The Book of Masks (Vol. 5)

Madam I'm Adam

Previously: "The Emerging Backstory" 

Laura is very quiet as you drive her to Catherine's house—Catherine came with Adam, so you have to give her a ride home—and you don't know what to say either. Not until you are in front of her house do you tell her not to worry, that things will be alright.

"I don't know how," she says in a very low voice. "But maybe you're right." She is quiet for a moment, then exclaims, "What if this kind of thing happens all the time? But no one says anything because they think no one will believe them?"

You don't know how to answer that, so you brush past it. "Just don't worry too much about it," you tell her. "Just remember everything Catherine told you to, um, expect here, I guess." You have to fight the instinct to palm and squeeze her thigh, like Adam likes to do. "I'll pick you up in the morning, around eight, okay?"

"Maybe we'll change back to normal during the night?" she suggests. She seems reluctant to leave you.

Then she leans over to give you a fast but hard kiss on the side of the mouth.

"Thank you, Will," she gasps. "This is all so frigging weird, and you're being so solid about it!" She leaps from the car before you can react further.

That spot on your face where she kissed you burns all the drive home.

* * * * *

Adam's family lives in one of the older and more tired parts of town, not far from your friend Caleb, in fact. This is more than a little strange, it seems to you, because Adam's family owns the Dortch Oil Co., a local gasoline wholesaler, and half a dozen convenience store/gas stations. Adam himself has never paid much attention to the business, and understands only that it's a racket (the markups on junk food are outrageous) but overall not a very lucrative one. His father, Michael, who is in his mid-forties, is basically a blue-collar worker with a sideline managing other blue-collar workers; his mother, Kaye, also in her mid-forties, is the company bookkeeper. With his friends, Adam acts embarrassed and horrified by his family's grossly anti-environment friendly business, and brags that he's going to use his college degree (in whatever it turns out to be) to get a position with an environmental non-profit. But he also accepts the generous allowance his dad gives him, and when he's not showing off his green bona fides to friends, he never gives the Dortch Oil Co. a second thought.

His mom is in the living room when you come in, huddled up on the sofa with a paperback and a cigarette and a whiskey. She's a short, fat woman with a baggy face. Adam gets his hair—that great mane of frizzy hair that bunches up in tight little kinks and wavelets when it grows long—from her, along with his green-gray eyes. His height (he is about six-one) and his physique (strong but lithe and wiry) he gets from from dad. Or, at least, he looks like his dad does in the old family pictures, before he got a pot belly and his shoulders slumped.

"You have fun with your friends?" Mrs. Dortch asks without looking up from her book. "You get something to eat?"

"Yeah. I got a little homework I have to finish still, so I'll be in my room."

She doesn't answer, being completely absorbed in her book. A couple of Adam's friends have observed how weird it is that she reads instead of watching TV.

Adam's room is down the short hall, on the left, across from his parents' door. You heft his book bag onto his bed and chew your lip. You know what you'll see if you look in a mirror, and you have no doubts in your mind—in either of them—what you look like. But you still feel like you have to make it official.

So you go in the bathroom, put on the light, and turn to study your reflection.

Yep. It's Adam Dortch staring back at you, alright.

Adam is tall and rangy. His face is narrow but it has planes and a shape, tapering gently from a broad forehead past some barely visible cheekbones to a lean jaw and chin. It's handsome enough, but it's also got a kind of ugliness that gives it character: the nose is just a little too beaky and pocked with pores; the tight muscles of the cheeks are just a little too pronounced; the eyes are just a little too deep-set under a jutting brow and a little too satirical. Most prominent of all are the slightly buck teeth with the just-too-large gap between them. When he grins—which you do now, to test the effect—he looks like a bold and impertinent rabbit.

But his most notable feature has to be the hair.

It is a dark brown, and when it lays flat, as it does now, it falls just past his shoulders and the nape of his neck. It isn't curly, but it bunches up in little tight wavelets that ripple with reflected light. He's got great, heaping bunches of the stuff, with a natural body that makes it easy to manipulate, being as stiff as a 'fro but as pliable as a white person's hair. His 'do can hold whatever shape he pushes it into with only a little chemical help.

