The Book of Masks (Vol. 4)

Flashback

Previously: "The Hiding Place" 

"I'm gonna call my mom to come get me," you tell Riker, and not until after you've spoken does it strike you how thoughtlessly the phrase "my mom" came tumbling out. "It was great, but I'm kind of done with it."

"But the party's just getting going!" Riker protests. "And Eric and Alec, they've come up with this game, it's like a version of the thing—"

"I want to go home," you tell him firmly. You don't want to glower at him, but you can't stop your brow from lowering and your mouth from curving.

"Will!" Riker squeals. "I wanted us to spend the night together!"

You have to fight to keep from shuddering all over, and your heart hops about with fright.

"Some other time," you tell him as you pull out your phone. Your fingers tremble as you tap in your mom's number. "I told you, I have to get used to—"

"Will." Riker lays his hand over your phone, and you look up into his frowning face. "Can you at least tell me—"

Your nerves flare, and you shove him back. His eyes pop in surprise. You're instantly filled with remorse.

But that doesn't change the feeling that is crawling all over you.

"I'll talk to you about it later, Sydney," you tell Riker through gritted teeth. "I'm— Me and Elijah are kind of all mixed up at the moment. I need to settle down, figure out—"

You squirm on your feet, and your face goes hot. This is so embarrassing! "I think I need to sleep on it."

Riker looks very grave. "I could come over with you, to your house. We could get your mom. Then we could—"

"No!"

Riker whitens. "I was just going to say we could talk!"

"No. That would make it even weirder."

Riker bites his lip. "Will. Is everything okay with ... Elijah?"

"I'm fine," you tell him with ten times the assurance you actually feel. "And he's fine. We're all fine."

Then, leveraging all your willpower behind the move, you put your hands on Riker's shoulders, and lean in to kiss him, gently, on the mouth. "We'll do everything you want to do. For serious, Sydney," you promise. "Only, you need to give me more than, you know, five minutes to get used to ... it."

Yeah. Elijah Cabot is going to need a lot more than five minutes to come to grips with it.

And also with the life change of being turned into a skin-suit inhabited by a total stranger!

* * * * *

Gradually you get your thoughts sorted, after you're back "home" again, upstairs in "your" bedroom, on "your"bed, playing a pro soccer game on "your" cell phone. Through the swirling confusion you are at least able to put a name to the problem, to give an answer to the question that has left Elijah obsessively horror-struck for the last few months.

What is wrong with me?

You're still dressed in your soft, warm track suit and socks, and are tucked under the comforter, with a cold rain pattering against the window. (It's cold even inside, for your mom hates central heating, and runs the furnace only in the absolute depths of winter.) This cozy solitude is a huge relief after the hurly-burly at the Browns. That was fun for a little while, but soon your brain began to feel brambly and tangled.

Which is another lobe in the vast, shapeless, blobby fear (What is wrong with me?) that oppresses you. I didn't used to get tired of seeing and playing with my friends!

So how come now, ever since—?

Yes, ever since his ... things ... came squirting to life ...

* * * * *

Puberty.

That's the answer you have for Elijah. It was an answer he himself grasped, but only intellectually, and was helpless to comprehend in all its immensity.

And even for you, the word does nothing to relieve the heavy, sinking horror of the thing, now that it's returned—

—a second visitation—

—to you in a vivid, in an almost vengeful, way.

Like punishment for stealing the mind and body of someone it has just struck.

* * * * *

It was last year that Elijah started to feel weird, and started to worry. He found himself getting into pointless fights with his friends. Started getting snippy with his mom and dad. Felt restless and distracted, even when he wanted nothing better than to play games on his phone.

But all that was nothing as compared to the night his ... things ... reared up and lunged at him.

There'd been presentiments there, too. Overnight, it seemed like, they'd gotten very big. Ginormous, even. They'd swelled up and bulged out, so that he couldn't sit comfortably with them anymore. His underwear didn't fit comfortably around them, and he found himself (to his own hideous embarrassment) having to tuck and retuck himself inside his own shorts.

