The Book of Masks (Vol. 3)

Surprises for Kristy Suffolk

Previously: "A Meeting with the Mitchells" 

The weather continues cold and rainy, so that you're standing under an umbrella Thursday morning when Cam and Kerri pick you up. Kerri waits until you're settled in the back seat before turning around to drop a conversational bomb. "Cam hasn't talked to Scott yet," she says.

Cam says nothing, but the tendons in the back of his neck tense.

"It's okay," you tell her. "I talked to Scott last night." Kerri stares at you with a faint, mirthless smile frozen onto her lips. "I told him all about how there was this other guy I'm starting to date. He was very sweet about it."

For a long moment there's no sound but the scrape of the windshield wipers, and the hiss and splash of water under the wheels. Then Cam says, "Toldja." Kerri gives him a dirty look.

"That's great," she says as she settles back in her seat. "But what happens when Scott doesn't see you going around with anyone?"

"There is someone," you tell her. "I'm pretty sure he's about to ask me out, and I'm pretty sure I'm going to say yes."

Kerri whirls about. "Really? No! Who?"

"Will Prescott?" Your heart thumps in your chest. What is Kerri going to say to that?

She doesn't say anything, but frowns thoughtfully. "You'll have to help me," she murmurs.

"He was trending on x2z last weekend? He made kind of a splash at the Warehouse? Kind of a rakish kid," you continue as Kerri just blinks and frowns. "Was wearing this leather hat like Indiana Jones wears?"

"Oh! Him? Really?"

Fuck you. "What's wrong with him?"

"Nothing. I dunno! I don't know him. I guess it's just not—"

"Not what?"

She shrugs. "Not the look of the kind of guy I picture you with. But I'm gonna have to check him out now!" She turns back around.

You can't help scratching at the sore. "So what kind of guy did you picture me with?"

"Nothing! No kind! Could be anyone!"

"Luke," Cam says.

Silence falls, like an anvil crashing through the roof of the car.

"Luke?" you echo.

"Yeah, that's who Kerri—"

"Shut up!" Kerri yelps. She whirls toward you. "Forget him, he doesn't know what he's talking about!"

Luke would be Luke Richardson, who is on the school baseball team with Cam. He's a good-looking redhead—better looking than Fairfax—with a tangle of sloppy locks and an easy grin. Kerri must have fantasies of you and Luke and her and Cam going on double dates.

You lean forward. "You were thinking me and Luke—?"

"I wasn't thinking anything! And Cam doesn't know what he's talking about! He's totally garbaging up something I said once upon a time!"

You just shrug. "Well, anyway, I think Will's going to ask me out, and I think I'm going to give him a chance. He seems interesting."

At least, you hope he'll be interesting when it's Sean Mitchell playing your part.

* * * * *

That hope—that Sean could make you "interesting"—is the reason you took him up on the offer to play your boyfriend by switching into your part. He was right that it would be easier for you and him and Taylor (as the club newbies) to keep in touch if there was some kind of fake but public relationship between you, but you liked better an unmentioned dividend: That Sean (who is a football player and wrestler) probably knows better than you how to be popular. Or, at least, how not to freak out at having lots and lots of new people trying to crowd into his life, the way you felt freaked on Monday when you had to hang out with all those strange girls.

Of course, you explain none of this to Kerri, and she has to make do with scrolling across the internet to find out about Will. She asks you how you got to know him, and you explain that you share a class with him and that you heard through some mutual friends that he had kind of a crush on you. "We've run into each other a couple of times since. I think I was being set up. Oh hell, I know I was. But that was okay. It's all been really casual and no pressure." She gives you a look whose meaning is easy to read: Yeah, then, like I'm so sure something's going to develop between you.

At school you part with her and Cam and go looking in the gym for Stephanie in the P.E. classroom. You find her sitting on a desk just inside the classroom door, her head bent over her cell phone. You can tell she sees you out of the corner of her eye, but she ignores you.

* * * * *

At least you've learned one thing from your time impersonating Kristy Suffolk: Stephanie Wyatt didn't treat Will Prescott any different than she treats other people. If anything, she was maybe nicer to you than to most.

Kristy, for instance, hated Stephanie when they first met. Hated her. Hated her as an arrogant, sneering cunt. A bully, practically.

