The Book of Masks (Vol. 4)

An Exercise in Substitution

Previously: "A New Kind of Carjacking" 

You feel like you’re going to faint—everything is going wrong at once.

“You have to get rid of everyone!” you squeal into the phone. “I need your help out here!” You cast a fearful glance at the unconscious Dana. “If I get caught out here, like this—!”

“Where are you?” Bridget snaps.

“Back seat of your car. And Charles is out here looking for Dana.”

The Warehouse door opens again, and Bridget steps out. You catch here eye and frantically point down into the seat beside you. “Dana’s in here with me!”

“Yeah, you told me. Chill. Lemme think.”

She steps back inside. You listen to the sound of your own breathing. Your heart goes sideways when you spot Charles trudging back toward you.

“Bridget?” you squeak into the phone. “Bridget?”

And now the line is dead.

But as you’re wiping the sweat off your palms and trying to figure out a new way of bamboozling Charles, the door opens again, and a crush of kid spills out. Charles, surprised, gets caught up in the mob until he is pulled aside by Bridget. You watch anxiously as the other kids wander off to other corners of the parking lot, but she and Charles remain behind, him frowning and her waving her arms and talking a mile a minute. The conversation ends with him rolling his eyes and going back inside. Bridget looks over at you, raises a single finger, then follows him in. A moment later your phone rings. “What’s going on?” you demand when you answer.

“We’re looking for the guy who’s parked behind me. I told everyone else to go on ahead. But now I need you to get onto Dana’s phone. Text Charles and tell him you—you text like you’re Dana—you’re in the bathroom and you’ll meet him outside when you’re done. That’s the best I can do.”

“Oh God thanks!” Faint with relief but still shaking with fear, you snatch up Dana’s phone. Almost every word you have to type three times because your thumbs are trembling so hard: Sorry in bathroom. Meet you outside in ten.

Will that be enough time? you wonder. What if they find the guy whose car is parked behind you before you can finish up with Dana?

And as if in answer to your unspoken prayers, the mask reappears on Dana’s face.

* * * * *

“Remember,” you hiss at Dana as Charles and Bridget step out of the Warehouse, “you were in the bathroom, and we have to drop you off at your house.”

“Psh!” The pedisequos rolls its eyes. “I don’t know why you’re telling me again. You’ve only told me half a dozen times.”

“Just do what I tell you. Also, I’m stopping off with you when we get to your house.”

The thing had been studying its face in Dana’s cell phone, but now it drops the phone and raises its head to stare straight ahead. You’d ask what the trouble is, but the others are drawing up to the car.

There’s a gangly, blonde-headed kid with Charles and Bridget; you can’t place his name, but you do recognize him from some of your classes. He squints at you, then gives Dana a slightly longer look-over, leaning over to keep her in view as he passes the window. Jerk, you think. Pervert. Charles and Bridget get in the front. Charles turns to look at Dana, and opens his mouth.

“I was in the bathroom, and you have to drop me off at my house,” the Dana-pedisequos tells him in a toneless voice. “Also, Kelly is stopping off with me when we get to my house.”

Charles stares at her, his mouth hanging open. Then he says, “I didn’t say nothing.”

“Give her a break,” you snap at him, and take Dana by the elbow. “Kaylee was being a butt and she needed some time alone.”

“Whatever,” Charles turns to the front. “But are you coming out with us at least? Are you coming back here?”

Dana looks at you. You shrug.

“I don’t know,” Dana says in that same robotic tone. You facepalm.

So Bridget comes to the rescue.

“You know, I think it’s really great,” she says as she puts the car in gear and backs up, “that we’ve got this place where we can all party and we can all pitch in to help to keep it running. Like, we’ve got the guys who come in and sell the, you know, food and drinks, and we make our own music and we have our own security and we even clean up after ourselves. And we do it all without anyone have to tell us to or to organize it!”

“Thbt!” Charles interrupts. “It’s organized. You just don’t know who runs it.”

“So who runs it?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“Whatever, Chazz,” Bridget scoffs, then plunges back into a rhapsodic appreciation of the Warehouse and the way it practically runs itself. You’d love to tell her to stuff it and give your and everyone else’s ears a rest, but you know she’s doing it to shut Charles up and to keep him from asking any more awkward questions, so you grit your teeth and put up with it.

