming the door behind her.
∗ ∗ ∗
Poppy needed coffee. Badly.
She parked Clementine near the town square, instructed Dud to stay put, and jogged toward Smitty’s; crowds were starting to show up, so Poppy quickly scooted through the door while everyone else was trying to decide whether donuts were the right food for parade spectating.
As she entered, the smell bowled her over, knocking an epiphany into place.
Cup o’ Joe.
“What can I getcha?” Smitty half shouted at Poppy, causing her to jump at least a foot back from the counter.
“Um . . . coffee?”
He grunted and started to pour her a cup as she raked her eyes over every inch of his face. “What are you doing?” he asked, looking uncomfortable.
“I—I have a question,” she improvised, redirecting her focus toward the various baskets of bagels behind the counter. “About a bagel.”
“Oh, not this again. I know what you’re gonna ask. ‘What’s on the everything bagel?’ Dumbest question I ever heard! The answer’s right there in the name! It’s got your garlic. It’s got your sesame seeds. It’s got your onion. It’s got—”
“Actually, my question was about the baking technique,” said Poppy. “How do you prepare them?”
“Oh. Boil ’em first, then pop ’em in the oven.”
“What kind of oven?”
His eye twitched. “The one in the back. It’s pretty big.”
“How many bagels can it bake at once?”
“A lot.”
“I know, but how many exactly?”
His nostrils were flaring. “Kid, I don’t got time for this! You want a bagel or not?”
Poppy shook her head, handed him a few bills, grabbed her coffee, and fled—but not before hearing him mutter to himself as he counted the money: “Rotten gutbag.”
“Smitty is an imposter,” Poppy hissed at Dud once she got back into the car. “The real Smitty would never pass up an opportunity t
o talk up his precious bagel oven. The real Smitty would have known its exact capacity—would have shouted it from the rafters! This one’s got to be a Hollow!”
“That’s bad.”
“It’s very bad.” She nervously blew on her coffee. “So that means they’ve got all three Bursaws, plus Smitty—hang on a sec.” She handed Dud her cup and pulled out her notebook. “The first day of BiScentennial candles was Big Bob and Miss Bea. The second was Blake and Smitty. Which means that today there should be two new candles, but . . .” She looked at her phone. “Crap, we don’t have time to get to the factory and see what they are.” She slumped in her seat. “Not that it matters. If the Chandlers process everything overnight, their victims are probably beyond saving. Whoever it is, they could already be dead.”
“And what is ‘dead’ again?”
She turned on the radio. “Here, listen to NPR.”
He turned it off. “Tell me!”
She sighed. Better he learn it from her than from Dr. Steve. “Well, if you’ll recall our lesson on the miracle of life, humans are born, then they grow up, then they hopefully live long, meaningful lives, and then they die. They . . . stop living.”
Dud frowned. “I don’t understand.”
“It is a hard thing to understand. And no one likes to think about it. Or talk about it. So can we not?”
“That means that one day,” Dud persisted, “you won’t be here anymore? Because you’re human?”
Poppy fidgeted in her seat. “Yeah.”
“But I will be, because I’m wax?”
“Right.” She took the coffee cup back from him and took a sip. “That’s what this whole thing is about—the Chandlers moving their souls from body to body. They don’t want to die. They want to live forever.”
Dud fell silent. He looked out the window. “Oh.”
Poppy glanced warily at the teeming crowds as she pulled out of her parking spot. The last time she had seen this many Paraffiners in the same place at the same time was on the satellite feed during her final Triple Threat performance. The show had repeatedly cut to that shot of them gathered in the town square, cheering for her and holding up signs. Then, after the fall, to a shot of them no longer cheering. Lowering their signs.