The Book of Masks (Vol. 4)

Surprise Admirer

Previously: "Demons by Night, Demons by Daylight" 

You've got food for thought as you leave your last class of the day, and you shake off Ricky—who has followed you to your locker and is clearly trying to worm his way into an embrace or kiss by asking you about your mood—with the excuse that you have a headache and need to go lie down in a dark room someplace until it passes.

You don't have a headache of course, and your bedroom is well-lit, but you sprawl on your bed with your face to the ceiling as you thumb your way through various social media sites, looking for clues about how to contact David Kirkham (who Amanda hasn't got any contact with). That sewer known as x2z seems the likeliest place to find him—surely he's posted memes and gifs of him pulling the tail off a dead rat, or something horrible like that—but you are soon forced to conclude that if he likes to scull through that turgid lagoon of bilge water and vomit, he has done so under a pseudonym.

(Speaking of which, while you're there, you log in long enough under one of Amanda's five aliases to leave a couple of nasty notes in the streams of a couple of her friends, including the admonition to just die in a fire already why dont you? on a photo of Brooke Galloway's seventh birthday party. Brooke really chaps your—Amanda's—hide, and the poor girl has broken down more than once on seeing what BritneySpanksWHS has posted in one of her streams.)

But it's on Pinterest, of all places, that you find Kirkham. He apparently has a page there and everything! Only two followers but—

Oh. Wait. The page is in his name, but the description makes it clear it's maintained by a fan. Or a stalker. My secret husband and all about him and what makes him the most special to me, it says under the blurry profile picture.

Interesting! you think, and wonder that you've not come across or heard about it before.

There's only about fifty photos or so on it. All but a handful of them, clearly, were secretly snapped—catching him at his locker, trudging through the hallways, glaring sullenly at the front of the classroom. Many of them are blurry and almost all of them are badly framed.

Only two of the photos are any good, and one of them is a group photo: him and four other students, standing around a piano and holding string instruments. In it, he is grasping a cello by his neck, like he's about to wrench it over and break it, and in the other photo (a studio job, it looks like) he is also holding a cello while daunting the photographer with a you-wanna-make-something-of-it-motherfucker? stare.

You text Kelsey a link to the Pinterest page with a querying ?????!!!!!

* * * * *

"Sure, he plays in the school orchestra," Kelsey tells you when you talk directly a little later. "Didn't you know that, Amanda? Will?"

"I try not to pay attention to Kirkham, no matter what name I answer to," you retort. "How long has that shit been going on for?"

"Since middle school, at least. I can't believe you didn't know! He even plays in a string quartet. With Preston, when they make it a piano quintet."

Preston Spinks. Now there's a name to conjure with. Preston Spinks takes college classes, and has been to national piano competitions. He also has absolutely nothing to do with Kelsey and Amanda and her friends if he can help it.

Or, at least, that's how he acts. Stuck up prick. Like, you'd really have to be an arrogant asshole to look down on Kelsey and her friends.

But Kelsey is still speaking. "This is interesting," she says.

"I'd call it horrifying."

"Stop sniffing your own farts long enough to listen to what I have to say. This Pinterest site is interesting, is what I mean."

"Do you think we could use it against him?"

"Or use it to get to him. Have you thought anymore about what you want to do about him, Will?"

"No."

"Well, it gives me the idea that he might be worth recruiting. For the Brotherhood."

He's certainly nasty enough for a Satanic cult, you think. "You weren't thinking about that before?"

"No, were you?" She sounds surprised.

"I told you, I try not to think about him. But when you said we should do something about him, I guess I just assumed—"

"Well, I assumed you were just going to do something indirectly to him, like you were planning to do to Blake. But recruiting him would be the straightest way to get him to leave your pedisequos alone. Let me think about it," she says, "and you also think about Blake and his friends."

But you don't. You've already decided that Kirkham is priority one.

