The Book of Masks (Vol. 2)

A Change of Mind

Previously: "A Manufactured Rebound" 

"Yeah, we need to make it plausible," you mutter. Your scalp crawls.

"Great!" Cindy chirps. "We'll tell people you were hanging out with Eva and Jessica, and I came along, and I was totally moaning and bitching about calculus, and you"—she snatches up your hand with a giggle—"offered to tutor me."

You yank your hand away. Cindy frowns. "What's wrong?"

"Will you stop with all this cutesy, freaky flirting?" Your cock is straining against the front of your trousers as Cindy Vredenburg—blonde bombshell cheerleader—pouts at you with saucer-like eyes. "I know who you are, dude, and it's freaking w—"

"I have to act like this, Will," Cindy says in a small voice. She puts her hands behind her back. "My parents are home. It's one of the things that Philip really insists on, that when we're around people who know the real girls, that we have to totally act like them."

"Your parents aren't here in the bedroom with us!"

"But we have to be especially careful at home, Philip says. If we drop out of character, even for an instant, we might not be able to get back into it fast enough if my mom and dad come in."

You swipe a hand over your forehead. "Alright, alright. But dude, do you have to turn it up so high? And if you're supposed to be acting like Cindy, would she really be all—" You shudder all over, like gelatin. "All like this with me?" The Cindy Vredenburg you know doesn't even give you a sidelong glance.

Maybe the same thought has occurred to Keith, for he puts his head to one side and studies you.

"Maybe you're right," he says. All the goop and sugar has drained from his voice. He pushes y back our hat—the stylish leather hat that he and the others bought for you—and brushes your bangs. "You clean up a lot better than I'd give you credit for, Will, but you'd have to be really freaking charming to get Cindy to thaw to you. Tell you what," he continues as you feel your eyes narrowing at the implied insult. "We'll play it just like Cindy would have played it if, you know, you and her really had hooked up in a tutoring thing. So, no kisses or flirty little accidental touching. Okay?"

Fuck, we don't have to fall over the other way! you want to yell. But with a shrug and a grumble you agree that's for the best.

* * * * *

As a tutoring session, the afternoon is kind of a bust. It's not only that you're seriously distracted by Cindy Vredenburgs breasts, hips, lips, neck, eyes, and hair. You're at best a B-minus student in Calculus, while Cindy's skating along with something like a 92% average, so Keith winds up tutoring you on several points.

By the end of the afternoon, he is a lot chillier toward you than he was before, though he denies it when you call him out on not wanting to be your girlfriend. "It's not that," he insists in Cindy's dulcet tones. "It's so goddamn perfect— Excuse me." He takes a deep breath and closes his eyes, and when he opens them again it's Cindy looking out at you again, though her expression is grave. "I'm just going to have to do a lot of acting, it seems like. I'm sorry, Will," she says, "but even with your makeover I'm just having a hard time, well, falling for you."

"Thank God, since you're really my friend Keith in a Cindy skinsuit."

She makes a face. "Don't be gross, Will, it's really unattractive. No, I'm talking to you like Cindy would." She straightens out your clothes. "You don't have the right build, for a start. I can forgive Seth for a lot of his shit—well, pfft! Cindy can—on account of what he looks like under his clothes. Although—" She titters. "Even Cindy thinks he's got a face like a horse. But if you're going to really wow her," she continues, ignoring the hot flush you feel washing over your face, "you have to do a lot better in the personality department."

You stare at her for a long moment, then pinch the bridge of your nose. "It's pretty amazing what you can get away with saying when you look like Cindy," you tell Keith. "If you'd said all this about me having a shit body and a shit personality, I'd'a thrown something at your face by now."

She giggles. "It is amazing what a sexy girl can get away with, isn't it?"

* * * * *

Keith does assure you that you don't have a "shit body" or a "shit personality," only one that needs augmenting before Cindy Vredenburg would really pay attention to you, then he shows you to the front door. You point your truck toward home, where you can look forward to a couple of hours of restless inactivity before the "cheerleader slumber party" is supposed to begin.

