The Book of Masks (Vol. 3)

What Happened to Hannah

Previously: "It's a Boyfriend-Girlfriend Thing" 

"You got your homework?" you ask Katy the next morning in the parking lot. She pulls the metal strip from her backpack and with a bright but panicked expression waggles it at you. "Lemme see."

"Did I do good, teach?" Katy asks as you take it from her.

"I'll double-check it at lunch. Meet me out here? We can hang out in my truck, glue the stuff together and finish making it."

Katy wrinkles her nose at you and grins.

You catch your breath, and before you know what you're doing, you've caught her by the elbows and stepped up to lean in and put your face into hers. You wrinkle your nose too, and touch its tip to hers.

Then you jump back and give her a panicked grin of your own.

Katy gasps and her mouth falls open. Then she squeals and feels for your arm. You don't hold hands, but you do bump against each other as, on tottering legs, you walk into the school together.

* * * * *

The plan that Katy has come up with is very simple, and for that reason very likely to backfire spectacularly. She has texted Hannah and asked to meet her in order to "talk about" some of the problems that some of the girls are having with her. (Hannah knows she's not popular in some quarters of the school.) The idea, Katy tells you, is to corner Hannah in her car, get a mask onto her, and scamper off before she wakes up.

Well, it has the virtue of the direct approach, but you can imagine it going pear-shaped in all sorts of ways. Not that it matters. You've got your own scheme that you're not telling Katy about, and if Hannah doesn't show up where Katy is expecting her, that'll be fine.

You're only a few minutes from the first bell, and the girls' soccer team is already warming up on the fields, so you pull Katy over so she can point Hannah out to you. She's a husky girl but she's probably in better shape than you, with strong thighs, wide hips, and a massive head of wiry brown hair that she keeps pulled back in a head band.

In your classes, you ask around for Hannah's schedule so you can find her later without Katy knowing, and it's Amanda Ferguson of all people who tells you that she has Hannah for fourth-period German. So you risk being late to English so that you can look for Hannah in her German class.

She comes sweeping along just minutes before a tardy bell: a tall girl who thanks to her height and muscles would probably have a weight advantage on you in a wrestling match. Almost at once you can tell why she would be popular with some of the guys and unpopular with a lot of the girls, for she has a bold stare and a lazy, mischievous smile that mark her out as a girl who probably likes to have fun and doesn't give two fucks who knows it.

"Hey, Hannah," you say, jumping in front of her as she swings toward the classroom doorway. She stops to give you a direct but not unfriendly look. She's a lot less scary than Stephanie, you find yourself thinking. "You don't know me, but my name's Will Prescott and I'm, uh—"

Katy Conlee's boyfriend? You hang a hard left at the last moment and introduce yourself merely as Katy's "friend."

"Yeah, you're supposed to meet up with her after school, right?" you confirm. "Four-thirty at Panera? Can I get you to come meet up with me first? Down at the Acheson Community Center?"

Naturally, Hannah wants to know what for, and she wants to know where this community center is. But after giving her the bullshit excuse you cooked up, she agrees with a skeptically amused nod of the head to meet you at a little before four.

* * * * *

You spend lunchtime in your truck with Katy, eating and guiding her through the final process of gluing the metal band to the interior of the mask. When you are done, you have a mask that she has made one-hundred-percent herself.

And she can't wait to use it on Hannah. Last night, like the night before, she slept inside Stephanie's mask, and she is full of fiery schemes for teasing, humiliating, and breaking Hannah before delivering the coup-de-grace by destroying her relationship with Marc.

"I should show up at Panera in Stephanie's mask, do you think?" she breathlessly asks. "That way it doesn't look like I'm— Oh, but then Stephanie might be the one who got in trouble," she corrects herself with a hard, sharp frown. "Shoot! Oh, but even if Hannah did think it was her, she can handle anything that Hannah can throw back at her." You're struck again by how much Katy seems to worship the ground that Stephanie walks on.

