The Book of Masks (Vol. 4)

Two Virgins Walk Into the Warehouse

Previously: "Bridges to a Brotherhood" 

The walls of the Warehouse rise before you: sooty red brick, broken and cracked and scored with the years. High up, under the short eaves of the roof, a row of dirty windows glares blindly down. Behind it looms an abandoned grain elevator: the crowning, post-apocalyptic touch.

Bridget pulls open one of the dented double doors leading in; a stink of dirty bodies, and stale beer and cigarettes, rolls out. You choke on the tendrils.

It’s dark inside, and the room beyond is a lot smaller than you were expecting—like a concrete box fitted inside a larger box. The floor is bare concrete (stained) and the walls are murals of graffiti covered by still more graffiti. Voices—loud and raucous—sound from deeper inside the building, but the words are smothered by the rumbling bass thump of the music coming from another room.

“Hello?” Bridget calls out. “Have you ever been here before?” she asks you.

“You know I haven’t.”

“I was talking to someone else, Kelly,” she says. “Hey!” she calls as she edges deeper in.

Spitefully, you shove her in the shoulder. “Come on, you’re the one who wanted to—“

“Don’t push me!”

“Let’s just find someone, okay?”

But you don’t have to find them. They’ve found you.

A tall guy in a football jersey and jeans, with lank hockey hair draping down to his shoulders, comes swaggering in through another doorway. Behind him swaggers a second guy, also in jeans and a jersey, with short blonde hair and a “don’t fuck with me” stare under his black eyebrows.

“Oh, hey,” Bridget calls out to them. “We’re looking for— Um. Is—?” But she falters as they stride up, silent and unblinking.

Not until they are on top of you do they speak. “Coupla virgins,” Hockey Hair mutters to his friend. He ducks and grabs you about the waist.

And then you’re airborne, tossed over Hockey Hair’s shoulder like a sack of grain. “What the—?” you gasp the world turns upside down, and the blood gushes into your face. Hockey Hair’s grip is like iron, and you’re jolted along as he carries you back the way he came in. From somewhere close, Bridget squeaks and squawks. “We can walk, you know!” you shout.

Laughs and jeers break out around you. You raise your head, but all you can see are the legs of the people crowding around you. Someone yanks at your hair.

You’re hurled with a jolt onto a hard surface. A table top? Hockey Hair thrusts his face into yours. His breath is hot and stinks of beer. “Get away!” you yell. He grabs your hands in his, then with a grunt and a leap wedges himself atop you, straddling your lap and pinning your hands under his thighs while gripping you by the wrists. He shoves his mouth over yours, and jams a thick tongue past your teeth fast enough to tear away a quick kiss.

Then—still panting heavily in your face—he fishes a hand up your shirt and grabs you by a boob. You yelp and twist under him, but he’s got at least sixty pounds on you, maybe more. His fingers pull and tug and probe at the front of your shorts.

Then, with a grimace, he leaps back and off. He smirks down at you as the crowd behind him hoots and claps. “Fuck,” he drawls. “She got titties like teabags.”

You can only gasp and glare, bug-eyed, at him.

He throws out his arm and grabs his friend, who is wedged in next to you, about the neck and pulls him back. Bridget appears from beneath him, gasping hard for air.

A long, gloating cheer goes up from the crowd. Faces—some you recognize—press up and leer at you. You scramble backward, hoping that some kind of crack will open up in the wall behind you, to let you squeeze out and escape.

But the gap, when it opens, is in the crowd. The last person you expect—Avery Ayala—pushes through. She grins as she reaches for you and Bridget.

“Go away!” “Stop that!” You slap at her. “Kelly!” she shouts. The crowd guffaws. “Just come with me!” “I’m gonna start screaming in a moment!” Hoots from the crowd. Hockey Hair turns to yell at it: “Hey! Fuckers! Back to work!” “Just calm the heck down,” Avery implores you.

“The hell was that?” Bridget asks as Hockey Hair and his friend push the crowd back. Her voice is faint.

“Just come on.” Avery pulls at her. “You want a Coke? Or maybe a beer? Something else?”

“I wanna vomit,” you tell her.

“We’ll go sit in a corner,” she says. “It’s all over now.”

