Waste of Space

by Gina Damico

Spice and musk and tea and rum. Love and home and peace and America.

  The town of Paraffin smelled of everything.

  Everywhere.

  At the same time.

  All the time.

  Each scent layered one on top of the other, mixing and mingling, fusing and swelling into an odorous abomination that could knock an unsuspecting sniffer off his feet​—​a gag-inducing whiff that attacked the nostrils with a ruthless barrage of cinnamon-and-death-scented stink.

  Other than that, Paraffin was a lovely place to visit.

  Its population numbered 1,014. The streets were tree-lined, the lampposts adorned with Star-Spangled Banners. The town square overlooked a little blue lake, where human-hating geese assembled to peck at bread and discuss their plans for world domination. Across the lake rose Mount Cerumen, a postcard-perfect background for the fireworks that exploded over the waterfront every Wednesday night in the summertime. Main Street featured country shops stocked to brimming with farmhouse tchotchkes, animal-themed coffee sets, and wooden signs with painted homespun sayings like “If You Want Breakfast in Bed, Sleep in the Kitchen” and “When I Get the Urge to Clean, I Lie Down Until It Passes!” plus enough chocolate, cheese, and pure Vermont maple syrup to sustain the populace well into the apocalypse.

  But these and any other regional attractions paled in comparison with the ever-present behemoth across the lake. Nestled in the foothills of Mount Cerumen sat Paraffin’s bread and butter, the real cash cow with which no amount of cow-shaped dairy creamers could compete: the Grosholtz Candle Factory.

  The building was a strange amalgamation, a mutant hybrid from two vastly different eras: the front, a modern retail experience comprising clean lines, bright colors, and welcoming customer service; the back, a soaring candelabra of a structure, a castle straight out of Transylvania, with spires looming so high that in the dead of winter they cast eerie, spiky shadows onto Paraffin’s sidewalks.

  It had been there for as long as anyone could remember. Its provenance was murky; spotty record-keeping at the time had all but doomed its origins to the frustrated conjectures of local historians. To have the archives tell it, the entire enterprise seemed to have popped up overnight. And while the layers of architectural schizophrenia suggested that it had changed hands more than once, the names of the owners of those hands were lost to the icy Vermont winds.

  But no one really cared where it came from. Whatever its past, the Grosholtz Candle Factory had grown from its humble beginnings into a wax-poured juggernaut of industry, posting annual sales of half a billion dollars and growing. Convinced that happiness was only a twenty-dollar hunk of wax away, candle enthusiasts came from all over the world to gape at the groaning shelves of merchandise, watch the children’s barnyard animal show, peruse the candle museum, make their own candles and wax hand molds, and, of course, take the factory tour.

  The tourists​—​a special brand of sightseers, happy to endure a multiple-hour car ride as long as there were tasteful wicker basket displays at the end of it​—​loved the conglomerated smell. As if on a pilgrimage, they’d walk through the store’s swishing automatic doors, close their eyes, and inhale deeply, dragging every note of sage and sandalwood and Santa’s Sleigh down to the bottommost pocket of their lungs.

  Those who lived in Paraffin year-round thought these people were bonkers. Every morning at sunrise that ubiquitous funk would waft down from the factory, skate across the pond, and wriggle between each and every molecule of clean mountain air. Some townspeople claimed that they could no longer smell it. Those townspeople were lying.

  Though probably with good reason. Because with the stench came a small, barely quantifiable feeling of unease that no one in town could put a finger on. With its spectral architecture, the factory had a certain quality​—​something out of a dark and twisted fairy tale, perhaps. Although additions had been made to bring it up to modern standards, the wooden structures of the original remained, tucked away from the tour buses, snaking up the side of the mountain like the legs of a prowling spider. Over the years, urban legends had bubbled up, stories about malevolent spirits and dark presences. With the smokestacks puffing late into the night, the entire framework seemed to breathe, savoring the scents of its own making.

