Post by wanzer on Aug 22, 2009 19:49:30 GMT -4
THE MASK OF PERSONAS
Tim Westwood was the average sophomore in high school, he was tall standing at five feet and ten inches with a long lanky body and arms that really stretched down to his knees. He rarely went ten minutes with running his fingers through his tangled mess of curly brown hair or rubbing under his hazel eyes as if he was constantly exhausted. He like other males and females of his age spent the majority of his mornings looking into the mirror for some sort of blemish on his sharp face, knob like nose or his thin lips. Every morning Tim would wake up for school just like the day before and dress in blue jeans and toss on some old button up shirt, not really caring either way if it was wrinkled or not, he just wanted to be done with the day. Tim had one problem with his life and that was he wasn’t accepted any where with in the high schools hierarchy and his only friend was another boy like him named Allan Smithy.
“Allan…don’t you wish we could be more popular sometimes?”
Tim asked Allan one dreary day in the middle of November, where the grey clouds rolled in as if some incoherent force was pulling a giant comforter over the sky and tucking the sun in as if it were a small child. Allan turned his head to look directly at Tim with his odd way of just looking through people and not at them. It was probably why Allan didn’t have many friends, even though that trance like stare ended after a few seconds and he regarded you in a normal way. Tim got a moment to regard his features as they continued to walk; Allan was two inches shorter than Tim, with a head of neatly combed blonde hair that we kept parting in the middle. He wore thick bifocals which magnified his bright green eyes so they were much larger than they appeared. Tim envied Allan in a way, because even though neither of them were accepted in their school, Allan was muscular and avoided bullying, Tim wasn’t so fortunate.
“Tim, popularity isn’t something that you should desire, you have me as a friend and you could make other people your friends if you tried. You don’t need to change yourself to make yourself fit in better you just need to be yourself.”
“Gee, you sound just like my mother Allan, you mean to tell me you never have wished yourself a different person?”
“Can’t say I have Tim; I just like to walk through the fire and flames I guess?”
Tim grew silent and wondered about the complexity and maturity of Allan’s mind as his sneakers began to click when the concrete sidewalk switched to a long narrow path of red bricks that the city had never bothered to replace after a hundred fifty years, in this small Washington City located in the very heart of nowhere. Tim looked up and noticed the Cherry Blossoms were shedding their little pink petals finally, which was odd because they were usually gone before October came, shrugging off the oddity he continued his walk along side Allan who was content to merely walk in the soft grass, which allowed his shoes to beat into the soft ground below it instead of click incessantly as Tim’s were. Ignoring the cacophony of clicks that were now ringing through his head Tim, looked ahead to the small school building ahead of him and sighed regretting getting up today. Honeybranch High School was home to the fighting Tigers, the second worse team in the conference and ironically also home to some of the most aggressive teens in the country, mostly because of a government ordinance that was using their school as an experiment to see if reformed juvenile delinquents could function in a school setting after being released and from what Tim had seen so far the answer to that question was no. Honeybranch in the last two months alone had seen three stabbings, fourteen fights and a shooting, that’s also not mentioning the numerous bomb threats and vicious gang wars that took place inside of its benign white marble walls. Stopping twenty feet from the entrance, Tim shivered then stepped inside into the small commons area where the five hundred and twenty students resided, the areas already being sectioned off into areas designated into certain cliques unless you belonged to one of the two gangs that had been created inside of the school. In the center of it all were the preps, the wealthy kids who pretty much owned the school and flaunted their wealth or were beautiful and immensely popular with the opposite sex and knew it all too well. Nearing the left wall of the school and bunched into a tight corner almost creating a barrier with their dark book bags were the Goths and Emo kids as they were known in the school, stereotypically they were the children that had or believed they had some problem that granted them a privilege to be depressive and dark, while some of them just enjoyed the culture in reality, they just came off that way.
“I wonder what makes them like that stuff Allan? Its kinda like looking at smoke on the water, you know its there is a reason its there, but you can never really discern it till your right beside it.”
“Its just who they are, they’ve decided to go against the grain and express themselves in a different way than anyone else. Its just like if you had joined the West View Zodiacs or the East Vale Broncs, you’d express your pride that you were part of that gang that’s different from anyone elses path, though I’d smack you over the head with a shovel if you ever joined them. You’ve also got your jocks and your so called geeks or nerds, its just a stereotype that one is all brains and no brawn and the other is the opposite, but that’s not really true except in a few isolated cases its just all in how they carry themselves. Me, however I just hold myself up on my own wings and fly high like a free bird.”
