The Book of Masks (Vol. 3)

Is You Is or Is You Ain't My BF?

Previously: "Who One Is and Who One Might Be" 

Fresh and early the next morning—a Saturday, so "fresh and early" means "around 11:15"—you meet Sydney at the elementary school. You had offered to drive over to pick her up, but she told you not to be silly.

You're meeting at the school both because it's the center of your own occult studies, and also so that you can check up on the fire. To your delight, you see that it has gone out. But the flames spark to life again when you put a lighter to it.

"So, I wore by biggest, floppiest track suit," Sydney brightly announces when she arrives ten minutes later. The gray-and-white suit does hang very loose on her, like footie pajamas for a little kid. "I figured I should wear something extra-large if I'm gonna balloon up." She squints up into your face. "You're about Caleb's height, right? I hope they're big enough."

"Well, I brought some of his things anyway." You gesture at the grocery bag with the last batch of clothes you stole from him. "You can put them on if the track suit still doesn't fit."

"Mm," she says, and her dimples pop out. "I think I'll try it with the track suit on. Change clothes after, if I have to. Anything I need to know before we start?" She hops onto a table.

You describe the process—what little of it there is—to her: That the mask will knock her out and that she'll wake up looking like Caleb Johansson. "The memories and stuff come crowding in pretty quick," you tell her. I was actually kind of confused at first about who I really was. It was like when you're waking up from a deep sleep," you hastily add as alarm shows in her eyes. "You know how you can be kind of groggy and confused, but then after you're awake everything's clear? It was like that."

She accepts that with a nod, and at your direction lays back on the table and takes the mask from you. (And just in time you remember to tell her to kick her shoes off.) She holds the mask over her face, studies its inner surface, then after shooting you a quizzical look she lowers it onto her face.

You stare at her hard, curious to see what the transformation looks like.

It's over before you can even brace yourself. One moment, it's Sydney McGlynn lying on the dusty old conference table. Then it's Caleb Johansson. He is so solid and natural looking—no glow, no sparkles, no shifting or morphing of flesh—that it's like it always was him laying on the table.

His expression is slack and peaceful. You bend over him, twisting yourself around to look straight down into his face. Big nose, liverish lips, tightly curled hair, a little acne next to one ear and some downy fuzz on his cheeks and upper lip.

Wow, it is totally Caleb.

Which is why it's really creepy to feel your cock engorging as you study his face. You back away.

Okay, you tell yourself, it's because you know it's really Sydney under that face, right? Getting turned on by your best friend would be super-weird. Getting turned on by Sydney is totally natural.

So getting turned on by Sydney while she just happens to look like Caleb? More weird than normal, but not as weird as if it was Caleb.

Still, when you have the sudden, vivid image of Caleb smiling at you, and flirting with you, and putting his arms around you and slipping inquiring lips up to yours—

Okay, no that would be too much!

But sitting up close to him? Putting your arms in his? Talking quietly and laughing at private jokes? Being cozy and conversationally intimate? (Conversationally intimate! Conversationally! you emphasize to yourself.) Well, that would be ... interesting. In a good sort of way. Sort of. Maybe?

Suddenly it's all too much to take in. You scramble from the basement and take a long, hard jog around the perimeter of the school grounds to burn off the nervous energy—and confusion!—that's now fizzing and popping inside you.

* * * * *

There's noises coming from inside the basement when you get back, panting and blown, from your run, and when you go inside you see a figure twisting around in the darkness. It turns as you tramp down the stairs.

It's Caleb. He's got his shirt off. "Oh, hey," he says in that honking voice. "I was wondering where you went. You get tired of waiting for me?" A mischievous smile—a disgusting, flirty thing—twists onto his lips. "I was gonna change while you were gone."

"Yeah, man, you do that, I'll give you some privacy," you gulp.

"Will!" he shouts as you turn away. "You don't have to go." You glance back, just in time to see him shove the sweat pants down to ankles. Oh God, Sydney came to this meeting commando! You quickly avert your eyes. "Guys take their clothes off in front of each other, don't they?" he says as his dick flaps openly in the breeze.

