The Shadow Mask

by Lin Oliver

  He spun around from his locker and scanned the hallway, then looked me up and down, seemingly not understanding my question.

  “Do you have two quarters for fifty cents?” I tried again.

  “What?”

  “I’m Leo. I need to break this fifty-cent piece to make a phone call.”

  “Oh,” he said, closing his locker. “You’re new here, right? Let me see that fifty-cent piece.”

  “Here,” I said as I ground my teeth and reached into my pocket.

  As soon as my hand opened my pocket, I felt a strange force. My muscles tightened and my fingers became claw-like, and as I thought of Crane putting that fifty-cent piece in my pocket to teach me a lesson, I felt a giant surge of anger course through me. As my fingers touched the metal, the ground beneath my feet seemed to lose its solidness, and in a flash, I saw myself in a kind of alternate version of Satellite North, like a secret underground version. Everything around me had lost its color and shape until all I saw was a series of hazy brownish hallways, looming over me, Crane’s voice echoing through them. Just little fragments, one on top of the other, his voice filled with rage.

  “Up the river, past the rapids …” his voice shouted inside my head. “No, no, it’s a blind alleyway…. Those liars, those terrible liars … I’ll find the other half, Mother, I’ll find it and prove them all wrong. They’re following me, I know it. They’re out to get me….”

  “Let me see that,” I heard the kid in the hall say. He snatched the half-dollar from my hand and took off down the hall. I snapped back to reality just in time to see him run past a bank of lockers and disappear around a corner. All I could do was stand there, dazed, trying to get my mind around the realization that my sound-bending power had returned.

  “You jerk,” I finally sputtered. I didn’t chase him, though, just stared at my empty hand, in shock. My power had returned, but with an unfamiliar feeling to it. I’d never had a sound-bending trance like that one before. I’d never gone to that underground space.

  As I looked around, trying to focus on where I was, I was suddenly overcome with all the sounds of my new school — blasts of walkie-talkie static, sneakers squeaking on the linoleum floors, snatches of distant laughter echoing through the deserted halls. It was as if my ears had opened up. Smiling, I leaned up against some lockers and took out my digital recorder from my backpack. Throwing on the headphones, I pushed record and listened to the symphony of sounds — the garbage truck backing up in the alley, the phones ringing in Ms. Confalone’s office, the Jamaican school nurse talking in her lilting accent to a sick girl, a fire-truck siren wailing several blocks away, a Chihuahua yapping from an apartment window. It was so cool, a true combination of the sounds all around us that we never notice. I knew Hollis would love it, too — he was writing a new song for his band, and I had promised to record some city sounds for him to weave into the piece. This was perfect.

  I was so immersed in the soundscape that I nearly jumped out of my skin when I heard a deafening blast of walkie-talkie static and felt someone taking off my headphones.

  “Where’s your hall pass?” a voice said.

  I looked up at a bearded man in a security guard’s uniform. He was almost as hulking as Mr. Dickerson.

  “I didn’t get one.”

  “Of course not, young man. Let’s go.”

  “Where?” I asked as I tried to keep up with his officious pace.

  “Where you always go for cutting: the assistant principal’s office.”

  As we marched back into the school office, I pulled my beanie down.

  “Got another one for you, Ms. Confalone. Found him in the hallway with some sort of electronic equipment.”

  “Already, Leo!?” she said, shaking her head. All the same kids were still on the bench, but they weren’t laughing at me anymore.

  “I just needed to make a phone call,” I said, wrenching myself from the security guard’s grip. “Listen, Ms. Confalone, I didn’t know the rules, honestly. I just need to make a quick phone call. It’s incredibly important. Can I use your phone?”

  “Does my phone say, ‘Help yourself, kids?’” she answered. “I don’t think so, Leo.”

  “It’ll just be one second, I swear. I need to let my kid brother know where I am. My parents died, and we’re all we have. It’ll take one second, I swear.”

  “Hmm … if it’s short, okay,” she said, bringing the phone to the desk. “Dial nine to get out.”

  “You’re a lifesaver, Ms. Confalone. Real quick.”