“I don’t know about that Allan.”
Tim said quietly back to his only friend as the two walked through the nearly desolated hallway that was the fine arts and non mandatory classes. All the fights broke out here, because it was the least patrolled and the teachers all had the outlook on the school system that they aren’t paid enough to break up fights. Usually the shouts of several students could resound through out the school as a fight broke out with grim results and blood splattering across the floor leaving odd shape stains that reminded Tim of the ink splatters they show people when they are trying to decide if they are normal or not. Without looking back at the school entrance, Tim went through out his day thankfully without a hitch till seventh period when a few preps and jocks approached him and shoved him against a locker and grinned wolfishly, flashing their perfect white teeth like knives at him.
“Hey Tim, I just got a Mustang Nismo for my birthday and we wanted to see if you could run all the way to sweet home Alabama with us chasing you.”
Tim’s blood slowly ran cold as he felt them carry him out through the double doors of the high school and into the senior parking lot, their hands leaving a sweaty taint on his body and the heavy odor of a locker room. Gulping as he was thrown to the ground and could see their muscled bodies revealed through their sweat drenched shirts, he began to retreat when one of them shoved him back into the circle while their leader retrieved their car.
“You should try to find a click loser boy, maybe then it wouldn’t be so easy for us to hassle you.”
Tim shouted some profanities at him and asked him if he thought he didn’t know that already, but was rewarded with nothing more than a swift kick to his crotch as the V8 inside of the sleek muscle cars frame roared to life and soon Tim was running for his. Horror ripped through his mind and body, causing his already exhausted frame to sweat even harder as he heard the engine roaring behind him and the jock behind the wheel shout at him.
“Come on kid! Run faster, I got a need for speed!”
Tim’s adrenaline was flowing in droves as the rapid pace of his heart speed up over two hundred miles an hour and he could feel the pain driving in his chest. Its going to burst, he thought, I’m really going to die today, who would have thought it would end this way? Regaining some clarity on his situation as the muscle car rammed against his back leg, Tim jumped into a narrow back alley that caught his eye and fled down the maze of backstreets, till he came across from of the EastVale Bronc’s playing craps, each of them looking just like the jocks only less refined and many of them were smoking blunts or some sort of cigarettes. Each of them looked at him with vicious eyes as he hid inside of the dumpster beside them.
“Yo, Kid what you looking for someone to buy you a drink or somethin’? Get your butt off our turf before we make sure you never can again.”
A gruff member of the gang said to him just as the voices of the jocks and preps came echoing down the alley way. Silence soon ensued outside of the trash can, except for the sound of guns loading and foot steps leaving the area. Peeking just outside the can, Tim got out and seeing no one around scooped up the hundred dollars on the craps table and ran further downtown, before the death cries and gun shoots sounded out in the dank alley way and his former torments ran away with their tails between their legs and several of them dead. Tim didn’t care, he thought they deserved it as he ran away and soon found himself in a purple neon area that looked like a run down china town in the heart of New York. It’s entire lay out was so absurd it was almost as if Tim had walked into an M.C. Escher painting, the builds appeared skewed and looked almost as if they were on top of each other moving in completely opposite directions, while the heavy scent of wet paint and fried chicken wafted through the air. Shaking his head, Tim walked along the area completely amazed by the variety of shapes and sizes of the buildings and their odd colors. Stopping for just a moment, he analyzed a apartment building that was painted, red, blue, green, yellow, pink, orange, purple, turquoise, and lavender each clashing with the next, but somehow forming some sort of iconic balance that left the on looker wondering if it was just his or her perspective confused rather than it being the one in the wrong.
“You seem confused dear, what is wrong because only people with problems come here.”
Tim turned hurriedly around expecting someone to be mugging him as he clutched his heart afraid it would leap from his body at any moment. Taking a deep breath, it was just a simple gypsy vendor with all sorts of ‘mystic’ wears which Tim was sure none of which had any real magic powers. He drew closer and saw she was dressed as a swami, with a red turban wrapped around her head, complete with purple prayer beads and yellow tassels that seemed to move even when she wasn’t. He drew back a little at her shrunken and decrypted face, which had more wrinkles than he could coat running through it in everyway along with one overly large glass eyeball that rattled around in the eye socket like a coy fish would in a fish bowl it had grown to large for. She opened her mouth to give him a small grin though she had no teeth and Tim wouldn’t have been surprised if a roach had crawled out of her mouth. As she shifted in place behind her black dress, made of some sort of crepe, Tim thought he heard her bones rattle and was tempted to just leave her before an item on her shelves caught his eye. It was little more than a white opera mask with no strap on the back, that would cover the entire face when worn, but it wasn’t that attracted him it was what it said over it.
