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  “Was he in school today?” Poppy asked Jill.

  “Is he ever?” Jill got up. “I’ll go find him.”

  “Check the bathroom,” Banks advised on her way in, slinging her backpack onto an empty seat. “The tacos at lunch today were questionable.”

  Aside from Jill, Banks was the only other nonwhite student at Paraffin High, and people simply didn’t know what to do with her. Her father was Hispanic, her mother was black, her height was five foot eleven, and her opinion was that she did not care one bit about public opinion. So she joined the outcast repository that was the Giddy Committee​—​“because I don’t fit in anywhere else, and why the hell not.”

  A flash of satin entered the auditorium. “Hey, Connor,” Poppy said, waving him down, “come here a sec.”

  The pudgy junior with the beautiful operatic voice whom Poppy had cast as the Phantom of the Opera skittered to a stop on his way to the stage. Though they were not yet in dress rehearsals, he was already wearing his cape. “Yes, my angel of music?” he boomed.

  Connor liked to stay in character. It was equal parts charming and annoying.

  “I’ve got something for you.” Poppy removed the trophy from her bag and handed it to him.

  He cradled it to his breast. “Sweet, sweet yam! ‘You alone can make my song take flight!’”

  “Okay, that’s enough of that. Get onstage. We’re doing your number right after​—​sweet Jesus, where is he?”

  “Right here,” Jill said, pulling him into the auditorium by his ear. “Hanging out by the girls’ locker room again.”

  “Hey!” Christ protested. “Let go of me, woman!”

  “You ‘woman’ me again, and I will end you.”

  “Why you gotta be like that? I wasn’t doing anything wrong!”

  Poppy tsked. “That’s what the real Jesus said. And then he got arrested and put on trial and things didn’t turn out too well for him, did they? Now let’s go.”

  Yet for all of Jesus’s whining, the Superstar medley went well, the ensemble not even missing a beat when Connor, playing Judas, ripped his pants.

  “Betrayed by a defective inseam,” Jill remarked. “The irony.”

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Several hours later Poppy burst through the front door of her home. “Sorry I’m late,” she said, dropping her backpack to the living room floor. “The Annie number turned into a fight over which orphan was the most pitiful. Hair was pulled, toes were stomped.”

  Her mother and little brother were seated at their usual places on the couch, tray tables lined up in front of them, as her father bustled in from the kitchen. “Hello, family!” he boomed, plate in hand.

  “Hurry up,” Owen insisted with the life-or-death intensity that only a five-year-old can bring to a conversation. “It’s starting!”

  “Food’s on the stove,” Poppy’s mother told her. “There’s extra flax if you need it.”

  Of course there was extra flax. The Palladino pantry looked like a Whole Foods had exploded​—​neatly, mind you, into color-coded Mason jars. The health nuttiness of Poppy’s family didn’t bother her, as she was the kind of person who ate anything and everything, but there were times she wished things could go back to the way they’d allowed her to eat the week she’d returned from Triple Threat: Ice cream. Every damn day. For every damn meal.

  Poppy made her way into the kitchen and found a tofu menagerie waiting for her. Tofu shaped like a bird. Tofu shaped like an elephant. Tofu shaped like an octopus. There was also a camera lying askew atop the counter, as well as a handful of notes her mother had abandoned in her haste to get dinner ready on time. She’d no doubt pore over them later that evening, readying her blog post for the next day. Poppy, who had an uncanny knack for discerning what the title of her mom’s posts would be just by inspecting the aftermath of the cooking frenzy, surmised that “Tofu Zoo!” was a strong contender that night.

  She selected a giraffe, plunked a pile of mashed potatoes next to it, grabbed the freshly blended wheatgrass-kale smoothie from the fridge, and headed into the living room, sinking into her favorite armchair beneath the framed painting her father had commissioned from one of his artist friends. Its overly pretentious title was A Pulchritude of Peacocks—​but since it featured one flamboyant male getting all the attention from the ladies while another male sulked in the corner, the Palladinos lovingly referred to it as The Pissed-Off Peacock.