And so Adam shows it off by wearing it up, teasing it into a great, tapering bush that adds at least eleven inches to his height. He works on it every morning at school, just before class, and lets it slowly collapse across the course of the day, before repairing it if he's planning to go out to any parties. When walking down the hall, he looks like a candle with a giant brown flame burning atop his head.

You've noticed him, of course, but intentionally ignored him as a freak trying to get attention.

Which is, yes, pretty much the reason he does it.

You clap your hands to your face and open your mouth in something between a yawn and a silent yowl. Oh, frick, you sigh to yourself. Oh, frickety-frick fuck frickety fuck fuckity fuck. Unless a miracle occurs during the night, you're going to have to go to school tomorrow as this clown.

Not that you're in a hurry to get there. But back in your bedroom you tell Adam's homework to go fuck itself to hell and back, and flop onto the bed with his cell phone, to review the day's social media and confirm to yourself that, yeah, you are now one of those people, one of those fucks who makes x2z the toilet bowl that it is. You glower over some of the posts, and fight down the anticipation of hot, sour joy it would bring to continue a couple of those threads—particularly the one where, under the name JessicaGarnersTampon you relate a lot of blood- and other fluid-soaked adventures putatively taking place inside Jessica Garner's panties—before closing the phone and flopping onto your back and closing your eyes. You are suddenly getting wood, and a lot of it.

Catherine, you think. God fucking damn it. That's going to be a problem.

* * * * *

It gave you no pleasure the next morning, only an intense relief, to spend yourself violently into Adam's jerk-off rag after waking up. He has a long and skinny schlong, one that from its base to its tip is as long as the span from the heel of his long, skinny hand to the tip of his long, skinny middle finger (he's measured and compared them), and it's even wilder and more rebellious than your own. There's no way Adam could have kept his technical virginity as long as you have, not with that angry serpent restlessly coiling and uncoiling in his underwear. Under the hot water of the shower, you almost get another erection.

After showering and dressing in jeans and a gray silk shirt bought second-hand at a thrift store (Adam is partial to castoffs, and trying to make them look stylish), you slurp down a quick bowl of cereal before returning to the bathroom to brush your teeth and blow-dry your hair. Something seems to have happened during the night, but it's not the reversion that Laura had hoped for. Instead, Adam's spirit seems to weigh more heavily on you. Yesterday you only knew what you knew about him. This morning, you feel like you have to fight to keep from acting and even thinking like him.

Though maybe you shouldn't fight the urge too hard, not if you're going to have to be him at school. A lot of Adam's friends are tougher than yours.

Mom and Pop—it's more natural, too, to think of them this way this morning—are getting their own breakfast when you come striding out the back at about seven-thirty with your bag bouncing on your skinny shoulders. "Bye," you wish them, kissing your mom lightly on the top of the head and giving your dad a quick wave and an impudent smile. Then at a bouncing walk you're out the door to the car. The dark-gray Jetta was bought for Adam as a necessity, not a gift, and it's a rattletrap whose rear fender still bears the deep scars of the collision that knocked more than a thousand dollars off the price it was fundamentally worth.

Laura is standing outside when you pull up to her house, but it is even harder now not to think of her as Catherine, for of course she looks like Catherine and is dressed like her, in the green, sack-like shift that drives Adam wild with desire. (All he would have to do is loosen a zipper, and whole thing would fall off her to the floor.) Again, you have to throttle the urge to grab and kiss her as she clambers into the car with her book bag.

"How did it go for you last night?" you ask.

"Okay," she says mutely. "I still don't know what I'm doing, though."

"You hear from, uh, Catherine?"

She nods. "Same thing." She closes her eyes and groans. "Oh God, how am I going to do this?"

You haven't heard from your replacement, so as you pull back into the street you hand her your phone and ask her text him.

She frowns a few minutes later when the reply comes. "He says," she reports, "that he knows what you did last Friday."

Next: "What Adam Knows" 

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"Table of Contents (Vol. 5)" 
"The Book of Masks (Vol. 5)"