The Book of Masks (Vol. 2)

Up in Smoke

Previously: "A Dopey Trade" 

The bell for eighth period rings, making you officially tardy.

"I'll talk to you guys later," you growl. Except probably not, you add in an undertone.

"Looking forward to doing business with you!" Spencer calls out as you sprint away. You narrowly avoid crashing into Justin Roth, one of the stoners who you often see out at the portables, who is trudging out to join Spencer and Steven.

* * * * *

Mr. Cash.

That's what Caleb leaned over to mutter at you last April, when you and him were watching the James Bond movie The Man with the Golden Gun, and the villain appeared on screen. There's a definite resemblance between Scaramanga and your Astronomy teacher—the long face; the dark, flashing eyes under bushy black eyebrows; the iron-gray hair raked straight back from the pale forehead; the full lips that twists around a mouth full of hard, straight teeth—and not just physically.

He doesn't say anything when you rush in, but he does summon you back to his desk after the last bell rings. We have a tardy bell for a reason, Mr. Prescott, he growls at you in a deep, resonant voice. It's to encourage you, if you are not yet inside the classroom, to spend the next hour in the library or in a restroom or wherever else you please, instead of bursting into my classroom like Hannibal over the Alps after I have already begun my lecture. There is some more in that vein, to the effect that although you were physically in the room for class, technically you were absent and will be recorded as such. At least he doesn't give you detention.

So that is the reason you are late rendezvousing with Caleb and Keith outside Mr. Walberg's classroom, and when Caleb asks why you are late, that's why you tell him, I got shot in the face by the man with the golden gun. And then when he asks if you are having a stroke or something because you aren't making any sense, you tell him, Never mind.

Almost you texted him to say you weren't going to show. But you decided to be a grown-up about it, because this afternoon he's going to try getting into Mr. Walberg's desk, and he's going to need your help.

The problem is that Mr. Walberg hasn't got the room to himself. Dane Matthias has detention with him, and that means that, when Mr. Walberg leaves the room (assuming he ever does) someone is going to need to distract Dane while a third person watches for Mr. Walberg's return even as Caleb sneaks into his desk to make the swap.

It was Caleb who came up with the plan, and he's the one who disperses your forces, ordering you to sit on the floor outside the classroom while he and Keith loiter out of sight around the corner. Your job—

"Would you like to take that and yourself someplace else, Mr. Prescott?"

You look up from your phone and almost jump from your skin. Mr. Walberg is looming over you.

"Huh? Oh, n-no. I'm just waiting for someone."

"Suit yourself," Mr. Walberg says, and waddles off toward the restroom at the other end of the wing. You close the browser on your phone and text a single letter—"k"—to Keith. A moment later he comes sauntering around the corner, hat on backwards, and goes into the classroom. "Ay!" he calls, and from inside Dane groans an answering, "Ay!"

A count of ten, and Caleb comes sliding from around the corner. He gives you a quick nod, then peeks into the classroom. Satisfied, he tiptoes in and over to Mr. Walberg's desk, where he crouches in a position so he can search the desk drawers while also cocking an eye at over atyou. You shift so you can simultaneously watch Caleb and the hallway. Keith's voice carries loudly into the hall, but you pay no attention to anything he says.

Your heart is thumping as Caleb slides open the big drawer where Mr. Walberg is keeping the stuff. Silently he paws through it, and after a moment takes out and shows you a thumb drive, then digs a little more before taking out a plastic bag containing a marijuana joint. You glance down the hallway, and give him a thumb's up. From his backpack Caleb takes another thumb drive and the busted hair dryer you brought in from home this morning, and drops them both into the drawer. He slides it shut and peeps out over the top of the desk, then on his haunches waddles toward the door. He stops just inside the doorway, his nose twitching inquisitively at you, and you make another glance down the hallway, then gesture him to stand. He shoots upright, and comes sauntering out to join you as you scramble to your own feet. You touch knuckles, and a moment later Keith comes out. Then, fighting the urge to run, you set off the opposite way from which Mr. Walberg went. You make one quick glance back down the hallway before rounding the corner. It is still clear.

