The Book of Masks (Vol. 4)

At Play with Cousin Brandon

Previously: "At Home with Shelly Nolan" 

Magic may be real, but it still can't get you out of the church social your mother is dragging you to. After getting back from Niamh's, you have an hour to get ready.

It only takes you fifteen minutes, though, to change into fresh jeans, a fresh sweater, and a windbreaker. Because why bother?

* * * * *

The school building is all lit up as you and your mom arrive, but there's no crowds out front, even though the parking lot is filled.

"Don't slouch, Shelly," your mom fusses after you get out. "You'll have fun!"

As if! you think.

It's a "church/school function" but for you it's actually more of a "family function." That's because neither you nor your mom attend the South Creek Presbyterian Church, and you don't go to school at the Agape Christian Academy, which is where South Creek Presbyterian is holding this "social." But your Aunt Susan teaches at Agape, and your cousin Brandon goes there, so when the invitation came, of course your mom said "Yes" and of course she had to drag you along. Aunt Susan was the reason you and your mom moved to Saratoga Falls from Los Angeles.

You don't know what it was before it was a Christian school, but to your hyper-critical eye, it looks like a repurposed nursing home. It's a low slung building under gently sloping eaves, with a covered driveway out front for drop off and pick up, and two wings with a lot of tiny windows peeping out. When you and your mom step through the sliding front doors, it's to enter a tiled foyer decorated with orange-and-brown paper leaves, drooping cornstalks, and two limp flags, one American and one Christian. Despite the blazing lights, the foyer still manages to feel dim and oppressive, and there's an antiseptic smell rising off the dingy floor.

A receptionist hands you a couple of blank name tags, and directs you toward the "fellowship hall." You tense all over as you clatter down the tiled floor in the indicated direction.

"Lucy!" your Aunt Susan calls from the middle of a crowd that is mingling in the midst of paper-covered buffet tables. There's not a padded surface in the room, and the low chatter bounces and echoes and magnifies until it's a sawtoothed racket. "And Shelly!" Aunt Susan gives you a quick hug and smooch on the side of the head. Like your mom, she is a red-head, but her coloration has more gold than copper in it. She's also chunkier. "Brandon's in one of the classrooms with his friends," she tells you. "Get yourself a hunk of cake and go find him! They've got board games!"

{iOh, could life be so good? you sarcastically (but silently) retort as you hunt around for some refreshments. A tiny, humpbacked old woman with the width and heft of a small refrigerator comes shuffling out from a kitchen someplace, lugging a Bundt cake. You take a slice after she's set it down, then pick up a plastic cup of something dark—watered-down grape Kool-Aid, you discover on taking a sip—and wander out and down one of the wings into the school proper.

Every classroom is very narrow and has at least three doors opening into it, as if multiple smaller rooms had been merged by knocking the walls out, so maybe your guess about the place being a refurbished retirement home is on point. Each room holds different age groups, doing age-appropriate activities. Some kind of hopscotch game for the second-graders. A read-along for the third-graders. Board games for the fifth graders. (How old does Aunt Susan think you are?) Pictionary and Jenga for the sixth graders.

Finally, at the end of the long hallway, in the last classroom, you find kids that look like seniors.

They're jammed up around a couple of tables and ... yes, they are playing board games. Loudly and with a lot of laughing. But as you edge in closer, you see that it's Settlers of Catan at one table, and some kind of war game on a hexagonal map at another. Despite your skepticism, your interest is actually piqued.

You draw a few quizzical looks, but you ignore them as you look for your "cousin." You find Brandon at a table in a back corner, immersed in card game.

For a moment you are shocked. Brandon? Playing poker? But then you see that it's just Uno.

He is a tall, skinny kid with messy blonde hair and dark eyes, and a way of crookedly sitting or standing that gives the impression that his backbone bends in zigs and zags. There's an intensity to him, even when he smiles, so that it feels like he's boring a hole through with his eyes. He's looking especially intense now, with a fat magic marker wedged between his cheek and gum like a cigar; and, as with a cigar, he rolls it around chews on it as he pulls first at one card and then another in his hand with long, white fingers. He's two years older than Shelly—a junior at Agape.

