The Book of Masks (Vol. 4)

A Date with Joey

Previously: "Paranormality and Paramedics" 

"Yeah, sure," you tell Joey. "I mean, I got homework to do, but I can hang out."

She gasps. "Oh crap. You've got homework!"

"Yeah, but that's—"

"Maybe we could do it together?" She darts quick looks between you and the road ahead, in a way that leaves you wanting to grab the wheel and slam on the brake.

"That would be awesome," you stammer as you brace yourself for a collision with the car ahead. Joey sees it in time, and lurches to a stop. "Um," you continue, "since I'm okay now, maybe I could drive?"

"But I'm already driving," she protests. "Just tell me where to go. We'll go pick up your books and—" She sucks in a quick breath. "Go to the library?"

You make a face. The library is for serious studying, and after this afternoon you don't think you could concentrate. "How about a coffee shop?" you counter-propose.

Her ass leaves the truck bench. "Okay!" she exclaims.

Too late, it occurs to you that she think you've just asked her out on a date.

* * * * *

Joey waits for you outside as you dash into your house to get your books. Supper is almost ready, and it kills you to have to skip it, especially as you're down to your last few bucks and will probably have just enough to get a coffee and maybe a muffin at whatever place you land at. Your mom gives you a tired look when you tell her that you're going off to study with friends. But when you get back downstairs with your book bag, she stops you at the door.

"Is that the friend you're going to study with?" she asks, and jerks her head at the kitchen window, which looks out onto the driveway.

"Y-yes."

"Anyone else?"

You feel the blood drain from your face. "Probably not?"

Her expression remains very steady. "Where are you going to go?" she asks. "To study?"

"Um, a coffee shop? Probably?"

She gives you the kind of long, hard look that she used to give you when you were little. Then, with her mouth squeezed primly shut, she opens the kitchen utility drawer and extracts the emergency twenty that she keeps there.

"To go with whatever you're already carrying," she says as she holds it out to you. "So go someplace nicer than you were going to go anyway."

"Whoa, thanks," you gasp as you take the bill. "It's not a date," you protest as you back up toward the door.

"Sure it is isn't," she says, and turns back to the stove.

* * * * *

So you and Joey wind up at The Flying Saucer, which is one of the better of the coffee shops, inasmuch as it sells sandwiches too. The dining room is round, like the building, so there's no "corner" to huddle in, but you take a table as far as you can from the bearded weirdos crowded up near the front, and where the music maybe isn't quite so loud.

Your homework, as usual, is Calculus, though you've got some reading in English that you're overdue on. Joey picks up the battered paperback of the Aenid that the school supplied you with, and flips through it. "I know this translation," she says.

"You've read that?"

"Two years ago, when I was starting on Latin."

So, naturally, that comment develops into a topic: "So Latin is one of the subjects you're studying at, uh, home?"

"Mm-hmm." She drops the book and looks around, like a squirrel on the lookout for dogs, as she talks. "My parents wanted me to learn a language, and there was just something, I dunno, about Latin that made me want to study it. We're all learning it together, my parents and me." Her mouth curls up into a pert little smile, and her eyes shine.

And— Holy fuck, it occurs to you, she actually is kind of cute. "So why do your parents homeschool you?" you ask.

"They didn't like the public schools." She shrugs. "I've never really asked them. I guess they figured they could do a better job." She pauses. "I guess that makes them sound kind of conceited?" she asks in a worried tone.

Considering some of the idiot classes you've suffered through, you're pretty sure anyone could do a better job of teaching, and you tell her so.

She grins. "That's what Jenny says too. At least a couple of time a year, she asks me what my mom would charge to teach her if her parents took her out of your school."

"It's your mom who teaches you?"

"Weekdays. My dad handles weekends."

"Oh, God, you have school on weekends too?"

"I have Sundays off," she protests. "And Saturday is mostly a review day, mostly short. Except for the science stuff. That's what my dad teaches me."

You ask her about her "classes," and learn that it's a fairly standard set of topics: math (she's learning Calculus too), science (physics and chemistry now, after studying some of the easier things like astronomy and geology in earlier years), history, social sciences, Latin, and English. She also practices the piano.