  Owen bounced along to the rhythm as the Dr. Steve jingle cued up. A man with questionable medical credentials, Dr. Steve had somehow conned a producer into giving him a television show​—​and as practitioners of questionable lifestyle choices themselves, Poppy’s parents couldn’t get enough of him. Neither could Owen.

  Neither could Poppy, but only because she’d fashioned a drinking game around his habit of advising people to stop eating food.

  “Oh, good, he’s gonna talk about the hidden dangers of lemons,” her father said. “I read something about that.”

  Her mother nodded intently. “Me too. The seeds have arsenic in them? Or something?”

  Poppy held her tongue, a well-practiced maneuver by now. Her parents were sweet, creative, enthusiastic, caring, energetic, wonderful people, and they loved her very much, and she loved them very much, and they were idiots.

  Perhaps that was too strong a word. “Ditzy” was more accurate, or maybe “flighty.” “March to the beat of a different drum,” Poppy’s teachers would say after meeting them at parent-teacher conferences. They wanted her to do well in school, of course, but Poppy’s parents were of the opinion that not all wisdom could be found in books. “The greatest education is experience!” they said​—​though, thankfully, never to her teachers’ faces.

  But what they lacked in book learning, they made up for elsewhere. Both employed as yoga teachers at the Paraffin Resort and Spa, they were well-liked members of the community. They worked hard to give their children a good life, and most of the time Poppy was able to take their silliness as it came. And, she had to admit, they did have a certain wisdom about them that she couldn’t identify​—​a sort of unwavering satisfaction with the world and their lives, as if they’d learned some secret that the rest of humanity hadn’t figured out yet.

  Whatever it was, she envied it.

  “These potatoes are amazing, Mom,” she said when Dr. Steve had finished inciting his war on citrus and the show went to commercial. “What did you do to them?”

  Her mother grinned, her blond hair sticking out like straw just like her daughter’s. “Oh, you know. I put the love in.”

  Her father joined in on the grinning. “And I helped peel the love.”

  Poppy beheaded the giraffe and gummed her tofu. “Mr. Kosnitzky says hi, by the way.”

  “How’s his wife’s yeast infection?” asked her mother, who took it upon herself to know every facet of her yoga students’ health.

  “All cleared up.”

  “Dr. Steve says yeast leads to salmonella,” said Owen, building his mashed potatoes into a mountain. “He did an experiment and made it foam up like a bubble bath and ooze out all over the floor. Is that what happened to Mrs. Kosnitzky?”

  “Yes,” said Poppy. “The hospital had to be evacuated.”

  “ Not the same thing, buddy,” said their father. “Hey, Pops, something came in the mail from your school​—​something about international something? Is that something?”

  A hot flash consumed Poppy at the memory of her encounter with Mr. Crawford, recalling his irresistible coconut-lavender-formaldehyde scent. “It’s nothing,” she said, keeping her eyes on the screen. “They want us to host an exchange student. You can throw it out.”

  “Oh, why?” said her mother. “That would be so fun!”

  “And educational!” Her father pointed his fork at his children. “Family,” he lectured, “we should always endeavor to open our home and hearts to those who are different from us.”

  “Yeah, well,” said Poppy, “I don’t think it�
��s a good idea.” Though she was loath to disappoint Mr. Crawford, hosting an exchange student was bound to be a terrible decision. “One thing I do not need in my life right now is to be belittled in multiple languages.”

  They couldn’t argue with that.

  “Any grand plans for the weekend, Poppy?” her mother asked, changing the subject. “Owen has a couple of soccer games tomorrow, so we’ll be gone all day.”

  “No plans.” Poppy stabbed her giraffe through the heart. “Probably hanging out with Jill, drag racing on the strip, meeting up with some arms dealers. The usual.”

