The Book of Masks (Vol. 4)

The Rapunzel Protocol

Previously: "Personas, Grata or Not" 

"There's no reason we can't try both things, is there?" you ask Joey. "Do we have enough stuff to make another mask?" She nods. "What about the stuff for the new spell? Does it look like it'd be expensive?"

"I dunno. I'm not through translating. But—"

She doesn't finish. Instead she plunges back into reading the spell.

* * * * *

You're in the women's restroom washing your hands when the phone in your shirt pocket chimes. It's only the latest in a rapid burst of mortifications when you open it up to see it's a text from Jenny: Yure not ignroring me r u?

As Joey studied the new spell, you had felt the first twinges in your bladder. At first you thought you could ignore them, but they rapidly grew worse, so that you were soon twisting in your seat to keep from pissing yourself. "Be right back!" you'd gasped at Joey, who only grunted without looking up. Off you waddled, your toes pointing inward, searching for a restroom. Almost you went into the men's room before correcting your course.

Peeing was a huge relief, so much so that you wondered if Joey had slammed a liter of cola just before you got to her house. Or was it you that needed to pee? You spent a good minute on the toilet, puzzling and procrastinating over the issue until, with gritted teeth, you got up and unspooled a length of TP and patted yourself dry in front. It was doubly awful, with I'm touching Joey's hoo-hah struggling with Dude! Where'd my dick go! for top honors in the body horror category.

Okay, it wasn't horrible. But it was damned excruciating, and you slapped some cold water against your cheeks afterward and gave yourself a steady look in the mirror afterward. I like her complexion better, you decided. No little patches ready to break out into zits. No scratchy little hairs on the cheek and chin. Soft skin, too. If it wasn't so girly, you'd almost prefer this face to your own.

Oh God, what am I thinking? you thought. And while you were still recovering from that is when Jenny's text came in.

You scroll back with your thumb. The string of messages from Jenny goes back half a dozen entries with no interruption or reply from Joey herself:

Im sending will over to pick up stuff frm u. Dont blor urself up

* dont blow yurself up

Did will pick up stuff from u yet? B nice to him but tell him ur not intretesd n his bullsht

Dont get me rong wil is nice guy but hes too flaky for u.

Just got thru talking to frinds who know will good. I like will but they say hes got smthing to prove aftr braking up w old gfrined. Ill call u tnite n we ll talk.

Your knees are trembling as you scroll back further to see what else Jenny and Joey have been saying about you. But except for one or two texts indicating that they mean to talk on the phone, there's nothing except brief texts about when and where they will meet.

You shut down the app and return to where Joey is sitting. "Where'd you go?" she mumbles without looking up.

"Restroom."

It takes a second for her to react, and even then she just looks up at you from beneath her brows.

"Yeah," you say. "Sorry."

"It's alright." She goes back to reading. "I had to pee just before you got to my house."

At first you think she's accusing you of lying—that she already peed and so you wouldn't have had to. Then you realize what she's really saying.

She herself has already run some water through your spigot.

* * * * *

You and Joey are each expected home by six or six-thirty, so you don't linger at the library. You drive around town for a little bit, wracking your brains for a place where you can exchange clothes and identities again. (To your relief, Joey assures you that the book does detail a way of getting the masks off.) At last you agree that, as you've already seen each other naked in the most intimate ways possible, you will find a secluded spot and swap out together inside your truck. The exchange takes place behind a strip center, next to a garbage dumpster.

You start by taking the mask off Joey. The procedure (which she explains to you) consists of laying your hand across her brow and muttering some weird, untranslatable magic phrase three times fast, and pulling, as though wrenching the front of her forehead away. It takes you two tries before you succeed, and to your momentary horror and subsequent relief, a mask comes away in your hand and an unconscious Joey Tartaglione materializes inside your clothes. You shake her awake as gently as you can—but she's very hard to wake, and extremely groggy when she does come around—and then so as not to tear her clothes you take off her clothes and let her clamber atop you to pull the mask off of your face. You feel very hot when you awake, as though you've been wrenched suddenly out of a deep and paralyzing sleep. She is already out of your clothes and inside of hers as you rub the rags of sleep from your face. Then you dress and take her home.

