Wax

by Gina Damico

“Then what is it?” her mother asked teasingly.

  Poppy considered her options. She couldn’t tell them it was a message from a somewhat-dead-somewhat-alive art legend. She couldn’t tell them that Dud wasn’t capable of understanding the concept of nipples, much less love. She couldn’t tell them anything.

  Poppy fixed a defeated scowl on her face. “It’s a love letter.”

  “I knew it!” Her father grabbed the stone candle and held it over his head, out of her reach. “Oof, heavy! Can I reeead it?”

  “No!” Poppy jumped up and tried to grab it from him, noticing as he held it aloft that the factory logo was stamped on the bottom along with the factory’s motto: One fire, many flames. “Give it to me!”

  He laughed again and relented, carefully handing her the candle. “But seriously, Popsicle, keep it friendly between you two. Dud’s a nice kid. I don’t want to have to end his life.”

  “Noted.”

  She shoved them both out into the hallway. “Remember Dr. Steve!” her father reminded her. “Come hell or high water, you said!”

  She closed the door on them, then whirled around and leaned her back against it. “I would take both hell and high water over the problems I’ve got right now.”

  There was a polite knock.

  “Your dad said I should come give you a firm handshake and nothing more,” Dud told her when she opened the door. “I don’t know what that means.”

  “Just get in here.”

  Dud sat down on the bed next to Poppy as she grabbed her magnifying glass and read Madame Grosholtz’s newly revealed writing.

  BUT PEOPLE IN THE SMALL VILLAGE WHERE I’D FLED BEGAN TO TALK, OF COURSE. ABOUT THE RECLUSIVE OLD LADY WHO MADE SUCH LIFELIKE WAX SCULPTURES. WORD GOT AROUND. AND BEFORE LONG, IT FELL INTO THE EARS OF THE WRONG PEOPLE. THE WORST PEOPLE: ACTORS.

  “I take offense to that,” said Poppy.

  IF YOU TAKE OFFENSE TO THIS, I APOLOGIZE. BUT IT WAS ACTORS WHO SPELLED MY RUIN, AND SO I AM NO LONGER CHARITABLE TOWARD THESPIAN FOLK. THE PAIR OF TRAVELING THEATRICALS WHO CAME TO SEE ME WERE INTERESTED IN USING SOME OF MY SCULPTURES IN THEIR PERFORMANCES, LIKE PUPPETS. YET THEY CHANGED THEIR TUNE ONCE THEY SAW WHAT I COULD DO.

  I ALWAYS KEPT MY MOST PRIVATE WORK HIDDEN AWAY, BUT I WAS NOT AS GOOD A LIAR AS MY VISITORS WERE, AND THEY SOON FIGURED OUT WHAT I WAS UP TO, WHAT I HAD BEEN DOING TO KEEP MYSELF ALIVE. AFTER THAT, THEY FORGOT ALL ABOUT THEIR FOOLISH PUPPETS. WHAT THEY SAW INSTEAD WAS POTENTIAL. SOMEONE WHO COULD SCULPT REPLICAS OF THEM SO THAT THEY COULD NEVER DIE. OR AGE.

  WHY DID I GO ALONG WITH IT? IN TRUTH, I WAS LONELY. AFTER YEARS OF SOLITUDE​—​MORE THAN ANY HUMAN SHOULD HAVE ENDURED​—​HERE WERE FRIENDS AGAIN. I’D SCULPT HOLLOW AFTER HOLLOW, AND THE CHANDLERS WOULD DO ALL SORTS OF THINGS WITH THEIR DISPOSABLE BODIES​—​THROW THEMSELVES OFF BRIDGES, SWIM OUT INTO THE MIDDLE OF THE OCEAN, CLIMB TREACHEROUS MOUNTAINS. AND IF THEY FELL AND GOT IMPALED ON A ROCK​—​WHAT OF IT? I WOULD SIMPLY REINCARNATE THEM FROM THEIR FLAME-SOULS, LIGHTING THEIR FRESHLY SCULPTED HOLLOWS BACK IN MY STUDIO. WE WERE IMMORTAL. WE WERE UNSTOPPABLE.

  OF COURSE

  Even if the wax had burned down farther than that, Poppy wouldn’t have been able to read it​—​her hands were shaking too hard. She placed the candle on her nightstand and put her head into her hands. “The Chandlers,” she whispered. “The Hollow Ones . . .”

  “Poppy?” Dud placed a worried hand on her back. “Are you okay?”

  “No. Nope. The Chandlers​—” She swallowed. “The Chandlers are made of wax. The Chandlers are well over a hundred years old.”

  “Is that bad?”

  “It’s​—”

  Poppy sputtered. It wasn’t inherently bad. Madame Grosholtz did the same thing, and she seemed decent enough. Most people, if given the opportunity to become immortal, would take it, as long as it didn’t hurt anyone in the process.

  But the Chandlers seemed so . . . sinister. They were up to something in that candle dungeon of theirs. Sure, maybe it was a shrine to all the years that they’d cheated death​—​but if they’d been existing as nothing but wax Hollows for decades, then what was up with those bloodstains? If it wasn’t their blood, whose was it?

  “Is it bad?” Poppy repeated. “I don’t know. But it’s not good.”

  Her first instinct was to call Jill​—​but when she picked up her cell phone, her finger paused over the screen. Jill had already made her feelings on this subject known.

