The Book of Masks (Vol. 2)

Sacking a Ballplayer

Previously: "Mystery Date" 

Eight-ten, Monday morning. You're at the corner of the gym nearest the tennis court, gulping down hot, bitter coffee and chain-smoking cigarettes. Exhaustion claws at the bags around your eyes.

You didn't go to sleep last night. After tearing through your homework while babysitting your grandfather, you'd retired to the "bedroom" to polish off what remained of your schoolwork with no qualm about its accuracy, then shoved it away and until six-thirty carved runes into the three brain-bands you'd prepared. With the container of glue you attached them into three blank masks, and attached the bands of Evans, Mendoza and Thomason into their masks. You were reeling, but a hard, cold shower revived you enough to propel you through breakfast and out the door. You were at the school by eight.

Now you're waiting impatiently for fucking Mendoza to show up. In that time you see Jacob May, and arrange to sell him three eighths at lunch.

Mendoza finally shows, and with heavy feet and ankles and legs you lead him back to the first portable. "Bring him back here," you tell him, referring to Kevin Hall. "You do like I did to you yesterday. You let him go in first, then grab his chest from behind and bring the mask around like this." You demonstrate, clasping his chest from behind with your left arm and putting your right palm over his face. "Lay him down, whistle for me. I'll be over there, waiting." You give him a querying look—surely he can pull this off—and hand him one of the blanks when he nods. An encouraging clap on the arm sends him back toward the gym while you duck around a corner. You squat in the grass, set the coffee to the side, and light another cigarette.

This is brutal, man, and you're not thinking of your victims. Trying to get this shit done in one day? Fucking brutal. But if not now, when? You got maybe two hours after school before you have to be up at the country club, to work until midnight. And homework after that. You exhale a stream of smoke and rub your nose. Then what? Five hours sleep, if you're lucky, before Tuesday starts. If you don't take care of business today, Tuesday would be the earliest you could do it, and that's too much time for your bitches to dig in their heels. Hustle 'em into it, that's the only way.

Even then you won't be done, because today you can only get Trantham and Hall. You could probably get Roth too, if you'd pushed Thomason in that direction. Luckily, it looks like he's beguiled enough by the idea of Andrea Varnsworth that you can let him dangle a bit longer. You close your eyes, pondering how to get her. Your head droops.

You jerk it back up as you feel yourself fading. Also, there are voices.

Guys' voices. You raise up, alert. Cheerful, laughing voices. They don't sound like Hall and Mendoza.

Aw, Christ, not this. Adrian Semple and Keith Hennepin appear around the corner. You fly into their faces. "Hey, faggots, who the fuck said to come back here?"

Semple blinks in surprise, but his grin doesn't fade. It does vanish, though, when you shove him into a wall. Hennepin steps forward, but you slap him across the cheek with your left hand and show him the bunched up fist you've made with your right. "I asked who the fuck told you to come back here?"

"Hey, we can—" Semple starts to stutter.

"And I said you fuckin' can't. We got a fuckin' campus big enough for twelve hundred assholes, you gotta be back here?" You grasp Hennepin's skinny throat and force him backwards. "You walk back where you came from, you little shit-dribble, and you go put your fucking head in a fucking toilet, and you flush it till you got yourself a perm. You do that now, cocksucker, or I'll do it to you every day for the rest of the month." You shove him away. "Semple, same goes for you."

"Jesus, man, you don't gotta— Okay, I'm going!" He runs past, shielding his face and head.

"Nothin' personal, man, see you at lunch," you call after them, but they just hurry away.

They pass Mendoza and Hall.

You step back around the corner to your waiting spot. The confrontation with Keith and Adrian jammed some adrenaline through you, but it's left you weak and shaky, for your exhausted constitution can barely handle the rush. You swallow most of the rest of the coffee, and make a face.

You hear Mendoza and Hall talking gruffly. You wonder vaguely what story Mendoza told Hall to get him back here. Hall uses, but Mendoza isn't his supplier. Do they share a class? That would be awkward after the switch.

Your meditation is interrupted by a low whistle; you jog around the corner and into the portable as Mendoza holds the door open for you. Hall is just inside the doorway.

