Wax Read Free

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?”
    â€œEr, 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?”
    â€œYes.” 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?”
    â€œCorrect.”
    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?”
    â€œThe Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Yams.”
    He raised an eyebrow. “And what does ‘yams’ stand for?”
    â€œOh, it doesn’t stand for anything, sir. A yam is a type of sweet potato, a starchy tuber that grows in the​—”
    â€œI 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
—”
    â€œYou don’t say,” he said, finishing the inscription and fitting it back onto the base. “And why aren’t you in school?”
    â€œI already told you, sir​—​I had free period last today, so I was allowed to leave early.” When he glared at