The Book of Masks (Vol. 1)

The Hangover

Previously: "Sons and Lovers" 

You flinch at the glimpse you've gotten of Jamie and his mother, and suddenly you want to get out of this mask. "Okay, we got the stuff we went shopping for," you tell him. "Let's head back to the school."

He twists the key in the ignition and guns the motor. There's a hard, surly expression on his face.

* * * * *

You change out of Meghan Rennerhoff's mask as soon as you are back in the basement, waking afterward in a dark corner with the scent of grime and dust in your nostrils, and a grinding ache in your temples. You clamber out—naked—to find Jamie perched on the corner of the big conference table, studying his cell phone. But you see that he kept himself busy while you were unconscious, for all the stuff you bought is now unpacked and lined up on the table beside him.

Neither of you spoke on the drive back, and you watch Jamie warily as you dress yourself back in your own clothe. He concentrates on the screen of his phone and only glances up briefly when you shuffle over to deliver his mom's clothes and gym bag back to him. But his eyes flick up no further than the collar of your shirt as he wordlessly takes them.

You suck in your lips and search for something to say. You settle on business: "So you wanna work on the next spell now, or pick it up tomorrow?"

Jamie jerks his shoulders and bends his face to his phone again.

"It, uh, it was a good idea you had, for getting the stuff. If you don't want to stick around to help, I can do it myself," you add when still he says nothing.

"No, 's'okay," he says. He looks up and brushes a bang out of his eye, but he still won't look directly at you. "If you wanna work on it now we should work on it now."

But he doesn't move, and neither do you, until with a shrug of the shoulders you shuffle over to the sandbags piled up at the bottom of the stairs. You glance around, looking for an open space to pour the sand out, and with a sigh start to shift furniture about. After a moment, Jamie pitches in to help.

Neither of you talk, but the temperature between you does seem to warm as you work. The next spell, like the previous ones, has to be executed in the sigil in the book, so you lay the open book on the concrete floor and pour the dirt out on top of it. Then you add the expensive powders and liquids that you bought with Jamie's mom's credit cards. You hesitate when it comes to the point of lighting the stuff on fire—there's a lot of explosive fuel soaked into the dirt—but when you don't make a move, Jamie wordlessly pries the lighter from your grip and bends down to set it to the dirt. A great purple flame noiselessly blooms about you, but so quickly does it dissipate that you have no time to react, let alone panic. Instead, you stare and blink at the violet fire that silently wafts and licks at the dirt pile. Jamie—who is acting as stiffly and thoughtlessly as a marionette—sticks his hand into one of the flames and holds it there. Then he drops his arm.

"How long's it going to take?" he asks.

"I don't know," you confess. "The book said something about ... Well, I'm not sure I remember." (You were so intent on getting the spell started that you neglected to study it carefully.) "But I think it said something about how the fire might go out, and you'd have to relight it until it didn't relight no more. So who knows?"

Jamie nods and twists on his feet. After a few minutes of staring at the fire he hops up onto the table again, to stare at it some more with his knees tucked up under his chin. As you start to clean up, he says, "You can go home if you want, I'll stay here and watch the thing."

"You don't have to do that."

"I kind of want to."

"You want to be alone?"

Jamie stares at the fire, then shrugs.

You suck hard on your teeth. You wish you knew what to say. More fervently, you wish you weren't stuck here in a situation where you have to worry about what to say.

"Tell you what, I'll straighten up," you tell him, "and then I'll have to go home for a bit. But I'll come back later this afternoon, catch up with you and this thing. I'll bring over something to eat."

"You got money?" Before you can answer, Jamie pushes his mom's gym bag at you. There's some cash inside it, you remember.

"I'll spring for it myself," you tell him. "Or, I'll bring sandwiches and chips from home."

He shrugs again, and you return to picking up the basement. But you hear him sigh deeply as you mount the steps to leave.

* * * * *

Your time at home is torture of a different kind. You try to occupy yourself with homework, but your mind keeps returning to the morning's expedition.

You find it hard to shake your memory of—and pleasure in—the impersonation, at least right up until the end. Meghan Rennerhoff didn't have the tight, compact body of some of the girls at your high school—the Chelsea Coopers, the Cindy Vredenburgs, or the Yumi Saitos; girls with skin like stretched latex and muscles like hard rubber—but she was trim and taut and curved in all the right places. And on top of that you knew how to carry that body, and enjoy it, the way Meghan Rennerhoff likes to carry it and enjoy it. Not as a bag to be hauled around, or as a lot of limbs to be thrown around (which is how you feel about your own body), but as a mature, confident woman comfortable with herself and with her effect on men. Even now, outside her mask, you catch yourself leaning back in your chair and shaking back phantom tresses of hair, and your hand keeps wanting to rise to cup and fondle a baggy breast.

But you still can't help wincing at that remembered "effect on men," and at the look you saw on Jamie's face as you were talking to Chip. It's not something you want to think about, let alone confront. It's like a black shape glimpsed in a dark landscape through a grimy window—a thing you can't make out clearly but fear you will recognize if you look at it directly. And yet you glimpse it again and again, and shy away from it again, as your hand goes to your crotch to massage the erection you give yourself as you think of the loamy mound that you had for a little while inside your shorts.

Jamie texts you at a little before six to say that fire is still burning and that he has to go home; you ask if he wants to get together tomorrow. He takes a long time to reply, and finally says that he'll text you in the morning to check in. You give him thirty minutes to clear out, then return to the school to check on the basement yourself. The fire is still burning, silently and without heat, and you curl up to watch it for an hour or so before leaving it for the night.

* * * * *

You have church the next morning, but Jamie doesn't text you until early afternoon anyway, shortly after lunch, to ask about the fire. When you say you haven't been over to check, he says he'll meet you there around two-thirty. You beat him over there by about five minutes.

Whatever his problem was yesterday, he seems to have recovered his spirits, and there's no moodiness to manner. "Shit, this thing's gonna take forever, innit?" he says as he grimaces at the fire. "I don't wanna waste the day. Whadda you wanna do?" He hops on the balls of his feet.

"We could make some more masks," you suggest.

"M'neh," he retorts. "That's a lot of work."

"You wanna go see a movie? Go back to my place and play on my Xbox?" Jamie only makes a face.

So you suck in a cheek and go there. "You wanna do something with the masks we already made?"

He cocks a sharp eye at you, and for a moment you think you've gone too far. But he goes back to staring at the burning dirt pile.

"I guess we could make some new masks," he says at last. "That was fun yesterday, going out and pretending. If we got some more masks, you know, we could go out and pretend to be some other people."

"Sure." You turn with relief to the supply pile. "Like who?"

"Girls," Jamie says, and you can hear the grin in his voice. "There any girls you want to hang out with? Like, we could go around, with me hanging out with you like you hung out with me yesterday."

"You wanna hang out with me as a girl?" you ask in surprise.

"Sure." Jamie smirks. "Or you could put on that mask of me and we could hang out that way. You as me and me as a girl." His smirk deepens. "Come on," he goads you, and kicks you lightly in the shin. "Who's some girl you wanna go hang out with."

You feel yourself blushing.

Jamie suggested Jenny Ashton when you were making the second mask. He would probably go for her.

And then you're stuck for any other suggestions. Sure, there are girls you'd love to hang out with—Chelsea Cooper, Cindy Vredenburg, Andrea Varnsworth—but there's no way you could get a mask of one of them. And the girls you could masks of, you're not much interested in.

Except for one: Your ex-girlfriend, Lisa Yarborough.

Next: "The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of" 

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