MASK OF PERSONAS!!! FOURTY DOLLARS!!!
The wearer of this mask will find themselves fitting in with anyone they wish!
Could it really be true, could the answer to all of his problems be laying right in front of him, in a simple white mask? It was worth a shot and it wouldn’t be his money he’d be spending anyway, so Tim gave the woman forty dollars and asked for the mask and was given a warning along with it.
“Never lose sight of who you are when you wear this mask, young man…”
Tim ignored the old woman and made his way back home, before his mother got back, his mother was usually never home and Tim was normally sad about this, but not today. He didn’t want her to see the mask and he definitely didn’t want her seeing the sixty dollars he had stolen from the Eastvale Broncs. Stepping into his plain blue bedroom with only his oak dresser and vanity mirror aside from his white sheet and comforter bed, he hated his room, but he did find solace in it on most nights and didn’t complain today as he was too tired to even begin to think. He collapsed onto his bed in an almost dream like state after storing the mask under his dresser and never even noticed that during the night it produce a spectral bioluminescence that not even the ants would go near.
Awaking in the morning, Tim thought that the events of yesterday had been nothing more than a dream, before noticing a tip of white sticking out from under his dresser and stooped down to retrieve it. Smiling, he found the mask still there and carefully put it onto his face, thinking that just for a day he’d like to see out of the eyes of a Goth. Looking back into the mirror, he stared in horror as his hair had changed to black and his entire body was covered in Gothic clothing, baggy black pants that were held up with a chain belt and had chains hanging down the side, along with a black t-shirt with some screamo band he had never heard of advertised on the front. Even his eyes had been layered with some sort of make up that made him look like he hadn’t slept in a long time, shaking his head he touched his hair and it even felt different.
“I guess I’m the walrus.”
Tim said in disbelief as he looked at himself and heard the buzzer downstairs ring, which meant Allan had come by to pick him up and then the frantic knocking that meant he was getting impatient. Taking another moment to examine himself, Tim ran down the stairs and opened the door to an angry Allan.
“Can’t you hear me knockin….? Oh…my....God….what did you do to yourself Tim!? You’ve entered a whole new world man!
“Shhh…you wanna wake everyone up?,” Tim said with a slight distaste for Allan now, “lets get to school and get this day over with.”
As they walked together, Tim began to feel an uncomfortable tinge in the back of his neck on his face, the closer he stood to Allan. It was almost as if while he was wearing this guise, he was disgusted by the mere thought of what Allan stood for a tried to distance himself from him, just before some car drove in front of them nearly splashed them from the gutter of the street and the man in the front seat rolled down his window flipping them the bird, before yelling in a sing-song manner which came out drunken and harsh.
“I love college!”
“What a idiot huh Tim?” Allan asked him with a slight grinning as that type of event happened to them quite often and the two of them had promised each other they would never turn out like that. Tim’s mind filtered through its normal responses and what came out of his mouth surprised him, but it sounds so cool to him that he didn’t bother to take it back.
“I don’t know, seems like a good time to me.”
Allan just stared at Tim with his mouth agape as if a big yellow submarine had just driven right past him. Shaking his head at Tim, Allan left him to walk to school on his own, telling that he felt very sick suddenly and needed to stay home. Tim ignored this and keeping walking along, not feeling like he needed Allan’s company anymore with his new personality and believed he could easily make friends with the Goths of the school now. Taking the shorter path to school today, he felt the drab bleakness of his new persona funnel down into him and felt all of his thoughts getting a little darker as his own personality was pushed back. This chain reaction of self-destruction through replacement was soon ended as loud, Spanish rap music filled the air behind him; he knew that it was one of the gangs coming up, but today he had no fear of them.
“Conteo mi dinero! I’m a flirt today with my girl during lunch and make sure I get a little pay later. Frank, you meet me at the watch tower later and be sure to bring the good stuff this time, I don’t want the place to smell like that stupid purple haze again, you understand!? Viva la Vida and don’t get shot again or waste all your bullets you understand me?”
