The Book of Masks (Abridged)

Fear Strikes Out

"CALEB!"

He continues hurrying forward, hunching as though against a wind. "Caleb!" How can he not hear you? "Hey, wait up, dude!" He seems to hurry even more.

But you do catch up. "Didn't you hear me calling! Where's your head?"

"I don't want to talk to you," he says. "I don't want to be anywhere near you. Stay away from our locker." He keeps moving, quickly, out of the parking lot and toward the school.

"The fuck? Do I have cooties?"

"In a way. Scuttlebutt is the Molester's been bragging to Lynch and his friends about how he scored money off you. You've got a shitstorm heading your way, and I don't want to take any collateral damage."

"The fuck you say!"

"The fuck I don't! You better have at least fifty on you, and you better try dolloping it out in small bills." He veers sharply away from the door to the gym; pre-class basketball practice will be letting out soon. "You're gonna take a loss on that job, and then you're gonna start losing blood!"

Jason Lynch; Steve Patterson; Gordon Black. The star baseball pitcher, and the two top basketball players. Creme of Westside society. Alpha jocks, and alpha bullies. The Molester is just a pilot fish to their Great Whites. They're so far above you they never noticed you.

Until you bled money to Lester Pozniak.

Caleb darts a fearful glance at you. "Why the fuck did you have to be such a pussy?"

* * * * *

Wham! Your head hits the locker door so hard you think you hear the school bell.

"It's like a piggy bank!" Lynch's voice is almost deranged with glee.

Wham! It rings again.

"I wonder how much I got saved up in here. Never opened it before. Must be a fortune!"

A hard kick sweeps your feet from under you, and your shoulder cracks on the floor. You wince up into Lynch's wide, grinning face. He looks like a fashion model—blinding teeth; strong cheekbones; symmetrical features; the complexion of a ripe peach; and sandy hair. Only his eyes—blue, naturally—blaze in a way that reveals the sadistic psycho behind the all-American face.

He puts his foot on your chest and steps down hard. "Squeal like a piggy, my little piggy bank. Squeal, or I'll bust you open."

"Squeal?" you squeal.

He hocks up a loogie—a big one—and with a baseball player's practiced ease hocks it into your right eye.

You swallow and take out a ten. He snatches it, examines it, and slowly tears it into eight pieces. "Twice that, Prescott. If Pozniak gets ten, I get twenty." He leans over you. "Tomorrow. And I suggest you start carrying at least that much ever'day."

* * * * *

"It's my fault, Will," says Blackwell. "I should have foreseen the precedent it would set."

"I'm going to need a raise," you say sullenly from the other side of the library desk you and the professor are jointly occupying. It is Thursday, your fourth day on the job, and the second day you have been openly mugged in the school hallways.

"A raise is what I'm giving you now, I believe." Blackwell looks up at you from the banknote he is doodling on. "In a manner of speaking. By the way, did the Molester accost you today?"

You shake your head. "Just Lynch. Pretty sure they've worked out a schedule. One a day until I crack."

"That may work to your advantage," the professor muses. "How many of these custom-made twenties will you need?"

"Until I graduate? Oh, about—"

"No no. How many bullies? You'll only need one for each."

"Right. Because one go at me is all they really want." You roll your eyes.

"I don't resent your skepticism. But let's just see what happens. It's my money we're losing."

"But it's my face!"

"How is your face? Swelling down?" He picks up another twenty and begins to carefully mark it.

You touch your cheek. Anyone who hadn't seen Lynch's assault would never know he'd hit you. "Thanks," you say. "I don't think I've thanked you yet for this or for those black eyes you fixed. By the way, how's your finger? How did you say you hurt it?"

He grimaces. "I didn't say, and it will be alright. Please continue to concentrate on that design. I found a mistake in one that you completed last night." He glowers briefly, then regains his composure.

"We were talking about your being humiliated," he continues as he bends over another bill. "We all have to be humiliated at one time or another. It's part of learning. So what have you learned from these humiliating experiences?"

