The Book of Masks (Vol. 1)

Teasing the Cats

Previously: "The Cooper D'etat" 

As soon as your "mom" has stalked off to dust another room, you sneak upstairs to hide.

Jordan's bedroom is fairly tidy, not because he's a tidy sort of person—he's even sloppier and lazier than you are—but because his mom keeps it picked up for him. He drops his clothes on the floor or shoves them into the closet hamper, but she washes, irons and returns them to the dresser or the hangers; she always makes the bed up by mid-afternoon; and Jordan, being no more a reader than anyone else in the family, keeps his shelves bare of any books except those he needs for the semester. Only his lacrosse gear, shoved in the corner, gets regular attention from him.

And yet the room has a rumpled feel. The chair at the desk is askew, the desktop is piled with papers and books and pencils, and the bedspread is wrinkled from where he crashed yesterday afternoon for a pre-party catnap. You wrinkle it further by falling backward onto it, and take out your cell phone. For a quarter hour you nurse a cursory erection as you flip through the album of college girls Jordan has surreptitiously snapped photos of, before you're interrupted by a text from Jack. He wants to know if you want to go see the just-opened Howling Skies with him and some of the other guys.

You suck on a tooth. It's tempting, for a movie would get you out of the house, and Elise has been keen to see it. It's a steampunk thing with pirates and airships, she told Jordan back when she first mentioned it to him. Elise has a really sexy body, but she's also got nerdy tastes. To his own surprise, Jordan is really turned on by the combination.

You're about to text Jack an affirmative when you catch sight of the time at the top of the phone: 2:27. The show won't be over before you're due back at Blackwell's, so you regretfully demur.

Voices waft from downstairs, but you don't peek out of your room until you hear soft footfalls in the carpeted hallway outside your door. You roll off your bed and go out to check.

Chelsea's door is open, and when you look in you find her bustling about her dresser, changing out hair combs and earrings. She turns sharply when you call. "I hear you're in charge of dinner tonight," you tell her.

"That's right," she says, and her face loses a little of its color. "Lasagna." She turns back to the dresser.

"That's pretty complicated. And Mom says you're in charge of all the cooking from now on."

"That's right. She's, uh, going to help me out. Giving me pointers."

"What, are you planning on opening a restaurant or something? Why the sudden interest in cooking?"

Chelsea turns a little pink. "It's not a sudden—! It's just something I, uh, want to get more practice with!"

"Did Gordon say something to you about needing to learn to cook?" A feeling of faint revulsion washes over you, and you realize that Jordan is no fonder of Gordon than you are. He's rather less fond, in fact, for he actually does have some protective instincts for his sister.

Chelsea's color deepens. "If he did," she retorts, "I don't think it's any of your business!" She turns back to the dresser and fumbles about in the top drawer. When she doesn't turn back around, you tread downstairs.

Of course you know why your "sister" is doing the cooking now. Chelsea only knows how to add granola to a cup of yogurt, and in Kelly Cooper's body she would be no more capable of cooking a meal than you are. Maybe less capable. And so Kelly, now in Chelsea's body, has to take over.

But your scornful reference to Gordon—though uttered by chance—has reminded you that you have at least one sharp stick you can poke at the real Chelsea with.

You find your "mom" sorting through the dirty clothes in the laundry room, muttering to herself. "Is Chelsea's boyfriend going to start eating with us?" you ask her.

She nearly drops the jeans she's holding. "What?"

"Is Gordon going to start eating with us? I mean, if she's going to be fixing meals around here—"

"What's that got to do with Gordon?"

You shrug. "Nothing, I guess. Only, I was just wondering if that's how come she wants to start fixing meals so bad. Give her an excuse to have him over, show off what she can do." You lower voice. "It seems like they're getting pretty serious about each other, don't you think?"

She flushes, just like the girl upstairs. "Well, so what if they are?" she stammers. "It's good if they are, and if Chelsea wants to, mm—" She twitches all over, and covers it by snatching up an armful of clothes and dumping them in the washer.

"Is she going out with him tonight? It's Saturday, you know. Heavy date night."