  But other than the weirdness, the smell, and the blatant tourist-trappiness of it all, Paraffiners had nothing but love for the Grosholtz Candle Factory. It created jobs and kept the economy afloat at a time when many other small manufacturing towns in the area had perished. And with candles stuffed into the nooks and crannies of every home, no one was left in the dark when the occasional nor’easter knocked the power out.

  Yes, the town of Paraffin was a happy place. The grass was green; the streets were clean. The residents were good, wholesome cheese-loving people. They worked hard, they loved their kids, and they greeted every day with a smile. They said hello to one another in passing, and they watered their neighbors’ plants while they were away. They had no reason to distrust their fellow citizens or suspect that they were up to anything heinous, no reason at all.

  Until, one day, they did.

  1

  Pick a fight with a computer

  POPPY PALLADINO HAD TRIPPED, FALLEN, AND HUMILIATED herself on live television in front of thirty million Americans, but convincing the CVS touchscreen to reverse its stance on her bungled self-checkout transaction​—​that was pure torture.

  “Help is on the way!” the computer chirped.

  “I don’t need help,” Poppy told it. “I need you to take my coupon.”

  The pharmacist leaned out over her pharmacy battlements. “You need some help, hon?”

  “I’m told it’s already on the way.”

  The pharmacist came to her aid, a woman with limp hair and glasses that in all likelihood had been swiped from the nearby rotating eyewear display. She must have been a recent transplant; Poppy had never seen her around town before. The name tag on her blue polo shirt said JEAN!

  “Hi, Jean!” Poppy said. Politeness went a long way in the art of savings.

  “Hi there. What seems to be the problem?”

  “Sorry to pull you away from your drugs. It’s my coupon.” Poppy showed her the crumpled-up coupon smelling of receipt ink and old gum that had been trawling around the bottom of her bag since her mother imparted it two weeks earlier. “It didn’t work.”

  “Well, let’s give it another try.” She took the coupon from Poppy and smoothed it between her hands, as if Poppy had not done this half a dozen times by now.

  Only twenty minutes were left before she had to get back to school for rehearsal, but Poppy remained patient​—​albeit less than thrilled to have to sit through yet another round of Let the Adult Fix the Thing That the Idiot Teenager Broke. “The machine told me to scan my coupons,” she explained, “so I did. Then it beeped. Then it scolded me. Then it stopped talking altogether and decided to have an existential crisis instead.”

  “Sorry about that. These things can be finicky sometimes.” JEAN! put a hand on her chin and looked from the screen to Poppy. “Did you wave it across the scanner in a fluid mo​—”

  She froze. Her mascara-laden lids began to blink rapidly. “Wait a sec. Are you . . .”

  Oh, crapnugget.

  “Yes,” Poppy said through the tiny hole her mouth had formed. “Yes, I am.” Immediately she looked down at the floor and rubbed the scar at the edge of her hairline, her default reaction whenever someone recognized her. It wasn’t her favorite reflex; she’d prefer to strike a heroic stance and burst out of the nearest plate-glass window in an epic display of bravado and fearlessness. But some bug in her internal programming wouldn’t allow it.

  JEAN! put a hand to her mouth, which Poppy could tell was twitching at the edges. “Oh, my.”

  “Please, just​—”

  “Poor thing.” Despite the woman’s best efforts to be polite, her eyes crinkled in that way that suggested there was a laugh coming, a bombastic chortle barreling its
way up her throat with no regard for tact or civility or the feelings of an emotionally fractured seventeen-year-old. “How are you holding up, dear?”

  Poppy’s tight mouth contorted into a tight smile. “I’m fine.”

  On paper, at least. Poppy’s therapist had officially labeled her “No Longer Traumatized,” a phrase that her best friend, Jill, had found so hilarious, she had it printed on a T-shirt and gave it to Poppy for her birthday. “Everything’s fine,” she reiterated.

  The pharmacist, fully embracing the fineness of the situation, was fighting the giggles so hard, her neck wattle was quivering. “It wasn’t that bad, you know.”

  Poppy was beginning to think that a dollar off deodorant wasn’t worth this level of ballyhoo. “I’m sorry, but the coupon . . .”

