The Book of Masks (Abridged)

Hangover for an Absent Party Crasher

THAT'S THE START OF A SWATH you cut through the Friday night party scene.

You return via the front door to Alexis Lachance's party, where you hassle another girl in the other living room and barge in loudly on some in-progress necking sessions in the upstairs bedrooms, but retreat before any of the beefy guys can start to take serious issue with you.

At the next party you run into Stephanie Wyatt, who plays for the Westside girls' basketball team. She's always scared you, slightly, for she's intense and athletic and never has the time of day for you. So you barge up to her and call her a bitch to her face. She does a double-take at you: "What did you say?"

"You heard me. You're a bitch and you've been bitch for as long as anyone's known you."

"Are you drunk, Johansson?"

"Only drunk on the truth, babe. Start being nicer to my man Prescott, and maybe I'll think about taking it back."

She stares at you, then sprays you with a "Pfft!" and turns away. "That's the kind of shit I'm talking about!" you yell after her. "Don't have time for anyone except your own self!" For the next ten minutes you circulate the house, butting in on conversations purely in order to tell people that you think Stephanie Wyatt is a skanky bitch and doesn't everyone agree?

Eventually you're pulled aside by a very big and intense-looking dude in an Eastman High letterman jacket. He asks you politely to leave, and when you inquire if he's as pussy-whipped by Stephanie as everyone else, he carries you outside. His hands are incredibly strong, because you're unable to so much as twitch while he's got you in his grip.

After that you go down to the river, where cars are strung out along the strand for half a mile and kids are wandering up and down with beers, joints and their arms around each other. You start at one end and march steadily toward the other, carefully insulting every person that you meet along the way. (When you're asked, incredulously, to repeat what you said, you just reply you always charge a dollar for the privilege of sharing your opinion twice—five dollars if you're sharing it with an idiot.) You make it about a hundred yards down the riverbank before you're caught and thrown into the black, eddying water of the Mohegan River.

"I'm back and it's not my curfew yet!" you holler as you return through the living room on wet, squelching footsteps. Your dad, who has changed into a robe and pajamas and is reading a book, looks up with a scowl. But instead of yelling at you, he asks what happened to you. "Some jerks threw me into a swimming pool when I lipped off about the music. So I came home. I'm gonna take a hot shower and go to bed." You find a couple of weeds caught in your pants as you peel them off, and judging by the smell you'll have to throw the clothes away.

* * * * *

Sure enough, Caleb is a trending topic on x2z when you check the next morning, but still you only managed to get him into the top 25. It's a painful reminder that you and your friends may be the tiniest zits on the expansive ass that is the Westside High School social scene.

For instance: Really! All that trouble you went to at three different parties to get Caleb thrown out in a memorable way, and still the number 5 trending topic is Hannah Westrick (who?) getting drunk and making out with a guy who wasn't her date at the Warehouse.

On the other hand, you ruefully reflect, maybe it's for the best. You didn't want to get Caleb in too much trouble. You just wanted to create some really memorable scenes so your best friend would freak out some more about the apparent arrival of a doppelganger in his life.

"Dude," you ask when you talk him later that morning, after you've texted him to see if you can call. "What was your problem last night?"

"What problem?" he says. His tone surprises you by having more than a little panic in it.

"You okay?" you ask.

"Why shouldn't I be?" Now he definitely sounds rattled.

"Look, if you want to get together and talk about it—"

"I don't need to talk about anything," he exclaims, "except to find out why you're fucking calling me!"

It sounds like he's already seen the x2z streams, though why he'd be looking at that site—he has the same feelings about it that you do—you don't understand. "Did any of those guys come find you last night? Or this morning?"

"What guys?" Now his voice has risen to a shriek.

"The guys posting about you on x2z."

There's a pause. "I don't know any guys posting about me on x2z."

"You don't? Then what are you so freaked out about?"

"I'm not. Freaked. Out. Except for the way that you seem to think that I should be freaked out about something!" He hangs up.

You call him back. Though aggravated, he at least takes your call, and agrees to meet you someplace for a burger.

"How can you not remember any of this?" you demand as he scrolls for the third time through the x2z posts tagged with his name. "Were you high?"

"I wasn't there!"

"How could you not be there? Dude, there's a picture of you!" You scroll through the feed on your own phone until you find the photo that got taken of you at Alexis Whosits's place. You show it to him, though he's already seen it. "Is that you, or isn't it?"

His brow furrows up in worry as he chews his lip. He mumbles something. "What did you say?"

"I said's not me. 's a Photoshop."

"Are all these posts fakes?"

He stares at you. You almost relent and confess everything when you realize he's about to burst into tears.

"Look, I'm not calling you a liar, man. But what did you do last night? Did you take some funky cold medicine? Some expired cough syrup? Did you go out and do this shit and there was something in your system that made you black out?"

"I don't think so!" he squeaks. His eyes are half bugging from his head, and he's stopped blinking. "But it's gotta be a hack. Someone hacked the servers and put this stuff up."

"So what did you do last night?"

"Nothing!" He finally closes his eyes and clasps his head between his hands. "I stayed in. I had a bad day."

You decide to dial things back. "Well, maybe things will look better on Monday," you tell him. "Maybe someone did hack the x2z stream. I'll, uh, text around, see what I can find out."

Caleb looks at you wetly. Then his eyes fall, and he mumbles something that sounds like a gratitude.

* * * * *

You do text around, contacting people you know who would be in a position to testify one way or another about what Caleb might or might not have been doing Friday night, and they confirm the authenticity of the posts. Of course, you knew that already, but now you've got proof for Caleb.

You decide to wait until later to talk to him about it, though. Instead you spend the balance of Saturday shopping for supplies.

The next spell in the book wound up being easy to cast. Just a handful of the ingredients you already had on hand, burnt in a bowl over a sigil (it didn't even produce any noxious odors or smokes this time) and you got a slightly sticky paste that you could use to glue that metal band that contains Caleb's brain into the mask that contains his face and body. So you did, giving you an all-in-one Caleb Johansson disguise for the next time you release his doppelganger.

The spell after that, though, looks to be much bigger, and the ingredients, once you got them deciphered, scare you a little with their quantities and their cost. It makes you very glad that you collected all that money from your friends, because you've spent most of it by the time you haul the ingredients back to your house. You have to hide them inside a giant cardboard box in the garage.

But you still have one ingredient to get, and it's not going to be able to fit in a cardboard box.

Dirt from a graveyard.

Yep, the spell requires four hundred pounds of it. And because you're supposed to soak it in stuff that is basically jet fuel and set it on fire, you know you won't be able to execute it in your room. So you sit on your bed and think long and hard about where to try it out.

You're almost embarrassed when the idea comes to you.

That old school a couple of blocks from your house, where you changed into Caleb's mask. It used to be an elementary school, but it closed a bunch of years ago and got converted into a community center. Only part of it is used, though, and on the opposite side of the building is an outside door that leads into the basement.

You found that door a year ago, and busted through it, and explored the dusty spaces beyond. It wasn't very interesting, only being stuffed with old desks and chairs and cabinets and bookshelves. You put your own padlock on the door, and when you checked back on it a few days later, you found it still there. So for a couple of weeks you and your friends had free reign of that basement, moving stuff around, stashing some liquor, and even holding a small Halloween party. You've not been back, though, in many months.

You grab your keys and race over. To your delight, your padlock is still on the door.

So you run back and forth from it to your house, moving your supplies. In the midst of the basement junk you clear a space that might be big enough for four hundred pounds of dirt.

Which then raises the question: Do you get that dirt tonight? Or do you add to Caleb's troubles with another "doppelganger sighting"?