The Book of Masks (Vol. 1)

Maria's Crush

Previously: "At Home as Maria Vasquez" 

Sean Mitchell. You try to push the name away and return to your homework. But it just keeps floating to the forefront of your brain, like a balloon caught in a draft.

Maria noticed him last year, at a party. Sean and his twin brother, Taylor, were there, along with a lot of other people from Eastman High. She didn't pay much attention to Sean at first. He and his brother were just a couple of guys in a roomful of other guys, all of them stamped from the mold. Meaty, blonde football players, with whitish, three-day-old growths of beard and dirty ball caps pulled down low over their brows. She knew the type well. The kind of guys that laugh too loud and jostle the other guys; who lounge and spread themselves across the patio with beers and wine coolers; who push in close to the girls and breathe hot, salty air in their faces and brush hairy arms against them.

That was Sean and Taylor Mitchell too. Only they weren't as gross and close about it as the other guys.

At least Sean wasn't, when he got close to Maria, and talked to her.

He had a plastic cup he was sipping from, and when he offered her some she found it filled with nothing stronger than Seven-Up. He looked her in the face and asked her name and which school she was from, and his eyes lit up as they fell to talking about mutual acquaintances. He looked her in the face and eyes, too, and only once did his gaze fall to her breasts. (And when she caught him, he blushed a little and grinned, then went right back to talking about the camping trip he was planning with his brother and friends.) He had bright blue eyes, and though she could tell he was interested in her, he didn't push, and only suggested they might run into each other later, and that it would be cool if they did.

That was all. But it was enough. He polite and he wasn't tacky and he didn't brag. (Unlike Chris Ratliff, for instance—another bluff and blonde guy, who roamed about the house clasping guys around the waist and picking them up to show off how strong he was.) Even if she wasn't smitten with him, she made a point of not forgetting him. Before leaving the party she pointed him out and asked Lin Pol who he was.

They ran into each other a couple of weeks later, at the mall. Maria was with Eva and Jessica Garner, but Sean was by himself. He was coming out of Academy Sports when Jessica saw him and called him over; the four of them wound up in the food court, with Sean munching down two orders of chili fries. Eva and Jessica, being the two girls in a set of triplets, naturally talked to Sean about being a twin, and he laughed and told them about all the pranks he and his brother had played in their time. (They looked so much alike that even their parents had a hard time telling them apart.) But his eye kept flicking back to Maria, and he went out of his way to pull her into the conversation. "God, he was so into you," Jessica teased Maria afterward, and she and Eva goaded her mercilessly about giving him a call to set something up. And though Maria dug her heels in, she did find herself thinking more about him.

Then came the morning when her mom, reading her tablet at the breakfast table, gasped and looked up and told her that a high school student had been in an accident. It was Sean's brother, Taylor.

To her own surprise, the tragedy touched Maria very deeply. It preyed on her: the thought of what Sean had lost, and the pain he must be going through. She made a point of scanning the paper for news about his family, and she made sure to go to Taylor's funeral. It was a big affair, for Taylor and Sean were popular athletes at Eastman, and all of their friends (and their friends' friends) were there, in jackets and ties and plastered-down hair. Sean looked lost in the midst of them, and when Maria offered her condolences he accepted them only with an air of melancholy distraction. She gave long and wracking thought afterward to calling him up, to offer more condolences, and to suggest getting together. (She would be a shoulder for him to cry on, she thought.) But then she thought it would be a tacky thing to do so soon after a funeral, so she put it off, and put it off some more, and by the time she decided she had waited long enough, it felt like she had waited too long.

By that point, school had started, and she got another surprise. Sean had moved over to Westside, where he joined the football and wrestling teams. He and Maria shared no classes. But she watched him out of the corner of her eye; was always almost on the point of speaking to him when they chanced to brush by each other; but always crumpling at the very moment of decision. Still, he was soon wedged firmly in her imagination as someone kind and gentle; strong but sensitive; touched and made thoughtful already by life; but still boyish and brave and bold and unbending.