"That I need to stop knuckling under to them."

"Tch! And what happens when you stand up to them? Do you ever win?"

"No," you admit through gritted teeth.

"And you're still humiliated." He shakes the pen to unblock an obstruction. "How do you avoid being humiliated, win or lose, yield or resist?"

"I dunno," you say impatiently. "Just live with it? Don't give them the satisfaction?"

"A Stoic attitude," he exclaims, as though this is a strikingly new thought. "Ask the residents of Auschwitz how that worked out. But perhaps we are framing the question wrong. So: How do you prevent the bullies from humiliating you?"

"Really, I don't know."

"That's because you've lived at the bottom so long you don't see where you are. You're like a frog in a deep well. No, you're like a newt in a latrine, and you let everyone drop excrement on you. What would you do if you found yourself in a latrine?"

"Get out of it, I suppose."

"Exactly!" The professor's cry shocks you into looking up from your work, and you find him sitting up straight and beaming at you. "So how does one avoid being humiliated? One avoids the situations where humiliation is possible."

He says this like he's discovered a new continent, but you're less impressed with the insight. "I can't stop going to school."

"Ha! But it's not a physical context I am speaking of. It's a social one. You are lower than them, and one only ever bullies those who are lower than one's self. So you need to get higher than them. You are afraid of them. You need to make them afraid of you."

"Like how? Take karate?"

He suddenly looks very wry and puckish. "Or an equivalent. This is your karate chop," he says, handing you a just-finished twenty. "And instead of 'Hiyaa!' you say 'I'll give you twenty dollars to leave me alone'."

* * * * *

The week that follows is awful. After Lynch comes Patterson. Then Black and Javits, who more often than not satisfies himself with torturing your friend Keith. Then David Kirkham and Gary Chen double-team you, and three of their goonish friends attack you the day after that. Also Roy Nelson and Dominic Kleason, and some other guys you don't even know but who are built like football players.

You fight off a sophomore, though. Your pride couldn't take giving in to a tenth-grader.

And then nothing.

At first you think it must be a lull, or that they have unaccountably lost interest in you. For three days you hurry through the halls, at each moment expecting a blow. But one never falls.

And then on Friday morning, you are passing by the gym on the way into the school when the doors fly open. Laughing, cursing, jeering, the basketball stars charge out, straight at you. Instinctively, you flinch against a wall—

And look up to see Black and Patterson and Javits flinching away from you.

That's Gordon Black, who is six foot-six and two hundred pounds of ugly muscle: his eyes go wide and his nostrils flare.

That's Seth Javits, who one-handed hauled your friend Keith up a ladder onto the gym roof: he darts around to put Jeremy Richards between you and him.

That's Steve Patterson, the tallest guy in school, who regularly carries three victims at a time over his shoulders to the end of the track, where he sits on them and twists their legs into interesting three-dimensional puzzles: he runs back into the gym.

The other players stop and stare in bafflement as Javits and Black slink back into the gym after their friend. Richards then give you a puzzled glare, then shuffle off to the main building amid a confused murmur of voices.

"It was the weirdest thing ever," you tell Caleb later at lunch. He's not done avoiding you, but you have managed to corner him.

"They're trying to psyche you out or something," he says after you describe the events that morning. "It'll start again on Monday. Just a trick to make it hurt more."

"They're not that subtle. Besides how is that supposed to work?"

"They're mocking you, pretending to afraid. Or some shit like that."

"I dunno." You scratch your head. "Those guys haven't hit me up since Monday. I haven't even seen the Molester around."

"Don't worry, I'm filling in for you," he says bitterly.

It suddenly occurs to you that Caleb shouldn't be wearing sunglasses on a cloudy day like this. "What are you hiding behind your shades?" you ask him.

He turns on you slowly and pulls them down. Both his eyes are a livid mix of red and yellow and black.