* * * * *

"Did you get your stuff back from Joey?" Jenny asks you the next morning. It's just before class and she's hanging out by herself next to the office, watching the front doors of the gym. She gestured you over when she saw you coming in from the student parking lot.

"Yeah," you tell her. After seeing those texts she sent to Joey, you don't feel much like talking to her.

She was looking past you, but maybe she caught something in your tone, for she turns to face you.

"Well, good," she says. "You know, if you want to get together later, me and Eva and Jessica—"

"I'm gonna be busy."

"Oh?" Surprise shows on her face. "With what?"

"I can have fun on my own, Jenny," you inform her. "I don't need you to set me up with ... whatever!"

You brush past her toward the door, with all the stiff dignity you can muster. It's only when you're inside that you realize you turned down a possible afternoon date with at least two members of the cheerleading squad.

* * * * *

"Then he had me bend over and shot free throws at my butt!" your friend Keith Tilley exclaims. "And every time he hit me with one, he shouted 'Swish!'"

His face is red with indignation. Or embarrassment. It's lunchtime, and he's relating his most recent run-in with Seth Javits, the basketball-playing bully who seems to have made it his life's work to torture and humiliate Keith.

"I don't get it," James Lamont asks. "Was this a basketball he was throwing at you? 'Cos where'd Javits get a basketball inside the G-wing boys' bathroom?"

"It was D wing! And it wasn't a basketball! I told you, it was wet, wadded-up paper towels!"

Behind his back, you and Caleb wince at each other. Neither of you want to laugh at Keith—Lord knows you've got problems of your own with asshole jocks, and Javits has sometimes been one of them. But he's not helping his case if he wants people to feel bad for him.

So you're not surprised when James snorts. "Paper towels? What are you bitching about, then? That's nothing, I've had—"

"He had me bend over and put my face in a urinal while he was doing it!"

"Your problem, Tilley," says Carson Ioeger, who having finished his banana-and-peanut-butter sandwich is lying back on his elbows, sunning himself, "is that you're a victim. Guys like Javits can sniff it out. Stop being a victim and he'll stop harassing you."

"How did we got on this topic?" Caleb asks.

Keith gives him the stink eye. "Because you wanted to know how come I didn't want Cindy coming over here to talk. Because I like her exactly as much as I like her boyfriend!"

"No wonder Javits has it in for you," Ioeger says. "He must'a heard that you fantasize about him as you're jacking off."

* * * * *

Joey's wifi might be turned off during her school hours, but you text her anyway to tell her you made a third mask last night with the book and the supplies you brought home. You were smart enough to do it in the garage, too, so as not to stink up your room, and you polished it out there, too, with your dad's buffer. You have the mask and the book in your locker now.

Sorry, you can't come over, she replies. To your ???!!! she says, My mom and dad don't know you and you're a guy.

You roll your eyes. Do her parents think Joey's made of fine china?

You text: So how we sposed to get tgtrhr agin?

She says: At Jenny's?

Im not talkng to jenny any more.

I mean, I could tell my mom that's where I'm going. You could pick me up close to her house.

As you mull this, she sends a follow-up: Or you could stop by to give me the book so I can work on next project. My mom just doesn't want me going off alone with you anymore.

Yes, that's a possibility, and it's probably the safest thing to do for today. Later on, you could figure out a way of meeting up with her that wouldn't set off any—pffft!—alarm bells at her house.

But as you sit back and prepare to send a reply, you have a sudden thought.

You have a blank mask and the stuff to seal it up. If Joey's mom doesn't want a guy showing up at her house to pick up Joey, how about showing up at her house as a girl?

Next: "The Cheerleader Proxy" 

*
"Table of Contents (Vol. 4)" 
"The Book of Masks (Vol. 4)"