So instead you drive out to Caleb's.

You did get a text from him earlier—an answer to a text that you sent earlier, right after getting out of The Warehouse—but you ignored it. He doesn't hold it against you, though. He does hold last night against you, however.

"Christ, you were out of control," he says after you've said hello to his mom and he's got you back in his bedroom. "Do you even remember what you did?"

"Well, some of it."

"Do you remember telling me to go fuck myself on the ceiling? You weren't even coherent by that point."

"I'm sorry, man, I didn't mean it. Did you have fun?"

"As much fun as I could while trying to watch your ass for you. I finally let Eva and Jessica drag me away. Did Marc look after you? They told me he would."

"He got someone else to. But man, I had a wild night. And a wild afternoon today."

"Why, what happened?"

"Oh, I just wound up at Cindy Vredenburg's house, that's all." You grin at him, and waggle your eyebrows.

He frowns. Then he points at the door. "Out," he says. "Get out."

"The fuck, man?"

"I don't want to hear it. 'The Erotic Adventures of Will Prescott' is not an idea for a comic book movie I want to hear a pitch for."

"Dude, I was just tutoring her! In math!"

"And who was tutoring you? And since when is tutoring someone a reason to rush over here and tell me about it?"

"It is when it's Cindy Vredenburg!"

"Exactly, and this is why I'm throwing you out. Don't take this the wrong way, Will— And you will shut your mouth and not make the obvious comment when I tell you this—" He shove a stiff forefinger in your face. "I don't want to hear about you and your cheerleader girlfriends until I have a cheerleader girlfriend of my own."

"Pfnerk!"

Caleb seizes you by the shoulder and propels you out of the room. "The only thing that is keeping me from killing you myself," he says as he marches you through the living room, "is the knowledge that Seth will kill you himself. Goodbye, Will. I'll see you Monday." He thrusts you out the front door.

* * * * *

Caleb was pretty rude, but he did make a good point at the very end, and it was a point that clarifies some of your own confused feelings about Keith's proposal. You wind up talking about it with Maria Vasquez—a.k.a., Philip Fairfax—after you pick her up for the "slumber party."

"Keith texted me what you and he talked about this afternoon after the rest of us left," Maria tells you. "I have to be honest with you, Will. I have doubts."

"Yeah, Keith told me he was having trouble picturing us together," you mutter back. "I don't have the right personality."

"It's not just that. Have you considered Seth's likely reaction? He doesn't strike me as the sort to just let his girlfriend go, even if she insists on the breakup. There are a lot of ways he could make your life difficult if you're the one who replaces him in, uh, Cindy's affections."

"Yeah, Caleb told me the same thing."

She swing to face you, her mouth open. "You told someone else about what we're doing?" she exclaims.

"No! I only told him that I wound up over at Cindy's house. He told me Seth would kill me if he found out. So I guess I'll tell Keith we're broken up even before we start going out," you sigh.

The drive continues in silence until you're almost at Cindy's, where you will be picking up that petrified beta, when Maria says, "There might be a way of handling both problems."

"What problems?"

"What we were talking earlier, Will. Basically, you're not having the right personality to handle Cindy after she's broken up with Seth. We could give you a new personality."

The phrasing jars you even though you have no idea what he means. "The fuck do you mean, 'giving me a new personality'?"

"I mean that there's a way of giving you an internal makeover, like the rest of us have gotten an external makeover. You know that we have the personalities that go with these feigned exteriors. What I mean is," she adds after looking over at your frown, "we have their brains inside us too. Memories, personalities, talents, character traits. You don't have to wear a mask to get these. There is a way of giving you someone else's personality traits while leaving you externally unchanged. Oh, and you'd still have your own, of course, just as we still have our own."

Yeah, Fairfax is still definitely Fairfax, even if he does look like Maria.

* * * * *

It's an idea the others like too, after you've talked over with them at Carlos's studio: Give you a personality that can withstand Seth and would look plausibly attractive to Cindy. But whose? After long discussion, the consensus settles on four candidates.

Next: "Enigmatic Antecedents" 

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