“Jesus! Focus!”
“Hey, I wasn’t rude about it! Jesus is a gentleman! So I respectfully bump fists with Miss Fitzgerald, wish her the best of mornings, and stride on into Lincoln’s office. He doesn’t see me come in at first, he’s turned around, looking through a file cabinet. I said, ‘ Sic semper tyrannis, Lincoln.’ That’s what I always say. We got a whole thing going on. You know, like John Wilkes—”
“I got it. Continue.”
“But this time he jumped, all surprised and shit, and scraped his hand on the corner of the cabinet—which is made of sharp metal, so there shoulda been a cut there. But it didn’t bleed! And then he rubbed it real fast and, like, made it go away! I guess he thought I wouldn’t notice, but when he took his other hand away, there wasn’t even a scratch mark there anymore.”
Poppy felt sick. “Go on.”
“So I said, ‘Busted, Lincoln!’ And of course he went all innocent and shit, ‘What are you talking about?’ but it was too late.”
Poppy’s palms were getting sweaty. “Too late for what?”
“I already told you! I set him on fire and melted his waxy ass to the ground!”
This claim, now repeated to her for the fourth time, still did not compute. “How . . . did . . . you do that?”
He rolled his eyes, as if there should be no difficulty in comprehending the words he was saying. “I took out my flamethrower,” he said slowly, explaining, “and burned him up. What don’t you get about it?”
“Everything!” she yelled. “What flamethrower?”
“Well, after you told us all that shit yesterday about the wax monsters invading our town, I went home and, you know, got to work. We gotta defend ourselves.” He lifted the back of his shirt, removed something from his waistband, and displayed it to Poppy with a flourish.
“A paintball gun?”
“With a Zippo attached,” he said proudly. “And filled with lighter fluid.”
Poppy felt the floor tilt beneath her. “Oh, no. Oh, no no no.”
“So he melted.” Jesus shrugged as if, now that he’d told his epic tale, it was no big deal. “Bam. Cross him off the list.”
It was clear to Poppy that the most pressing issue here was that she’d created a situation in which a boy thought it was okay to fashion an improvised flamethrower and start immolating the school administration, but—“Wait. He really melted?”
“Hell yeah! That office floor was one big puddle o’ principal! Ruined the rug, though, which is a shame because it was a nice rug. I rolled it up and threw it out the window, then went outside and dragged it into the woods. Collateral damage.”
“Did anyone see you? Or hear you?”
“Nah, and you know what? Lincoln didn’t scream. When he saw what I was about to do, he just kind of stood there and glared at me. I don’t think he wanted any attention called to it neither, you know? ’Cause then people would see that he was made outta wax, and that’s real bad for Team Hollow.”
“Okay. Okay.” Poppy put her clammy hands over her eyes and tried to think. “This is a regrettable development, Jesus. You can’t just go around killing them. That’s not part of The Plan. We need to identify them first, and then figure out—”
“Figure out what? If the situation is as bad as you say it is, we gotta start eliminating ’em, one at a time!”
“No. Nope. That is not how it works. Someone’s going to notice that the principal vanished from his office!”
“Nah, I took care of that, too. I wrote up a phony note from the pad on his desk, said he was heading out for an emergency root canal, and showed it to Miss Fitzgerald. Chatted her up for a good minute or so, blocked her view of the door—so she’ll think he slipped out while we were talking.”
“But his car is in the parking lot. Sooner or later people are going to realize that he’s missing!”
Jesus just shrugged. “Not my problem. I did what I had to do.”
This was every kind of disaster rolled up into one. “Okay, give me the flamethrower,” Poppy said, never having thought she’d have to say that sentence out loud. “I will keep it for now.”
“You’re not gonna break it, are you?”
“No. I’m going to put it into my locker for safekeeping. I think we should keep the ritualistic incinerations limited to one per day.”
Jesus pouted. “If you say so.”
