The Book of Masks (Vol. 1)

A Yumi Life

Previously: "A Yumi Choice" 

Well, there will be plenty of time tomorrow for your new friends. Besides, you were never the type to break your new toys after only a day by playing with them too hard.

"You like?" you exclaim as you bounce into Blackwell's library. You do a handstand on the table he is sitting at, walk on your hands, then do some slow forward somersaults. You end by doing the splits across the gap between two desks, and grin back mischievously at him.

He claps with delight. "Talented and beautiful. I highly approve. So you decided to go for a queen bee than one of the athletes."

"No, Yumi is just a stepping stone. It's the only way to get close to one of the guys I'm really targeting. I need to make one more mask, for him, and probably a second in case I need two stepping stones." Possibly you'll have to switch with Chelsea in order to get to Gordon Black, captain of the basketball team, who is your first choice.

His face slackens a little. "That will take at least a week. She will miss that week when you release her from the golem-mask you made."

"I know." You shrug. "But what can she say or do?"

"Perhaps you're right. You'd better change now, though."

You skip upstairs—an easy run—and pull off your clothes while admiring yourself in your bedroom mirror. With a sigh you pull the mask from your face and when you wake again you slap it against the golem in the corner. It swims and reappears as a naked Yumi. She recoils at the sight of you.

"Oh, give it up," you say. "You know where you are and what you are." You hurl her clothes at the thing. "Get dressed and go talk to Blackwell so he can give you orders." She pulls them on in a hurry and runs from the room as though being chased.

You yourself slap on the Jared mask and don the clothes Lucy Vredenburg had bought: jeans and a polo shirt. She even bought a Keyserling ball cap, which you pull down low over your brow as you saunter downstairs. Yumi gives you a look of loathing as you enter.

You ignore her, though. "Why don't we get her a job working here," you suggest to Blackwell. "We can set it up through my duplicate. He can quit his job here, recommend it to Yumi. She can come to work here, say, two hours a day."

"Eager to stay in her skin, are we?" Blackwell asks with a light leer.

"No, I'd dress out like this." You pick up discarded books, glancing at their titles and returning them to their places on the shelves. "But we could use extra hands to polish masks."

"An interesting suggestion," he concedes, "but two hours work a day isn't going to hurry things along appreciably."

"Over time they would." You make a mental note to check out the book you're holding—it's about curses—when Blackwell isn't around. "Anyway, why don't you make up a full-time golem to do chore work around here? It would free us both up for more research."

He dismisses Yumi, who exits with a scowl in your direction. "Two reasons. First, the chore work is part of your training. You may not have noticed, but you are picking up knowledge subliminally by working in here. It's one reason why magic books are kept locked away. They can leak."

You slide a book onto a shelf using only the very tip of your finger.

"Secondly ... Well, let's make that today's lesson. Let us examine the golem sigil."

* * * * *

You grimace over the results, but you've triple and quadruple checked them, and the proofs are quite clear. A golem obeys its master because it contains a little bit of its master; and if the master makes too many golems and spreads himself too thin ... It doesn't matter if it is a large golem like the one inside the fake Yumi, or a mask-golem like the one that now encloses the real Yumi and pretends to be you. The results are nonlinear and unpredictable, and the consequences obscure, but if the golem-making goes to far it will result in a catastrophic collapse.

No wonder no magician has ever used golems to take over the world. Unless he is very good, a magician probably couldn't take over a city council.

You sigh and consign your proof to the flame bowl. The latter is a small thing of your own design and making—a toy, really, for turning paper into air—but it had impressed Blackwell, and he praised your perception in seeing that magical proofs, scratch work, and exercises had to be disposed of with the utmost care.

Whatever your plans, you should limit yourself to no more than three golems; one of which you have already made.

* * * * *

"Well, look who graces us with her presence for lunch." You look up as Carson Ioeger settles down onto the grass next to you. "Getting tired of your snooty friends finally?"

