The Book of Masks (Vol. 2)

One Guy, Three Girls, Zero Chances

Previously: "A Sean of Ice and Fire" 

You came with Sean, but you don't care for the idea of hanging out in a room with a bunch of "couples" when you don't have a girl of your own. So you drop Sean's bag in the "couples' room"—barely casting an eye on a football player and the girl he's got his arm around—before trudging back into the other. Stephanie has disappeared in the meantime.

Your suspicion that this "study party" is mostly for something other than studying hardens after you've plopped yourself onto the floor. There's only two girls in there, sprawled on the floor with their cell phones out. One of them you know: Meghan Velasquez, who like Stephanie is on the basketball squad. The other, a mousy little thing with dirty blonde hair, you don't. Neither of them say anything to you, though, but after lifting their faces briefly to smile at you, they dive right back into their phones. After getting settled a respectable distance from them, you turn your attention to Stephanie's phone.

You know that some people will compose their homework essays on their phones, to be texted or emailed to themselves or to the teacher, but you've never done so yourself and are a little baffled to find that Stephanie is one of those people. The essay she's asked you to read is on the Ptolemaic model of the solar system, and it makes both your eyes and your brain hurt to read. Not only can she not spell or punctuate, you can barely make out her meaning because none of the sentences want to stick to any of the others. You have the impression that she composed it one sentence at a time, taking ten- or twenty-minute breaks between each sentence to check her social media or talk to a friend.

So you keep very still and don't say anything each time Stephanie comes tramping into the room. Fortunately, she doesn't seem to be much interested in you, and comes in only to consult briefly and cryptically with the other two girls for a moment before running back out again. Once, she picks up her bag, paws through it, then looks over to give you a long, hard stare before dropping her pack and leaving again. It's after this last time that Meghan—a pleasant-faced Hispanic girl with a dark complexion, coffee-black hair, and a warm, cheerful smile—leans over to ask, with a quizzical look on her face, "Is that Stephanie's phone?"

"Yeah, she wanted me to read something she wrote for a class we got."

"Oh my God." Meghan plucks the phone from your hand long enough to glance at the screen before returning it to you with a snicker. "Good luck!"

"What do you mean?"

"Nothing." She lowers her face with a grin and goes back to tapping into her own phone. You look at the other girl, but she is still absorbed with her own phone.

But when Stephanie has returned, and hauled that other girl (bag and all) off the floor and out of the room, Meghan leans over again to ask, "Who'd you come out here with?"

"Sean. Mitchell," you add when Meghan's puzzlement doesn't clear up. "He told me there was a 'study party' going on out here," you continue when Meghan's eyes light up, "but, um—"

You crane your neck to look into the room on the other side of the atrium. Sure enough, it's now packed with people, some of whom have arrived in the meantime. Sean is in there, along with a couple of other wrestler/football players you recognize (none of them awful, you're relieved to see, but none you'd care to exchange two words with) and a bunch of girls, including the mousy girl, who is now sitting next to a beefy guy with a fuzzy black beard and hairy calves. "I didn't bring anyone with me," you dryly add after settling back again.

Meghan titters. "I didn't either. And neither did Katy, but I guess Stephanie—" She breaks off as Stephanie comes back in and drops to sit cross-legged with a sigh. "Who'd you hook Katy up with?" Meghan asks her.

"Isaac."

"Seems like a match."

Stephanie nods, and her gaze darts between you and Meghan. "Has Prescott here been bothering you?"

You blanch, but Meghan throws her head back to laugh open-mouthed at the ceiling. "He's been trying to read your paper for the last twenty minutes!"

"Yeah?" Her emerald-hard eyes lock onto yours. "How is it?"

"Um—"

"He's been trying to get through it for twenty minutes, Stephanie!" Meghan gasps with suppressed laughter. "How do you think it is?"

Stephanie flushes and yanks her phone from you. "It's in English, Prescott," she growls. "Something wrong with your reading comprehension?"

"I— I'm just not used to reading stuff on a phone. School papers, I mean."

"Yeah?" Her chin tilts. "What do you write yours on?"