English is her favorite, because except for some assigned authors that she has to read, like Shakespeare and Milton and Dante and Dickens, she gets to read whatever she wants. She mostly likes science-fiction, she eagerly confesses, but she'll read almost anything that dad puts in front of her.

It all makes you want to crawl under the table, especially when she asks you about your classes, and you have to confess to taking a "Career Planning" class; and when you tell her about your "Film as Literature" class, her jaw drops in bemused horror. "That sounds like the kind of class that'd set my dad off ranting about the educational system!" she exclaims.

Talk from there shifts and expands to take in related topics. You ask her about the friends she's got, and then it's her turn to wince. "I don't hang out a lot with people, I guess, not outside of church," she admits. "And they all go to regular schools and are busy with their school friends doing school projects. But I've got my books," she says. "I like to read." She takes a deep drink from her coffee cup and avoids looking at you.

You should start hanging out with me and my friends.

But you don't say it, though it seems like the sort of thing you should say, and maybe she's expecting you to, because she falls silent. But in the first place you're worried about leading her on, and in the second you don't have a lot of really close friends either. Caleb and Keith are about it, with Jenny and Carson Ioeger and James Lamont and Paul Davis as people you sometimes hang around with. Moreover, Caleb and Keith you can't see being really patient with her; besides which, they sometimes get gross in a way that might scar her for life.

So instead you say, "Well, if we've got this project we're working on, you and me'll be seeing more of each other." Too late you realize what it sounds like, and your legs jerk in horror.

"Project?" she says while staring brightly at something over and behind your shoulder. She sounds breathless.

"Well, the mask thing. There's a whole book of, I guess, spells to get through. And you're the one who knows Latin."

"Mm-hmm," she says, still gazing past your ear. Then: "I'll be right back." She leaps like a startled fawn and runs up to the front. The clerk—another bearded weirdo in a Rastafarian cap and a forked beard that dribbles from his chin to his bellybutton—points, and she scampers out of sight into an annex.

You put your head in your hands and try not to think about things.

And yet it's hard not to, in a dim and distracted kind of way.

It's quite a change in Joey's attitude, in just twenty-four hours. Even less. She was still kind of pissy and impatient with you when you got together at Jenny's this afternoon. But now? She's acting like she wants to be your best friend.

Well, Jenny did say she had that talk with her. Maybe she told Joey to stop fighting you, to stop being so bossy? (Which would be an odd thing for Jenny to advise, considering that Jenny Ashton is one of the most bossy girls you know. (At least she's mostly pleasant about it, unlike some of the other girls you know—the girls with a princess complex who are just nasty or vicious.))

Still, you can't shake the impression that her attitude has slid waaaaaaayyy over in the other direction. She's acting like she has a crush on you.

Or are you just imagining it? Maybe it's just her weird mannerisms coming out in another weird way?

But at the same time, you feel your own attitude toward her being wrenched off its axis. She's very weird, and you're not sure you want to hang out with—let alone "like"—a girl who's weird like she is.

And yet—

You lurch forward, hunching with your hands under the table, as your dick wakes up. There's no stiffening, no rigidity, none of the springing to attention that, even after four years of puberty, still hits you in the middle of class, the middle of dinner, or the middle of the night. But like a dozing dog that's heard a noise, just the thought, "Joey is kind of cute" has caused it to raise is head and cock its ears (so to speak).

"So, I guess we should do some studying now," Joey blurts out as she hops back into her seat. "Or you should. Oh, jeez." She grimaces. "I've been totally distracting you."

"No, it's okay. I should probably go home, if I want to study."

"I'll let you," she says. "This has been—" She catches herself. "Fun."

"We don't have to break things up now," you point out.

"Maybe we should," she says. "Jenny texted me, she's going to bring your stuff over to my place. Oh, she, uh, found that mask. The one you tried on. If we go now, maybe you can collect it at my place?" She swallows a deep breath. "And you could come over to my place tomorrow to work on it? Jenny says she doesn't want anymore to do with it. Too much drama this afternoon."

Next: "Joey and You and You" 

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"Table of Contents (Vol. 4)" 
"The Book of Masks (Vol. 4)"