"You will be out there in time, won't you, Will?" she anxiously asks as you hop out to go to class. You assure her that you will.

* * * * *

So you're feeling pretty anxious yourself as four o'clock turns to four-fifteen, and Hannah still hasn't shown up at the elementary school. You don't have contact info for her, and it would suck mightily if she went out to Panera to meet Katy while you were waiting for her here. But finally, as you're about to wrap things up and race out to meet Katy, Hannah comes driving up in a big SUV.

"Hey there," she says after she's opened the door. "So what's the deal with Katy that you wanted to warn me about?"

That was your bullshit excuse for this meeting: as a concerned friend of Katy (you told her) you were worried that she was going to say or do something stupid at this meeting with Hannah, and you wanted to warn Hannah ahead of time so she wouldn't take it personally.

But you don't want to talk more than you have to, and slam the mask into her face. She falls backward into the SUV, then slides out. You catch her, but it's like catching an avalanche, and she flops out of your arms to the ground.

It's hard work—the hardest you've ever done, harder even than digging up all that dirt the other night—but you manage to drag her by the arms to the basement door. She thumps and bumps all the way down the stairs, and during the whole trip you can only visualize what would happen if someone came upon you doing this. After getting her to the bottom, you run up to close the door.

There's no question of getting Hannah up onto a table, so with an overstraining heart you drag her over and flop her onto the open book. The other materials you had already prepared, and you quickly dump them over her. What will happen? You don't know. But you will have a mask of her, and a lackey to set it on, if things go really wrong.

But you try not to think about things going "really wrong." At the same time it's also hard to think of a way in which they will go "really right" that won't end with this beefy girl, after she's recovered from your experiment, punching your face through a cinderblock wall.

So, in truth, it's inertia that is carrying you forward. Got to get through this spell, you tell yourself. See what's on the other side.

All the powders, liquid, and dirt are piled up on Hannah when the mask reappears on her face. Not until you struck the match do you think, Am I going to wind up burning up all her clothes? and What happens if I set this up wrong? Terrible as that would be, you know how terrible the consequences will be if Hannah wakes up find her self covered in flammable filth.

So you drop the match onto her.

* * * * *

Do u stil want to get tgther? you text Katy an hour later. You really really hope the answer will be "No," but you feel like you have to ask. It would look suspicious of you didn't. It's some time before she answers.

In the meantime, you feverishly study the next spell. If it doesn't solve the problem you've made for yourself, maybe the one after it will.

Hannah has gone home, after you used her cell phone to text Katy, telling her that she can't make it out to Panera to see her. Katy in turn has texted your phone to tell you of the cancellation.

At least, you hope it was Katy who texted you. Lotta people suddenly pretending to be people that they aren't.

Take the Hannah who went home. It wasn't Hannah, but a lackey who answered to her name, and which listened with a contemptuous incredulity as you told her to get dressed and drive home and pretend like she had never seen or even met you before.

But there's another Hannah in the basement with you. This one won't talk to you, though. You suspect she won't talk to anyone ever again, unless you can find a fix.

When you dropped the match onto her, a purple flame bloomed off, but it didn't burn long, and when it winked out you found that Hannah had been transformed into a statue. Well, technically it's called a vinctus, and the book (when you pried it from under her) smugly informed you that the real Hannah is now imprisoned within it—a thing with the color, texture, and solidity of the pedisequos you made earlier, but in the shape of Hannah Westrick, as though she had been flash-petrified. Is there a way to get her out? The book doesn't even so much as hint that there is. You had to peel the clothes off it and give it to the other Hannah that you materialized in the opposite corner of the basement.

So when Katy texts back, Come hang out w me? you would really like to find an excuse to turn her down.

Next: "Two-Faced Girlfriend" 

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"Table of Contents (Vol. 3)" 
"The Book of Masks (Vol. 3)"