The Book of Masks (Vol. 1)

The Boy with Two Faces

Previously: "Sealing the Deal" 

"G'yum?"

With some such noise you open your eyes. They are very heavy, and it takes you a moment to focus on the madly grinning visage that's pressed close to yours. You shrink back.

"Dude!" Jamie Rennerhoff gasps. "You've got to see this!"

"What?" For half a second you are conscious of nothing but your lack of surprise at being in the company of Jamie Rennerhoff.

Then it comes flooding back: him and the school basement, and the mask, and the fact that you were going to put on the mask to see if it turned you into a copy of him. You come halfway off the desk and scoot back. Your esophagus is like an elevator shaft, and something is joyriding up and down inside it. "What happened?"

"I think it worked!" Jamie cackles.

Your heart almost explodes. Is he saying that you look like him now?

Well, that was the point of the experiment. Still, there's an angry, fearful twitching in your chest as you sit up fully.

You would start by touching your face, but you double-take first at the fingers you are raising. They are long and white and tapering, at the end of a long, slim hand. The nails are a little longer than yours, and they look sharper too, and more polished. Your eye drifts down them and past your hand and wrist to your forearm. It is completely smooth.

As though darting after a thought, your hand flies to your shirt, and you pull back the neck to peer down it. No hair down there either, you think as you look at your chest. Again, it's not like you had a massive carpet of the stuff spreading across your pecs, but at least you had a tuft there. Now there's nothing, unless the one thick hair curling up in the middle of your breastbone is supposed to be your (solitary) "chest hair."

Jamie is breathing hard and making clicking noises as he swallows. You ignore him and his smile, though, to finally touch your face. You can't really tell anything, of course, until you raise your hand to brush bangs that are shorter and softer than yours.

"You want a phone? To look at yourself?" Jamie asks. He sounds slightly strangled, but excitement still burns in his eye.

"Yeah. Wait, I think there's a mirror in the back."

Together you find it, a massive thing, maybe seven feet tall, in an ornate metal frame. You had wondered, on finding it, what use it would be in an elementary school.

Now you're much more interested in what its dusty surface will show you. Jamie follows you over, and practically snuggles up at your shoulder as you gape into it.

Two Jamie Rennerhoffs stare back out at you.

The one in the orange shirt is grinning madly, and his nostrils are flaring. He twists on his feet, and clasps and unclasps his hands.

The other Jamie Rennerhoff is staring back at you with a softly sagging jaw and eyes wide with surprise and maybe a little horror. But he has the same pale skin, rose-colored lips, brown hair, and sharp, slanted nose. You and he slowly breath in synchronized rhythm.

Now you do touch your face. It feels exactly like skin, and it hurts when you pinch and pull at it. You run your tongue along and your teeth. Now that you notice, the inside of your mouth does feel strange, for there are gaps where you're not used to there being gaps, and teeth where you're not used to teeth being.

The clothes also feel a little strange on you, though you and Jamie are of nearly the same build. Your shoes bind a little, and with a grimace you kick them off.

"You know," Jamie says softly, "you could fool anyone if you went out looking like that."

Yes, you could.

Or could you? Your reflection returns a face wearing the wrong kind of expressions. Well, probably Jamie has looked shocked and disconcerted before, but that's not the expression he's got on now.

You swallow again. You've got his face. You could try out his expressions.

Slowly, you unfurl a smile.

It seems to take forever, for your lips just keep spreading and spreading and spreading. One row of teeth show, then the next. You stop when your mouth reaches a position that is comfortable.

Wow. Your smile is ginormous, and yet it feels perfectly natural.

The smile doesn't reach your eyes, though. There's still something furtive and worried in them. Try to enjoy this, man, you tell yourself.

The light in them changes, and it warms into a gleam you find that you are enjoying it more, so that the gleam warms even more, which makes you feel better, and—

Jamie giggles. Nervously.

