Wax Read Free Page B

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.”
    â€œI’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.”
    â€œThanks!” Without making eye contact with Blake, she whirled around and bolted for the door.
    â€œWait!” 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.

2
Engage in childish name-calling
    â€œ GIVE
YOU
A TURD, JERKFACE, ” POPPY MUTTERED, returning to the school’s main hallway just as the final bell rang. “Right in your stupid ugly
jerkface.
”
    â€œPardon me?”
    She glanced up at Principal Lincoln, a tall, baggy-eyed, gaunt-cheeked, cheerless man whom Poppy liked to think of as Abraham Lincoln’s less successful, undead twin. “Oh​—​nothing, sir,” she said, staring up the full length of his ski-slope nose. “Just talking to myself.”
    â€œMmm.” He turned his attention back to the masses, no doubt yearning for a bottle from the long-rumored wine rack under his desk, while Poppy struggled against the surging current of students as she made her way to her personal sanctuary: the Gaudy Auditorium.
    Once upon a time, a well-intentioned benefactor had mistakenly come under the impression that Paraffin High had any regard at all for the arts, and consequently had donated a heap of money to build a hideous theater. (Had he done his homework, he might have learned that the school routinely sank ninety percent of its extracurricular-activity budget into sports programs and the other ten percent into the only arts group in service of those sports programs: the Paraffin High Marching Band. And that the surplus wax the Grosholtz Candle Factory had donated over the years had never been sculpted into masterpieces, but rather had taken up residence as a rarely used, unsightly gray lump in the art room closet.)
    The Gaudy Auditorium immediately fell into disrepair, as it was only ever used for graduation and the occasional Giddy Committee performance; students graduating at the end of four years were surprised to find that their school even
had
an auditorium. So Poppy and her crew had full run of the place, using it whenever they wanted, for whatever purposes their theatrical minds could concoct. It maintained a constant temperature of a million degrees (two million onstage, as