"Hey," says one of the other players—a dark-haired, dark-skinned kid who might be Indian or might just be a really tanned Anglo—addresses you. "T'sup?" Brandon does a double-take at you.

"Oh, hey!" He puts out his hand to take yours, then changes his mind at the last minute and pulls you in toward the table by the shoulder. "Guys, this is my cousin, Shelly."

"Hey." "T'sup." "Hi." They all grunt at you without looking interested. He introduces them, but all you catch is that one is "Marcos," one is "Ryan" and one is "Philip." "When we get done with this hand, we'll deal you in," Brandon says.

"That's okay," you reply. "I'm good."

In fact, you are suddenly tongue-tied, even frightened. I don't belong here, you think. I'm not this girl and this isn't my cousin. He doesn't really know me. I'm an imposter!

To cover your sudden embarrassment, you jam a hunk of cake into your mouth.

Play is silent and very intense, and you don't disturb them as you watch. The battle seesaws, with Brandon four rounds in a row able to declare "Uno" while discarding the card he has drawn, until he gets hit with a "Draw 4" and subsequently draws another nine cards. It's the dark-haired guy who greeted you—"Marcos," apparently—who ultimately is able to throw down the last card. There's hisses and grunts of frustration from the others. Marcos doesn't gloat, either. He just twines his hands behind his head and draws a deep breath, as though he's just prevailed in a titanic struggle that has left him drained.

"I got a different deck out in my car," he says from behind half-closed lids as Brandon shuffles the deck for a new game. "Picked it up at a hobby shop."

"Yeah?" says the horse-faced kid with rust-colored hair sitting across from him.

"'Cept I'd get in a lot of trouble if I got caught with it in here."

"What is it?" asks the blond kid with the buzz cut who's sitting next to him. He snickers. "It got naked ladies on the cards?"

"Shut up," Brandon mutters.

"Magic the Gathering," Marcos mouths.

There's low hoots from the other two guys, but Brandon's expression tightens. "Yeah, you'd get in trouble."

"There's nothing wrong with it." The rusty-haired kid retorts. To Marcos: "If you wanna get together tomorrow, I'd—"

"It's called 'Magic.' 'The Gathering'," Brandon reminds him.

The blonde kid snorts. "So? Spencer and them are bombing the crap out of each other with a war game. It's just pretend, man."

"It's like a gateway drug."

"Oh, crap. It's just pretend."

"Yeah, well, be careful what you pretend, 'cos that's what you'll turn into," Brandon insists.

"Right." The blonde kid rolls his eyes. "Hey Spencer!" he calls. "Which one of you's playing the Nazis?" A boy in a football jersey raises his hand. "Yeah, we all better watch out, or Levi's gonna go all Luftwaffe on our butts."

"You just wanna be careful," Brandon insists in a pinched voice. "C'mon, let's just play another round."

He looks very unhappy as Marcos and the other two lay plans for getting together to figure out his new deck.

* * * * *

So that's your new cousin, a tightly wound church-boy at the Christian school. Not that it was a surprise. Shelly quickly found out what he was like after arriving in Saratoga Falls two years ago. She was excited to meet him back then, and looked forward to gabbling with him about her fantasy fetish, and it was a like a hard slap across the face when he told her that all her favorite stuff was basically "Satanic." Even the Narnia books? she gasped. Brandon got very prim. "Lewis didn't know what he was dabbling with," he said.

Shelly lives alone with her mom out south of town, you write up that evening at home, for Sydney. They lived in LA for most of Shelly's life until her dad left them, which is when they moved out here. You feel a twinge of hard regret after writing those words, but thrust Shelly's emotions behind you. Her mom did SFX work for TV and movies, making masks and appliances, and she still does that. She has a whole workshop in the garage where she custom makes them for high-end customers. Which is a great coincidence, you think. Shelly is super-deep into magic and fantasy books—

—and she's got a prick cousin who totally thinks that stuff is evil.

You don't know why it bothered you, so much so that you wound up sitting at the table where they were bombing make-believe Europe to splinters.

Maybe because his line, Be careful what you pretend to be, almost knocked you out of character.

Next: "Putting It Off at the Putt-Putt" 

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