Waste of Space
Page 31
He went back to his work, grumbling. Poppy didn’t take his disdain personally; as a rule, Mr. Kosnitzky hated all teenagers. He’d gone so far as to appoint himself Paraffin High’s honorary truant officer. Every morning before opening for business, he’d camp out at his storefront window, scan the town square and its prominent gazebo through a pair of ancient binoculars, and call the principal’s office the second he spotted anyone unlucky enough to appear adolescent. He was correct roughly sixty percent of the time, and he still felt pretty good about the other forty percent because he still got to yell into the phone.
“So the farmers want this Connor’s name engraved onto a giant yam for, what, heroic weeding efforts or something?” he asked.
“Oh, no,” said Poppy. “Connor won the yam-eating contest. It was all part of the first annual Paraffin Yamboree, to raise money for the farmers. Didn’t you hear about it? I put up flyers all over town. There are two in your front window.”
Mr. Kosnitzky frowned and looked over her shoulder. “I don’t remember posting those.”
“I took the liberty. And it’s a good thing I did—we got a great turnout!”
He stared. She beamed. He stared some more. “That’ll be five dollars and six cents.”
She blinked her giant eyes at him—always a disarming gesture, as they were slightly too large for her head—and placed a neat stack of dollar bills on the counter. “Can I leave some yamphlets too?”
“Heh?”
“Pamphlets,” she said, fanning a stack of no less than a hundred. “About the yams.”
“No.”
He took her money and started punching buttons on his antiquated cash register as the door bell rattled again. “Be with you in a minute,” he said to the new customer, who stepped up behind Poppy, boots screeching on the tiled floor.
Poppy could tell from the combined scent of Orbit gum and cheap body spray that it was a teenager. Tall, judging by the way he blocked the light from outside. A watch jangled on his wrist, one of those oversize titanium gimmicks that were bought only by scuba divers or people who wanted to appear as cool as scuba divers. He let out a low chuckle, then advanced another step.
“‘The hills are aliiiiiive,’” he quietly sang.
Poppy’s ears reddened. She glanced at his stringy reflection in a plaque on the wall.
Blake Bursaw.
Crapnugget.
The self-appointed first family of Paraffin, the Bursaw clan ran every inch of the town—or at least every inch that the candle factory didn’t touch. The matriarch, a corpulent floral-print-wearing old woman who resembled a roll of wallpaper and was known colloquially as Miss Bea, served as Paraffin’s mayor. Her campaign motto, AN EXTRAORDINARY WOMAN, had blanketed the town for years, everyone still too fearful of her sparkly-eyed wrath to take any of the posters down. Her son, a middle-aged blowhard called Big Bob, sat on the town council and was widely assumed to be next in line for the mayor’s office. And his son, Blake, treated Paraffin as his own personal dog park, pissing on everything just to mark it as his.
The three of them lived together in an ostentatious mansion modeled on the White House and worked hard to maintain their position as the Worst. Everyone knew it. Everyone thought it.
But no one said it. Not out loud, at least. And so they got away with everything.
“With the sound of loooosers,” Blake kept on singing.
“That doesn’t even make sense,” Poppy said under her breath. What was he doing in a trophy shop? The kid had never won anything in his life. Except maybe a World’s Biggest Douchebag contest.
Poppy nearly laughed at the image of what a giant douchebag trophy would look like, but she reminded herself not to engage. Ever since senior year started, Blake had proved himself to be terribly adept at wreaking havoc upon the tatters of Poppy’s once-pristine reputation, orchestrating a reign of mockery that was showing no signs of toppling. The whole school was still talking about the Halloween party debacle two weeks prior, of which Blake had been the chief architect. Poppy had exacted some measure of revenge with a well-timed pantsing in gym class—and the fact that he’d been wearing SpongeBob boxers was a nice bonus—but she’d never be able to top his level of malice.
To Blake, bullying was an art. And Poppy was his muse.
She would not give him the satisfaction of turning around. Yet her palms were getting sweaty, leaving gross condensation marks when she tapped them on the glass counter. “Let’s hurry it up, Mr. Koz.”
“I’m trying to get rid of the pennies. Just a second.” After what seemed like eons, he shut the cash register drawer perhaps a little harder than was necessary and dumped the change into her waiting hands. “Here.”
“Thanks!” Without making eye contact with Blake, she whirled around and bolted for the door.
“Wait!” Mr. Kosnitzky called after her. “You forgot your turd!”
Poppy froze in her tracks.
Well. That ought to do it.
Blake promptly burst into a hyenalike fit of giggling. His lanky frame, stretched taut and tough like a piece of jerky, doubled over. “Turd?”
Poppy slunk back to the counter and grabbed the trophy out of Mr. Kosnitzky’s hand. “Yam.” She stuffed it into her bag and headed for the exit once more, glaring so hard at Blake that she missed the handle and slammed into the door, prompting yet another explosion of laughter.
Gritting her teeth, Poppy darted out of the shop, trying—yet not succeeding—to hold her head high.
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About the Author
PHOTO BY WILLIAM SULLIVAN
GINA DAMICO grew up under four feet of snow in Syracuse, New York. She is the author of the grim-reapers-gone-wild books of the Croak trilogy (Croak, Scorch, and Rogue), Hellhole, and Wax, all published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. She has worked as a tour guide, transcriptionist, theater house manager, scenic artist, movie extra, office troll, retail monkey, yarn hawker, and breadmonger. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, two cats, and one dog. They are all made of star stuff.
Learn more at www.ginadami.co
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