The driver stepped out of the low rider with its engine still running as the thug beside him, jumped into the drivers seat and drove off, leaving a choking mist of exhaust as he speed away. Thankfully, the original driver didn’t seem to notice him and walked off toward the school the same way he was and moments later Tim began to experience first hand what gothic life was all about. The experience started out with him discovering a boldness inside of him that never existed; he stepped into the circle of Goths and sat down all of them glancing over him and finding him acceptable let him stay. Introductions were made and a few inquires before one of them suggested they should just leave and spend the day out of the cliffs. This suggestion was readily voted as the course of action for the day and the entire group of twenty left the school without a word and walked five mile north to the Cliffs of Dover or so they were called.
Tim walked along the rocky cliff with little interest as they neared an abandoned surf shack that was dilapidated on the inside and rotting on the outside. Tim could see that it at one time had been painted red, but the weather had chipped and worn away at it till there was only what looked like a bloody remnant on its exterior. The inside didn’t look much better either and he could see where rot had eaten through the roof, letting them see the sky through the worm-ridden wood. Sitting down on the splintery boards which cracked under with a soft creak, left him wondering why they choose this place, but that thought left as a blunt was shoved toward his face.
“Wanna hit?”
Tim’s hand instinctively grabbed the blunt and smelled it, for some reason he could tell just by the smell it was good stuff and inhaled without a second thought. Tim was losing himself piece by piece the longer he left this mask on, but he was having so much fun! There couldn’t be anything wrong with it could there? The smoke came out of his mouth in a rolling fog as the blunt was passed around, but just as it reached the last person, a young man that Tim knew by the same of Chris stood up and walked outside. Tim had never seen any of his features because of the hood Chris was always wearing, but he could always point him out by the blue hoodie he wore; he was surprised that he would walk out on everyone and exited to see what he was doing as he stood on the edge of the cliff with his arms out like a cross and his hood pulled back revealing he was bald.
“Well now that you’ve joined Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Tim, you might as well know I’m doing this just because of one girl who I thought I loved enough to make my own. I’m tired of all this playing, you can take my place I don’t need life anymore.”
Tim watched his mouth an wide o of horror as he watched Chris’s feet leave the cliff’s edge and him fall backwards down below to the jagged rocks that made up the shore line below. Tim didn’t need to watch to know what happened and turned and vomited as his knees hit the ground only an inch from it. He could his breakfast mixed with the coppery bile that made up his stomach and wretched again as the other Goths came out and looked down at the scene and began to weep. Tim returned home soon after too shocked to even think as he stepped through the door at only a quarter past ten. He walked wearily up to his room and laid down on his bed as black tears ran down his face and he reached to take the mask off ready to be out of this persona, but when he looked into the mirror after he had removed the mask all he knew was total fear.
The mask came off his face with ease, but what laid underneath it left Tim speechless, literally. Touching his face as he stared back in the mirror, it had no features on it at all aside from his hazel eyes, which stared in fixed horror at his own reflection. Shaking he threw the mask across the room and watched it flake into dust as it flew, then was carried by some unearthly breeze out the window and down the street toward downtown. Tim, never noticed this he was too busy watching the metamorphous taking place before his eyes. His tan skin was turning milky white and his nose was beginning to reappear, but it wasn’t his nose, it was the mask of persona’s nose that was coming up and its lips. He tried to scream with horror, but his mouth wouldn’t open as his hair receded rapidly and soon he was bald. Franticly, he began clawing at his face only to watch as his hands begin to disintegrate before him being carried off on the same wind that took the mask with it. He had time to shed a few last tears, before his entire body became dust in the wind and all that remained was one opera mask with hazel eyes that were shedding thousands of bloody tears before they dimmed and drifted away.
An hour later the strange gypsy woman stepped through the window of Tim’s room and picked up the mask. She shook her head as Allan appeared behind her, looking a little melancholy as he did so. The old woman smiled and looked him in the eye before saying:
“Looks like you lost the bet brother dear, time to hand over your youth.”
A soft breeze blew through the room as the drapes covered the two and when they returned to place, Allan was now an old swami, dressed in the same clothes with the same appearance as the old gypsy woman only with a straggly grey beard.
“Don’t worry brother dear, I’m sure it won’t be long before you win it back again!”
The giggly little girl before him said with a grin as she took his hand and lead him away. Those that saw the odd little girl that day as they walked home from Honeybranch High, swore she looked just like Allan’s twin and no one there ever heard from him or Tim ever again.