* * * * *

Well, she says it’s over, but you’ve still got the shakes, even after you’re huddled in the corner of the room. Looking around, you see you’re in something that looks like saloon. Mismatched tables and chairs are scattered around the floor, and lining the walls are booths that look like they were salvaged from the city dump (or worse). Along one wall is a makeshift bar. Guys, including Hockey Hair and his friend, are setting up and unpacking boxes of beer and colas and snacks, but none of them pay the slightest attention to you. The few times you accidentally make eye contact with one of them, they look away as though they don’t even recognize you.

“It’s on account of you’re virgins,” Avery says after you and Bridget are calmed down enough to listen. She is very bright-eyed, almost giddy, as explains it all. “This is your first time out here, right?” You don’t answer, but Bridget insists she has been to the Warehouse before. “I mean, first time before things get started,” Avery says. “Just hanging out, you know?”

“How do they know we’re ‘virgins’?” you demand.

“They can just tell,” Avery says. “By the way you walked in, probably. And they do that to everyone, all the virgins.” Her smile turns nervous. “There was nothing to be scared of. I mean, it freaked me out the first time it happened to me.”

“You mean there’s other times they do it?”

“No! Well.” She twists in her seat, and her grin turns brittle. “I mean, now that you’re, um, not virgins anymore, it’s all over, it’ll be okay for you to come out on the weekends. Like now, when they’re cleaning up. I wouldn’t come out on the weekdays, though,” she adds with a shiver.

You lapse into a moody silence, and catch yourself glaring at Avery as she continues to explain the weird sociology of the Warehouse.

She’s such a delicate flower. How did she manage to “lose her virginity” at the Warehouse before Kelly did? She’s tall and skinny, with a big head and big eyes and big hair, like a flower stalk with a bulb of delicate petals bobbing atop it. She is Hispanic or something, with dark skin and coal-black hair and wide-set eyes. Her mouth relaxes easily into a smile is very broad and white. But despite her gawky build and fidgety mannerisms, she is very graceful, and during your freshman year she was a star tumbler on the gym mats.

But your discomfiture at seeing that Avery is a regular at the Warehouse is nothing on learning that Dana DiBenedetto, Kaylee Mercier, and Wendy Adler are too.

* * * * *

They’re with Darrell Jackson and his friends—when they finally show up—and they only laugh and offer congratulations when Avery tells them that you and Bridget have just “lost your virginity.” As for Darrell and his friends, they just nod and tell you that it’s “Cool.”

“Are you going to be okay?” Bridget asks you an hour later, as you’re scrubbing down the saloon tables. (That’s the official reason you came out, to help Darrell and his friends with cleaning and setting up the place again.)

“I’ll be fine as soon as we get out of here,” you retort.

She looks hurt. “If you want to go off with Darrell,” she starts to say.

“I don’t!” you hiss. You glance over your shoulder. “Is he trying to hit on me or something?” He has been more than a pest, hovering near you and voicing any silly thought that comes into his head.

“You have to ask?”

“Is this his idea of a date? I could be at home doing my brother’s stinky laundry.”

She gives you a look. “He’s a guy,” she says. “And he’s only a sophomore, he doesn’t know any better.” She leans in very close. “On our first date, we basically hung out at the cemetery, remember?”

You grimace, then glance around. Kaylee and Dana have given up even pretending to help with the cleaning, and are perched at the bar, where they’re flirting with (ugh!) Hockey Hair.

Ryder Hillberger! You actually snap your fingers when his name comes back to you. A.k.a., “The Thrillberger.” A football player, on the JV squad. Everyone assumes he’ll be quarterback next year. No wonder Kaylee and Dana are flirting with him. Like Madison, they’re on track to be cheerleaders.

Madison. You look around. Is she here? “I don’t know,” Bridget says when you ask her. “Why?”

So you tell her the idea you had, for putting a mask onto her, or onto one of her friends.

“Oh, I like that plan,” she says. “Of course, we’d have to find a way to get to her. I don’t think even I could just call her up.” She looks over your shoulder. “One of her friends,” she murmurs, half to herself. You don’t have to follow her gaze to know that she’s looking at Avery, or Kaylee, or Dana.

Then her eyebrows shoot up. “Or Ryder?” she says. “I bet she’d pick up the phone for him.”

Next: "A New Kind of Carjacking" 

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"Table of Contents (Vol. 4)" 
"The Book of Masks (Vol. 4)"