Wax (19 page)

Dud shook his head. “Too many feelings.”

One of them being disappointment; Poppy had hoped that the stone candle's overnight revelations would contain more pertinent information about the Chandlers, but they weren't juicy enough:

OF COURSE, THINGS ALWAYS TURN SOUR. THE CHANDLERS HAD LONG AGO ABANDONED THEIR REAL, NON-WAX BODIES​—​ONCE THEY SAW WHAT I COULD DO, THEY DID NOT THINK TWICE ABOUT DISROBING THEIR MORTAL TRAPPINGS. ONLY LATER DID THE HARSH REALITY OF WHAT THEY'D DONE SET IN​—​THE REALIZATION THAT THEY WOULD HAVE TO KEEP REPLACING THEIR WAX BODIES, OVER AND OVER. AND THAT WITHOUT ME THERE TO SCULPT THEM, THEY WERE DOOMED. SO THEY KEPT ME CAPTIVE FOR A WHILE​—​THEM LIVING THE LIFE, ME TOILING AWAY AS THEIR PRISONER. AND EVENTUALLY THEY GOT GREEDY. THEY WANTED MORE. THEY WANTED TO

“They wanted to what?” she'd shouted at it. “Tell me!”

But the candle did not accommodate her request. And though she dearly wanted to bring it to school and give it a nice cushy spot in her locker and check it obsessively between classes, she just couldn't risk removing it from the safety of her house.

“I heard her again, when I smelled the candle this morning,” Dud said quietly.

“Who?” Poppy asked. “Madame Grosholtz?”

He nodded. “In my head.”

“What does she say to you?”

“Oh, she doesn't talk to me. She talks to . . . herself, maybe? It's sort of like when you get excited about something and you walk back and forth around your room and talk fast and move your hands around a lot.”

“Um,” Poppy said, tucking a piece of hair behind her ear, “just so you know, thinking out loud is something a lot of creative people do. It doesn't make them, like, nuts or anything. In fact, it makes them​—”

“Can I get more candles?” He pointed at the factory as they rounded the bend of the lake. “To sculpt more things?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Poppy was about to launch into an exhaustive explanation of exactly why not​—​when she got an idea.

“Because,” she said, “I'm going to do you one better.”

∗ ∗ ∗

“Ready?” Poppy asked, straining to carry the dented
Annie
orphans' buckets through the narrow door.

Dud bounced excitedly on the balls of his feet, causing the multitude of props and costumes stacked up in the slop room to sway perilously. “For what?”

She dropped the buckets at his feet. Inside were grayish, disgusting blobs of what appeared to be industrial byproduct. “Here you go.”

Dud's eyes almost fell out of his head. “What is it?”

“It's wax!”

His nose scrunched up as he poked at it. “Doesn't look like wax.”

“That's because it hasn't been dyed and scented and raped of its original beauty by a soulless corporation.” She left out the part about the soulless corporation selflessly donating it to a school that lacked an arts budget. It would have ruined the spirit of her indignation. “Go ahead, try it.”

Dud broke off a chunk of the wax and immediately formed it into a squirrel.

“Wow,” said Poppy, ever amazed by his speed. “Guess you've already got the hang of it.”

Dud let out a whoop and straightaway began chipping more wax out of the bucket, his supplier all but forgotten.

Poppy glanced around the slop room. As it was an offshoot of the Gaudy Auditorium, odds were that no one would come within a hundred feet of it during the school day. Still . . . “Dud, promise me something. Dud. Look at me.”

He paused mid-bucket to look up at her. “Hmm?”

“You can stay here all day long and sculpt, as long as you don't leave this room, okay? That way no one will bother you, and you won't bother anyone else. I know they're not ideal conditions, but there's a sink, and some tools, paint, and costumes​—​and wigs, if you dig around in some of the boxes. And if you need more wax, just hang tight​—​I'll come back and check on you in a couple of hours. Got all that? Can you promise me you won't leave?”

“What's a promise?”

“It's when you have to do what you say you'll do. Or I'll be sad. And mad.”

“Okay,” he said, his eyes on the wax. “Promise.”