"What?" you ask, and turn on him. Fear and excitement mingle on his face. You feel a perverse kind of delight in his reaction, and the muscles on your face tighten into a harder grin.

"Jesus, stop it!" he yells, and slaps at you while laughing.

You slap back at him, and laugh too. "Whatsa matter?"

"Take it off!"

"No, I like this!"

He leaps back, laughing and staring, then covers his face. "I can't take it anymore! It's too weird!"

You turn back to the mirror, and brush at your hair. Your smile fades a little, and what is left looks very smug and impudent. "Yeah, okay, I'll take it off. But you have to put it on next."

"How come?"

"A deal's a deal."

"What deal?"

"I dunno. But we should check this stuff out every which way." You saunter back over to the table. Your walk feels a little funny, as though Jamie's hips don't work the same as yours.

And speaking of hips, it occurs to you that if you've got his hair and face and fingers and hands and hips, then you're bound to have his junk too. But you don't dwell on corollary, and just hop up onto the table. "Gimme the book so I can see again how to get this thing off." That was one of the things you double-checked before putting the mask on, that there was a way of getting back to being yourself.

It's a tricky maneuver, which involves grasping your forehead with one hand and pulling while reciting some magical words. You have a hard time getting your hand into position, and you wind up letting Jamie work the release, as he has better leverage or something. After three or four fumbling tries, he pulls, and the world rushes away as you fall back into darkness.

* * * * *

You are groggy for a moment as Jamie shakes you awake, but on sitting up you feel healthy and whole, and a quick self-examination shows that you are entirely back to normal. Jamie, who had been too preoccupied with staring at you while you had the mask on, now rushes to ask you what it was like. You tell him that you felt normal, not at all like you were wearing a mask, or like your face and body were not your own. You ask him what it looked like as you put the mask on and he took it off. He tells you that the mask seemed to sink into you, and that instantly it wasn't you anymore on the table but him; and that when he pulled at your face he suddenly had the mask in his hand and you were back to normal. In both cases you were asleep until he woke you up.

Then, at your renewed prodding, he gets up on the table and puts the mask on. You're glad afterward that he told you what to expect. Nothing, you suspect, could have prepared you for the sight of the mask sinking into him and vanishing. He doesn't change, though, but neither did he wake up, and for ten heart-ripping minutes you sweated to see what will happen next, and make plans for what to do if Jamie remained unresponsive with staring eyes and a shallowly heaving chest. Then, to your relief, the mask reappeared on his face. You tear it off him and shake him awake.

His only response to your report: the excited exclamation, "Cool!"

It's getting on toward suppertime now, and Jamie says he definitely has to go. As for what comes next: "I'll take a look at the next spell," you tell him. And when he asks what you're going to do with the blank mask that you and he made, you tell him, with more reluctance, that he can take it home and start polishing it. You show him what to do, and warn him that it'll take him most of the rest of the week.

You're quiet and distracted at supper, which is probably for the best, for it means you and your little brother don't fight nearly as much as you usually do. After supper, you surprise your parents by volunteering that you've got some homework to do. Instead, naturally, you tackle the next spell.

To your disgust, it calls for an entirely new batch of ingredients, and the instructions for their assembly are also completely different. When you research prices online, you realize that you don't have nearly enough left in your depleted cash reserves to continue.

Not without Jamie's help.

You're gritting your teeth and getting ready to text him when a text from him pops up. hey got ur thing polished up who we copy next?

Of course, you demand to know how he could have possibly finished it so fast. car buffer, he replies. You groan at the obviousness of the technique. You dial him directly when he suggests you talk instead of text.

"Yeah, so, I got this thing all done," he says in a low, guarded tone. "We should try it out, and I know who on."

"Yeah?"

"My mom."

You nearly drop the phone.

Maybe he can sense your shock, because he immediately follows it up with a stammering, "But I seen you hanging out with Jenny Ashton sometimes. Or," he adds when you don't reply, "there's this stuck-up girl I think I could get it on."

Next: "The Mother of All Suggestions" 

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