He's a junior, and he's not especially big, but like his brother Nathan he plays for the varsity football squad. His hair is honey brown in color; it's short and straight, but twists away into curls at the ends. His features are regular, and his face is thinner than his brother's, and he wouldn't be a bad-looking son of a bitch except that his expression settles rather too easily into a scowl; and he has a reputation for being mean—gleefully so. He's dressed in half-assed gangbanger attire: floppy shorts that drape below the knee, socks that come right halfway to the hems of the shorts, gaudy sneakers, a t-shirt that hangs past the end of his butt. "Take your clothes off," you tell Mendoza as you seize one of Hall's feet. "Then help me get this fucker undressed."

* * * * *

You've had so much practice by now that it almost goes as clockwork: Undress the victim, redress him in your partner's clothes while your partner dresses in his; send your partner to another portable; take the mask from the victim when it reappears on his face; seal it up while he's still unconscious; before he stirs, drop your partner's mask onto him. Within ten minutes, George Mendoza, looking just as he did when you met him at eight-fifteen, is sprawled on the floor as you shut the portable door on him. You rap on the door of the portable opposite and let yourself in. Mendoza, looking perfectly at home in Hall's clothes, looks up at your entrance. He's much calmer than you'd expected him to be. "Drop on the floor, this'll only take a minute." He obliges, and you drop Hall's mask onto him. Then you pinch his nose shut; a moment later he's up again, sputtering and coughing. But it's Kevin Hall gasping for air.

"It's gonna take you a little while to get used to your new brain," you tell him as he blinks manically at you. You squat by him and grab him by the hair. "You hear me?"

"Yeah. Yeah, take me a little while to, uh, get used to—" He blinks. "My new brain."

"Right. You gotta concentrate on it, use it, make it your own. So you go over there, under that desk—" You point to the teacher's desk. "You hide there until the start of second period. You think about all the classes you're gonna be taking. Who you see in them, who your friends are, what your homework is. You think about your brother, you think about your parents, what you did this weekend. You think about the football team and who's on it. Also, and this is important, you think about where they're gettin' their weed from, who's using, who's paying, how much, to who? I wanna know the demand structure of the football team, inside and out. Make notes, practice your penmanship." You kick Hall's bag. "When second period bell rings, you go to class, go to classes the rest of the day, you be Kevin Hall, as much and as hard as you can. You send me a text if there's an emergency. Otherwise, I don't wanna hear from you for at least twenty-four hours." You slap him lightly. "Make this work, pendejo, I'm counting on you."

He nods dutifully, and you leave him as he scrambles over to that desk.

Outside, you glance around. No one is in view. You swing your pack onto your shoulder, and as the warning bell for first period rings you trudge off toward English, where Ms. Gladstone doesn't let you sleep, no matter how boring the subject matter.

* * * * *

You do catch a break second period. You cannot possibly make it through two periods of soccer practice, but you're not going to show yourself weak in front of Garner. But he notices the sag in your shoulder while changing out after first and pulls you aside to ask what the trouble is. You confess you didn't sleep last night; he regards you gravely, then goes to talk to Coach Gellman, who gives you a pass to the library for the two periods. You gratefully accept, and pass out for a hundred minutes in a back corner, waking only briefly at the changeover to fourth when May shakes your shoulder and swaps three fifties for three baggies; you go back to sleep, and sleep through fifth as well. That gives you enough rest to get you through AP Statistics and Physics II, which are dry, serious classes of sustained concentration.

You almost skip Orchestra practice, but suck it up.

And that's where you hear the news.

It's the girls chattering about it, of course: Eva Garner, Danielle Davis, Audrey Briscoe, others. Brent Pruitt lurks near the little knot, listening intently. At first you pay no attention, but something about their enthusiasm for the subject finally draws your interest. It takes you awhile to piece it together, for you don't interrupt to ask them what the news is. But gradually it dawns on you:

Chelsea Cooper has dumped Gordon Black's sorry ass curbside.

You chuckle quietly to yourself and listen some more, but there's no mention of Steve Patterson. Did she not ask him out, as Gordon's replacement, as she told you Saturday she'd likely have to do? It would be hilarious if he rejected her.

Next: "A Musical Transposition" 

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