“Just—go about your day. Avoid authority figures. And obviously don’t tell anyone about this.” As soon as she said it, she realized that to someone like Jesus, that may not be obvious. “You got that? You can’t tell anyone.”
“Okay, okay.”
“Or take them outside to show them the rug.”
“Aw, come on now.”
∗ ∗ ∗
Poppy wanted desperately to move on with her day, but she had to double-check Jesus’s work. “Hi, Miss Fitzgerald!” Poppy chirped to the secretary, hoping to sneakily get a status update. “Is Principal Lincoln in?”
“No, in fact,” Miss Fitzgerald said. “Emergency root canal! He was acting so strangely when he came in this morning—not like himself at all. Must have been in so much pain, the poor man.” She clucked her tongue. “Do you want to leave a message? He’s been getting calls all morning, but I haven’t been able to track him down.”
Well, that’s because he’s melted into a carpet out back. “No, that’s okay. Thanks anyway!”
By the time Poppy finished, she’d missed English class completely; when the bell rang for lunch, she went straight back to her locker, where Jill was waiting for her.
“What’s up?” Jill said.
Poppy almost deflated with relief upon seeing someone sane and helpful. “Oh, Jill. I don’t know where to start.”
“You look sick, Pops. What’s wrong? You are the whitest thing in this hallway, and that is saying a lot.”
Forgiving Jill’s earlier Dud-related accusations in light of this new Jesus-related melting, Poppy gave her a quick rundown of the situation. “And the real Mr. Crawford is trapped in the tank, probably dead! He’s younger than the rest, so maybe he’s holding on, but—”
“Wait a sec. Are you sure Principal Lincoln was melted?”
“Yes. Why?”
Feeling a remarkable sense of déjà vu, Poppy whirled around. Principal Lincoln was striding through the hallway as though nothing had happened, frowning at students, throwing out the occasional warning of “No horseplay.” He didn’t look at her as he passed, even though she froze, dropped her books, and stared at him, open-mouthed, while other students were forced to go around the mess she’d made.
Only when Jesus rammed into her from behind did she snap out of it. “Poppy, did you see that? He’s back. He came back!”
She lifted her books from the floor and hugged them to her chest, dread settling through her bones. “They must have multiple copies.”
It made sense. Surely the Chandlers had the capacity to duplicate Madame Grosholtz’s originals; why not make an exhaustive supply of backups? Poppy hadn’t gotten a good look when she’d seen Tank #2, but it was big enough to store them all. She could picture its balconies now: identical copies lined up one behind the other, like rows of a shark’s teeth.
Jesus’s eyes were all fire and brimstone. “So—what, now we can’t melt ’em?”
Poppy detected a teachable moment here. “Well, we’d agreed that we weren’t going to melt them anyway, correct?”
But Jesus’s head was somewhere else. “Yeah, yeah. Unless . . .”
“No, Jesus. No ‘unless’!”
But before she could stop him, he took off down the hall and disappeared into the crowd. Poppy and Jill wordlessly watched him go.
“Round up the Giddy Committee,” Poppy said numbly. “Emergency lunch period rehearsal. Now.”
∗ ∗ ∗
Poppy sat in her usual spot in Gaudy Auditorium, marveling that the rest of the student body was carelessly chowing down in the cafete
ria as if it were any other day. As if the fate of the town did not rest on a scrappy gang of musical fanatics and a psychotic plastic-flamethrower manufacturer.
The Giddy Committee slowly trickled in, buzzing with rumors. “What’s going on, Poppy?” Banks asked.
“Well, Mr. Crawford is a Hollow, for starters.”
“Mr. Crawford is a Hollow?”
“I know,” Poppy said ruefully. “He’s way too hot for something as horrible as this to happen to him, but here we are.”
It was then that Jesus bounded into the auditorium and started to make his way down the aisle.
Poppy knew that unnervingly gleeful look on his face. She grabbed Jill and hurried to meet him before anyone else could hear whatever troublesome things he had to say. “What now?”
Jesus winked at her. “I melted him again.”