And she goes to the theater after school every chance she can sneak away from Chelsea, because she has heard that he has gotten a part in the theater department's next production.

But she's not seen him there yet. Of course she hasn't, not when he's working after school at Salopek.

Where Will Prescott works.

Where Will Prescott is working more or less under his direct supervision, if your impression from last week is correct.

Well, she's entitled to take advantage of the coincidence, you decide. And the same tender yearnings she feels also pulse in your temples and in the hollows of your heart, so that you inevitable jealousy is palsied by the guilt that leprously speckles it.

So you pass a cold first night, as Maria, in her bed. She is not shy about relaxing herself with probing fingers. But as you try stroking yourself, you are haunted by Maria's fantasy that they are Sean's fingers, preparing her for the planting and blooming of another, thicker stalk, and soon give up.

* * * * *

Chelsea is cool to you at practice the next day, and you pull yourself into Maria's shell so that you don't have to talk to her or any of the other girls. (But not so deep that Chelsea has to snap at you to get your attention.) Even in the changing room, where there are nine other shapely cheerleaders, each peeling off one set of clothes and squeezing into another, you keep your eyes to yourself and your own locker. When Eva Garner asks to borrow a brush, it's not until you've handed it to her and turned away that it registers she was wearing nothing more than a bra and panties.

Second period finds you in AP Calculus, with silky legs crossed under your desk, scrolling through Twitter on your cell phone, when out of the corner of your eye you see two scruffy guys enter the room. The one in the urine-yellow t-shirt and baggy jeans is Caleb Johansson, who you have no memory of ever noticing in here before. The other, in the burgundy t-shirt and cargo shorts, with blonde hair sticking out in every direction from under a filthy and shapeless ball cap, is Will Prescott.

You affect not to notice as Will nudges Caleb. But even at this distance you can make out his wicked grin and read his murmured aside: Dude, watch this! As Caleb looks on with a frown, Will swaggers across the room and drops into the chair in front of you. "Hey," he says, and leans over your desk to put his face close to yours.

Instinctively you pull back from his leer. "So," he says, "we getting together again after school?"

You stare at him, then shiver slightly. "Sure. School theater?"

"How about tonight instead? Starbucks or someplace like that. Study group?" He glances over at Caleb, and jerks his chin at him. "I got a friend in here, you know, was talking to him about doing some math homework together. I told him, 'I seen Maria Vasquez in here too, how about we ask her along?'" He sits back with a smirk, nods at you, and resettles his cap.

Jesus, you think as a gaping hole of horror opens up in your heart. Is that what I'd look like if I tried coming on to Maria Vasquez?

The reply, when it comes, is no comfort: Don't flatter yourself. You'd shit yourself, drool all down the front of your shirt, and fall to the floor in spastic convulsions if you tried coming on to Maria Vasquez.

"I guess we could do that," you tell him. "But we should meet before then."

"How come?"

"School theater," you murmur through frozen lips. "Right after classes."

His expression tightens, and he shakes his head.

"No time. I can't be late to your work again. Then I'll have to get home."

"After Starbucks, then? Or before?"

"Why are you in such a hurry? Is something wrong?"

"No. I just—"

"Then we'll talk tomorrow after we see how it goes tonight. Dude!" He gets up with a grin. "Your friend over there is shitting himself with jealousy!"

Jesus, you think as he struts off, if she wants so bad to go in to work for you, she must really be going all out to get close to Sean.

Or is she? Because if she was chasing after Sean Mitchell, your skin would not be the place to do it from.

Besides, if she's chasing Sean, why is she setting up this "study date" and trying to impress Caleb for you?

It can't be, but there it is: Could it really be possible she's impressed with you? Could she seriously be trying to set up what you could never have set up yourself?

Could she be trying to construct a math equation that reads WP + MV = 2gether x 4ever?

That's all for now.

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