Which was why Poppy was so pleased that her next errand involved the one and only Mr. Kosnitzky, who, she was positive, had never laughed a day in his life.
“Not again,” he muttered when the bell over his shop door rang, slumping as he spotted her head bobbing toward him. He’d recognize his most frequent customer anywhere—blond hair secured with a pencil into a messy bun, the ends pointing up and fanned out into a sunburst. “Why aren’t you in school?” he demanded.
“Good afternoon, sir! I had free period last, so I was allowed to leave early.” Poppy smiled and shook his hand with a practiced combination of firmness and warmth, as if she were running for office.
She was, in a way. And not just because she’d been elected president of Paraffin High’s drama club, the Giddy Committee, in a blitzkrieg of a campaign that the Paraffin High School Gazette called “well-run,” “hard-fought,” and “glitter-and-elbow-macaroni-fueled.” (Also “unnecessary,” as she had run unopposed.) But in a larger sense, Poppy’s life post Triple Threat was now one big campaign. A drive to win back the hearts and minds of everyone she’d ever met or would meet. A crusade to show all potential college admission boards that she was more than just a joke, more than just That Girl. The One Who Sang and Fell and Bled Everywhere. Ha-Ha, Remember That? Pull Up the Video, Let’s Watch It Again.
Two and a half months into the school year, some progress had been made in restoring her reputation; people were finally starting to treat her like normal again, and she’d been going above and beyond to remind everyone that she was the same old Poppy she always was. She got stellar grades. She aced her SATs. She clogged her schedule with extracurriculars. Sooner or later, she thought, everyone would be forced to admit that they were wrong about her, simply through her sheer force of being relentlessly, unequivocally respectable.
Case in point: She was still shaking the engraver’s hand. “How is Nancy, sir?” she asked with genuine concern. “That pesky yeast infection clear up?”
“Er, yes,” he muttered, pulling his hand away. Most people in Paraffin were comfortable with the small-town inevitability of knowing one another’s personal details, but Mr. Kosnitzky preferred to keep his wife’s yeast where it belonged: at home. “What can I do for you, Poppy?” He spit out her name in a bouncy yet mocking tone, as though resentful that he was being forced to say something cheerful.
Poppy couldn’t blame him; she hated her name too. Despised everything about it. Its ditziness, its whimsicality, the sheer Britishness of it. The way it was full of round, unwieldy letters. It undermined her, she felt—or, at the very least, made her feel like a googly-eyed Muppet that had wandered off set.
(Her father claimed that it had all been her mother’s doing. He’d wanted to name her either Coolbreeze or Jubilation. But Poppy’s parents were on another plane of crazy altogether.)
She plunked an oddly shaped award onto the counter.
Mr. Kosnitzky sighed. “Another one?”
“Yes.” She slid a piece of paper toward him. “But it’s not for me this time.”
He read the name off the paper. “Connor Galpert?”
“Correct.”
Sighing again, he picked up the trophy and held it to the light. This one had a faux-marble base, like many of the others she’d brought in over the years, but where there usually sat a plastic gold figure of a shuttlecock (badminton team) or a paintbrush (Art Club) or a jazz hand (the Merry Maladies, a group Poppy had spearheaded that went into local hospitals to foist cheer and Broadway songs upon defenseless patients), this particular chunk of gold plastic more closely resembled a large slug.
He waved it at her. “This a turd?”
Poppy stifled a grunt. He was the third one to ask that today. “No, sir.”
Mr. Kosnitzky squinted through the lenses of his plastic-rimmed glasses at the paper Poppy had given him, then at the inscription on the copper plate, frowning as he fed it into the engraving machine. “What does SPCY stand for?”
“The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Yams.”
He raised an eyebrow. “And what does ‘yams’ stand for?”
“Oh, it doesn’t stand for anything, sir. A yam is a type of sweet potato, a starchy tuber that grows in the—”
“I know what a yam is. Why does it need its own society?”
She pulled a pamphlet out of her bag and slid it across the counter with a firm finger. “Mr. Kosnitzky, I don’t want to alarm you, but yam farmers in our state receive, on average, fifty percent less—”
“You don’t say,” he said, finishing the inscription and fitting it back onto the base. “And why aren’t you in school?”
“I already told you, sir—I had free period last today, so I was allowed to leave early.” When he glared at her, she added, “It’s in the handbook.”
He went back to his work, grumbling. Poppy didn’t take his disdain personally; as a rule, Mr. Kosnitzky hated all teenagers. He’d gone so far as to appoint himself Paraffin High’s honorary truant officer. Every morning before opening for business, he’d camp out at his storefront window, scan the town square and its prominent gazebo through a pair of ancient binoculars, and call the principal’s office the second he spotted anyone unlucky enough to appear adolescent. He was correct roughly sixty percent of the time, and he still felt pretty good about the other forty percent because he still got to yell into the phone.
“So the farmers want this Connor’s name engraved onto a giant yam for, what, heroic weeding efforts or something?” he asked.
“Oh, no,” said Poppy. “Connor won the yam-eating contest. It was all part of the first annual Paraffin Yamboree, to raise money for the farmers. Didn’t you hear about it? I put up flyers all over town. There are two in your front window.”
Mr. Kosnitzky frowned and looked over her shoulder. “I don’t remember posting those.”
“I took the liberty. And it’s a good thing I did—we got a great turnout!”
He stared. She beamed. He stared some more. “That’ll be five dollars and six cents.”
She blinked her giant eyes at him—always a disarming gesture, as they were slightly too large for her head—and placed a neat stack of dollar bills on the counter. “Can I leave some yamphlets too?”
“Heh?”
“Pamphlets,” she said, fanning a stack of no less than a hundred. “About the yams.”
“No.”
He took her money and started punching buttons on his antiquated cash register as the door bell rattled again. “Be with you in a minute,” he said to the new customer, who stepped up behind Poppy, boots screeching on the tiled floor.
Poppy could tell from the combined scent of Orbit gum and cheap body spray that it was a teenager. Tall, judging by the way he blocked the light from outside. A watch jangled on his wrist, one of those oversize titanium gimmicks that were bought only by scuba divers or people who wanted to appear as cool as scuba divers. He let out a low chuckle, then advanced another step.
“‘The hills are aliiiiiive,’” he quietly sang.
Poppy’s ears reddened. She glanced at his stringy reflection in a plaque on the wall.
Blake Bursaw.
Crapnugget.
The self-appointed first family of Paraffin, the Bursaw clan ran every inch of the town—or at least every inch that the candle factory didn’t touch. The matriarch, a corpulent floral-print-wearing old woman who resembled a roll of wallpaper and was known colloquially as Miss Bea, served as Paraffin’s mayor. Her campaign motto, AN EXTRAORDINARY WOMAN, had blanketed the town for years, everyone still too fearful of her sparkly-eyed wrath to take any of the posters down. Her son, a middle-aged blowhard called Big Bob, sat on the town council and was widely assumed to be next in line for the mayor’s office. And his son, Blake, treated Paraffin as his own personal dog park, pissing on everything just to mark it as his.
The three of them lived together in an ostentatious mansion modeled on the White House and wo
rked hard to maintain their position as the Worst. Everyone knew it. Everyone thought it.
But no one said it. Not out loud, at least. And so they got away with everything.
“With the sound of loooosers,” Blake kept on singing.
“That doesn’t even make sense,” Poppy said under her breath. What was he doing in a trophy shop? The kid had never won anything in his life. Except maybe a World’s Biggest Douchebag contest.
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
Engage in childish name-calling
“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 th
em. “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.