Once you're out of sight of the classroom door, the three of you bolt for the nearest exit.

* * * * *

You and your friends drive out (separately) to the old elementary school near your house. It closed a couple of decades ago and was converted into a community center, but you park yourselves on the side of the building farthest from the wing where the center is housed, and there you light and pass around the joint you recovered. Fuck Steven and Spencer and that book, you decided. Let 'em keep it. Half the joint is still unsmoked when you cut short the celebration, and you hide what's left in a cleft in a nearby tree before parting. You feel good, but not so "good" that you don't rush through the living quarters when you get home and run upstairs to spray deodorant all over yourself and change clothes before going back down to help get dinner on the table.

Still, you're relaxed enough that you don't feel any fear when your dad asks about the book, and you tell him that the guy wouldn't sell it back. He fixes you with a sharp glance and asks how much the guy paid you for it. "Thirty dollars," you carelessly reply, and he drops the subject.

The next morning you do not go looking for Spencer, and when you see Steven in Mr. Hawks's class, you tell him you changed your mind and don't want the thing back.

"That's cool," he says. "It actually looks kind of interesting."

"So you're not gonna want to trade it back to me?"

"I dunno. Maybe. I'll let you know."

One of his friends comes in just then, distracting him, and you let the matter drop.

* * * * *

You are given approximately thirty-six hours to feel good about yourself before the roof caves in on Friday morning, when your first-period class troops out to bury the time capsule behind the music wing. It's a dull exercise—Kelsey Blankenship reads a pompous little speech to the class, and then some of her AP friends carry out the actual internment—but you jump like you've been poked with a cattle prod when, on the way back inside afterward, Mr. Walberg himself falls in beside you. "So tell me, Mr. Prescott," he gruffly inquires, "what are you going to say in your paper?"

"Paper? Uh, what paper?" you squeak. You'd been hoping that rumor would prove to be just so much hot air.

"The paper you're going to write on your submission. You're all going to write papers on what you put in the capsule."

"Oh. Uh, I didn't know we were going to write a paper."

"Well, you are. So tell me, why did you you choose to put that thing into the time capsule? Go ahead. I really want to hear your reasoning."

And that's when you realize you're stuck for an answer.

* * * * *

"And then the moron actually tried bluffing his way through!" Caleb howls with laughter. "Right there, on the spot, he tried coming up with some bullshit reason why the future would be interested in his busted old hair dryer!"

Everyone else is laughing too.

It's lunchtime, and you're sitting out front again with Carson and James and Jenny and Paul and Keith, along with Caleb, who is entertaining the others with an account of that disaster of a conversation.

"Well, what was I supposed to say?" you holler.

"What you should'a done is say you were going to write a paper about putting some weed into the time capsule!"

"But I didn't! I gave him a hair dryer—"

"He knew you gave him weed, Prescott," Carson says. His eyes are watering with amusement. "Remember? He told you it was an 'interesting' submission."

"He noticed the swap," Caleb says, redundantly. "Like I told you he would. But if you'd told him you'd given him weed, he wouldn't'a figured out that you knew about the swap, and that you broke into his desk to swap things out!"

"I didn't break into his desk!" you yell. "You did!"

The whole group goes very quiet, all of a sudden.

"I hope, for the sake of your continued popularity with your friends," Carson gruffly informs you, "that you don't intend to narc on Caleb."

Well, of course you don't.

But it all means that now you get to share detention with Dane in Mr. Walberg's classroom for an hour after school, for all of next week. You also have to take home a note to your parents explaining the circumstances of your detention: that you broke into the teacher's desk after first trying to submit a marijuana joint for the time capsule project.

So you are fucked all the way around.

Next: "Detention Deficit Disorder" 

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