Tim Westwood was the average sophomore in high school, he was tall standing at five feet and ten inches with a long lanky body and arms that really stretched down to his knees. He rarely went ten minutes with running his fingers through his tangled mess of curly brown hair or rubbing under his hazel eyes as if he was constantly exhausted. He like other males and females of his age spent the majority of his mornings looking into the mirror for some sort of blemish on his sharp face, knob like nose or his thin lips. Every morning Tim would wake up for school just like the day before and dress in blue jeans and toss on some old button up shirt, not really caring either way if it was wrinkled or not, he just wanted to be done with the day. Tim had one problem with his life and that was he wasn’t accepted any where with in the high schools hierarchy and his only friend was another boy like him named Allan Smithy.
“Allan…don’t you wish we could be more popular sometimes?”
Tim asked Allan one dreary day in the middle of November, where the grey clouds rolled in as if some incoherent force was pulling a giant comforter over the sky and tucking the sun in as if it were a small child. Allan turned his head to look directly at Tim with his odd way of just looking through people and not at them. It was probably why Allan didn’t have many friends, even though that trance like stare ended after a few seconds and he regarded you in a normal way. Tim got a moment to regard his features as they continued to walk; Allan was two inches shorter than Tim, with a head of neatly combed blonde hair that we kept parting in the middle. He wore thick bifocals which magnified his bright green eyes so they were much larger than they appeared. Tim envied Allan in a way, because even though neither of them were accepted in their school, Allan was muscular and avoided bullying, Tim wasn’t so fortunate.
“Tim, popularity isn’t something that you should desire, you have me as a friend and you could make other people your friends if you tried. You don’t need to change yourself to make yourself fit in better you just need to be yourself.”
“Gee, you sound just like my mother Allan, you mean to tell me you never have wished yourself a different person?”
“Can’t say I have Tim; I just like to walk through the fire and flames I guess?”
Tim grew silent and wondered about the complexity and maturity of Allan’s mind as his sneakers began to click when the concrete sidewalk switched to a long narrow path of red bricks that the city had never bothered to replace after a hundred fifty years, in this small Washington City located in the very heart of nowhere. Tim looked up and noticed the Cherry Blossoms were shedding their little pink petals finally, which was odd because they were usually gone before October came, shrugging off the oddity he continued his walk along side Allan who was content to merely walk in the soft grass, which allowed his shoes to beat into the soft ground below it instead of click incessantly as Tim’s were. Ignoring the cacophony of clicks that were now ringing through his head Tim, looked ahead to the small school building ahead of him and sighed regretting getting up today. Honeybranch High School was home to the fighting Tigers, the second worse team in the conference and ironically also home to some of the most aggressive teens in the country, mostly because of a government ordinance that was using their school as an experiment to see if reformed juvenile delinquents could function in a school setting after being released and from what Tim had seen so far the answer to that question was no. Honeybranch in the last two months alone had seen three stabbings, fourteen fights and a shooting, that’s also not mentioning the numerous bomb threats and vicious gang wars that took place inside of its benign white marble walls. Stopping twenty feet from the entrance, Tim shivered then stepped inside into the small commons area where the five hundred and twenty students resided, the areas already being sectioned off into areas designated into certain cliques unless you belonged to one of the two gangs that had been created inside of the school. In the center of it all were the preps, the wealthy kids who pretty much owned the school and flaunted their wealth or were beautiful and immensely popular with the opposite sex and knew it all too well. Nearing the left wall of the school and bunched into a tight corner almost creating a barrier with their dark book bags were the Goths and Emo kids as they were known in the school, stereotypically they were the children that had or believed they had some problem that granted them a privilege to be depressive and dark, while some of them just enjoyed the culture in reality, they just came off that way.
“I wonder what makes them like that stuff Allan? Its kinda like looking at smoke on the water, you know its there is a reason its there, but you can never really discern it till your right beside it.”
“Its just who they are, they’ve decided to go against the grain and express themselves in a different way than anyone else. Its just like if you had joined the West View Zodiacs or the East Vale Broncs, you’d express your pride that you were part of that gang that’s different from anyone elses path, though I’d smack you over the head with a shovel if you ever joined them. You’ve also got your jocks and your so called geeks or nerds, its just a stereotype that one is all brains and no brawn and the other is the opposite, but that’s not really true except in a few isolated cases its just all in how they carry themselves. Me, however I just hold myself up on my own wings and fly high like a free bird.”
