The Book of Masks (Vol. 2)

The Return of the Reluctant Prodigal

Previously: "Alone with Yourself and Dwayne Macaulay" 

It's Sunday (nine days after you left Saratoga Falls) before you arrive at Putnam Academy to reclaim the errant Dane Matthias. (Dwayne was the one who took full charge of installing his cousin there—he even went so far as to claim to be the boy's guardian—which is why you have come out in the guise of Dwayne and not of Marianne Matthias.) Anyway, it doesn't take much work to get Dane withdrawn from the school, even on such short notice, though you have the impression that the commander—or whatever he is—doesn't much like your look and tries delaying things. But at a little after ten, Dane Matthias, stripped of his school uniform and returned to jeans and a t-shirt, is brought to you.

He flinches at the sight of your face, and in the sidelong glance he gives the commander you think you see a silent plea not to be sent off in your company.

You yourself are rather shocked by his appearance as well. His eyes are hollow, and he seems to have shrunk inside himself, despite the stiff, straight posture that has been instilled in him during his brief stay at the academy. Most shocking of all is his hair. Gone is the shaggy mop of coppery locks. He was apparently shaved down to the scalp, and it's a very short carpet that has started to grow out again.

"Come on, man, we're taking you home," you tell him, and give him a reassuring squeeze to the upper arm. Again, he flinches. "It'll all be okay, you'll see. It's all back to normal. Got everything?" Dane shrugs and holds up his back pack. "Come on, then. It's a long drive."

He waits until you're in the car before speaking. "Do you have to take me home?" he asks in a dull, hollow voice.

"Don't you wanna go home?" you ask as you start the car. "Don't tell me you liked it here."

"It was okay." His Adams apple bobbles. "Liked it better than home."

"I told you, everything's back to normal. Going back to normal. That includes you."

You catch his sidelong glance. "Me?"

"Uh huh. I know who you are, man. Your name is Evie Cummings, and your friends sent me out to rescue you."

* * * * *

You and Evie have a good, long talk over the next few hours. You start by telling her that you are not Dwayne Macaulay, the guy who hustled her onto a plane to Oregon, but a fellow Westside student named Will Prescott who, like her, is wearing a magical disguise. From there, bit by bit, you steer her through an explanation of the masks and how they work; how her friends have the book that makes the masks; how they have been taking turns using a mask of her in order to keep her family from realizing that she's gone missing; and that you were tasked with retrieving her from her oddball exile.

Only when she asks why you—a senior she doesn't know—got the job do you explain how her fantastic misadventure got started.

Even there you build up to it slowly, by telling how you're the one who found the book, and got to playing around with it with your friend Caleb, and how one bad day for you—the day Gordon Black hauled you out to the portables for a righteous beat down—turned into a bad day for both you and Gordon, which was followed by worse days after you hid out as Dane Matthias, culminating in ...

Finally you admit that it was you who forced an unwilling body swap on her, which led to everything else that followed.

That ends the conversation for awhile, and you let her stew over your confession silently for a few minutes before you resume.

"I've learned my lesson, man. Er, Evie," you tell her. "Or I guess I have. I hope I have. Your friends had to catch me first, but after that, uh—" You break off with a shrug. "I've put myself through a lot of hell setting things up to get you back, and when we get back we're putting everything back to normal. Your friend Lindsay's going to make sure of that."

Naturally you say nothing of the trouble that her friends Joe and Grant and Justin and Bhodi have been getting up to, and want to get up to.

You let her be quiet, and you don't interrupt the silence. Not until you stop for a late lunch do you speak again, and that's when you offer to get her out of Dane's mask.

She hesitates, but declines the offer. So after you've collected some burgers and fries and are on the road again, you ask her for her story.

She shrugs, and even under your constant prodding she doesn't say much. She was, of course, completely baffled to find herself transformed into a guy, and still more appalled when she got hustled off to a military school in Oregon. ("It's not something that happens to me a lot," she dryly observes.) After that, she tried to survive by simply accepting whatever happened, and doing her best to deal with it.

