The Book of Masks (Vol. 1)

Personalities on Parade

Previously: "More Pieces for a Homemade Puzzle" 

"Who do we know that's been out to the Warehouse?"

That's the question you put to Caleb the next morning. You've fifteen minutes or so before first period starts, but as usual you and your best friend are camped out in Mr. Walberg's class early. Except for Dean Stratton, who's slumped in his desk on the other side of the room with his eyes and thumbs glued to his cell phone, you so far have the place to yourself.

Caleb answers you with a beady-eyed glance. "Are you saying you don't know me?" he asks.

"What?" you reply. Then: "Oh, fuck you! You've never been out to—"

"Who says?"

"I say so! Fucking liar."

"I am a man of many secrets and mysteries," he retorts with a note of lofty disdain. "You think you know me, but—"

"Thhbpppt!"

He gives you a dirty look. "Why do you want to know?"

"Just wondering. Do you think Cassie's been out there?"

"Cassie? Harper?" He blinks. "No. Cassie Harper—"

"I think she has. I was hanging out with her and some friends on Sunday—"

"When was this?" Caleb asks sharply.

"I just said. Sunday."

"What was the deal?"

"I ran into them." Now it's your turn to give him a look. "I just ran into them, man. It's not like I'm seeing people behind your back."

"Yeah, well, I was hanging out with people last Sunday too, and—" He breaks off. "Aren't you going to ask me who?"

"No. Do any of them hang out the Warehouse?"

"What is this fascination with the Warehouse all of a sudden?"

The fascination has to do with all the chatter last night after you started replying from Will Chang's x2z account. Aside from the rush of posts and replies about your selfies, and questions about when you'd be putting up pictures from San Diego (questions that made you gulp), you found yourself badgered from all directions from girls begging you to come out to the Warehouse this weekend.

Which is a great temptation, particularly if you can do it under a face that's not your own.

The Warehouse is probably the most famous party spot in the city, which is a paradox because it is also supposed to be the most secret. How it manages to stay open, no one can say. (Unless the cops and politicians are being paid off under the table.) It's an abandoned warehouse in the city's crumbling, post-apocalyptic industrial downtown: a hulking cavern of concrete and sheet metal, bounded on one side by the railroad track and on the other by other abandoned industrial building that are now the abodes of transients, addicts, and the criminals who prey on them. No one that you personally know dares visit the place in the daytime during the week.

But come the weekend ...

That's when the city's high schoolers take over.

The place, report has it, comes alive with music, dancing, drinking, and assorted other entertainments. It's a giant rave, staffed, policed, and attended exclusively by high school students. There is safety in numbers from the area gangs—particularly as security (so you've heard) is provided by school football players, wrestlers, and other well-muscled types—but it is supposedly no less dangerous on the inside, in which brawls, fistfights, and the occasional shooting are all supposed to be a regular happening. Along with alcohol poisoning, drug overdoses, falls from high places by people too hopped up on chemicals to know better.

It's a place you've been dying to see first hand, but have always been too chicken-shit to visit yourself.

Though if Cassie Harper—tiny, sweet, no-swearing chatterbox Cassie Harper—regularly goes out there, it can't be as bad as rumored, can it?

Anyway, your new friends told you all about it and insisted you had come out. You'll fit right in! It's totally your scene!

But though you might have a fake face to hide behind, you'd feel a lot safer if you also had a fake persona to hide behind as well—the persona of someone who knows the Warehouse and is comfortable with that kind of scene.

A persona that you could copy into the magical metal strip that you stayed up making last night until two in the morning.

Of course, you don't tell Caleb any of this, and when you persist in asking who he knows that has been out to the Warehouse, he rolls his eyes and jerks his chin at the other side of the room where—

Well, why didn't you think of it before? Dean Stratton—a lanky hipster with the kind of tousled hairdo that's supposed to look casually unkempt but probably has to be styled for twenty minutes before it looks right—is exactly the kind of person you'd expect to see out at the Warehouse.

But you don't know Dean except by name and face. You'd have better luck with that type in second period—your Film class—which is packed with that kind of boho doofus.

So ... second period ...

* * * * *

"Hey Karl!" you shout to the guy as he comes shuffling in. "You going to the Warehouse this weekend?"

Karl Hennepin, who is well over six-feet tall, with a massive, poofy 'do of dirty blonde hair atop which bobs a battered cloth fedora, looks over at you. He sports dirty jeans, a paint-spattered pullover, and sandals—an Artist-with-a-Capital-A who dabbles in painting, sculpture and collages.

