by Gina Damico
“Oops,” he said, his scrambling sneakers ripping the registration.
Poppy rubbed her temples. “Maybe you don’t deserve to ride shotgun.”
“Shot . . . gun?”
“Front seat of the car—forget it.”
Poppy scanned the street for witnesses. Luckily, Mrs. Goodwin had finished her gardening, but Poppy’s parents could arrive home any minute. She gunned it out of the driveway, narrowly missing the mailbox her mother had painted to look like a watermelon.
Fascinated, the boy watched suburbia fly by the window. “Better than trunk,” he said with a sage nod.
Poppy glared at him. “Do you have a name?”
“Dud?”
“No—sorry, I only called you that because—”
“Dud! Dud! Dud!”
“Okay, okay. Here—be quiet and listen to the radio.”
She hit the button, and one of Madonna’s more recent songs screeched out. Dud put his hands over his ears.
“Fair enough.” She pointed at the scan button. “Press this until you find something you like.”
Tentatively, the boy pushed the button, pausing briefly at each station until he landed on Poppy’s parents’ religion of choice: National Public Radio. He sat back in his seat and smiled.
“Talking,” he said with enthusiasm. “Learning talking.”
Poppy gaped at him. “You’re learning how to talk just by listening? So you’ve only learned what I’ve been saying—”
“Shh,” he said, holding up a finger. “This American Life.”
Poppy rolled her eyes. “Excuse me,” she said, though she did shut up. No point in trying to compete with Ira Glass.
They were rumbling along toward the center of town, listening to a heartbreaking story about migrant diaper factory workers, when Poppy turned the corner—and abruptly sat taller in her seat.
The town square had become a sea of flashing red and blue lights. Sirens split the air; smoke darkened the sky. A cavalcade of fire trucks, police cruisers, and ambulances tore down the road, screeching around the edges of the lake.
With a sinking feeling, Poppy looked across the water.
Towering orange flames licked at the spires of the Grosholtz Candle Factory, the whole rear of the building lit up like a blazing candelabra.
8
Weave a merry web of lies
“THIS QUINOA IS DELICIOUS,” POPPY SAID, shoving a spoonful into her face. “What am I tasting here—cumin?”
The Whole Foods buffet-to-go boxes had gone untouched. Dr. Steve had gone unwatched. One hundred percent of her parents’ attention was focused on the boy shoved awkwardly into a folding chair and looking at a fork as though he had never seen a fork before.
“Coriander,” her mom answered flatly.
Dud speared a carrot with such force that the fork plowed through the cardboard of the container, dispensing some of its contents onto the carpet. Owen giggled.
“Poppy?” said her father, bending down to pick up the runaway chickpeas. “Could we have a moment to chat with you? Alone?”
“But I’m eating.” Poppy arranged her mouth into a shape that was a smile in name only. Behind it was nothing but sheer panic. The second she’d spotted the fire that had consumed the Grosholtz Candle Factory—and was still consuming it, judging by the occasional fire truck screaming by—she’d bolted, for motives that she couldn’t herself determine. Maybe she wanted to keep out of danger. Maybe it was a gut feeling.
Or maybe it was the fear that she’d somehow, inexplicably, caused it.
Whatever the reason, she’d sped home at once. Worry clouded her thoughts—was Madame Grosholtz okay? Had she gotten out in time? Poppy hadn’t been able to see too well from across the lake, but it looked as though the flames were concentrated toward the back of the factory. And the way the building was shaped, with that one narrow hallway, escape would have been near impossible . . .
When she got home, she wrangled Dud back up to her room and into her closet again, trying to think. But thinking was a higher brain function that Poppy had lost the capacity for. In the space of fifteen minutes she’d devolved to the mental level of a dung beetle—and like the dung beetle, all she could think about was the immense pile of shit she was in.