“I don’t know about that Allan.”
Tim said quietly back to his only friend as the two walked through the nearly desolated hallway that was the fine arts and non mandatory classes. All the fights broke out here, because it was the least patrolled and the teachers all had the outlook on the school system that they aren’t paid enough to break up fights. Usually the shouts of several students could resound through out the school as a fight broke out with grim results and blood splattering across the floor leaving odd shape stains that reminded Tim of the ink splatters they show people when they are trying to decide if they are normal or not. Without looking back at the school entrance, Tim went through out his day thankfully without a hitch till seventh period when a few preps and jocks approached him and shoved him against a locker and grinned wolfishly, flashing their perfect white teeth like knives at him.
“Hey Tim, I just got a Mustang Nismo for my birthday and we wanted to see if you could run all the way to sweet home Alabama with us chasing you.”
Tim’s blood slowly ran cold as he felt them carry him out through the double doors of the high school and into the senior parking lot, their hands leaving a sweaty taint on his body and the heavy odor of a locker room. Gulping as he was thrown to the ground and could see their muscled bodies revealed through their sweat drenched shirts, he began to retreat when one of them shoved him back into the circle while their leader retrieved their car.
“You should try to find a click loser boy, maybe then it wouldn’t be so easy for us to hassle you.”
Tim shouted some profanities at him and asked him if he thought he didn’t know that already, but was rewarded with nothing more than a swift kick to his crotch as the V8 inside of the sleek muscle cars frame roared to life and soon Tim was running for his. Horror ripped through his mind and body, causing his already exhausted frame to sweat even harder as he heard the engine roaring behind him and the jock behind the wheel shout at him.
“Come on kid! Run faster, I got a need for speed!”
Tim’s adrenaline was flowing in droves as the rapid pace of his heart speed up over two hundred miles an hour and he could feel the pain driving in his chest. Its going to burst, he thought, I’m really going to die today, who would have thought it would end this way? Regaining some clarity on his situation as the muscle car rammed against his back leg, Tim jumped into a narrow back alley that caught his eye and fled down the maze of backstreets, till he came across from of the EastVale Bronc’s playing craps, each of them looking just like the jocks only less refined and many of them were smoking blunts or some sort of cigarettes. Each of them looked at him with vicious eyes as he hid inside of the dumpster beside them.
“Yo, Kid what you looking for someone to buy you a drink or somethin’? Get your butt off our turf before we make sure you never can again.”
A gruff member of the gang said to him just as the voices of the jocks and preps came echoing down the alley way. Silence soon ensued outside of the trash can, except for the sound of guns loading and foot steps leaving the area. Peeking just outside the can, Tim got out and seeing no one around scooped up the hundred dollars on the craps table and ran further downtown, before the death cries and gun shoots sounded out in the dank alley way and his former torments ran away with their tails between their legs and several of them dead. Tim didn’t care, he thought they deserved it as he ran away and soon found himself in a purple neon area that looked like a run down china town in the heart of New York. It’s entire lay out was so absurd it was almost as if Tim had walked into an M.C. Escher painting, the builds appeared skewed and looked almost as if they were on top of each other moving in completely opposite directions, while the heavy scent of wet paint and fried chicken wafted through the air. Shaking his head, Tim walked along the area completely amazed by the variety of shapes and sizes of the buildings and their odd colors. Stopping for just a moment, he analyzed a apartment building that was painted, red, blue, green, yellow, pink, orange, purple, turquoise, and lavender each clashing with the next, but somehow forming some sort of iconic balance that left the on looker wondering if it was just his or her perspective confused rather than it being the one in the wrong.
“You seem confused dear, what is wrong because only people with problems come here.”
Tim turned hurriedly around expecting someone to be mugging him as he clutched his heart afraid it would leap from his body at any moment. Taking a deep breath, it was just a simple gypsy vendor with all sorts of ‘mystic’ wears which Tim was sure none of which had any real magic powers. He drew closer and saw she was dressed as a swami, with a red turban wrapped around her head, complete with purple prayer beads and yellow tassels that seemed to move even when she wasn’t. He drew back a little at her shrunken and decrypted face, which had more wrinkles than he could coat running through it in everyway along with one overly large glass eyeball that rattled around in the eye socket like a coy fish would in a fish bowl it had grown to large for. She opened her mouth to give him a small grin though she had no teeth and Tim wouldn’t have been surprised if a roach had crawled out of her mouth. As she shifted in place behind her black dress, made of some sort of crepe, Tim thought he heard her bones rattle and was tempted to just leave her before an item on her shelves caught his eye. It was little more than a white opera mask with no strap on the back, that would cover the entire face when worn, but it wasn’t that attracted him it was what it said over it.