  Crinkling her nose in disgust, she scrolled through her contacts until she found BLAKE BURSAW.

  It rang six times before he picked up. “Hogwash? Didn’t think you could dial with those hooves of yours.”

  “I just made a series of groundbreaking discoveries, Bursaw. Do you want to hear them, or do you want to keep acting like a douche?”

  “Can’t I do both?”

  “I’m hanging up.”

  “Okay, okay​—​sorry. Go ahead.”

  Poppy took a deep breath. “The Chandlers​—”

  “Gram?” A moment of muffled speech​—​it sounded like he was talking to Miss Bea. “Sorry. My grandma’s being . . . can I call you back in a second? I’m gonna go somewhere private.”

  Poppy decided that it would be prudent to sort the groundbreaking discoveries in order of importance by the time he called back. They started to run together in her head, and new insights kept popping up​—​no wonder the fire was a hologram; it was just to keep up appearances, since a real fire would be the last thing wax beings would want in their proximity—​so she reached into her bag to tear some paper out of The List.

  Which wasn’t there.

  Poppy made a noise not unlike that of a dying whale.

  “What’s wrong?” Dud asked.

  “The List,” she croaked, frantically digging into each section of her bag. A queasy feeling of helplessness bobbed around her midsection. “It’s not here.”

  She tore the sheets off her bed, but it wasn’t there, either. She must have left it somewhere. School? No. It was in her trunk yesterday. Was it still in the trunk? Or was it . . .

  “Oh, no.” Her stomach lurched. “Oh, shit.”

  Her phone rang. She answered it with, “I left my notebook in the cavern!”

  “So?” said Blake.

  Whether the arson investigation had been called off or not, it would be very bad for someone to find her notebook directly beneath the crime scene, giant block letters screaming IF FOUND, RETURN TO POPPY PALLADINO, along with her phone number and address. “So . . . what if they find it?”

  “Is this what you called about, Hogwash? Your stupid notebook?”

  “Of course not​—”

  “Then get to the point.”

  “Fine.” Poppy took a deep breath. “Have you ever heard of Madame Tussaud?”

  Blake let out a disgusted sigh. “You know what? We’re done here. I’m just gonna ask my dad what’s going on. He appreciates direct questions. He’ll tell me.”

  Poppy flashed back to the horrible things Madame Grosholtz had said in her message. “No! Blake, listen to me: do not confront them. I think they’re mixed up in something really bad​—​actually, I think we all are​—”

  “Thanks for your concern, but I think I can handle it. I’ll call you afterward, if it’ll make you feel any better.”

  “No, you don’t understand! The Chandlers are not who they say they are!”

  He hung up.

  And though Poppy stared at her phone all through dinner and all through the Dr. Steve marathon, and stayed up half the night waiting, he never did call back.

  13

  Try to Monday

  THE NEXT MORNING, POPPY WAS IN HER CAR AND OFF TO school before her parents came down for breakfast.

  “And the worst part ,” she shouted into the phone at Jill as she drove, “is that the candle won’t stay lit! There’s more message in there​—​I know there is​—​but when the Dr. Steve marathon finished and I went to check it, the flame was out and it ha
dn’t burned at all! Then I lit it before going to sleep, but when I woke up later during the night​—​same thing!”

  “I’m more concerned,” Jill said over the phone, “with your delusion that the Chandlers are evil wax mannequins.”

  “It’s not a delusion​—​hey!” Poppy blared her horn at a car that had cut her off. Or perhaps the car that she’d cut off. “Jill, I’ve lost the capacity to multitask. I’ll explain everything when I see you.” She ended the call and focused on the road, hands at ten and two.

  “Where are we going?” Dud asked. His yellow sneakers were tapping against the floor of the car, his eyes bouncing around, taking in the sights of the town as they drove past.

  “School!” Poppy burst out, irritated. “Can you believe that amid arson and subterranean mountain lairs and the emergence into my life of not one but four sentient beings made of wax, I still have to go to school and take a gym quiz?”

  “What’s a gym quiz?”

  “Good question, Dud! A gym quiz is a thing that should not be. Because the height of a basketball hoop is a piece of knowledge that will NEVER ASSIST ME IN MY DAILY LIFE.”

  “You seem tense.”

  “As if gym isn’t demoralizing enough on its own. Now we need to bring paperwork into this? And the result of this farce will have a bearing on my GPA?”

  “What’s a GPA?”

  “Oh, only the number that will determine my future. Add to that the fun little challenge of getting to school early and explaining to the administration who you are and why you need to be enrolled in classes and oh, by the way, if my parents ask, just tell them he’s from the incredibly specific ‘island near Africa.’”

  “I thought it wasn’t really that close to Africa.”

  “It’s not!”

  Dud put a hand on her shoulder. “Do you need to talk through your feelings?”

  Poppy glanced sideways at him. Did he pick that up from eight hours of Dr. Steve? “Yes, I do. Let me talk through my feelings. I feel like I’m trying to put a jigsaw puzzle together, but half of the pieces are from Teddy Bear Picnic, and the other half are from Kittens Frolicking in Baskets of Yarn, with a few random pieces of Majestic Bald Eagle Flying Over American Flag thrown in for good measure, and all of them are singed black and mutated from fire damage and smell like Ocean Breezes and broken dreams!”

  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, per
formance 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?”