She was still “thinking” by the time her parents and Owen got home, and that’s when her mutated insect brain decided it would be a good idea to remove Dud from the closet, take him downstairs, and introduce him to her family as if he were a cherished guest star on a sitcom. She’d half expected an unseen studio audience to burst into applause.
But all she’d got was a gust of stunned silence, six widened eyeballs, and Owen blurting, “Who’s that?”
At which point it became obvious that this half-baked plan of hers was crumbling fast, and no amount of coriander could save it.
“Poppy,” her father repeated. “A word.”
“Can we please watch the news? I want to know what they’re saying about the fire at the—”
“Poppy.”
“Yeah, okay,” she muttered, standing up from the couch. “Um—” She looked at Dud, who was evidently unsettled by the existence of bean sprouts, and then at Owen, whose expression was that of a child who’d been given a life-size action figure for Christmas.
“Watch him,” she told her brother. “Make sure he doesn’t break anything.”
“Sure,” said Owen, watching Dud slice a single pea.
Poppy followed her parents into the kitchen and then into the privacy of the pantry, where they closed the door and stared her down. As the space in the pantry was limited, the awkwardness was nice and concentrated.
Her parents were busy shooting each other a lot of uncertain glances, which gave Poppy enough time to decide to charge forth from an offensive position rather than retreating into the canned tomatoes. “That was very rude of you,” she hissed at them.
“Excuse me?” said her father.
“I thought about what you said. That we should open our home, with open arms, and open our hearts to a scared young foreigner who wants nothing more than to learn all about our strange, vegetable-loving ways.”
“We did not say ‘open’ that many times,” her mother said.
Her father agreed with a huff. “And we did not mean that you should pick up a random exchange student as soon as you found one! These things take months to set up! You’re supposed to do this with the help of placement coordinators, there are interviews—”
“So I cut out the middleman!” Poppy exclaimed. “Look. Dud needs a home, and I need a better reputation. Do you have any idea how good this will look on a college application? It’s right up there with Habitat for Humanity. All the karma, none of the nail gun accidents.”
That mollified them a bit. “What about his family?” her mom asked. “Aren’t we supposed to be in contact with them?”
“I already talked to his mother,” Poppy said, which technically wasn’t untrue. “She was fine with it. Practically shoved him into my car!”
“I don’t know, Poppy. This whole thing feels . . . what’s the word . . .”
“Illegal?” her father supplied.
“Yes. This feels like kidnapping.”
“Mom. It’s not. I even cleared it with the school. You can check with them on Monday,” Poppy said, making a mental note to add #19026: Bribe a school official to The List.
The lies were working. Her parents were now shooting each other deliberating glances. Her mom asked, “Where is he from?”
“Um. Canada?”
Wrong answer. They deflated. “Canada?” her father whined. “That’s not very foreign.”
“Sorry, Dad. I was unable to secure a Parisian debutante on such short notice.” Her father’s nostrils flared. She was losing them. “Of course he’s not from Canada,” she said. “I meant he arrived via Canada. He’s originally from—” Think, Poppy. Somewhere exotic. “An island.” More specific
. “Tristan da Cunha!”
Their stares got blanker, if that was possible. “I’ve never heard of Tris—how do you say it?” her mother said, not very subtly glancing at the food in the pantry to see if Poppy had stolen the name from a can of beans.
“Tristan da Cunha. It’s a real place!” Poppy said too forcefully. “It was discovered by and named for a Portuguese explorer, then it was annexed by Britain and settled by only a handful of people, and the tiny population living there now are all descended from that first small bunch,” she rattled off, grasping to recall the salient points from the report she did in tenth grade. “It’s one of the most isolated places on the planet.”
Her mother was captivated. “Is that true?”
Poppy batted her giant eyes, trying with all her might to inject as much gravitas as she could into her tale. “It’s all true, Mom. Wikipedia it.”
“I will.”