* * * * *

It turns out that Dana lives in Acheson, just a couple of blocks from your old house, and it gives you kind of a creepy feeling to go driving through your own neighborhood when you’re not yourself, and when you know that the thing at your house that your family thinks is you really isn’t. What kind of trouble is it getting into? you wonder.

With that same lack of emotion, the Dana-pedisequos guides Bridget to a two-story house about the same size as your old place, but with a much better paint job and a much nicer lawn. Almost too nice. You can’t help peering at it suspiciously as you climb out onto the curb.

“Will I see you again tonight?” Bridget shouts at you from behind the wheel of the car.

“Probably not,” you call back. “I feel like staying in tonight.”

Bridget’s eyes shift to your companion. “What about you, Dana?”

Again, the pedisequos looks directly at you for instructions.

“Oh, probably,” you call back on her behalf. “I think we just have to, you know, get her into a change of clothes, a change of mind, and she’ll be back to being herself. I mean,” you hastily correct yourself, “she’ll be like a whole new person.”

Bridget visibly winces. You slam the car door shut and grab the pedisequos by the wrist. You even open the front door for her. “Tell your mom and your dad that I’m a friend from school,” you growl at her.

So she leads you through a small entryway and down a short hall to a living room, where a fat woman with eyes black as currants is knitting. “Mom,” Dana says tonelessly, “this is a friend from school.” She then marches from the room.

“My name’s Kelly,” you gasp at Dana’s mom.

“It’s nice to meet you, Kelly,” Mrs. DiBenedetto says. Her mouth twists into a smile of surprise as she watches her daughter briskly march off without another word.

“We’re kind of busy,” you tell her, and hurry after.

And the pedisequos says the same thing, in the same way, to her dad, who is in some kind of study, reading papers over a pair of half-moon spectacles. He only gives you and his “daughter” an astonished look before you’re scrambling after Dana again. “Take me up to your room,” you tell her. With robotic precision she wheels and marches up a flight of stairs.

“What are you doing?” you exclaim once you’re inside a bedroom and have the door shut.

“I took you to my room,” Dana informs you. “I do just what you tell me to do, as you instructed me in the car.”

“Oh, for God’s sake!” You bunch up your fists. “Fine. As long as you’re doing what I tell you to do, take off your clothes. No! Wait!” You think through the necessary steps. “Do you have a private bathroom?” The thing points at a door. “Answer your folks if they call you down, but stay here and keep out of trouble until, um, this door opens again.”

Inside the bathroom: The Kelly-pedisequos better not be that bad once you get it up and running, you think to yourself after you start to peel.

* * * * *

You run your hands slowly down the sides of your new—and naked—body. You were right. Dana’s body is just that five or fifteen percent more feminine that you need to go from being a “tomboy” to being “pert but sexy.” You slide your palms over those curves as though sculpting them while studying yourself in the bathroom mirror.

Oh, there are flaws, and with Dana’s eyes you can pick them out. Calves that are just a little too skinny for thighs that are just a little too chunky. The short hairs that have to be shaved in the bikini area. Tiny blackheads. But she’s got a strong stomach that curves inward from bowl-like hips, and breasts more like small, firm mangos than Kelly’s underdeveloped bananas. And that’s all it takes to make all the difference. You take a deep breath as your gaze travels up to your face. Dana DiBenedetto—that’s you!—gazes back with an expression of surprise and wonder.

Movement in the room outside reminds you that you have to get dressed if you’re going to go out to the Warehouse again with your friends, of which you’ve got so many. You wouldn’t miss out for anything. Sure, Kaylee was being a butt about Ethan’s party—

You freeze at the thought of Ethan’s party.

Dana is helping Madison organize a surprise birthday party with Ethan Clayborne. It’s part of her plan to get him to start going out with her.

But how great would it be—how perfect the revenge for all the small cruelties that Madison has inflicted on Kelly, and on other girls, if Ethan bypassed Madison and started going out with … you, Madison’s BFF?

You could arrange that.

That's all for now.

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