The Book of Masks (Vol. 3)

The Crisis in Chelsea's Trousers

Previously: "When Cheerleaders Try Calculus" 

"Oh God, what's happening?" Philip Fairfax's soft baritone rises to a shrieking soprano. He stumbles back against your bedroom door and raises his hands over his head, as though surrendering to a mugger.

In a sense, he is. Chelsea Cooper—who is inhabiting Philip's body—is being mugged by a very male erection.

At least you have to assume that's what's going on. The bulge in the front of Philip's tan-brown khakis swells even as you gaze on it with a kind of horrified glee. Now it's a mound; now it's a tent; now it's a pyramid. If the fabric continues to give, it might turn into an obelisk. "Don't laugh!" Chelsea yells.

"I can't help it!" you titter from behind your hand. "Don't you know what that is?"

"I know exactly what it is! WHY IS IT HAPPENING?"

That you can't answer. Chelsea Cooper is getting a boner is a sentence that doesn't make sense in any language.

"Look, just try to relax," you tell her. "Get on the bed."

"What?" Chelsea's eyes bulge behind Philip's glasses.

"Okay, then sit on the floor. You're gonna have to, um, splay your legs out."

Chelsea slides down the door, hitting the floor with a groan. She hisses and twists in place, clenching her fists high over her sweating brow.

You have to wipe some sweat off your own brow. Of course as a teenage boy you are deeply—not to say throbbingly—familiar with the kind of trouble she's having, and you know what you'd likely do if it was you and you were back in your own bedroom. But that seems like a nonstarter here and now. Never mind talking Chelsea into unzipping her trousers and letting the snake romp free. You're not sure that you could even voice the suggestion.

Chelsea is whimpering now, and she gasps as you drop next to her and take her hand. "It'll be alright, Chelsea," you tell her. "You're not going through anything that any other— I mean, that any guy hasn't gone through."

"Take the mask off," she moans. "Get it off me. I don't want—!"

"Sh! Shhhhh! Now let me think about this." Some kind of idea is struggling to express itself through the tangled confusion of synapses that is presently passing for your brain. "You said you were getting some of Philip's memories earlier? Like dreams?"

"Ye-es," she says through clenched teeth.

You stroke her hand. "And now you're—"

She wrenches her hand from yours. "That's not helping, Will! It's like Gordon used to—! And that scent in your—! Oh, God!"

She thrashes, kicking at the air and bashing the door with her bobbing skull. You grip her and pull her close, to stop her from hurting herself. Now you're terrified that this isn't a mere "penis panic," as Keith Tilley used to call them back in middle school. What if Philip has epilepsy, or something like that? You've heard that epileptics hiss and thrash uncontrollably, which is what Chelsea is doing now.

So you grab at her forehead, to pull the mask off.

But before you can get a good grip, she stops and sags with a groan. "Oh God. What—? Oh God it's—!" She swallows: a very sticky sound. "It's like it was doing acrobatics down there. And—" She sucks on her bottom lip. "It's still alive. I can— I can feel it. But it's— I think it's better."

Now it's your turn to mutter a silent Oh God. "I think you need to go into the bathroom," you gently inform her. "Kick off your shoes, go in the bathroom, and take off your pants and underwear. Carefully. Um, if your underthings are, uh, wet, put them in the sink to soak. You're going to have to wipe yourself down—" Chelsea bolts upright to stare at you. "You'll probably have to go commando when you're done."

"Go commando?" she echoes. "You don't mean pants without underwear, do you?" You nod, bracing yourself for the storm. But she just blinks and says, "Okay."

You help her up and send her—tottering, bowlegged, on the tips of her toes, like she doesn't want anything below her waist to touch anything else below her waist—into the hall bathroom. Back in the bedroom, you sit on the edge of the bed and try to fit the pieces together.

* * * * *

Chelsea is pale—pale even for Philip Fairfax—when she returns ten minutes later. "So," she says. "I creamed my jeans."

"You know the expression?"

"I have a boyfriend," she retorts, "and he's got the usual disgusting friends, so yeah, I know the expression. I just never—" She bites her lip. "I wish I knew what set it off!"

"You don't have any idea?" You cross your legs Indian style, and put your breasts out. "You sure it wasn't me?"

Her jaw drops. "I'm not attracted to you! To Danielle, I mean." But though there mouth says No, her troubled brow says Am I?