“That’s why he seems a bit off,” Poppy continued. “He’s lived in such a remote place with the same three hundred or so people his entire life. So if he doesn’t know how to, like, use a telephone, or, like, use a fork . . . that is why.”
Her father was still staring at her, trying to discern whether he’d raised a lying, evil monster or merely a lying, well-meaning monster. “Tristan da Cunha,” he repeated.
“It’s near Africa,” Poppy threw in.
As soon as she said it, she realized that she should have led with the A-word right off the bat. Relieved smiles drifted onto her parents’ faces. At last: Africa. A continent full of culture. And exotic, healthy cuisine. And blood diamonds and genocides and all sorts of other atrocities for her parents to get all up in arms against.
“Come on, you guys. Pleeease? Can I keep him?” she begged, adding once more under her breath for good measure, “Africa?”
“Well,” her father said, “as long as it’s okay with the school, he can stay with us. Of course he’s welcome,” he insisted, retroactively inserting goodwill and diplomacy into his tone. “Think of the education we’ll get!”
“Have you learned anything from him so far?” her mom asked, now joyous. “Does he have any unique customs?”
As if in answer, the shrill, deafening shriek of a smoke detector blared from the living room.
∗ ∗ ∗
The television was aflame.
While her father dashed for the fire extinguisher and her brother screamed and her mother inexplicably searched for the remote control, perhaps hoping to find a “cancel fire” button, Poppy scanned the room for Dud.
He was gone. Her box of food was smushed into the carpet, the Nike swoosh rendered in butternut squash.
The fire was small, but the acrid fumes of melted technology were starting to choke the air. As her father battled the flames, Poppy grabbed handfuls of Owen and her mother and hauled them both out of the house—into equally smoky conditions, thanks to the fire on the other side of town. “What happened?” she shouted at Owen over the whoosh of the extinguisher.
Owen looked dazed. “I don’t know. We were sitting there—he was eating his peas one by one, and then he sniffed at them, and then he sneezed, and then the television caught on fire.”
Poppy had gone her entire life without having seen a fire anywhere other than where fires were supposed to be, and today, within the space of four hours, she’d seen two? It couldn’t be a coincidence. “He was just sitting there? Are you sure he didn’t . . . I don’t know, breathe toward the TV or anything?”
“Poppy,” her mother said dismissively, “Africans can’t set things on fire by sneezing on them. They don’t have magical powers. Don’t be racist.”
Poppy dearly wanted to devote a hunk of time to dissecting that little gem, but Dud was now missing, and for all she knew, this particular flame-throated fake African could in fact sneeze things on fire. “Did you see where he went?” she asked Owen.
He shook his head. “He looked at the fire, then ran out the door.”
“Bad news, family.” Poppy’s father emerged from the house and tossed some melted DVD cases into the front yard. “We lost a couple of throw pillows and Dr. Steve’s Cauliflower Hour.”
“And the television,” Owen added.
“Well, yes. And the television.” He wiped a puddle of sweat from his forehead and glanced up at the sky, where the smoke from the factory still swooped up into a column, blocking out the moon. “Geez, two fires in one night? What are the odds?”
A faint whimpering issued forth from Mrs. Goodwin’s bed of roses.
“Oof,” it said.
“Why would he run into a pricker bush?” Owen loudly inquired.
Poppy could see him now—a dark form hunched inside the shrub, trying not to move. “I’ll get him,” she told her family. “You guys go back inside and open some windows.”
Dud was curled up in a ball again, his eyes wide and panicked as Poppy approached. She lifted a branch. “Dud?” she whispered. “Are you okay?”
“What happened?” he yelled.
“Shh!” She glanced at Mrs. Goodwin’s windows. “We need to work on your volume control.”
“What?” he shouted again.
“Shh!”
“What?”
“No—okay, when I make that noise, that shh? That means you lower your voice. Whisper. Like I’m doing.”
Dud lowered his head, as if doing so would also help lower his voice. “Whisper like I’m doing,” he rasped in what was technically a whisper, but a loud one.
