The Book of Masks (Vol. 2)

Guilty Consciences All Around

Previously: "Unexpected Exhumations" 

"Well, thanks," you tell Mr. Walberg. "I guess I'll have to ask around for, uh, my book."

The teacher dangles the chain on the end of the finger. "This isn't yours?"

"No, I don't wear crap like that. It looks like something Joe Thomason would wear, though," you blurt out before can stop yourself.

"Oh, what makes you say that?"

You shrug awkwardly. "Just seems like it. He's the kind to wear a bicycle chain as jewelry, right?"

"This isn't a bicycle chain."

"No," you stammer. "But it's a lot like one. Um -- "

Mr. Walberg leans forward with his elbows on his desk. "If you know something about this business, Mr. Prescott," he says, "I really think you should say something."

"No, I don't really know anything, Mr. Walberg." Your stammer worsens and you start to tremble under his stare. "It's only that the book I'm asking about, you know, it got stolen from me at one point—"

Shut up shut up shut up, you yell at yourself, but it's like Mr. Walberg has cast a spell over you, and you can't stop gabbling.

"—and Mr. Barrientos helped me get it back, but then I lost it again close to where we buried the time capsule, and it was Thomason and some of his friends who took the book from me the first time—" Oh God, I am in such shit if this gets back to Thomason and them "—and when you showed me that chain, I guess I thought that—"

Only now, when it's far too late, do you peter out as Mr. Walberg's eyebrows, which have been rising and rising, arc so hard that they nearly achieve escape velocity.

"Alright, Mr. Prescott," he says. "If all you've got is supposition and suspicion then you don't got jack. Is there anything else?"

You shake your head.

"Then have a good afternoon and good evening," he growls.

You turn away, feeling very shame-faced, and do a double-take at Dane, who is grinning with rapt delight at you. You give him a dirty look and shuffle out.

* * * * *

"Are you dumb or do you just like to play it that way?" Caleb snarls, and pushes you back a step and into the brick wall of the McDonald's. "The fuck were you thinking? You practically told Walberg—"

"I didn't tell him anything!"

"You practically gave the game away!"

"Yeah, you practically gave the game away." Keith echoes Caleb's accusation in a much smugger tone.

"You don't even know what we're talking about!" you retort.

"Don't got to," Keith says, and resettles his backward-turned baseball cap. "You can't help giving the game away, Will," he grins.

You snort and snatch open the door to the restaurant, and you don't hold it for your two friends as you stomp inside. It's five-thirty and your dad's working late and your mom was harried, so when you asked her for some money so you could get a burger with Caleb and Keith, she sent you out with her blessing. Since telling Caleb about your afterschool conference with Walberg, though, you're wishing she had kept you home instead.

"You only had to keep your mouth shut," Caleb fumes quietly beside you as you stare up at the menu. "That's all."

"I did. I didn't tell him anything."

"Only enough that he can put two and two together."

"Exactly," says Keith with smug complacency. "Even I got it figured out."

"You do not," you snarl. "You don't even know— Wanna make a bet, asshole?" you hiss as Keith grins in your face. "I bet I could tell you all about it and you still wouldn't be able to figure it out!"

Caleb snorts. "That's not much of a bet, Will. Tilley's so clueless -- "

"I'll take that bet," Tilley interrupts. "For the cost of my burger?"

"Fine, loser pays for the other's meal." It's a cheap bet, but you're eager to jam Keith down hard on the hook he's impaled himself on. "So tell me what you figured out."

"Settle it after we've eaten," Caleb says. He steps up to the counter clerk who's been patiently waiting. "I'm hungry."

So you order, with you and Keith topping each other serially (and annoying the order taker) by supersizing everything in the meal, adding more and more side items, and piling on deserts and drinks until each meal's calorie count must be somewhere in the mid-thousands and the cost of each is pushing twenty dollars. Caleb's countenance is a mix of chalk and cherry as you lug the trays to a table in the back.

"No, you gotta play fair with Keith," he says when you instantly demand that Keith settle up. "The only reason I'm going along with this is because -- "

"Who said you had to 'go along'?" you demand. "This is between me and Tilley."

"Yeah!" Keith hotly agrees. Then his eyes get a little shifty. "So tell me what I'm missing."

"See! You don't know—!"

