The Book of Masks (Vol. 2)

Portable Bodies

You don't know Justin that well, and have never hung out with him. He has a mixed reputation. He is shabby and unkempt, dressing in sloppy t-shirts and torn jeans. His shaggy brown hair hangs down over his eyebrows and ears, and he has a stoner's stare, and his baritone is scuffed with a smoker's rasp. He hangs out at the portables with a tough crowd, and you've heard rumors that his drug intake is considerably wider than just weed. But he's no bully, and you've heard he's a lot smarter than he lets on—that if he's flunking his classes, it's because he's more interested in harder stuff than what the school teaches.

You can spare him five minutes. You reach out to take the joint.

But he yanks it away. "Nuh-uh, not so fast there," he tells you. "You get paid for your time afterward." He turns away.

"Five minutes," you tell him as you scuttle after. "I'm on a schedule and I have to get home."

"Whatsamatter, you taking medicine?"

"No, I'm grounded, and I hafta get home or else I'm gonna get grounded even harder!"

Justin sniggers. "Then you definitely want five minutes with me!"

He throws open the the back door to the school and lopes out toward the portables. You make a face at him, but follow.

The portables—never used now because they are old, smelly, broken-down, and probably infested with black widows and rats—are behind the school, next to the Agricultural Annex, arranged in a double-row that bends into a U-shape. The open area in the middle is a hang-out spot for the pot-heads, skateboarders, and slackers, but lots of other types will hang out there too, if it isn't too crowded, and it's big enough that you can get a couple of different clusters huddled between the enfolding wings of the portables. Now, though, an hour after school has let out, it is deserted. As you approach, Justin breaks into a trot, then a run. He dives into a narrow alley and runs to the very back. You follow, and catch up to him at the last portable. Its door is open.

"Go on in, man." Justin points to the door and squats beside a backpack that's sitting on the ground.

"What for?"

"Got a thing I wanna show you, talk to you about."

"What is it?"

"Don't be a dumbass. You came out here, that means you wanna see it."

You stare at him. Then, even though you realize you are being transparently bullied, you step up into the portable. It's better than being jeered at.

It's dark and shadowy inside the portable, for the daylight has to shove its way through some small, grimy windows to get in. It is empty save for a teacher's desk squatting at the far end, like a pagan altar. Your eyes sweep past it, then are dragged back. It looks like there's a pair of feet sticking out from behind it.

Heavy footsteps creak behind you, and a strong arm goes around your chest. Something dark covers your face.

* * * * *

You wake with a fuzzy feeling inside your head, like your brainpan is being used to store fur coats. You blink and grimace at a shadow-shrouded ceiling, then sit up. You break out into a short but hacking cough.

What happened? you ask yourself. Where—?

It comes back to you, though only as a foggy kind of memory, as though you are remembering something that happened to someone else. Justin came and found you after you got out of detention—

No, it wasn't detention, you correct yourself. It was after basketball practice, and you were at your locker changing out books prior to going home. You heard a sound and looked over and there was Justin, leaning against the locker next to yours. He waggled his eyebrows at you and said—

But that's not right either.

Anyway, you followed him outside to the portables because you didn't feel going running off and to join up with Chelsea again just yet. And even though he's scruffy, Justin is also seriously hot. But as you were walking along Justin darted behind you and grabbed you—

No, you were inside a portable when he grabbed you. There was something he said that you'd want to see there.

Either way, you felt something go over your face and then you couldn't breathe and it felt like you were being dragged down into a hot, dark place.

You lever yourself upright and shake out your clothes, which are bunched up in a funny way around yourself. You are frowning at them, trying to figure out what is wrong with them when they are so obviously right, when you hear a soft squeak and moan. You look around.

Huddled up in a corner of the portable is a skinny figure, staring at you with saucer-like eyes. You've seen him around before.

But when you remember that his name is Will Prescott, it's like being struck in the small of the back by a sledgehammer.

* * * * *

One hour of acrid, vicious, terrified screaming and fighting later ...

"I can't do it," Will Prescott whimpers as he teeters in the doorway of the portable. His face is a grinning rictus of fear as he peers out, blinking, into the late afternoon sunlight. "I can't do it!"

"Well, you can't spend the rest of your life living in a school portable," you fume back. You are so sick of his shit.

"But people will see me!"

"People see you every day." You push him outside. "No one gives a shit."

He stumbles and snuffles, and you roll your eyes. It looks like he's going to bust out crying again, for the third time since you found each other inside the portable.

It was a real freakout for both of you, and that's an understatement, and the first few minutes of shrieking talk were wasted with the two of you accusing each other of being yourselves. But once you agreed that, yes, you were Will Prescott and she was Kendra Saunders—

Yes, you're Kendra Saunders, and somehow it didn't surprise you when you took out a sticker-covered phone and turned its camera onto yourself, and saw her slim, Kenyan face squinting back at you. It was a very familiar face, and you remembered it and the body and clothes that went with it, and even the friends and family that were Kendra's. You stared at your face for a very long time, until scarecrow-boy squealed at you to stop scoping yourself out!

Anyway, after settling the question of who was who despite appearances, there came the screams and accusations, and the person with your old face tried running off, only to come scampering back into the portable, whimpering with fear and horror. The same fear and horror she is showing now as she creeps down the lane between the portables, with a look on her face—your old face—like she expects to be scalded by the sunlight.

"Come on," you say, and lay a slim brown hand onto the kid with the scarecrow build and the scarecrow hair jutting out from under a sloppy white ball cap. (Such loathing on his face as he pulled your clothes on. That was another oddity—you each woke up in a new body, but were wearing your old clothes.) "We can't spend the night here, you know."

"But I can't go home like this!" he wails. "What'll I tell my ... my ...!" Tears well up in his eyes.

"No, you can't go home like that," you agree. "But I can't go home looking like this, either. We'll just have to go back to each other's houses and do the best we can."

"But I don't know anything about you!" His expression is haggard.

Then it hardens, and his lips curl back.

"You did do this!" he says for about the tenth time. "You want to go back to my house! You want—!" He swallows. "Oh God! You want to be me!"

You have to stifle a scream. He has circled back to the start of the drama—the accusation that you did this to her even though you and Kendra both remember Justin Roth as the one who lured you into some kind of ambush.

But you're too tired to argue. No, you don't want to be Kendra Saunders—the snooty, top-of-the-school-pyramid cheerleader—but you think you can handle it. For whatever reason, she has your body but hasn't got your memories, while you seem to have everything that belonged to her. You're pretty sure you can fake your way through.

And if this teenage boy started accusing you of "stealing her body"? You're for sure certain you could talk everyone into thinking he was crazypants. It might even get you a lot of sympathy in the school.

So why should you care what happens to this other person? Maybe you should just go off and let him hang.

Next: "Study Buddies" 

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"Table of Contents (Vol. 2)" 
"The Book of Masks (Vol. 2)"