"Hey," a voice mutters near your ear. "Got what you were lookin' for at the library?"
You tear your eyes from the front of the room, where Mr. Kowalski is explaining the concept of limits. Carson Ioeger is leaning halfway out of his desk to mutter at you.
It's sixth period, and you've spent the entire day distracted by yesterday's "experiment" with your father - the one that turned a bubbling mixture of random shit into a pearly mask. As an arts-and-crafts project, it was a success. But you've no idea what you've made. "Not exactly," you tell Carson.
He keeps his eyes locked on Kowalski. "Told'ja it was outta your league."
"... And I take it you gentlemen are discussing the sine wave equation?" Kowalski demands, and you whip around as Carson straightens up.
"Yes sir!" Carson exclaims. "Just clearing something up for Will." He grins.
You glare. Great. Now Kowalski's got you pegged as a moron.
You sink back in your chair and let your mind drift. You worked at the project some more last night, after you finished your homework. You rubbed it and rubbed it with a cloth for a couple of hours, as the book instructed, until you had worn a bluish spot into the mask. Your dad had gone to bed by that point, so you hid the mask away for the time being (so Robert wouldn't find it if he came snooping) and went to sleep.
"So, what was that all about, anyways?" Carson asks after Kowalski has turned his back to you.
But you don't answer.
--
Instead of hanging out with Caleb or Carson or any of your other friends, you return home. The mystery of the mask is consuming you.
But there's not much you can do with it. The mask itself is apparently incomplete until you finish polishing it, and the book remains obdurately closed. As before, no matter how you pry and pull, you can't get the next page to turn. Even when you give it a little more blood, it remains shut.
So you study the spell some more.
The word "persona," you notice, is the book's preferred term for the thing that you made, and it is also the word that the book uses in its introduction. And yet, although "mask" seems to be the correct translation for the word, it doesn't fit well in every context in which it appears. Google throws up a lot of alternate translations of the word, and "person" would make more sense in some of the contexts, and "disguise" in others.
As long as you on Google, you decide to make a search of anything related to your find: "masks" and "magic masks" and "magic mask persona" and other combinations. You've just typed in the long-ass title of the book - it's the length of a sentence - when there's a knock at the door. Your father puts his head in. "Hey champ. What are you doing?"
"Oh. Nothing. Just ... distracted."
Your father comes in and looks over your shoulder. "Doing research on the book?"
"Yeah. I haven't found anything yet."
Your father leans over to peer at the screen. You study it alongside him. He points to one of the links. "You got a hit here on someone out at Keyserling. You said you bought that book at Arnholm's? I wonder if they picked it up off this guy." He clicks the link.
It leads to a PDF, an academic paper about the history and purposes of masks throughout history. You let your dad do the scrolling, and he doesn't appear to be much more interested in it that you are. Your attention is briefly caught – before your dad moves past it – by one paragraph that describes how some cultures used vividly decorated masks to represent characters, and subsumed their own personas (there's that word again; it's probably why the search engine caught it) to the persona of the mask. But you find nothing in the cursory scan to link up to the book.
"Well, keep looking," your dad says as he straightens up. "You'll find something out." He turns to go.
"Dad, wait." You grab up the mask and turn it to show him the blue spot. "The last step in the instructions is to polish it, so I started rubbing it last night, and ended up with this."
Your father takes the mask and studies the spot. "Cobalt?" he mutters to himself. "How long did it take you to get this?" he asks you.
"About two or three hours."
"Lemme take it. I have an idea."
He goes downstairs, and you turn to your homework when he doesn't immediately return. Not until suppertime do you see him again, and it's only after you've helped clean up that he gestures you to follow him back out to the garage.
"Here," he says as he hands you the mask. "Got it done for you."
"Wow!", you gasp as you turn it over and over in your hands. Except for the shape, it is entirely transformed, from a pearly white to a deep and glowing blue. It has a depth of color that is almost translucent, so that when you stare into it you almost have the impression that you are gazing into a piece of the nighttime sky.
"How'd you get it done so fast?" you ask.
"Used the car buffer," he says. "Made it easy." He grins.
Something in his smile makes a catch in your throat. It's the kind of smile that you and Caleb sometimes share, when you're caught up in something that you're both enjoying, and that you're enjoying while sharing with each other. For a moment your dad doesn't feel so much like your dad as like your friend.
"Thanks," you tell him with a shy smile of your own.
"Thank you for showing me this. Keep looking into it, and if you find anything, tell me." He lowers his chin to give you a look from under his brows. "Your project. You're in charge."
"Keep doing online research?"
"Sure. Hit the library too. Or see if you can find someone at the college who knows about this stuff. The chemistry and physics of it is fascinating, but a historian – perhaps someone who knows about alchemy – would probably be a better bet."
You raise your eyebrow. "You think it really is alchemy?"
"The recipe would be alchemy, I guess. The facts will be scientific. I just mean –" He waves his hand. "If you want to know what the author of the book thought he was doing, talk to someone who knows about alchemy."
"I'll do that. Er, maybe," you add. "After I do some of my own research."
Your dad nods, and with his hand on your shoulder accompanies you inside.
Upstairs, you try to finish your homework while feeling bedazzled by it all. Your dad still wants to say it isn't magic, but whatever it is, it's something that neither of you understand. Should you get help? Your dad probably has the right idea about consulting some kind of expert in alchemy.
But maybe you should think farther outside the box. Braydon Delp, at school, has a reputation for being into magic and sorcery. And who knows, maybe those hardcore gamers that Carson alluded to up at the library would know something based on all their reading.
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