“Jesus!”
“No, no, it’s okay! Look.”
They watched him pull yet another weapon out of his bag.
“Where did you get that?” Poppy asked. “How many different guns do you bring to school on a daily basis?”
“I gotta be prepared! And with all the shit that’s going on, I don’t hear you complaining!”
“I have been doing nothing but complaining!”
“Check it out: the faster we melt their sorry asses, the sooner the copies will get used up! They can’t keep up with us forever!”
“Yes! They can! That is the point, Jesus—they’re immortal, they don’t sleep, they have all the time in the world to replenish their copies!” Poppy gave Jill a hopeless look. “Jill, can you field this one? I can’t talk to him anymore.”
Jill looked from Jesus to his gun, then back at Jesus again.
“Think you can make one of those for each of us?” she asked.
∗ ∗ ∗
“I can’t believe you’re taking his side,” said Poppy. “We’re all gonna get expelled.”
“Can’t get expelled if there’s no principal,” Jill said.
“Actually, I think that sort of decision falls to a disciplinary board—”
“Poppy, don’t you think you’re missing the bigger picture here? If we don’t start extinguishing these things soon, the board will be made up of the very things we’re supposed to extinguish!”
“But they’re just going to keep resupplying! They’re just going to keep pouring out of that storage tank and into the cathedral and through the tunnel and out of the gazebo and back into our lives again!”
“But Jesus is right—if we do it fast enough, maybe they won’t be able to keep up.”
Poppy scowled. “Assuming that’s even possible. So what are you suggesting—that we arm the Giddy Committee with flamethrowers and say, ‘Have at ’em, chappies!’?”
“I guess if you wanted to sound like an old-timey vaudeville performer, you could say that.”
“Um, Poppy?” Connor asked. “Lunch period is almost over.”
Poppy glanced up at the stage, where she’d placed everyone in accordance with the current incarnation of The Plan. (Except for Jesus. Jesus had been excused so that he could go make more flamethrowers.) Poppy had forgotten about them once she started arguing with Jill. “Sorry, guys. I’ve had to do a little scrambling in light of today’s developments. You can come down.”
There was a mad dash off the stage. As there’d been no school the day before, the furnace had been turned up extra high to reheat the building, and the floor of the stage had risen to surface-of-the-sun temperatures. “I have a bone to pick with you, Poppy,” Connor announced dramatically, then worriedly followed up with, “A metaphorical bone.”
“Look, there’s nothing I can do about the furnace. I’ve asked the janitor a million times—”
“It’s not that.” Connor put his hands on his hips and reflexively reached behind his back to swish the cape that he was not wearing. He scowled at its absence. “I have to say that while I appreciate the work we have to do in order to not let the townspeople slowly be replaced by evil waxen facsimiles, I fear that our performance is going to suffer if we don’t keep rehearsing.”
Poppy was starting to feel as though she were running a daycare center. “Connor,” she said, sighing, “this is kind of important.”
“Yes, but the craft! The craft is suffering! And I’m just going to put this out there—but you know what I’d want to do if I were an evil waxen facsimile and had just completed the exhausting task of infiltrating a town? I’d like to sit back, relax, and immerse myself in the transcendent experience of live musical theater, that’s what!”
“You’re suggesting we put on a show for the monsters trying to take over our town.”
“If they win, they’ll certainly deserve it.”
Louisa made an impatient noise and shoved in front of Connor. “Enough stalling, Poppy. Do you have a plan or not?”
“And where’s Jesus?” Banks asked.
“Jesus is on a special assignment,” said Poppy.
“In fact,” Jill added, “we all owe Jesus a great deal of gratitude, as he is the one who has figured out how to make a dent in their numbers.”
“How?” Banks asked.
Poppy looked at Jill. Jill nodded. Poppy sighed.
“Gather round, kids,” said Poppy, “and let me tell you a little story about improvised incendiary devices.”