Caleb pushes the side of your face. You slap him back, and only when you accidentally knock over your Pepsi—sending it foaming across the table—do you subside.

"Keith's right," Caleb says. "This is a test to see if Walberg can figure out what happened. Because if a moron like Tilley can figure it out, then Walberg can."

"Fuckin' a," Keith agrees. Then he blinks. "Say what?"

"Never mind. Just listen."

With interruptions from you, Caleb lays out the evidence that Walberg would have: How a time capsule got buried, then exhumed with its contents scattered; how a decorative chain was found nearby; and how you went in to ask if a book had been found mixed in with the crap from the time capsule. "Now, what do you conclude from that?" Caleb asks.

Keith sucks some cola through a straw and peers at you and Caleb with an expression that is probably supposed to convey that he is thinking shrewdly about the problem, but actually leaves him looking like he's pulling at an extraordinarily sour lemonade. He rubs his nose and resettles his cap. "You did it," he says at last, jabbing a finger at you.

"I did what?" you exclaim.

"You broke into the time capsule and lost your book while you were digging it up! Elementary, really," he adds in a smug undertone.

"And how do you make that deduction?"

"Easy. You're acting suspicious and anyway, all the way up here you've been talking like you're guilty of something."

"That's not evidence Walberg would have!"

"Doesn't matter, I figured it out." Tilley snaps his fingers and extends an open palm. "Pay up, suckah!"

"No, you pay me! Because I didn't dig up the time capsule! Caleb did!"

Well, it's not technically true. You did dig it up. But no one knows that, and Caleb isn't worried that you'll get busted. He's worried that he will.

So when Keith's face falls, and like a gasping fish he glances between you and Johansson, Caleb shrugs. "Yeah, I did the digging," he says. "Will only watched." He turns a glare on you.

It's your turn to be smug, and you hold out your hand to Keith. "Pay up, suckah," you taunt.

"Call it a fucking draw," Caleb says. "Because if Walberg hauls you in, Will, you'll put the finger on me."

"No I won't!"

"Pay me the cost of my burger if you do," he sneers back.

* * * * *

So you pass a couple of nervous days at school. Every day in Walberg's you expect to get a summons from the teacher to see him after class, but he mostly ignores you. You write the paper for him—describing the aftershave that you put in the capsule and why you chose that—and go to your other classes, and eat lunch with Caleb and Keith and your other friends. By the end of the week, your fears have mostly subsided.

Then, a week after your conference with Walberg:

Pow! The blow to your kidney, delivered as you're changing books at your locker, knocks all the strength from your legs. Your knees buckle, and you face-plant inside your locker. Only the strong arm that seizes you by the shoulder keeps you from flopping to the floor.

You're spun around. David Kirkham—a bully to make every other bully in school (except those on the basketball team) look like a Good Samaritan—sneers into your face. He rolls a toothpick in his grinning mouth.

"That's an invitation, Prescott," he hisses at you. "Last period. I got a dead spot in my schedule then. See you out at the portables." He grinds a knuckle into your chest. "Mandatory conference."

He steps back, and melts into the crowd.

Well, there's nothing to do but go, and you'd only be missing Astronomy anyway. But you'd rather have a root canal, and it's with dragging feet and a wildly flailing heart that you trudge out to the portables at the end of seventh.

He's already waiting. But instead of dragging you by the collar into the back, he summons you with a crooked finger to follow him up the sagging steps into one of the abandoned units. The hairs on the back of your neck go up.

He folds his arms and glares at you once the door is shut behind you. "I hear you lost a book a couple of weeks ago," he says. His voice is so soft you can hardly hear it. "I hear you're pitching a fucking fit over it." He rolls the toothpick around, then spits it at your feet. "What's so fucking special about it?"

A hard tremble passes through you. Kirkham is friends with Thomason and his gang, so there can only be one book that he's asking about. And the fact that he's asking about it suggests that Mr. Walberg is putting the screws to people over the time capsule incident.

Maybe if you tell Kirkham that the book was a valuable antique, it will scare him into giving it back to you—the trick worked when Mr. Barrientos got it back for you the first time. Or maybe it would be smarter to tell him it's no big deal, and that you didn't mean to make any kind of stink about it at all.

Next: "Dangers from Expected Quarters" 

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"Table of Contents (Vol. 2)" 
"The Book of Masks (Vol. 2)"