  I stared at the numbers with a sinking feeling. Hollis’s phone was brand-new, and I didn’t know his number. Crane had just given him a fancy top-of-the-line model as a reward for being so … so … not like me. Hollis has a taste for expensive things, and much as I hate to say it, the kid has been known to be won over by the latest gadget. Crane knew that and used this weakness to try to win Hollis’s loyalty. It didn’t work all the time, but it didn’t fail all the time, either. I kicked myself for never memorizing his new number.

  So that left Trevor. And although I’d called him every day for the past four years, I kept his number on speed dial and rarely had to actually dial it. I remembered that there were some twos in it, and a nine, and a four-five-seven — or was it a seven-five-four? Ms. Confalone was eyeing me suspiciously, so I just trusted my fingers and punched the keys.

  “Trev, it’s me. I’m at a school in Brooklyn. You have to give Hollis a message. Tell him I’m okay, that I’m not at some military academy. Let’s all meet up at Jeremy’s after school. I might be late, but just wait for me, okay?”

  “Who is this?” a man’s voice said.

  Blocking Ms. Confalone’s view with my body, I discretely hung up and dialed again, repeating my speech as soon as the call was answered.

  “¿Qué?” The reception was bad, so maybe I’d misheard.

  “It’s me, Leo. Trev, can you hear me? It’s Leo. Can you hear me, Trevor?”

  I saw Ms. Confalone look at me suspiciously, so I went on. “It’s Leo, you hear me, Trevor?”

  “Give me that phone,” Ms. Confalone said, and snatched the receiver.

  “Hello,” she said into the receiver, glaring at me. “This is Satellite North Middle School. Do you know a young man named Leo Lomax? No? He just called you talking a bunch of nonsense? I’m sorry, sir,” she said, hanging up the phone.

  “Leo, you gave me a long story, and I did you a favor, and then you make prank phone calls and bother a nice old man?”

  “I didn’t mean to —”

  “What’s the problem here?” Mr. Dickerson’s voice rang out from behind me.

  “Mr. Lawrence caught Leo here cutting class. And then Leo had the nerve to beg me to use the phone to make prank calls.”

  “Off to a fine start, Leo,” Mr. Dickerson said. He picked up my file from Ms. Confalone’s desk and scribbled more notes into it. All the tough kids were watching me like predators, taking everything in. I knew that what I did next would cement my reputation.

  “And I’m just getting started, Dickerson,” I said, pulling my beanie down low. “That’s a promise.”

  “Then you can start tomorrow at 6:30 a.m., Mr. Lomax,” he said, ripping out a piece of paper and handing it to me. “Detention.”

  “What’s your problem anyway?” I said, and snatched the paper. “You think you know me or something. I never had any problems till I met you. I’m just trying to be a person, but you guys are all over me. You don’t know me. You don’t know the first thing about me. You don’t know what I’m capable of.”

  Mr. Dickerson furrowed his bushy eyebrows, scratched his gigantic neck, and, for the first time, looked me up and down. “What’s that in your pocket?” he asked, referring to my digital recorder.

  “Nothing.”

  “Take it out, Leo.”

  I pulled out my recorder and held it in my hand, and at the exact same moment, both our eyes were drawn to the steady red light. Oh no.

  “You’re not recor
ding, are you, Mr. Lomax?”

  “No,” I said, my heart beating fast, but I controlled myself. Feel nothing, I told myself. Feel nothing. “No, red means standby mode; the green light means record.”

  As Dickerson paused to consider my lie, I smirked at the kids waiting on the bench.

  “Because in the state of New York, Leo, it is illegal to record anybody without their knowledge.”

  “I know. It’s not —”

  “If I see that thing again, it’s mine. Got it?”

  Just then, the bell rang, and I heard all the doors open and the sounds of kids hollering and laughing and brushing up against one another and banging their locker doors.

  “Got it. See you tomorrow, Mr. Dickerson,” I said, and bolted for the office door. All the kids on the bench also left with me, and as I merged into the stream of rushing students and screams, one of the bad kids grabbed my arm.

  “Nice one, Leo. Or is it Leon? That recorder was on, right?”