  “Mrs. Goodwin told me that the Rotary Club needs volunteers to help build their float for the Paraffin Day parade, so we’re going to that, if you want to come,” her father said. “Spoiler alert: it’s a goose!”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Come on, Popsicle. Are we so tragically unhip that you can’t bear to be seen with your parents anymore?” He made a frowny face. “I promise to leave my leisure suit at home!”

  “I won’t even wear my Crocs!” added her mother.

  “We’ll let you Instagram the whole thing!”

  “And tweet all the Twitters!”

  Poppy let out a snicker. If anything, they should be ashamed to be seen with her. “I don’t want anything to do with that parade. The Paraffin High Marching Band was asked to perform in it and the Giddy Committee was not. Paraffin Day is dead to me.”

  “But it’ll be fun!”

  “Fun is also dead to me.”

  Her parents let it drop. Good-naturedly, of course, but a distinct deflation whooshed through the room as their eyes turned back to the television. Though Poppy never talked about it openly, they knew about the bullying, the abuse she suffered at school. It was important, the therapist had told them, not to be overprotective and to let her feel her own way back into the thick of things. But Poppy had noticed that lately they’d been going for the hard sell a lot more often. Family fun time had taken precedence, and it was getting harder and harder to weasel out of it.

  “We’re still on for the Dr. Steve marathon on Sunday night, though,” she promised them. “Come hell or high water. Wouldn’t miss it.”

  That brought the smiles back. “Attagirl,” said her father.

  As if buoyed by the attention, Dr. Steve now spouted his nonsense at top volume. “. . . And once we added it all up, the exhaustive cataloging of healthful benefits was irrefutable!” he shouted. “And do you know what that means?”

  “Here it comes,” Poppy said, her eyes glued to the screen. “Here it comes!”

  Dr. Steve pointed at the camera. “Avoid beets,” he advised, “at all costs!”

  “Drink!”

  The family chugged their wheatgrass in unison.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Around eleven thirty, the phone rang.

  Poppy had gone up to her room to listen to some music and add more strips of fabric to Joseph’s Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. She wasn’t officially in charge of costumes, but the previous week, when Poppy asked the costumer whether she’d found any cowboy hats for the Oklahoma number yet, the poor girl had burst into tears and quit the Giddy Committee altogether. So it was now up to Poppy. It wasn’t the first time she’d been forced to wear many hats for the good of the production, and it wouldn’t be the last.

  Which reminded her. She grabbed The List out of her backpack, uncapped her trusty black Sharpie, and wrote:

  #19024: Buy cowboy hats

  The epic ink-laden List was such a Paraffin High legend that it deserved its own page in the yearbook. (And there was a good chance that could happen, as Poppy was one of its editors.) It all started in sixth grade, when she’d been put in charge of her soccer team’s bake sale and had come up with a list of no less than two dozen confectionary wonders, each of which she assigned with due haste to the bewildered parents. She’d kept The List going ever since, using it as a long-running to-do list that seldom saw a task go unfulfilled. When she reached the end of one notebook, she simply moved on to another. Pages upon pages of notes, each one crossed out with a thick black, outrageously satisfying line. She was now on Volume 7.

  With my own friggin’ money, she added to item #19024, scribbling bitterly. The marching band was currently in Madrid. Performing for a queen. And here she was, ripping up Owen’s old baby clothes to make a dreamcoat because the Giddy Committee would never see a fraction of that budget.

  So unfair.

  The Les Misérables soundtrack popped up on her playlist next. Poppy sang along as she slashed her beloved X-Acto knife through the fabric, delighting in the devious thrill that came from uttering the line, “‘Comforter, philosopher, and lifelong SHIT.’” Broadway singing-swearing! The best kind! “‘God knows how I’ve lasted, living with this BASTARD in​—’”

  The downstairs phone rang.

  Poppy lifted her head but kept on humming. It was odd to get a call that late at night on the landline, but not unheard of. She’d just reached for an exceptionally vibrant strip of periwinkle fabric when she heard her mother let out a yelp.