∗ ∗ ∗
After the bell rang and their flamethrower rap session ended and they all agreed to meet after school to finalize the details, Poppy went back to her locker to retrieve her American government textbook. But seeing the White House on the cover, she was reminded of the Bursaws, and then of the ostensible hopelessness of the situation, and then of the fact that she had not eaten a bite of food all day and was about to pass out.
She hurried across the hall and accosted Jill, who was still at her own locker. “Three things,” said Poppy. “I need to get out of here, I need to go pick up Dud, and I need to eat something fried.”
Jill crossed her arms. “Poppy Palladino, are you suggesting we ditch school again?”
“I’m as surprised as you are.”
∗ ∗ ∗
Dud scraped his crayon across the Friendly’s place mat maze so hard, pieces of wax crumbled off and tumbled around the table.
“I don’t know how I feel about this,” said Dud.
“You should feel good,” Jill said. “You’re almost at the pot o’ gold!”
He put down the crayon. “No, I mean about the flamethrowers.”
“Well, seeing as how we’re now producing weapons of mass destruction to be used exclusively against your people, you probably should feel kind of bad.”
“Jill,” Poppy warned.
Dud asked Poppy, “You’re not gonna use them on me, are you?”
She waved off his question and continued to stare at the menu, wanting to eat the photo of the waffle fries. “Of course not.”
“Aaaand what can I get you guys?” Greg surged to the side of their table, invisible tail wagging. Poppy stiffened but reminded herself to act normal. This midday Friendly’s trip wasn’t just for kicks; they were also on a mission to prove Greg’s Hollowness and incorporate his demise into The Plan. And since they’d already tipped their hand to Principal Lincoln and possibly Smitty, it was important not to let Greg know that they were onto him.
It was also important to eat a lot of food. Poppy had to keep up her energy.
As for Greg’s energy, Poppy had to hand it to this Chandler clone, whichever one of them it was. Very convincing. “Ever try the Fishamajig?” Greg asked. “It tastes as fun as its name!”
Poppy was not sure how something could taste fun, but in keeping with her life goal of eating every item on the Friendly’s menu, she was willing to find out. “Sure,” she said. “I’ll give it a whirl.”
“A jig!”
“Yes! That too.”
“And for the rest of you?”
Jill gave him a salute. “I’m all s
et.”
“And I’ll have . . .” Dud scanned the menu. “The buffalo.”
“The buffalo wings?”
“Ha!” Dud cracked up. “Buffaloes don’t have wings.”
Poppy whispered to Greg, “Just bring a pile of chicken.”
Greg said, “Right-io!” then danced off.
“Look, I’m not exactly pro-flamethrowing,” Poppy said, once again in disbelief at the words coming out of her mouth, “but I’m starting to think we don’t have much choice. It’s not like we can go around stabbing them or chopping their heads off or anything.”
“This is making me uncomfortable,” said Dud.
“Sorry.” Poppy took a long sip from her water. “Let’s talk about your day. Did you play with the geese?”
“For a little while, but then Madame Grosholtz started talking in my head again, so I sat down on a bench and listened.”
“Oh, really?”
He nodded. “I like to hear her talk. It makes me feel nice.”
“That’s kind of what memories are,” Poppy said. “A way to remember what someone was like so that you can feel nice about them instead of sad.”
“But I never met her.”
“Well, she’s the only family you have. So it’s okay that you miss her, even if you didn’t know her.”
“What does she say to you, Dud?” Jill asked with an edge to her voice.
He shrugged. “Mostly stuff about making sculptures.”
“Anything else?”
Dud’s smile disappeared under Jill’s hard stare. “Um, no.”
An awkward silence descended.
And the quieter it got, the more Poppy remembered what Jill had said earlier about him.
And the more she remembered, the more she glared at Jill.
Jill, in turn, kept glaring at Dud.
Dud started color-coding the sugar packets.
The rest of their meal was appropriately thorny. Poppy was mad at Jill, Jill was mad at Poppy, and Dud wasn’t mad at anyone but could tell that something was amiss.