The Book of Masks (Abridged)

Your Life as a Dog

AFTER YOUR DISORIENTATION OF THE LAST ... How long exactly have you been gone?

Well, that's another reason to run for home. You crave the familiar. Blackwell nods at your choice. "Yes," he murmurs. "Quite the wisest thing to do at the moment." He hurries out the door.

Twenty minutes later you are dressed again as yourself. "So, can you tell me what I've missed?" You jerk your head in the general direction of the bedroom. "Like, who he is?"

"Tomorrow," Blackwell says. "We'll be free of his company then, with luck, and can regale each other with our adventures and investigate the details of what has happened."

* * * * *

"I'm back," you shout as you swing through the kitchen door. "Groceries are on the counter."

"Put them away, please," you mother shouts from the living room. "Dishes too."

"Fine," you groan. "Did Caleb call while I was out?"

"No."

"Did anyone call?"

"Why would they call here? Didn't you have your phone with you?"

"Yeah, but they're all morons," you grumble.

It had been an awful day at school—well, it had been an awful day for your golem, and now you're walking around with his memories. Caleb and Keith have totally dropped you as friends. People in the halls hiss as you pass. Even Carson Ioeger and Jenny Ashton, who were sticking with you for a few days, have started to avoid you; though Jenny has the ill-considered grace to take you aside and, with infinite sadness and sympathy, explain that it is only because everyone has been giving them shit about still being friends with you. The only person in the entire school to treat you decently is Justin Roth, who you tripped over behind G wing while stumbling along between classes. He'd picked up his cigarette from the dirt and brushed it off and given you a lopsided smile and suggested you hide out with him for the period. He'd listened attentively as, to your own surprise, you'd unburdened yourself of your woes. "Fuck a duck," he'd rumbled in his resonant baritone when you were done. He'd offered no suggestions, other than that you start hanging out in the back with him more, and that was so close to being the perfect thing to say that you'd nearly burst into tears.

Upstairs you bang the wall to get your brother to turn down his music, and he bangs on it back. Supper passes quietly, and you shrug off all talk about school. During the evening you do your homework and surf the internet out of boredom, and turn in early.

Your adventure—brief as it was—seems to evaporate like smoke. Only a peculiar sense that you are being watched remains.

* * * * *

"My ointment doesn't work on golems, I fear," Blackwell says with a frown as he puts it away. "Who gave you the shiner?"

"Just some guy," you mutter. "Don't even know him."

"Those marked bills haven't solved your bullying problem?"

"I think they've made it worse." You describe what it's like at school. "You could have warned me."

"It's not an effect of the magic," he retorts. "The people you used them on. They aren't merely bullies?"

"Well, they're also the top jocks and stuff," you shrug. "You know, the basketball players, the kind of guys who date the cheerleaders and all the popular girls."

"Ah," he says knowingly. "If I had known that then I certainly would have thought twice about using that technique. They are using their popularity to make you unpopular."

"Yeah, I know," you snap back. You tell him about your brief conversation with Jenny. "Is there any way to take the curse off? Or to make myself popular?"

"Could you acquire some popular friends, who are not affected by the hex?"

You shake your head. "Chelsea and her crew don't tolerate rivals. Speaking of people whose faces I can't stand," you continue as Blackwell strokes his cheek thoughtfully, "what happened to whatsisname?"

"Mr. Shabbleman? I sent him back to— To the place he came. Sent him off with a flea in his ear, I'm afraid."

"Sacked him, huh? Who was he, anyway?"

"Another adept," Blackwell says. "I discovered that I liked having a pupil."

Shabbleman, you think to yourself. You have cousins named Shabbleman. Ugly, inbred hillbilly types whose company you loathed during those brief times you had to meet up with them. Interesting coincidence. But you say nothing.

"Well," says Blackwell in a business-like tone. "Shall we pick up where we left off?"

"Should I change into Jared? Aren't we going to send, you know—" You point to your face. "Back home?"