"Uh, yeah, that's what the jocks do," you say. "But guys like me and Caleb, we keep our clothes on around each other."

"I see. Something to know," he says. "There's a lot I need to find out. Those memories you were talking about are having a hard time coming."

"Really?" You study a crack in the wall as, out of the corner of your eye, you watch Caleb pulling on some underwear. "Where does Caleb live?"

"I don't know. Not a clue. I wasn't at all confused when I woke up, by the way. I had to— Well, I had to touch myself in a couple of places to make sure I was actually changed. Checked myself out on my phone."

"Huh," you say. "Maybe it was quicker for me 'cos I know Caleb, know a lot about him already."

"Yes, I'm not panicking," your friend's doppelganger says. "We can wait until I get them before we go out."

"Go out?" You jump half an inch into the air. "Go out where?"

"Anywhere." He falls back onto the table and pulls on his shoes. He is still shirtless. "Hang out where you'd hang out, pretending like we're you and him."

"What if we run into him? Get caught?"

"That'd be fun, wouldn't it?" He stands and picks up his shirt. That creepy smile is back on his face. It's a shock to realize that it's a smile like you've seen on Sydney's face: coy and a little secretive. It looks awesome on her. On Caleb—

Well, not to put too fine a point on it, but on Caleb ... And with the dainty way that he moves as he puts on the shirt ...

Oh, Jesus. He's mincing around like the biggest flaming queen in the universe.

He's still talking as you boggle at him. "But we can go someplace we wouldn't run into him. Call him, find out what he's doing, then we go someplace else. Anyway, if we get caught or get in trouble, you can just pretend like you thought I was the real Caleb. Like there's a real shapeshifter on the loose. You play innocent, and I play the monster. Rar!"

He rakes the air with a clawed hand, which is all that it takes to cement the picture of this person as Caleb Johansson's Ultra-Swishy Mirror Universe Twin.

"No, let's stay down here," you argue. "I mean—!" you gasp as a picture of the two of you here, alone, in the dark, being flirty, flashes across your inner movie screen like a porno-horror picture. "We really should keep out of sight! We don't want to, uh, spread any more rumors about weird, magical stuff going on than we can. Right?"

He shrugs. "If you say so. You can tell me about you and Caleb. Maybe it'll start jogging the memories."

He jumps onto a table and clasps his hands over his crossed legs.

* * * * *

So that's what you do. You sit in the basement—though it is dark and dusty and chilly—and tell her about your cramped and boring life. How your two best friends are total dorks like you are, and how you spend most of your time at school going to classes and dodging bullies. How you don't go to parties much or do much of anything outside school except hang out with Caleb and Keith while playing video games or going to movies or comic book stores or fast food restaurants where you tease and jeer at each other. "And I haven't even really been doing a lot of that," you concede, "since finding that book."

God help you, you even tell her about you and Lisa. She's sympathetic but she hasn't got a lot to say except, "It sounds like you really weren't that compatible."

Are you and me compatible? you want to ask, but you don't.

After taking a break to pick up some burgers at a drive-through, you return to the school where she tells you some things about herself. She's from Kansas City originally, and yes she was a cheerleader at the high school there. She loves track and gymnastics and tennis, but she isn't doing any of them (except for a P.E. class and after-school gymnastics practice) while she concentrates on her school work. She's made a lot of friends, but she's steered clear of the cheerleaders and most of the sports teams because "they don't seem very nice."

As for her own past experience with the occult, she still very reticent and only fills in little dabs of detail to what she's already told you. The most salient is that the car wreck that killed her father was arranged by magical means. "I found out how to do it in his notebooks," she tells you. "Someone did it to him. He wanted the stuff my dad had. The position, the knowledge, the prestige."

"And it doesn't seem creepy to you?" you ask her. "That your dad was into this stuff?"

She returns you a very even look. "I don't care," she says. "I'd make a deal with the devil to get back at the guy who killed him."

Next: "A Movie Steps Off the Screen" 

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