  “You bet,” I said. “Someone has to keep an ear on those jerks.”

  “Cool, man. I’m Pieter. We’re going to cut third, too. Come find us by the basement stairwell, and bring that recorder. Later.” They disappeared into the crowd.

  “Those are bad kids, the sons of Ukrainian gangsters,” I heard Dmitri say as he came up behind me and put his hand on my shoulder. I was actually kind of glad to hear his voice. He grabbed my schedule and examined it as we walked.

  “I’ll show you to class, follow me.”

  “Okay, dude. But first, show me to the library. I need to e-mail Hollis.”

  “No time. But I’ll text him for you,” Dmitri said, and pulled out a slick touch-screen phone.

  “You didn’t tell me you had a phone!”

  “You didn’t ask. What do you want to say?”

  “Here, let me see that. I’ll text him.”

  “No. Do not touch my phone.”

  “Fine. Just say that I’m alive and still in New York. And to get in touch with Trevor, and that we should all meet up at Jeremy’s store after school. I might be late, but tell them to wait.”

  “Okay, Leo,” he said, punching in the message. “That’s what friends do. Who is Jeremy?”

  “Jeremy Sebold. He was a student of my dad’s. He owns a record store in Brooklyn, and I go there after school for tutoring.”

  “You get tutored in a record store? That’s weird.”

  “My dad asked him to be in charge of my music education. See, my dad studied world music and taught at … never mind, Dmitri, it’s a long story…. So, can you just hurry up and press send?”

  “Sure. I’d like to meet Jeremy after school. We can talk about music from Poland. I will teach him all about polka.”

  “I think that’s a pass, dude,” I said as we turned a corner. “You don’t have to go.”

  “We’re going,” he said. I didn’t like the way he assumed he was in charge of me. “Here’s your class. I’ll be outside when it’s over, then I’ll buy you lunch and you can watch me run my business, so you learn how it works. Bye, Leo.” Then he shoved me into the classroom.

  Class was loud and boring. Mostly loud. Nobody even quieted down when I had to introduce myself and talk about my hobbies and interests. It was English class, and they were in the middle of discussing some book about a boy’s dead dog, a book that clearly only one or two kids had actually read. I pretended to take notes, but really I was trying to plot a way out of this school, and maybe, to get Hollis and me out of Crane’s clutches … possibly for good. Maybe we could stow away on a freighter to Panama. Or we could disguise ourselves as MTA workers, find one of those abandoned subway stations, and live underground for a while. I heard stories that tons of people live in those old stations. Bums and lunatics mostly, but maybe they’d look after us until it was safe on the surface.

  After class, I was heading for the door when a girl with long, dark brown hair came up to me. She was one of the two kids who had read the book. I didn’t have time to notice too much about her, except that she was pretty and wearing a strange necklace that looked like animal teeth hanging from a leather cord. It was the kind of thing my dad would always bring back from one of his music trips to some remote island. Behind the fangs, she also wore a tiny little heart locket on a silver chain.

  “Hey, Leo,” she said.

  I was surprised she knew my name. I didn’t think anyone in class was listening when I said my hobbies were setting world sports records and moth collecting. I wasn’t about to give those kids any real info about me.

  “You’re not Leon Loman, the kid from the news, are you?” she said.

  “They got my name wrong,” I said, taking her into my confidence because she was the first friendly face I’d seen all morning, and besides, how could you not like someone wearing a necklace made of teeth? “But I’m the same guy. But don’t tell anyone, okay?”

  “I thought that was you. I’m Diana.”

  “I like your necklace, Diana. Are those real teeth?”

  “Yeah,” she smiled. “Canine teeth from Borneo. I live there.”

  “Really??”

  “Well, sometimes. Beats this place, that’s for sure.” She laughed, then stopped herself short and looked at me curiously. “This might sound weird, Leo, but I swear I know you from somewhere. Where do I know you from?”

  “Beats me. I don’t know anyone here. Except for him,” I said, and pointed to Dmitri, who was squatting against the wall outside of class.

  “Ew. You hang out with him?”