"And how would we do that?" Blackwell asks with amusement.

"Don't you have a golem?"

"I did. But then you, ah, requisitioned it for your own use."

Oh. Right. "Can you make another one?"

"Of course."

"Can you show me how?"

He claps his hands in delight. "A capital suggestion, my boy. Let us begin at once."

He leads you outside to the whitewashed mausoleum. "To start with," he says, "we need earth taken from a graveyard. Fortunately, my predecessors at this villa thought their dust too refined to mix with the common clay." He points to a trench-like depression in the ground and the wheelbarrow that stands beside it. Then he hands you a shovel. "When you've filled the barrow to the rim on all sides, come find me. I'll be in the house, watching cartoons." You glare at his retreating back.

* * * * *

The week that follows is hellish. You take Justin up on his offer, with the result that you get caught and sentenced to detention for skipping classes, and your dad gives you holy hell. Then someone trashes your truck in the school parking lot; it has to be towed off for repair, and that puts you at the mercy of the jeering crowds on the school bus in order to get to and from school. You are only able to get to and from Blackwell's because Justin, who despite (or maybe because of) his stony reticence has become a rock of support, gives you rides when you summon him. The third trip out you catch him casting an amused glance at Blackwell's villa. "So what's it like working for Dr. Frankenstein?"

"What makes you say that?"

"This place is creepy as hell."

"You should see it on the inside," you joke. He takes it as an invitation and hops out. With a shrug, you lead him up the stairs and inside.

Blackwell, clearly, isn't happy that you've brought a visitor, especially when Justin finds the library. Which he doesn't enter, only stands on the lip staring into it. "You get used to it," you mutter.

"If you say so." Justin laughs quietly to himself. "Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger."

"Ah, Nietzsche," says Blackwell, who is looming behind you. "What does a ragamuffin like yourself know of the great philosophers?"

Justin's eyes flicker. "I read stuff."

"Lots of things," you add, coming stoutly to your friend's defense. "Justin's flunking all his classes, but he's the smartest guy I know."

"Ah." Blackwell gets a hungry look. "An autodidact who studies for pleasure and self-improvement. A rarity these days. Care to spend the afternoon with us?"

Justin demurs. "I got beers to drink." He claps you on the arm. "Pick you up at six?" You nod. He smiles back, and after briefly casting a satirical eye up at Blackwell, trudges to the front door.

"Sorry," you tell Blackwell. "I probably shouldn't have brought him in."

"It's alright," Blackwell says. He is looking thoughtfully at the front door. "You've found a friend, and he seems like a good sort. It pleases me." He shakes himself, and then ushers you into the library.

* * * * *

"Would you trade your life for someone else's?" you ask Justin that evening. Instead of going home, you'd asked him to hang out, and you're down by the river with beers.

His glance brushes over your face, showing a mix of hooded curiosity and disinterest. "A life isn't something you can trade," he points out. "It's not like a car."

"But if you could."

"It still wouldn't be the same. It'd be like trading your footprints for someone else's. It's not yours if you don't make it yourself."

"So you step into someone else's footprints. Walk where they were walking," you insist. "Like, they're standing in a different place. A better place."

He takes a drag on his cigarette. "Everyone is fucked up somehow."

"But some are fucked up worse than others."

"Look, man, you don't like what's going on at school? I don't blame you. But fuck 'em. You think in five years it'll matter? Five years? Wait five months. Wait till you graduate. It'll all change."

It sounds like wisdom, and you are only milliseconds from being convinced, when he ruins his own point by adding a thought: "It'll change, if you let yourself change."

If you let yourself change. Yes, change is good. Change is life. Especially when it is the change into someone else's life. For just that afternoon, Blackwell had made the suggestion:

"Why don't you take over the life of that young man who drove you out here? That would solve your bullying problems. Or perhaps we could put you into someone at the other high school."

Yes, change is what you want. You will change into ...