  “Oh, yes! You know what, hon? Just take it.” She pushed the deodorant into Poppy’s hand, then grabbed a package of Skittles and a ChapStick and piled those on top as well. “After all you’ve been through? You deserve it.”

  Poppy considered her offerings. “You’re right. After all I’ve been through, I do deserve the promise of moist, kissable lips.”

  JEAN! gave her a loving pat on the hand and ushered Poppy toward the exit, gallantly waving her arm at the sensors to make the automatic doors swish open.

  The doors closed behind Poppy as she left, but not fast enough to muffle the explosion of laughter from within.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Poppy had not always been America’s preferred object of ridicule. Six months prior, no one outside Paraffin had known her name. And within Paraffin, she was simply That Girl. The Blond One. With a Penchant for Maple Ice Cream and Musical Theater.

  She’d had no reason to suspect that trying out for Triple Threat would be a bad idea. After all, she could sing, act, and dance, thereby satisfying the trio of purported hazards. And she wasn’t delusional, either​—​it was more or less agreed upon by all who saw her perform that she was good. Maybe big-fish-in-a-small-pond good, but certainly not the sort of train wreck those reality show talent competitions love to poke fun at, with goofy sound effects and dramatic close-ups of the judges, their beautiful faces twisted into dual looks of pity and God-given superiority.

  She would do right by The Sound of Music. She would make her hometown proud. She would never be relegated to the blooper reel.

  But what everyone at home and in the audience at Radio City Music Hall had failed to account for on that steamy June evening was one simple, fateful equation: incompetent stagehands + an inconsiderate preceding act = imminent tragedy.

  It wasn’t her fault.

  It wasn’t her fault that the El Paso Players were absolute morons and decided to stage the musical number “Be Our Guest” from Beauty and the Beast complete with real food that would be tossed and smashed around on a stage that was already slicker than an ice-skating rink​—​all while citing their commitment to “authenticity,” as if singing and dancing cutlery were the epitome of realism. It wasn’t her fault that the wreckage got nothing more than a quick mop during the commercial break. It wasn’t her fault that she was scheduled to go on after them. And it certainly wasn’t her fault that she slipped on an errant bit of pie and pudding (en flambé) and crashed to the floor in a pile of screeches and flailing and braids and sensible Austrian costumery.

  It . . . was her fault that she chose to continue with her performance despite the gigantic gash that had opened up in her forehead. Blood gushed down her face as she crooned “‘The hills are alive . . .’” with a sweet, maniacal smile, gamely attempting to look as though she hadn’t been mauled by an Alpine wolf.

  Because the show, as everyone knows, must go on.

  In the moment, she thought she’d recovered quite well. She didn’t realize that the audience was sitting there horrified, transfixed, and that the judges were yelling for her to stop. She’d plunged gashfirst into the zone, the Theater Zone, and hadn’t snapped out of it until she’d sung through the last note​—​at which point she realized that she was drenched in gore, her teeth had turned red, and everyone in that theater and in homes across America was pissing themselves with laughter.

  Then she passed out from blood loss.

  When she regained consciousness, she was no longer the plucky young ingénue from small-town Vermont whom Katy Perry had called “adorbs.” She was Maria von Tripp. Julie Androops. The undisputed queen of the Internet. Clips of her demise got millions of hits in mere hours. Major newspapers printed her photo. Saturday Night Live did a sketch about her.

  Of course, not everyone had been mean-spirited. The paramedics had a lot of comforting things to say. She got cards and flowers from well-meaning viewers across the country. Ellen had extended an invitation to her talk show. (Poppy’s parents, fearing overexposure and the opportunity for another dance-related catastrophe, declined.)

  But overall, the damage had been done. Her confidence: shattered. Her nails: bitten to the quick. She couldn’t sleep without the aid of Forty Winks, a Grosholtz candle her parents had imposed upon her, insisting that it was scientifically proven (it wasn’t) to induce drowsiness and treat insomnia. And even now, five months later, all it took was a JEAN! to throw a little snicker her way for the wounds of humiliation to be freshly torn anew.

  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.”