You suck the yogurt off your spoon and scrunch your face at him in the way that James tells you drives Carson wild. "Chelsea was asking about you, Carson," you say, and his eyebrows rise. "She was wondering if you ever wash that bandanna."

He glowers and resettles the rag that covers his scalp. It is filthy. "I think he gets them pre-dirtied," Jenny jokes. You cross your legs beneath you—and catch Carson scoping out your thigh—and turn back to the homework you're doing with Jenny.

Jenny Ashton, Carson Ioeger, James Lamont, Paul Davis—sigh; yeah, that Paul Davis—are the guys you would rather hang out with than the head table crowd. Outside Yumi you know them only a little, but Yumi has been good friends with Jenny since grade school, and through them she has grown to know and appreciate the others as a crew of smart, clever, and mischief-loving kids: not wild, exactly, but not "good" either; sarcastic, suspicious of authority, mocking toward the upper crew. It has gotten them into trouble with Lynch and Black in the past, and Yumi has to carefully navigate the tension between the group she would like to hang out with and the crowd she is too terrified to drop. With Jenny and her friends she pretends to be a double-agent spying on the top kids and passes along tittle and tattle. With Chelsea and Maria she mercilessly mocks the kids that she secretly likes. And to make sure no one learns her double game she tells each group that the other is wildly jealous of them and likes to spread malicious gossip to turn them against her.

"So what's the latest from Olympus?" Carson asks. "Anyone had an abortion recently?"

"Kendra had a scare." Safe enough to use, Yumi's mind tells you; Kendra is always having scares.

"You find out any more about what's going on with Black and them?" Jenny leans in eagerly. "You were talking to Will yesterday after school."

"I gave him a ride home, that's all."

"Who'd you give a ride to?" James Lamont plops down next to you.

"Will Prescott."

James shudders. "Why? That guy gives me the creeps."

"Why is everyone suddenly coming down so hard on his ass?" Carson asks. "I don't see it."

"He's got, like, Columbine written all over him," James says. "He's a goatfucker. I bet he's pushing drugs down at the grade school."

Carson throws up his hands. "On the basis of what do you say this?"

"It reeks off him. Can't you sense it?"

"No. He's moody and he looks like he's got a special secret, but I've seen you looking the same way, dick. Remember that clothes fetish you had last year?"

"Clothes fetish?" You turn to James in surprise. He reddens and gives Carson the finger, but it doesn't stop his friend.

"You didn't know about that?" Carson hoots. "We caught him stealing clothes out of the gym locker, trying them on. Then Paul and me noticed some of our t-shirts were gone from our closets. We found them in his bedroom. In his bathroom!"

"Is that why I don't remember leaving my leather jacket at your place?" Jenny asks him narrowly.

"I'm going to fuck you up so bad, Ioeger," James says.

"My point is that whatever is wrong with Prescott, it's gotta be nothing worse than a kinky sex thing he's working through. He's clearly not getting any."

"Are you getting any, Carson?" you dimple at him.

He swigs from his soda. "No. That's how come I know what I'm talking about."

* * * * *

So James has also been afflicted by the curse that Blackwell attached to you. That's too bad. You like James.

Luckily, that curse attaches to the image of Will Prescott, not to you, so your golem is the one that draws the odium. But since Yumi, like James, is also under its influence, you get a sense of its effects as well. The difference is that you are immune to its effects. So you remember how his presence affects her, but you don't feel it when you are actually around the fake Will Prescott.

It takes the form of an ineffable aura that surrounds the person so that they come to seem loathsome. Your nerves shout that there is something wrong with them; you find yourself feeling impatient and irritable in their presence; you feel relief when they leave. And yet you cannot put your finger on what is wrong with them.

It must be a residual side effect of those bills you gave the bullies: the bills effect them much more strongly, but others who touch them pick up a kind of second-hand poison.

To study up on the curse: "Of Curses and Even Worse Things" 
Continue with your plans: "The Defenestration of Cindy Vredenburg" 

*
"Table of Contents (Vol. 1)" 
"The Book of Masks (Vol. 1)"