Without saying anything, his mom and dad bought him some jockstraps, and showed him how to use them. That made it better. But it also made it worse. It made him feel like a mutant.

What's wrong with me? he started to ask himself.

Of course, he had a general idea about what was happening. He probably knew even more than you did at his age, because his father (unlike yours) sat him down when he was turning twelve to give him a very cold and business-like lecture, and told him where to look online if he wanted to know more.

He didn't, not particularly. But reluctantly, fearfully—but also fascinated—Elijah had ... educated himself.

But knowing what was happening, and dealing with it, were different things. Elijah had blanched when he read about what to expect, and he dreaded it happening. And then when it did—

When his ... things ... exploded like a bomb in the middle of the night—

They were alive—writhing, spasming, erupting—when he woke. And he couldn't make them stop.

It was like they weren't his anymore, like they were a ... a thing ... that had fastened itself to him, gripping him in the crotch and digging into his loins. Fire shot through the nerves and muscles of his thighs and hips and the small of his back, and his peter lunged and bit and spat as it fought through the tangled front of his underwear. Elijah sweated and shook, but he could only softly gasp and cry as the thing spent itself, violently and mindlessly.

But though it was an agony, when it was done he was left limp with a radiant exhaustion.

Afterward, he gingerly unpeeled himself from his soppy underwear and stole into the bathroom to obsessively soap himself off. His underwear he left to soak in the sink, then early the next morning squeezed it dry, shoved it to the bottom of his garbage, and took the sack out to the dumpster.

He's had to throw away several pairs of underwear since.

* * * * *

You went through an almost identical experience yourself, of course, and you can take some solace in knowing how to deal with it. It's just a matter of getting ahead of it, is all. Clean the pipes on your own schedule, so they don't try to take care of themselves in the middle of the night. But Elijah was still too freaked to think about taking matters into his own hands (so to speak) this way.

So, the actual physiology of the thing won't be a problem. But Elijah's shame and confusion and disgust with his nightly ... struggles ... seems to be also tangled up with other ... things ... that arrived in a rush.

He can't stop thinking about boobs, for instance. Snowy white breasts with a sprinkling of tiny brown freckles on them. Visions of them—firm, creamy mounds dusted with cinnamon—will just pop into his head, almost randomly. Like the other day, when Mrs. Green plotted a curve on the whiteboard in math class (she was graphing a formula with an exponent)— Well, to Elijah the outline of the curve looked just like the silhouette of a drooping breast.

He also can't help noticing how nice the girls have started to smell, and at how beautiful their skin and hair is. And it's like he can't stop hearing the sound of their bodies rustling inside their clothes.

And his overactive organs aren't his only physical challenge. Elijah hit a growth spurt over the summer—he's now one of the tallest kids in his class, and his dad (who is well over six feet tall) has started teasing that he's going to start bumping his head against the tops of doorways. But it's not just in height (or in his shorts) that he's burgeoned. His limbs have gotten bigger. Things that were once the right size now feel oddly small in his hands, and sometimes, when he looks down at his feet, it seems to him that he's sitting on the shoulders of someone who has much longer and bigger legs. He's gotten clumsy, too. It's like the ground is too far away, so that he puts his feet wrong. He bumps into things that should be out of reach. The whole class exploded in laughter a few weeks ago when, as he went up to turn in his vocabulary test, he tumbled over the corner of the teacher's desk, and pulled an empty chair over him as he fell to the floor.

So ...

Your new persona is saddled with a sack of organs as big as a bagpipe, that pulse and wheeze and drone of their own accord, even in the middle of school. He can't stop thinking about girls, and their skin and their hair and their firm but tender breasts, all of it rustling around inside their clothes. And his own body is like a suit of armor he's clanking clumsily around inside. It's all left him with a skin that feels like it's crawling inside and out with bugs.

And somehow you're supposed to explain all this to Sydney, so she'll know why you flinch like a scalded cat when she tries to touch you.

Next: "Mother Dearest" 

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