"On a computer."

"On a computer," she mimics, meanly. "Pssh!" She glowers for a moment, then says, "Can you make it better?"

"Your paper? Um—"

"Lemme see!" Meghan reaches across to take Stephanie's phone. To Stephanie, you stammer, "You know, I can show you what I wrote for class, if you want."

If you jabbed yourself in the eyeballs with hot needles, it would hardly hurt worse than the look Stephanie gives you in return. "Except," you mutter, "I didn't bring my laptop with me, so I can't." Stephanie rolls her eyes as she takes her phone back from Meghan.

Lucky for you, the front door opens and another girl comes in. Mikaela Bowers is a soccer player, and she looks very trim and healthy even in blue jeans and a floppy burgundy t-shirt. Stephanie raises her hand and gestures her over to join your trio.

"Hey," Mikaela says as she drops her bag and looks over her shoulder into the other room, where the chatter and laughter is rising in volume. "What's going on in there?"

"That's where the couples are hanging out," Meghan says. "That means Will here's got us all three to himself." She twinkles at you.

Mikaela, who has a great, fluffy mane of brown hair and a very sober stare, nods vaguely at you as she drops to the floor, then leans back to give a long look into the other room. "Katy and Isaac?" she asks Stephanie when she turns back around.

Meghan answers: "It seems like a good match."

Mikaela gives you a thoughtful look, then turns to Stephanie. She doesn't even have to ask anything, for Stephanie's eyes turn to slits as she says, "Mitchell tracked Prescott in like gum on the bottom of his shoe."

* * * * *

And something in you seems to break. Without a word, you haul yourself onto your feet and leave the room.

Stephanie has been a dismissive bitch to you for as long as you've known her. Yeah, so you're not a natural athlete, or a pile of lean muscle like Sean Mitchell or the guys in the other room. That doesn't mean that she gets sneer at you because you flinch when someone pitches a fastball at your face, or to snort when you miss a free throw, or grab her head like she's got a migraine when the soccer ball goes between your feet—all things she's done in the past when watching you perform in P. E. class. And if she doesn't even like looking at you? Well, fine, you don't much like looking at her, even though she's a handsome girl with great knockers and strong, supple thighs that you could spend weeks kissing all over.

But does she have to treat you like a stain on the air that she's trying to peer through or past to see something more interesting?

And does she really have the right to call you "gum that Mitchell tracked in on his shoe"?

You get briefly lost as you wander through a brightly lit kitchen and into a laundry room before finding your way out through a door and onto a deck attached to the back of the house. The porch light is off, and you stand there, slouching against a railing, and glaring into the darkening yard while listening to the grumble of traffic and the barks of neighborhood dogs. The fuck of it all is that you'll have to wait for Sean to turn loose, and he told his mom it would ten before he would be back, and if he's got a girl with him, that will probably turn into an eleven o'clock or even a midnight departure. Can you kill those hours out here, in the back yard? Maybe you can grab your backpack and walk back home.

Consumed by these black thoughts, you flinch when you hear the back door open and shut. The deck boards creak, and then the girl is at your elbow. "Hey," Stephanie says. "I'm sorry, Will. That was a shit thing to say."

"It's alright," you mumble.

"No, it isn't. I didn't even think what I said, it just popped out, but—"

"Then why did it 'pop out' if you weren't thinking it?"

"It's just an expression, man, it's something my brother used to say. I told you I'm sorry."

"And I told you it was okay."

You're given a moment of silence before Stephanie seizes you by the chin and wrenches you around so she can stare you in the face.

"I said I'm sorry, Will," she says in a very even tone while holding you in this death grip. "I mean it. I'm sorry, I shouldn't have said it, and I didn't mean it. But if you want to be a baby about it—"

You tear yourself free of her grip, and she puts her hands up.

"Okay, I shouldn't have said that either. Jesus, I'm being a real bitch tonight. You know it and I know it too. But I'm done with this thing tonight and I'm going home now, so you can start having fun after I'm gone." She turns and opens the door.

Next: "A Study Date with Stephanie" 

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