"Yeah," he drawls without altering course. "Saturday. Lady Steel's playing."

"Cool. What are you doing tonight?"

"I 'unno." He plops into his desk with a thud. "Pro'ly stayin' in with pizza and some casuals."

"Cool," you repeat. But you don't know how to press further without overdoing it. Besides, his eyes look very bloodshot, and you guess he's at least more than a little stoned. At the very least, he's too distracted to be worth talking to.

Out of the corner of your eye you see Keith Tilley—who after Caleb is probably your best friend, and who sits behind you in this class—giving you a fishy-eyed stare. "What?" you ask him.

His expression turns frankly incredulous. "You hitting the Warehouse this weekend?" he asks.

"Thinking about it."

"Oh." He manages to fight the smile off his face. "Cool." He settles back in his desk and twines his hands behind his head. "Me, I'm thinking of flying out to Maui. Hook up with Scarjo." He smiles mirthlessly at you.

You make a face back, and turn around.

* * * * *

Hennepin, you thought, would be just about the perfect choice to graft onto your evolving Chang persona, but at lunch you are surprised with three more plausible candidates. Or, at least, their names.

Usually you take lunch out behind the school with Caleb and Keith, but today Caleb says he wants to eat out front with Carson Ioeger, James Lamont, Jenny Ashton, and Paul Davis, who are a quartet of friendlies that you sometimes do things with. He lobbies hard for this, because (he tells you) he heard a rumor that Yumi Saito and Jessica Garner might join their friend Jenny out there. Yumi and Jessica are cheerleaders—and unlike the other cheerleaders they will sometimes talk to you and even smile at you.

Sure enough, they are already out front, sitting cross-legged with Jenny while Carson and James lounge nearby. (Paul, who has an undisguised crush on Yumi, has edged up close to the girls.) Casual greetings are exchanged all around as you and your friends come up, and you try to settle in without making it look obvious that you're positioning yourself so you can drink in the two cheerleaders.

They're complaining about Chelsea Cooper, the head cheerleader, as they almost always do when they talk to Jenny. "I swear," Yumi is saying, "if I'd had a shotgun on me, I'd'a pushed it up the front of her skirt and pulled the trigger." She's a fiery little Japanese-American girl—compact, with a pertly bobbed hair—who doesn't suffer fools gladly.

Jessica Garner, who also wears her (blonde), curly hair cut short, shakes her head. "Too quick. A good drawing-and-quartering is what Chelsea needs."

You listen silently as you eat and as they prattle on, drinking them in. Particularly Jessica, who is one of a set of triplets—she has a sister, Eva, and a brother, Marc—and it is a comment about her brother that brings your interest back around to the Warehouse. He got a ticket for running a red light, she says after the conversation has wandered off the topic of cheerleading, and consequently has been grounded for the weekend. Which means— "Brownie and Laurent are gonna be chaperoning Hannah at the Warehouse this weekend." She rolls her eyes. "God, I know they're friends of his, but I think he'd be smart enough not to trust his girlfriend with them."

"Marc won't be at the Warehouse?" you blurt out. You're actually less interested in that than in the implication that Marc—the popular captain of the soccer team—sometimes goes.

"That's what I just said," Jessica retorts.

"Well, good," Yumi snaps. "Mokichi always used to go, and he'd come home smelling like beer, whiskey, clove cigarettes, pot, and five different kinds of perfume. My mom always pretended not to notice."

Ding! Another bell-like alert goes off. Mokichi is Yumi's older brother, and you remember him as a tough-as-nails bad-ass. Probably good mental armor. And it sounds like he knew how to have fun.

You're still mulling over these names, weighing them against Karl's, when Jenny unintentionally drops the name of another candidate: Ian Patton, who she says is "the only decent musician" she's heard playing at the Warehouse. You know Ian vaguely from your math class—maybe Chang should be a musician?

You pay hardly any more attention to lunch as your head buzzes with these possibilities.

* * * * *

The trouble, though, is getting to any of these guys, for you don't know them to hang out with. So you have to give serious thought to one DM that drops before the end of school.

Hey Will, hear great things about you, thought maybe we could meet up tonight.

It's from Jack Li, the gay guy they're trying to set Chang up with. But apparently he's popular, and he does regularly attend the Warehouse.

And he's ripe for the plucking.

Next: "Mindjack" 

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"Table of Contents (Vol. 1)" 
"The Book of Masks (Vol. 1)"