MASK OF PERSONAS!!! FOURTY DOLLARS!!!
The wearer of this mask will find themselves fitting in with anyone they wish!
Could it really be true, could the answer to all of his problems be laying right in front of him, in a simple white mask? It was worth a shot and it wouldn’t be his money he’d be spending anyway, so Tim gave the woman forty dollars and asked for the mask and was given a warning along with it.
“Never lose sight of who you are when you wear this mask, young man…”
Tim ignored the old woman and made his way back home, before his mother got back, his mother was usually never home and Tim was normally sad about this, but not today. He didn’t want her to see the mask and he definitely didn’t want her seeing the sixty dollars he had stolen from the Eastvale Broncs. Stepping into his plain blue bedroom with only his oak dresser and vanity mirror aside from his white sheet and comforter bed, he hated his room, but he did find solace in it on most nights and didn’t complain today as he was too tired to even begin to think. He collapsed onto his bed in an almost dream like state after storing the mask under his dresser and never even noticed that during the night it produce a spectral bioluminescence that not even the ants would go near.
Awaking in the morning, Tim thought that the events of yesterday had been nothing more than a dream, before noticing a tip of white sticking out from under his dresser and stooped down to retrieve it. Smiling, he found the mask still there and carefully put it onto his face, thinking that just for a day he’d like to see out of the eyes of a Goth. Looking back into the mirror, he stared in horror as his hair had changed to black and his entire body was covered in Gothic clothing, baggy black pants that were held up with a chain belt and had chains hanging down the side, along with a black t-shirt with some screamo band he had never heard of advertised on the front. Even his eyes had been layered with some sort of make up that made him look like he hadn’t slept in a long time, shaking his head he touched his hair and it even felt different.
“I guess I’m the walrus.”
Tim said in disbelief as he looked at himself and heard the buzzer downstairs ring, which meant Allan had come by to pick him up and then the frantic knocking that meant he was getting impatient. Taking another moment to examine himself, Tim ran down the stairs and opened the door to an angry Allan.
“Can’t you hear me knockin….? Oh…my....God….what did you do to yourself Tim!? You’ve entered a whole new world man!
“Shhh…you wanna wake everyone up?,” Tim said with a slight distaste for Allan now, “lets get to school and get this day over with.”
As they walked together, Tim began to feel an uncomfortable tinge in the back of his neck on his face, the closer he stood to Allan. It was almost as if while he was wearing this guise, he was disgusted by the mere thought of what Allan stood for a tried to distance himself from him, just before some car drove in front of them nearly splashed them from the gutter of the street and the man in the front seat rolled down his window flipping them the bird, before yelling in a sing-song manner which came out drunken and harsh.
“I love college!”
“What a idiot huh Tim?” Allan asked him with a slight grinning as that type of event happened to them quite often and the two of them had promised each other they would never turn out like that. Tim’s mind filtered through its normal responses and what came out of his mouth surprised him, but it sounds so cool to him that he didn’t bother to take it back.
“I don’t know, seems like a good time to me.”
Allan just stared at Tim with his mouth agape as if a big yellow submarine had just driven right past him. Shaking his head at Tim, Allan left him to walk to school on his own, telling that he felt very sick suddenly and needed to stay home. Tim ignored this and keeping walking along, not feeling like he needed Allan’s company anymore with his new personality and believed he could easily make friends with the Goths of the school now. Taking the shorter path to school today, he felt the drab bleakness of his new persona funnel down into him and felt all of his thoughts getting a little darker as his own personality was pushed back. This chain reaction of self-destruction through replacement was soon ended as loud, Spanish rap music filled the air behind him; he knew that it was one of the gangs coming up, but today he had no fear of them.
“Conteo mi dinero! I’m a flirt today with my girl during lunch and make sure I get a little pay later. Frank, you meet me at the watch tower later and be sure to bring the good stuff this time, I don’t want the place to smell like that stupid purple haze again, you understand!? Viva la Vida and don’t get shot again or waste all your bullets you understand me?”