  Poppy muted the music and put down her X-Acto knife. Now her parents were talking in hushed, anxious tones.

  A familiar weight thunked into Poppy’s gut. The air in her room seemed to go stale, all the oxygen sucked out through the gaps in their old, warped wood windows.

  Her cell phone. With a jolt, she remembered: she’d silenced it for rehearsal and had forgotten to turn the sound back on. She excavated it from the bottom of her backpack, lit up the screen, and drew a sharp breath.

  Eight missed calls from Jill. Twenty-three texts.

  Just as she was about to read them, her door swung open. Her father stood in the hall, his face pained.

  “Um,” he said, twisting his hands, “don’t freak out, okay?”

  3

  Freak out

  POPPY PERCHED ON THE EDGE OF THE LIVING ROOM COUCH and stared at the television screen, DVR paused on the Channel Six eleven o’clock news graphic and the face of lead anchor Veronica Fahey. Her father handed her the remote, which sat in her clammy hand like an alien device.

  Her stomach twisted. She pressed play.

  “And now for something,” said Veronica, smiling mildly at the camera, “on the lighter side of the news. Colt?”

  The shot switched to Colt Lamberty, Channel Six’s ace reporter, who had swept onto the local news scene about six months earlier from someplace much sunnier and with far more attractive people. He resembled one of those sketches of what scientists think that people in the future will look like once the world is completely globalized and all the races have finished banging one another: a picture of ethnically balanced perfection.

  Colt stood in the Paraffin town square, a spotlight-blasted beacon amid the encroaching darkness. He spoke into the microphone with ease, confidence, and just the right amount of playfulness in his non-regional dialect. “Thanks, Veronica! The Paraffin Day bicentennial celebrations aren’t set to begin until Tuesday, but according to footage uploaded by an anonymous viewer to our Channel Six YouNews app, it seems that a few pranksters​—​and Paraffin’s favorite local celebrity​—​have started up the fun a little early.”

  The screen switched to some shaky footage that had obviously been recorded on a cell phone. Laughter could be heard in the background​—​distinctive, hyenalike laughter​—​as the image bounced and blurred through the darkness. It came to rest on the gazebo, the scene lit with what looked like flashlights.

  “The return,” said the video’s narrator, “of Hogwash.”

  The remote tumbled from Poppy’s hand.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  #18984: Write essay for English

  #18985: Do calc equations

  #18986: Buy fabric and chicken wire for Ham costume

  #18987: Make Ham costume (reread Chapter 27 of TKAM to check details)

  #18988: Do Practice SAT Exam #5

  #18989: Go to the Bursaw Halloween party?

  #18
990: STRANGLE BLAKE BURSAW WITH MY GODDAMN BARE HANDS

  Poppy glanced up from The List​—​specifically, the section from last month, the one she’d sworn never to reread.

  But reread it she had. And spent the previous thirty minutes seething over its cruel foreshadowing.

  The instant she’d watched that news clip, she knew Blake was responsible. It smacked of his trademark pranking style: mean and immature, with enough creative flair that you had to give him a few points for originality. That was probably why there hadn’t been more outrage over what happened on Halloween​—​the scheme Blake had concocted was cruel but funny, at least to everyone who was not Poppy. And when it came to viral videos, funny trumped basic human decency every time.

  But it still didn’t seem all that hilarious to her.

  In retrospect, she never should have attended the party in the first place. For heaven’s sake, it was at the Bursaws’ house! It was walking directly into enemy territory! But it had been a few months since Triple Threat had aired, and she had just begun to gain back an iota of confidence. Plus, she hadn’t wanted to break her and Jill’s grand Halloween tradition of costuming themselves as props from great works of literature. So off they went, Poppy as Scout’s pageant ham costume from To Kill a Mockingbird and Jill as the conch shell from Lord of the Flies. Amid a sea of slutty nurses and slutty devils and slutty angels, there were Poppy and Jill, waddling around like sumo wrestlers in their bulky, chicken-wired, decidedly unsexy monstrosities.