Poppy watched him, unsure. She didn't feel a hundred percent about this, but it had to be better than trying to enroll him. Prospective students tended to be required to prove citizenship, and to have a Social Security number. And a pulse. “Well . . . okay. I'll be back at lunch.”

Dud was already busying himself with dumping the gray blobs out of the buckets. “Sounds good!”

Poppy bit her lip as she left the slop room, closing the door behind her. “Does it?”

∗ ∗ ∗

Paraffin High buzzed feverishly with the events that had transpired at the factory over the weekend. The fire​—​and who, if anyone, had set it​—​was all anyone could talk about.

Every class Poppy attended that day used it as a starting point around which to build a lesson. In math, they determined that it had to be arson, using calculations for wind speed and direction. In English, they explored what the act of setting a fire says about the human condition. Mr. Shale, the history teacher who should have retired decades ago, got a little carried away with his Cold War metaphor and declared that the fire was all the doing of the Soviets.

“In art we were told to sketch how the fire made us
feel,
” Jill told Poppy when they met up at her locker for lunch. “I asked if I could drink a gallon of paint instead, but was told that performance art didn't count.”

“To be fair, performance art never counts for anything.”

Poppy glanced around the hall. She'd kept an eye out for Blake all morning, but she hadn't seen him. Hadn't heard him. Hadn't discovered anything viscous planted in her locker. If she didn't hate his guts so much, she might even have been worried​—​

“Poppy?”

She whipped around to find Mr. Crawford smiling at her, that adorable dimple sinking so deeply into his chin that a family of bears could crawl in and hibernate there for the winter.

“Bear,” Poppy said.

“What?”

“I mean​—​hi, Mr. Crawford. What's up?”

He scratched his head, looking harried. “I was wondering if you could help me out with something.”

“Yes. Anything.”

If he noticed her abject desperation, he classily didn't let on. “You know how the Paraffin High Marching Band is supposed to be performing at the bicentennial parade tomorrow?”

Poppy suppressed a scowl. “I am acutely aware of that.”

“Well, Principal Lincoln just got a call from the band teacher, and, um​—​you're not going to believe this.” He let out a pained laugh. “They're stuck in Madrid! Another Icelandic volcano erupted and they grounded all flights in and out of Europe.”

“Are you kidding me?”

“So now we're scrambling. The mayor's office still wants a performance from the youth of the town, and . . .” He ran a hand through his well-conditioned hair. “Do you think the Giddy Committee could perform in the parade? Just a musical number or two​—​and it doesn't have to be polished, just something to​—”

“
Yes.
Oh my God, yes!” she shouted, prompting some of the students streaming down the hall past them to raise their eyebrows. “Absolutely. We'd be happy to.
I'd
be happy to. Whatever you want. Whatever you need.”

His eyes lit up. Sparkled.
Twinkled.
“Really? Oh, man, thank you, Poppy. Think you can rally the troops for a rehearsal today?”

She nodded so hard, her neck cracked. “We were rehearsing anyway for our Broadway revue that's coming up in a couple of weeks, so I can just refocus our rehearsal today for the parade tomorrow, because I'm the director, so I can. We can.” She fixed a goofy grin on her face and pumped her fist into the air. “Yes, we can!”

Now he was looking a little weirded out. “Okay. Great. Call time is at eight forty-five a.m. tomorrow in the parking lot behind the Price Chopper. I'll be around, but let me know if you have any questions before then.” He gave her a little wave and allowed himself to be swept up by the hallway rush. “See you in biology!”

“Wait!” Poppy called after him anyway. “Do you want to, like, give me your phone number, or​—”

“Nah, email's good. Thanks again!”

Poppy slunk back to Jill, who was judging harshly. “I want you to know what you look like right now,” said Jill, “which is one of those skeletons you see in a haunted house, with your mouth wide open and giant gaping holes where your eyes should be and the sort of vacant silent scream reserved only for the damned.”

Poppy gathered up her textbooks and what was left of her dignity. “Let us dine.”

When they got to the cafeteria, Poppy, envying the ordinary day her fellow students were having, unpacked the grapes and neatly compartmentalized cubes of tofu her mother had prepared.

“So back to the Chandlers,” Jill said, joylessly chewing her turkey sandwich. “You're saying that they're Hollow Ones?”