  “Hey, babe,” Dmitri said, standing up and giving my new friend Diana the creepy eyes. “Feel my muscles.”

  “Gross,” she said with a shudder, and got out of there fast. Dmitri seemed pleased. I just shook my head at him. You have to be pretty disgusting to gross out someone wearing a dog-tooth necklace.

  Dmitri bought me a chicken sandwich from the cafeteria. I wolfed it down standing up as I watched him run his business. I’d been afraid that Dmitri would be selling cigarettes or something really bad to the eighth graders, but he mostly sold kids’ stuff: candy, sodas, snap’n pops, pushpin slingshots, stuff like that. He kept everything behind a fake panel that he’d installed at the back of his locker. He also had old tests and homework worksheets back there, as well as two teachers’ edition books, which I presumed were for sale, too. All told, Dmitri made $14 during lunch, which he slapped on top of a hefty bankroll hidden in his pocket.

  I made it through the rest of the day without incident, just trying not to get noticed. After every class, Dmitri was always waiting outside to put his hand on my shoulder and guide me to my next class.

  By the end of the day, it almost seemed normal for me to be attending Satellite North. Hadn’t it been just yesterday that I was a student at the Academy of Science and Arts, hanging out with Trevor, watching Hollis play around with all the synthesizers in the sound lab, checking out books from the well-stocked library? It was just yesterday, but yesterday, I was a different person.

  By the time school let out, the nor’easter storm was moving in. It was almost dark out, but it was a strange darkness. The dry air was swirling with a frozen mist that made millions of little rattling sounds on the pavement. It was almost like the sun was blocked out, and the only light left was what was trapped beneath the clouds before they covered Brooklyn. The storm was just starting, but I could only see fifty or so feet in front of me.

  “Seriously, Dmitri, you don’t have to come all the way uptown with me,” I said as we trudged down the school steps. “You probably have lots of work at the warehouse, right?”

  “I’m not working at the warehouse today,” he said to me with a half smile.

  “So your work is to follow me around?”

  “I’m just being friendly, Leo. Haven’t I been a good friend today, buying you lunch, showing you to your classes?”

  “Friendly, got it,” I said, and walked faster, my boots crunching the thin layer of ice crystals on the sidewalk. I saw a blind al
ley a few feet ahead of me, and with the low visibility and the crowds of students piling out of school, I thought now might be a good time to make a run for it.

  “Hey, Leon! Wait up!”

  I turned to see the murky outlines of Pieter and his friends jogging up to us.

  “Hey,” Pieter said again. “Is that … is that Dmitri with you?! You’re mine, Dmitri! And you, too, Leon!”

  “Run,” Dmitri said.

  “Huh?”

  “Just run. Follow me to the subway.”

  I didn’t have time to try another plan because Pieter and his friends were racing toward us. Even though they were shouting at us in a language I couldn’t understand, their voices were cracking in anger. We sprinted through the frozen mist, sliding on the concrete at times, weaving in and out of the Brooklyn blocks, all with half-seen gray figures on our trail and their bodiless voices all around us.

  “Unhappy customers?” I panted as we slid into an alleyway and began to scale a chain-link fence.

  “Just jerks. Their parents are Ukrainian gangsters, so I screwed them.”

  “Faster,” I cried as we left the alley for an avenue, this somewhat fun chase through the ice mist becoming a little scary. But then my feet and calves tickled, and under my shoes I felt the reverberations of a subway train rumbling under the ground. “Look! There’s the entrance.”

  We dashed for the glowing green light by the stairwell to the subway, cutting across the traffic, hydroplaning down the stairs, and nearly knocking over everyone on our descent underground. It was warmer down there, and as we reached the bottom of the stairs, I heard the ferocious drumming from a subway musician echoing through the tunnels. In one swift movement, I pulled out my wallet, got out my card, slid it through the reader, and went through the turnstile. Dmitri just hopped over it.

  “Think we lost them?” I asked as we broke into a jog, and sweat poured out of me because of the stifling heat underground.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Yeah, I hear them, too. Follow me, we’ll take the 5 all the way uptown.”

  Even though I’d never been in that particular station, I know the subway system like the back of my hand.