That was their freshman year, when they shared a P.E. class. Stephanie was bossy, pushy, and totally ignored Kristy when she wasn't yelling at her for messing up.

At least she didn't do things to Kristy, the way the Molester did to you and Javits did to Keith. But even that hurt Kristy. Stephanie's dripping contempt—You're not even worth bullying—made Kristy hate her all the more.

Because it wasn't like Stephanie didn't have friends. There were girls she'd happily pass the ball to, and grin and chatter at to while coldly ignoring Kristy. Girls she'd sit with while texting and chewing gum as they all waited for Coach Tesla to get her drunk ass onto the court for class. (It was Stephanie who told everyone—though how she knew it she didn't say—that Coach Tesla was usually drunk during class.) But with Kristy she was just elbows to the groin and nasty words to the face. Soon, in Kristy's mind, Stephanie took on the aspect of a mountain troll.

Then one day, in the class after P.E., Bonny Trask (who was something like Stephanie's best friend) came in and slumped in the next desk over. She was sniffling, and her eyes were puffy. All at once, she buried her face in her hands and started bawling. When Kristy asked what was wrong she ran from the room. Kristy followed her, and spent the period in the girls' bathroom with her.

It was on account of Stephanie, Bonny said. Stephanie could be such a bitch! So what that Bonny had missed a couple of shots in P.E. That wasn't any reason for Stephanie to just lay into her and ream her out, and to tell her how bad she was at basketball. God, sometimes she hated Stephanie! Hated her! She could be so mean!

Weirdly, instead of making Kristy hate Stephanie even more, it made her look at Stephanie in a new light. Because if Stephanie treated her own friends this way, then maybe ...

Well, maybe she didn't have a special problem with Kristy. Maybe it was just the way Stephanie was.

Maybe she couldn't help treating everyone like dirty gum stuck to the bottom of her sneakers.

Still, Kristy took a gloating pleasure in cornering Stephanie two periods later, and in telling that she'd really hurt Bonny's feelings. To Kristy's surprise, Stephanie didn't sneer back something about "minding her own business." Instead, her eyes popped, and she said Shit and ran off. Kristy stared off dumbly after her and wondered about the look on Stephanie's face. Was she hurt? Or (as it looked to Kristy) was Stephanie actually frightened?

The next day, before P.E., Stephanie called Kristy over with a jerk of her chin. She was very clipped as she thanked Kristy—"Hey, yeah, just wanted to say thanks for telling me about Bonny yesterday, we got things sorted out"—and she didn't seem any different in class.

But from that point on Kristy didn't hate Stephanie. She just watched her, and got used to her, and eventually decided that Stephanie wasn't a mountain troll. She was just a mountain—icy, stony, unyielding, but there wasn't anything personal about it. You just had to not mind being bruised or broken when she moved in your direction.

It took another year for her and Stephanie to become friends, and for Kristy to discover that under that diamond-like crust Stephanie has deep reserves of molten loyalty—that she could kill anyone who seriously crossed any of her friends—and that if she was never kind or thoughtful, exactly, she would at least pull down mountain ranges and grind opposition into gravel if she ever got it into her head to help someone.

* * * * *

You don't think she'd go that far to help Will Prescott, and she gives you a slit-eyed side glare when you sit down next to her and apologize for missing the study session last night. She is somewhat mollified—though still kind of pissy—when you tell her it was because had to straighten out a guy who was hassling you for a date. "Was Will disappointed?" you ask.

"I dunno. I think he was trying to flirt with me," she retorts.

"Ooh! So maybe you should go out with him." She gives you a dirty look. "I'll go talk to him today. Maybe I'll ask him out."

"No, let him do the asking. It'll be good for him."

"I'll still go talk to him. Encourage him."

* * * * *

"We'll have to make up a new mask," Eva says when you speak to her at lunch time about your plan with the Mitchells. "Sean won't be able to wear the one of you that's out there now. But it's doable. We'll get started this afternoon."

"Can I come out and help? Or watch?"

She shrugs. "It's not very interesting."

You pass the message on to Scott (that is, Sean). He grunts, and says that he and his brother will be going out to the hospital to have a look at Sawyer Harrison—their friend who fell into a coma at the end of summer when he tried putting on a mask.

* To continue: "Sleeper, Awake!" 

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