“Yes.” Poppy took out her phone and showed Jill some pictures she'd taken that morning of the candle message:
They did not think twice about disrobing their mortal trappings.

“But what about Dud? Did he disrobe his mortal trappings too?”

“You know, I've been thinking about that.” Poppy selected three grapes to demonstrate. “Madame Grosholtz, Anita, and Preston all came from their original, nineteenth-century selves. They've been reincarnating wax versions of themselves for decades.” She then removed a single tofu cube and put it by itself. “But Dud is different. It's almost like Madame Grosholtz made him from scratch. Like his personality is new, not carried over from anyone else. Like she made him out of thin air. I don't know how, of course, but I'm pretty sure he's different from the other three. The tofu stands alone.”

“The tofu . . . stands alone.”

“Yes. Exactly.”

Jill seemed to have no idea how to respond to that. “What's with the phone?” she asked instead. “Don't you usually scribble your manic digressions in The List?”

“I have temporarily misplaced The List,” Poppy said irritably. “But​—​trust me, it's all right there in the candle.”

“I see. And where might this candle be?”

“I left it at home. I can't run the risk of it getting lost, or broken​—​or stolen.”

“Good Lord, Poppy. Paranoid much?”

“It's not paranoia if they're really after your secret-candle-message-hidden-by-a-dead-woman,
Jill.
”

Jill rubbed her temples. “Permission to change the subject?”

“Permission granted.”

“What's new with Wax Boy? Or​—​sorry, the Tofu Who Stands Alone.”

“Oh, he sculpted the town out of candles.”

“Um, what?”

Poppy filled Jill in on what had happened after they'd parted on Sunday. “It's like part of Madame Grosholtz is ingrained in him or something. Programmed.”

“How did the sculpture of me look?” Jill asked.

“Pretty dead-on.”

“Can I have it?”

“What? No​—”

“I'll give you ten bucks for it. Hey, look at that​—​you might have a pretty lucrative business opportunity here. Open up a little shop, sell the townspeople tiny versions of themselves. Or of other people, that they can then squash. Like voodoo dolls. Voodoo squash dolls. Doubles as a great band name, too.”

“Are you making fun of me?”

“I am.”

“This is serious, Jill!” Poppy whisper-shouted. “The Chandlers are up to something! Just because I don't know what it is yet doesn't mean it's not happening!” She angrily pushed her lunchbox away.

“Done with your food?”

“Yes. Your rudeness and skepticism have made me lose my appetite.”

“Poppy.” Jill flashed her a knowing smirk. “Come on.”

Poppy grumbled and downed the rest of her tofu in one bite. “Seriously, who are these bizarre people on TV shows who lose their appetite when they get stressed? I could eat an entire lasagna right here, right now, no utensils, just my face, splat.” She put her head on the table to demonstrate.

Jill patiently chewed her sandwich and looked out the window. “So where's Dud now?”

Poppy spoke into the laminate. “He wanted to keep sculpting, so I grabbed some of the surplus wax from the art supply and set him up in the slop room.”

“Are you sure that's where he is?”

“Yeah.”

“Are you sure he's not outside the window, flattening the landscaping with a giant wax version of Mr. Crawford?”

Poppy slowly raised her head.

14

“
DUD! WHAT ARE YOU DOING?
”

“Hi, Poppy!” Dud waved Mr. Crawford's wax arm at her.

She dragged him off the front lawn of the school while Dud dragged the wax Mr. Crawford, forming a motley chain of fools that was ultimately wrangled into the groundskeeper's maintenance shed. “I
told
you to stay in the slop room,” Poppy said as evenly as she could, not wanting to spook him but finding it hard not to among all the hanging pitchforks and shovels. “You
promised
you'd stay.”

A look of genuine remorse washed over his face. “I'm sorry, Poppy. But I thought maybe you'd want to show it to Mr. Crawford because you like him so much!”

“That's sweet of you, but​—”

“Maybe if he likes it, he'll
marry
you.”

“No. That is not how that works. Teachers don't marry students. And even if they did, he has a wife and two children, and if I haven't figured out a way to get them out of the picture by now, it's probably never going to happen​—”