It still wasn't enough. Her first night at Putnam she was cornered by some of the upperclassmen and given a rough, rude interrogation. She failed it, even in her own estimation, and they informed her (with gleeful malice) that she needed "toughening up," and that they were just the boys to give it to her. She won't give any details, though; and even when she says that "the girls I knew in middle school were meaner," you sense that she's only making a dark joke.

But when you stop for the night, and are alone in the motel room, she falls upon her own bed and weeps long and hard into a pillow.

It's a performance that neither you nor Macaulay know how to deal with, and it's all you can do to sit next to her and lightly stroke her back. ("His" back, technically, as she's still in Dane's mask.) The crying jag only lasts five minutes, though, and when she turns a tear-streaked face up at you her expression, though wan, is more peaceful than you've seen it yet. She hesitates again when you ask if she wants to take the mask off, but she shakes her head and says she'll wait until she gets home.

* * * * *

Evie looks a lot happier the next morning when you get up. This isn't to say that she's happy, exactly, but she is in a better mood, and you catch her in the passenger seat touching and stroking herself in an exploratory way. You ask her again about taking the mask off, and this time she is quicker and more emphatic about wanting to leave it on.

And then she starts asking you quick, eager questions about the masks, and how they work, and what kinds of things you can do with them. You have to struggle to keep up with her, and it embarrasses you to admit how much you don't know.

"I guess it's pretty neat," she says when you've made it clear you've exhausted everything you know. "I mean, when you know what's going on. It's no fun just having it shoved onto you. How are the other guys dealing with it?" You admit that you don't know. "Anyway, it's pretty neat," she repeats, and she touches her chest with her fingertips. "You know, I was so freaked out at first, and then I was at that school, that I just didn't want to deal with it. I didn't even want to ... to touch myself."

You mean you didn't want to touch your cock? you don't ask. Then how did you piss or wipe yourself after you shit?

"I just wanted to forget that this was my body. But now—" She strokes her face. Dane is a hairy guy, and after twenty-four hours she's already getting a beard. "It's just a disguise. And when you think about it that way ..." She trails off.

When you stop again for the evening—you've reached Nebraska—you don't ask her about removing the mask. Instead, she asks you to take Macaulay's mask off. You oblige, and wake to find her bending over you and studying your face intensely.

"I think I've seen you around," she says as you talk afterward. "You look familiar. I like your face better than the other guy's."

"Thanks. The other guy's a real asshole."

"Well, you're an asshole too," she says with a grin. "But it'll be okay if you make it up to me."

"Like how?"

She just rolls her eyes and says she'll have to think about it.

The comment, and just the way she's acting, reminds you more of the boy sophomores than of Lindsay and Paulina.

* * * * *

The trip only takes one more day to complete, and during it she tells you about herself and you tell her about yourself, emphasizing the parts that don't make you seem like a body-stealing psychopath. She grows ever more alert and eager the closer you get to Saratoga Falls, and when you're an hour outside of town—it's a little after noon on a Wednesday—she insists on being the one to text her friends that you're almost home.

For your own part, you feel yourself growing more worried. You have heard nothing from Karol Mathis regarding "Marianne Matthias", and Caleb only replied we'll talk the last time you texted him. Even Lindsay only said yay! when you texted her from Oregon that you had Evie and were on your way home.

Your concern deepens when you stop by the Donna and find that Marianne checked out a week ago. You lodge Evie there, with instructions to hang loose till her friends show up, and text Caleb: im back tfucks going on?

Thirty infuriating minutes later, he replies: come out to the basement.

Mystified, you drive down to the old Acheson school. Caleb is waiting, even though it's still early in the afternoon. "Why aren't you in school?" you demand.

"I am," he says. "It's been a busy week." He dodges your eye.

* To continue: "The Fate of Dwayne Macaulay" 

*
"Table of Contents (Vol. 2)" 
"The Book of Masks (Vol. 2)"