The driver stepped out of the low rider with its engine still running as the thug beside him, jumped into the drivers seat and drove off, leaving a choking mist of exhaust as he speed away. Thankfully, the original driver didn’t seem to notice him and walked off toward the school the same way he was and moments later Tim began to experience first hand what gothic life was all about. The experience started out with him discovering a boldness inside of him that never existed; he stepped into the circle of Goths and sat down all of them glancing over him and finding him acceptable let him stay. Introductions were made and a few inquires before one of them suggested they should just leave and spend the day out of the cliffs. This suggestion was readily voted as the course of action for the day and the entire group of twenty left the school without a word and walked five mile north to the Cliffs of Dover or so they were called.
Tim walked along the rocky cliff with little interest as they neared an abandoned surf shack that was dilapidated on the inside and rotting on the outside. Tim could see that it at one time had been painted red, but the weather had chipped and worn away at it till there was only what looked like a bloody remnant on its exterior. The inside didn’t look much better either and he could see where rot had eaten through the roof, letting them see the sky through the worm-ridden wood. Sitting down on the splintery boards which cracked under with a soft creak, left him wondering why they choose this place, but that thought left as a blunt was shoved toward his face.
“Wanna hit?”
Tim’s hand instinctively grabbed the blunt and smelled it, for some reason he could tell just by the smell it was good stuff and inhaled without a second thought. Tim was losing himself piece by piece the longer he left this mask on, but he was having so much fun! There couldn’t be anything wrong with it could there? The smoke came out of his mouth in a rolling fog as the blunt was passed around, but just as it reached the last person, a young man that Tim knew by the same of Chris stood up and walked outside. Tim had never seen any of his features because of the hood Chris was always wearing, but he could always point him out by the blue hoodie he wore; he was surprised that he would walk out on everyone and exited to see what he was doing as he stood on the edge of the cliff with his arms out like a cross and his hood pulled back revealing he was bald.
“Well now that you’ve joined Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Tim, you might as well know I’m doing this just because of one girl who I thought I loved enough to make my own. I’m tired of all this playing, you can take my place I don’t need life anymore.”
Tim watched his mouth an wide o of horror as he watched Chris’s feet leave the cliff’s edge and him fall backwards down below to the jagged rocks that made up the shore line below. Tim didn’t need to watch to know what happened and turned and vomited as his knees hit the ground only an inch from it. He could his breakfast mixed with the coppery bile that made up his stomach and wretched again as the other Goths came out and looked down at the scene and began to weep. Tim returned home soon after too shocked to even think as he stepped through the door at only a quarter past ten. He walked wearily up to his room and laid down on his bed as black tears ran down his face and he reached to take the mask off ready to be out of this persona, but when he looked into the mirror after he had removed the mask all he knew was total fear.
The mask came off his face with ease, but what laid underneath it left Tim speechless, literally. Touching his face as he stared back in the mirror, it had no features on it at all aside from his hazel eyes, which stared in fixed horror at his own reflection. Shaking he threw the mask across the room and watched it flake into dust as it flew, then was carried by some unearthly breeze out the window and down the street toward downtown. Tim, never noticed this he was too busy watching the metamorphous taking place before his eyes. His tan skin was turning milky white and his nose was beginning to reappear, but it wasn’t his nose, it was the mask of persona’s nose that was coming up and its lips. He tried to scream with horror, but his mouth wouldn’t open as his hair receded rapidly and soon he was bald. Franticly, he began clawing at his face only to watch as his hands begin to disintegrate before him being carried off on the same wind that took the mask with it. He had time to shed a few last tears, before his entire body became dust in the wind and all that remained was one opera mask with hazel eyes that were shedding thousands of bloody tears before they dimmed and drifted away.
An hour later the strange gypsy woman stepped through the window of Tim’s room and picked up the mask. She shook her head as Allan appeared behind her, looking a little melancholy as he did so. The old woman smiled and looked him in the eye before saying:
“Looks like you lost the bet brother dear, time to hand over your youth.”
A soft breeze blew through the room as the drapes covered the two and when they returned to place, Allan was now an old swami, dressed in the same clothes with the same appearance as the old gypsy woman only with a straggly grey beard.
“Don’t worry brother dear, I’m sure it won’t be long before you win it back again!”
The giggly little girl before him said with a grin as she took his hand and lead him away. Those that saw the odd little girl that day as they walked home from Honeybranch High, swore she looked just like Allan’s twin and no one there ever heard from him or Tim ever again.
