The Book of Masks (Vol. 5)

Pocketing the Profit

Previously: "Unexpected Windfalls" 

"Did you get what you wanted?" Joe asks as you're on your way out of the bookstore.

"Oh, I just had to talk the owner," you tell him. "I had a question about a book I picked up here the other day."

Joe gives you a curious look, but you don't say any more. You have a feeling that if you told him you might be coming into a couple of hundred dollars, he might try talking you into taking it on a drive to Vegas. Or Tijuana.

* * * * *

Joe tries inviting you into his place with a promise of pizza, but you tell him you have to get home; it would feel weird being at their place twice in one day.

On the drive home you reflect on what a difference it seems to make whether the jocks go to Westside or to Eastman.

Most all of the ones that you know at Westside, of course, are loathsome to the core: showboaters who push their way through the hallways, or bullies who will haul you out back for a little light humiliation. True, this year has not been especially bad—though Keith has gotten it in the neck a couple of time from Seth Javits—but the semester is young yet. But between Javits and Black and Patterson on the basketball team, and Pozniak and Maddox and Mendoza on the soccer team; Kleason and Douglas and Nelson from the football team, and Williamson and Denell and ... Well, it's a depressingly long list of assholes who seem to delight in pushing you and guys like you out of the way. And it was such as these who seemed more than fairly represented on the Warehouse goon squads last night.

But the Eastman guys you met last night seemed pretty chill. Sure, most of them paid no attention to you, but they didn't glare or sneer down at you. And Frank and Joe seem very friendly, even if they were both pretty intense.

But is there really a difference between the schools? you wonder. Or is just that the Eastman guys don't see you every day in the hallways, so they haven't become contemptuous toward you? Would the Westside shitheads be as nice to you if you went to Eastman, and the Eastman guys as ugly?

You eventually put these reflections aside as unprofitable. Certainly not as profitable as the rain of cash you visualize when you sell that book to that university professor!

If you sell the book to him, though, you will still have to come up with something for the time capsule. You wrack your brain for an hour or so, then give up and do what you should have done at the start, and go online for ideas.

* * * * *

Caleb isn't amused the next morning, in class, when you show him the thumb drive that you brought in. "That's my fucking idea, you fuck!" he hisses at you.

"Go fuck yourself," you retort. "Your idea was to give him a thumb drive full of porn. Mine just has a bunch of regular photos on it."

"Of what? Dick pics?"

"Bite me. No, it's pictures of my neighborhood, the school, the city, shit like that. I went around last night with my phone and took 'em, got up early and took some more before school."

"You're still gonna make me look bad!" Caleb is starting to turn red now. "I'm not telling him I'm sending porn, I'm just giving him a thumb drive!"

"So I'm giving him pictures, and am just using the thumb drive to hold them. They're totally different."

"But it's still a thumb—!"

But Mr. Walberg cuts this argument short by announcing a "last call" for time capsule submissions. You smirk at Caleb (and he glowers back) as you take your thumb drive to the front. Mr. Walberg takes it with a frown, and tells you to hold up a moment as he consults a little notebook close at hand.

"I already have one of these, Mr. Prescott," he tells you after trailing a fat finger down the page, stopping at the line with Caleb's name.

"No, Caleb's just giving you a thumb drive. Mine's got pictures on it. It's the pictures I'm submitting."

Mr. Walberg sucks in one tip of the enormous, walrus-like mustache that pours down either side of mouth. His frown deepens.

"I'm going to have to ask you to submit them in a different form, then," he says, and hands the drive back to you. "Print 'em out, put 'em in a book, and submit them to me tomorrow. You have a one-day extension on the assignment," he gruffly adds as your face falls.

You take it back with a growl and return to your seat.

And now it is your turn to glower at Caleb as he smirks back at you.

* * * * *

So, that winds up ruining your plans for after school. Instead of driving out to the professor's house to sell him that book—you even brought it up to school with you; it's in your truck—you have to stay after school to take a few more pictures and print them out in the library, and then you have to drive in to town to buy a small notebook to put them in. You spend way too much time (it feels like) before and after dinner cutting out the photos and gluing them into the scrapbook. Then, of course, you've got your usual homework to do.

The next day you decide not to waste time. At lunch you email the professor at the internet address on his card, telling him that you have this book he is trying to recover, and that you'll be willing to sell it back to him. (You also reference, in an aside you fancy is very sly, that Ted Arnholm had the book appraised at "a couple of hundred dollars," as you don't want the man to lowball you.)

You would leap for joy when the final bell rings and you turn on your phone, to find a reply from him:

My most esteemed Mr. Prescott, he writes. I cannot express my delight in hearing from you, and in learning that you are prepared to sell the SLP back to me. You are quite correct in assuming that it is worth a fair sum. Shall we say five hundred dollars? If you will bring it to my university office at your earliest convenience I should be most gratified to settle accounts with you. If you are not able to be at the university before six, I pray you stop by my house, whose address I believe you have. With all humble gratitude, I am yours, A. Blackwell.

Quite a production, you observe to yourself. You are at his office by four.

Aubrey Blackwell, professor of archaeology, turns out to be a fat man with greasy hair and an unwholesome tangle of mustache and goatee around his mouth. There is something piggish about the smile he beams at you when you introduce yourself at his open door, and he wobbles clumsily around the desk to clasp your hand in a clammy handshake. "So good of you to come, Mr. Prescott," he murmurs. "So good of you indeed."

So you don't much like him, and you don't waste time pulling the book from your backpack and handing it to him. He examines it and opens it, and you hold your breath, waiting for the bark of dismay at finding most of the pages glued shut. But he doesn't seem to notice, and after tucking it carefully into his desk he gives you an envelope extracted from the deep recesses of his jacket, and encourages you to check that "your full recompense is there." It is: three hundred-dollar bills and six fifty-dollar bills.

"Oh, Mr. Prescott," he says as you're almost out the door. "Did you notice anything unusual about the book, while it was in your possession?"

"Uh ... No," you say, not wanting to mention the glued-pages thing.

"Did you examine it in any way?"

"I looked through the first page or two," you say. "But, um, I don't read Latin."

"Why did you purchase it?" he asks.

Taking your life (and the six hundred dollars in your hands), you explain that you had seen it in the special collections case, and showed it to Ted Arnholm, and he had marked it down from two hundred dollars to two, on account of "damage" to it. "It just seemed, like, a steal, you know," you explain with a shrug.

"Indeed!" the professor says. "Your two-dollar investment has netted you a four-hundred-and-ninety-eight dollar profit! I must thank you again."

And that is the opportunity, finally, to run.

* * * * *

This might seem an odd place to end the story. But no narrative should run past the point at which it ceases to contain possible interest. What happens next to you can be summarized thus:

You were contacted later that afternoon by Frank Durras, asking for a chance to talk to your father about a possible job at Salopek. You arranged it; he came over; and your father was sufficiently impressed that your new friend took employment there.

And Frank and Joe did become friends of yours, of a sort, for awhile. At least, you went to a couple of parties at their house, and met some of their Eastman friends, and got to know them well enough that you decided that most of the Eastman jockstraps really were better people than their Westside counterparts.

But your acquaintance with them didn't have a chance to last long. Around the middle of November you heard through Sean Mitchell—a classmate at Westside who got to know Frank through their common employment at Salopek—that the brothers' family was moving; you were unable to make their going-away party, however, because you were grounded when a second trip to the Warehouse resulted in damage to your truck.

As for that book: You never heard anything more about it, but presumably it was destroyed in the fire that engulfed Aubrey Blackwell's house late on Halloween night. Quite a fire it was, too, for the professor's body was never found.

The End

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