* * * * *

It's Meghan Farris, Kelsey texts you the next morning. I bet the whole school knows by now.

"I had to send that link to everyone," she groans as you and she stride into the school the next morning. (Head back, tits out, hair flowing; it feels great.) "But it finally came back to me that it has to be Meghan who owns that page, based on which classrooms some of the pics were taken in, and from what angles."

"I can't fucking believe it," you reply. "Except I totally can. If anyone's out there just begging to be a victim, it's Meghan."

Kelsey turns toward you long enough to show you a duck-face smirk. Meghan Farris is the most desperate wannabe in Westside. There isn't a club or a clique she hasn't tried clawing her way into, only to climax in cringe-making failure. Like how she tried out to be a cheerleader at the start of the year, even though she is as flat as a plank of wood and hasn't taken a gymnastics class since seventh grade. You cringe all over again as you think of the way she face-planted onto the gym's hardwood floor—in front of hundreds of student spectators!—as she tried to do a cartwheel.

"Well, she hasn't updated it in a year," Kelsey observes. You and she come to the front doors of the school, and pause there to talk, waiting for someone else to fling the doors open so you won't have to. "So maybe she's over him." She snickers. "I hope she is. Or maybe I hope she isn't," she corrects herself. "No, I hope she is. That'll make it even more embarrassing when David tries hooking up with her. Because, you know, he's bound to have heard how—"

"What about Meghan as a recruit?" you interrupt. Kelsey looks surprised. "I'm serious. She'd be ... unexpected. Wouldn't she? Does she seem like the typical kind of girl who'd be—"

"Totally not!" Kelsey declares.

"Which would make her perfect?" you press, for no good reason other than a kind of intuition. Kelsey looks thoughtful. "Besides—" Two boys finally trudge up and open the doors, pulling them open far enough that you and Kelsey can dart inside behind them. "She's so flipping desperate to belong to something, and our little club would be—"

"So exclusive!" Kelsey finishes for you. "Okay, I see that idea. But you're supposed to be thinking about David," she chides. "Unless you've been thinking about Blake, and this is part of that."

"No, I'm just thinking about David. But I'm also thinking long-term, I guess. Isn't that what's important to you?"

"Oh, that's so sweet of you!" Kelsey gushes with cloying gratitude. She gives you a quick squeeze about the shoulders. "But I'm also thinking long-term," she continues in a much steelier tone. "And I'm thinking how in the long-term we have to protect a certain person by dealing in the short-term with someone else."

* * * * *

Kirkham is in the same second period AP Calculus class as you, and you watch him out of the corner of your eye. He slumps in his desk with his arms clasped and with a truculent expression on his face behind his sunglasses. It's the same pose he always strikes, so if he's heard about the Pinterest page that Meghan has devoted to her "secret husband," you can't infer it from his body language.

You also share a class with Meghan—seventh-period AP European History. If anything, you regard Meghan with even more disdain. Kirkham is hateful, but he demands respect. (And Amanda would also confess, if forced have to, that he exudes a charisma of danger; also he has great legs.) But Meghan is just sad. She's pretty, you suppose, but in a helplessly generic way. Her dark hair falls in a flat sheet just past her shoulders; her smile is wide but has no distinction or personality; and her glasses (which look like they cost twenty dollars at the Lenscrafters up at the mall) are windows that crookedly block access to her eyes instead of framing and illuminating them. She also has no chest, and her legs are too skinny.

She'd be the perfect girlfriend for Ricky, you think. Bland, soppy, and pathetically desperate for acceptance without the force of personality or talent to earn it.

Sydney is right. You need to deal with Kirkham. The direct route—grabbing him and turning him into a pedisequos—would be the best method. But if you turned his one-time secret admirer into a pedisequos, and used her to lure him into a trap, that could be a bank shot bringing some additional benefits.

Next: "Ambush at the Donna" 

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"Table of Contents (Vol. 4)" 
"The Book of Masks (Vol. 4)"