“Just stop talking until we get back into the house.” She grabbed hold of his forearms. “Come on, let’s get you out of—oh, that feels weird.”
His skin wasn’t . . . cold, exactly. But it didn’t feel warm, either. Not even lukewarm.
He was precisely room temperature.
Putting that aside for now, Poppy pulled him up. For all the mass he occupied, he felt awfully light. She was able to lift him out of the bushes with hardly any effort—except for the thorns snagging on his clothes. “Careful!” Poppy said, watching one plunge into his shoulder and tear through his skin. But when it came out, there was no blood. No cut. Not even a scrape.
Dud looked at his arm. “Hmm.”
Poppy deemed this to be an understatement. “Did you feel that?”
He didn’t answer.
“Hey. Did you feel that?”
“You said to stop talking until we get to the house.”
“I did! Good listening skills. But I’m giving you permission to answer this question: Did you feel that?”
“Yes.”
“Did it hurt?”
“What is ‘hurt’?”
“It’s—‘hurt’ means ‘pain.’ Like something that feels bad.”
Dud looked down at his vegetable-covered shoes. “I feel bad about the squash.”
Poppy gave a little snicker but retracted it when she saw how sincere he was. “No, hurts—like this.” She gently pinched the skin on the underside of his arm. “Do you feel that?”
“Yes.”
“And it doesn’t feel bad?”
“No. But I did feel bad when I felt the fire. It was hot and my face melted.”
It was hard to see in the darkness, but now that he mentioned it, his face did look a little melty. Obviously, she thought. He’s made of wax. Of course he’ll melt in the heat.
“Is that not normal?” he asked.
Poppy hesitated. He was aware that he was made of wax, right? Because that was not a conversation she was up for at the moment. She reached up and smoothed out the skin that had sagged under his eyes. “There,” she said. “Good as new.”
“And new as good!”
Poppy sighed inwardly. Were all their interactions to turn into Sesame Street segments? “Let’s go back inside.” She steered Dud toward the house. “Oh, and if anyone asks, you’re from an island near Africa.”
“What’s an Africa?”
∗ ∗ ∗
Poppy
’s parents somehow got it into their heads that a quality family dinner could still be salvaged after such a calamity. “So, Dudley!” her mother said, scooping some of her carrots onto a plate for Dud as the family hovered around the oft-neglected dining room table. They were so unfamiliar with the thing, they didn’t know how to properly sit at it. “I hear you grew up on an island!”
Dud frowned. “Dud—ley?”
“It’s just Dud, Mom,” Poppy said.
“Just Dud?”
“Yeah,” said Poppy, pulling her chirping phone out of her pocket. “It’s a traditional . . . island . . . name.”
Jill had texted her: we still on for ice cream now that you returned the mannequin for store credit?
Poppy replied: i didn’t return him, the factory was on fire
Jill, ever unflappable, said: okay
well
might ice cream help you cope?
“You must have learned all sorts of fascinating nautical skills,” Poppy’s father was saying to Dud. He’d perched one leg up on a chair and was balancing his plate on his pasty white knee.
for the love of god yes get me out of this house, Poppy answered, putting the phone away. “Dad, he doesn’t want to—”
“Sure he does. How many knots can you tie, Dud?” Unsure, Dud held up three fingers, but the Question Train kept chugging. “How many words do you have in your native language for ‘sand’?”
“Dad.”
Then Owen started in. “Can you climb a coconut tree and get the coconuts down?”
“Oh, Dud, you must give me some new coconut recipes,” Poppy’s mom said. “A few months back I was on a huge kick—did a blog series about it, ‘Cuckoo for Coconuts’—but I must have run out of steam after about sixty or so dishes because I stopped, and I can’t remember why—”
“Because you constipated us!” Poppy burst out, unable to take another second. “You constipated us all!”
Everyone stared at her.