"It's either you or Philip," you tell her. "Either you got excited and his body reacted, or he's in there with you, somewhere inside—" You point at her forehead. "And he got excited."

Chelsea's jaw slackens. "You mean you think he is inside me?"

"He's in the mask. We know that. Because the mask, when you put it on him, it had his memories and stuff so it could act like him. So he's got to be in there. And you said you thought you were getting some of his memories. So I think the mask is working. It's just— It's like it's taking time to get going."

Chelsea frowns, and she pushes up Philip's glasses to rub at her eyes. "Well, so how come it's hard for me to get the memories, but you got Danielle's right away? Maybe," she continues before you can answer, "we should switch masks to see what happens?"

"No, not yet. If it takes time to get the memories, then if you take the mask off you might have to start all over again. Let's leave things like this, see what happens."

"But I can't go home! Not back to, uh, Philip's house, not if I can't, you know, act like him!"

"Sure you can," you tell Chelsea with more confidence than you feel. "Just stay in your room and tell his parents you have homework. Anytime I see Philip he's got his nose stuck in a book anyway, so I bet he's that way at home too. Oh, but wait." You snap your fingers. "There's supposed to be some kind of meeting at Carlos's place tonight, to plan out the videos."

"Yes, I already told them I'm not going."

You shrug. "So stay in. Tomorrow morning—" You cock your head. "Maybe a good night's sleep will get rid of whatever block you've got. Maybe you just need to relax more. You've, er, got a pretty strong personality, if you don't mind me saying so, Chelsea." She just stares mulishly at you. "Maybe you need to, sort of, get out of the way before Philip can move into your head."

"He already moved into my panties," she mutters as she turns away. "If he gets in any deeper ... "

But she yields to your suggestion, and tells you that she'll see you tomorrow at school if you don't hear from her before then.

Only after she's gone do you find the set of tidy whities she left soaking in the bathroom sink. With a grimace you lift them out with your finger and thumb, wring them dry with a hand towel, then bury them in the garbage.

* * * * *

The "production meeting"—which is what Carlos calls it in his text to you—is held at a Starbucks. It runs for a little over an hour, and it gives you a bad feeling. Not for what the guys want to do, but for what it portends for Chelsea's schemes.

"It's gonna need a story," Mike Hollister says. He's an excitable kid with wide-set eyes, a gaping grin, and a complexion like tomato soup. "It can't just feature cheerleader routines," he says.

"Why not?" Carlos demands with a grin. His fauxhawk bristles, like the coxcomb of a rooster on its way to an assignation.

Mike blinks—

And it's a funny thing about his blinks, that they're more like full-body spasms. He twitches all over, and it's like his whole face and not his eyelids is trying to snap shut. "Well, we want lots of those too," he says. He blinks again, almost knocking over his coffee. "But there has to be a point to them. There has to be, you know, suspense—"

"No, I get what you're saying," Carlos says. "Totally, and I'm totally with you." He leans forward, as though sharing a conspiratorial thought. "It needs a heroine. Someone we can root for."

"It's not a competition," you cautiously point out.

"It could be," Mike says after a moment's thoughtful silence. "There could be a contest for ... Well, something."

"You're friends with Eva and Jessica Garner, right?" Carlos asks you. "Could you talk to them about what kind of competition they could be in?"

Actually, you could give them an answer now: a competition to unseat Chelsea as captain of the squad. But that wouldn't be good for Chelsea, and it wouldn't be a good advertisement for the squad itself.

More ideas get kicked around. A competition for a small scholarship. A contest to join an elite sub-squad that would then stage a contest against the Eastman High cheerleaders. A Bachelor-style fight to date some eligible guy. But they all come back around to the same idea: It has to be a story about some girls struggling to overcome some obstacles in order to achieve some goal. Nothing gets decided, though that doesn't relieve the sense of dread that has settled over you.

That's bad enough. But at the end Carlos drops big news.

"So it's too bad Philip wasn't here," he tells you in the parking lot as you're leaving. "Or maybe it's lucky he wasn't."

"Why's that?" you ask.

He gives you a sidelong grin. "Maybe I shouldn't say anything," he says, "or maybe you need a little warning. But he's got a giant crush on you."

* To continue: "A Science Nerd Reports" 

*
"Table of Contents (Vol. 3)" 
"The Book of Masks (Vol. 3)"