She twitches again, and runs her hands all over the front of the washer, as though searching out by touch for the settings she wants. "I told you, she's in charge of cooking dinner."

"Well, after dinner, then. It looks like she's getting ready to go out. She's doing up her hair and stuff."

"So why do you suddenly care?"

"I don't 'suddenly care'," you retort. You glance back into the house, before adding, "But it just seems like this is the kind of thing she'd be doing—this learning to cook and stuff—if she was thinking about getting really serious about Gordon. Like, really serious. I mean, up to now, Chelsea and cooking was, like ... I dunno. A dog taking piano lessons."

Your mom flushes.

"Well," she says in a shrill voice, "then I guess it's about time she took an interest in—! And maybe you'd better learn something about cooking too, Jordan, if you're going to be moving out of—! And you can't just keep ruining your body with fast food," she gabbles, interrupting herself yet again. "It's high time some one of us told you that you're getting fat! Too fat to be walking around without a shirt on, that's for—! Get a clean one!" she shouts as you bend over to pluck a black t-shirt from the dirty pile. She's breathing hard, and her eyes have a glitter of danger in them.

"Chill out, mom, I'm just—"

"Don't talk to me that way, I'm your mother!"

"I'm just saying—"

"Do you want to be grounded, mister?"

You don't know what to say to that, so you just stare back. Even with Jordan's instincts, and with his "mother" standing right in front of him, you have a hard time taking Chelsea seriously. She's trying way too hard.

And she's the first to falter. Her eyes flick over to something behind you, and she visibly flinches. You turn to find that your sister has crept up behind and is watching and listening with an expression of concern.

You dodge out from between them. "I'll just go change," you say. "I'm supposed to meet some guys for a, uh, study session in a bit." Neither of the women stops you, and neither one speaks (if at all) until you're out of earshot on the stairs.

* * * * *

Your jabs at Chelsea didn't land quite right, but on the drive out to Blackwell's you amuse yourself by fantasizing about the tug of war that must be developing between Chelsea and Kelly over Gordon.

It wasn't just on Thursday that Gordon and his current girlfriend took their lunch in the private loft over the gym. On Friday they took their lunch there too. And this morning, as you were getting ready to meet Jordan, you got a text from Lin, who said that Gordon's car was in the gym parking lot when she got up to the school for an impromptu jog around the track, which suggests that he spent the night there. Did "Chelsea" spend it there with him? You wish Jordan had spent last night at home, so that he could know if his sister's bedroom was unoccupied or not.

And one thought will lead to another, and you almost drive off the road when it occurs to you that Chelsea, in her mother's body, will be sharing a bed with her father. Yikes and double yikes! For though Kelly Cooper's particular memories have faded, you do remember certain facts, like how much Rob and Kelly like to have sex with each other.

So you've a preoccupied air when you arrive at Blackwell's. He sends you upstairs to change, and when you wake again in your own face, you are alone. When you catch up to the professor downstairs, he tells you that he has already sent the Jordan-bot on its way with orders to resume Jordan's life and to return tomorrow by noon.

"Are you sure it's safe to let it go out?" you ask.

He frowns. "That's what it's designed to do," he says. "To impersonate its original while the magician—"

"I just mean it's not going to tell its family or friends where it's been or what's been happening to it, is it?"

"Don't be absurd. I've given it strict instructions on what it can say and do. Really, Will," Blackwell says, sounding tired, "you underestimate me."

You spend the rest of the evening on Latin and sigils. You do very well, you think, and Blackwell only has to correct you at a few point. But he seems to grow more and more peevish with you, and finally dismisses you from your studies with yet an hour to go before midnight.

* * * * *

The next morning, you are washing up the breakfast dishes—on Blackwell's orders—when Jordan comes in. "Yeah, hey, bruh," he greets you. His tone is wary, and he is giving you the fish eye. "Had fun," he says when you ask what he did last night. "Went clubbing." His brow furrows. "Hooked up with this girl I knew back in high school."

Later, upstairs, when you wake inside his mask and mind again, you are able to confirm that the girl in question was Lucy Vredenburg.

Next: "Flirting with Disaster" 

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"Table of Contents (Vol. 1)" 
"The Book of Masks (Vol. 1)"