This choice: Get a good night's sleep • Go Back...Chapter #43A Life Without Masks by: Seuzz   Eventually the anxious and restless feeling fades. You stay up very late, for there is still an aching buzz in your head. But around eleven you go to bed, and your dreams, though vivid, are not disturbing.
The next morning brings church and Sunday dinner, and late in the afternoon your cousin Umeko shows up for a visit. You jump every time a phone rings, thinking it might be Frank or Joe or Carson or even Rick Bredon, but it never is. You come close to calling one of them a couple of times. But you figure that if they want to talk to you, they'll call you; and anyway, you'll see Carson on Monday.
Speaking of which, it gradually dawns on you that school will be rougher from here on in, at least in Mr. Walberg's class.
* * * * *
But it goes better than you'd expect. His class is taken by a substitute—the non-supernatural kind—on Monday and Tuesday, and when he returns on Wednesday he treats you no differently, and no worse (though no better) than anyone else. For at least the next month he seems in a very bad humor, and for the rest of the semester he is gruff and distant and barely polite. But if you think you sometimes catch him giving you the fish eye, he is never unfair in grading your papers or tests. And though he's a hard-ass, you end the semester with a B-minus in his class.
It's a little worse with Gordon Black and Steve Patterson. As far as you could tell, they never even knew who you were before the year started. Now—thanks to this adventure, and that breakfast with Rick Bredon—they do know you, and you catch them casting slit-eyed glances in your direction. That makes you extremely nervous, but they never do anything to you, and they never speak to you. Once, even, you're rescued by Gordon, though not in the same way as when it was one of the doppelgangers playing his part. Tanner Evans is crowding you by a water fountain not long after the spring semester starts, when he suddenly vanishes from view. You blink in time to see Gordon swinging him around, slamming against a nearby locker, and ramming a hard fist deep into his gut; Evans falls to the floor and vomits. Gordon then stalks away without a backward glance; and you're pretty sure he never looked at you once while dealing with Evans.
"Yeah, they're being weird, but not in that way," Carson says when you tell him about it. He and James have given up listening in on the "fuck room", and even given up on badmouthing Gordon's crew behind their backs; and Gordon and Steve and the rest have apparently stopped trying to stuff Carson and James down inside toilets.
And that's about all that Carson has to say on the subject of people acting out of character, for he absolutely refuses to discuss your late adventures together. "I said if we ever got out of it alive I'd never talk to you again," he says through gritted teeth when you first broach the subject, on that first day back at Westside. "I've decided I will talk to you, but only on the condition that we never talk about that weird shit again." He's mostly decent after that, though sometimes he does get very dark and growly with you. You watch your friends—and others you know were replaced by doppelgangers—very closely, but you never see anything really weird; and the few times they seem to be acting odd you're able to convince yourself it's only your imagination.
And Frank and Joe Durras? They disappear from Eastman, and you never see them or Rick Bredon again.
* * * * *
And that would be the end, when you graduate, but for one very faint coda—maybe—about seven or eight years later.
In college you discover you've an uncanny knack for computer programming. It serves you well, and you hop from one well-paying job to another, always with a big bump in salary, until you wind up in the United Kingdom of all places, in Leeds, working for a company called IMS. And one day, out of the blue, Carson Ioeger crosses your path again. "My job?" he laughs when you meet him at a pub for lunch at his invitation. "Who'd hire me?" He still looks much the same—lanky, with frizzled hair, the devil's own grin, and much lived-in clothes—but now he smokes like a chimney.
"Oh, I just fuck around with whatever shit pays for my next pack of smokes and grilled cheese," he tells you. "You'll cover for me here, won't you? Not that I'm seriously trying to sponge off you, I'll be out of your hair tomorrow, I picked up something down in London and I'm just passing through. Yeah, I was Googling people a few months ago, saw you were here. I was in Sweden at the time, but made a note to look you up if I drifted this way. You look good, man, considering how little sunlight you must get. Oh, fuck me, what wasn't in Sweden? Babes! But for serious, I was doing a freelance journalism project, research on an old Swedish nobleman, this scary, old-timey alchemist or black magician or something. No, I'm not into that shit, what are you, fucking nuts? Not after our senior year. Fuckin' brutal, that. Oh, right, I did threaten to not talk to you anymore, didn't I? Well, that's all old history. But what do you hear from the guys back in Saratoga Falls? Asshole I am, I ain't been back in years—"
And so the lunch goes very long, and you're ninety minutes late returning to work because Carson gets you mildly drunk, and it's not until you see the vast column of smoke pouring out of the hole where the IMS building had been that you discover how lucky it was he showed up that day and kept you out late, or else you'd have been blown to bits in the same freak explosion that reduced your colleagues to little puddles of green organic goo that not even DNA tests could identify as human.
You get a job back in the States after that, where building codes are, if not stricter, at least American.  |
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