Bewere the Night

work. Danny was quick with sums and nimble-fingered, but he had no patience for plans, so Jedward set the pace and the tasks. “Kay Mendez took it, I mean I let her have it.” He felt his face swell and blemish as he heard the suggestive way this came out of it. “I mean—”

“Yeah Jeddy, I know what you mean,” Danny snorted at him. He jammed a wire against a Nano Pylon and soldered it without looking, too distracted by his own amusement.

Jedward wondered how far into Danny’s brain he could get before they pulled him off, if he were to, for example, grab the hot soldering iron and shove it directly into his best friend’s right eye. “It’s not that funny, jerkface.” Once he’d said it, he knew it would just make Danny worse.

But the red puff descended as Danny signaled his line-crossing with a quick nod. They’d never talked about it, but Jedward supposed it was obvious anyway. His loneliness felt like a hood, a sack on his head that everyone could see.

With deadly psychic accuracy, Danny changed the subject to an even worse one. “Are you going or what?”

Jedward stared into a beaker and tried to pretend he hadn’t heard the question, but this time Danny wasn’t going to fade on it. After a few hard elbows in the ribs he relented. “I still don’t know, I’ll just go if I do, or not, otherwise.”

“Yeah obviously.” Danny was almost done with his first board, somehow, though he never seemed to pay attention or care about his work. “You’ll go or you won’t, that is the question. What are you gonna do, start walking and see if you end up there?” Now he was the one who sounded irritable; Jedward knew he was personally offended by the very idea of indecision. “Just go. You’re being stupid.”

“So I’m stupid.” Jedward sped up, fingers agile as he wove copper wires through leather pegs, and then stopped. “It’s all stupid. You’re stupid. I’m going home.” He stood and kicked his chair back, though not so hard it would jostle someone else’s station. “You finish that, you’re better at it anyway.”

That would help a little, make up for lashing out. Danny was relatively free inside himself, but he still had feelings.

There would be a label check at the doors. Wildhaus didn’t throw chintzy parties. Sometimes a loser with a cruddy knock-off would crash in and flail around like a loon, pretending to be on the level, hoping nowould summon the door guardians. More often, the maskless would creep in and clutter up the walls, hoping—for what exactly Jedward couldn’t ken. To find a lost one like he had, maybe, but they’d never give it away. Of course, Danny’s mask was always the best, the freshest pressing, and he always treated it like an old dirty sock, tossing it around and cramming it wherever.

Jedward wondered, lying under his thin, felty wool blanket, whether Karolin would even speak to him if not for the aura of Danny that followed him like a bodyguard. But she would, of course she would. She was a nice girl. She had a lot of growing up to do, that was all.

He crossed his arms in the dark privacy of his own bunk. Look out for yourself for once, he told the magic circle of Danny in his mind, and vanished it in a poof of smooth tan smoke. I’m smarter than you think. I know how to beat the Herks.

“Sure buddy, I’ll go to the party,” he said out loud, feeling good again at last. From the bunk above he heard Danny’s head lift from his pillow and then drop again.

They always started at noon. Even the freshest faces couldn’t peel off in time for moonup without some time to soak. Anyway there were streamers to hang, tall translucent towers of rapidly crystallizing sugar to press and mold into fantastic shapes, all the party details. It was a colorful year. Jedward was glad about that. Last season had been monochrome, which made his eyes feel like they were full of static. Danny had looked sharp in his checkered linen suit, though, that was true.

Eyes were all that was left by three. Soaked in, the masks began to ripple, and tiny silver-blue bubbles appeared at the edges where some skin was still left showing, spreading out over the backs of their heads and down their necks. A rubberized hand feels like a suede bag full of sausages and sticks. Jedward, creeping in from the gallery, was careful to keep a few feet of clearance all around him as two-legged, half-melted wolf-people snittered and worbled through the arches and into the den.

In the foyer there would be a messy hill of jeans and windbreakers looming up under a hanging rack of blouses and ties, with no one bothering to guard it. Jedward stepped through the spaces in the crowd and went there. As soon as he was alone, he touched his own face to reassure himself it was still real.

He had the new formulation in his bag. With nothing much else to do at night he’d always been up in the purple. He stripped out of his old jeans and pilly sweater and buried them, digging out a much nicer set before striding out confidently toward the wallflowers and poseurs he knew he would find leeching around the back gate.

“You guys looking for some fresh masks?” He smiled at them like Danny, like the whole world could just come right up and sit in his lap.

He sold out in less than fifteen minutes. Looping around front, he listened to his own boots crunching on the gravel and thought about the kids back there. Somehad to look out for them, even if they were desperate and annoying, that much was clear. You could do anything to them, or with them, for that matter. Anycould.

He saw Karolin and Danny when he was still out of earshot. They were hanging around the front arch, smoking through their masks and avoiding eye contact.

“It kind of sucks in there,” he said by way of greeting as he reached them. “Why don’t we just go out to the woods?”

Kay’s mask distorted as she rolled her eyes beneath it, briefly giving her the appearance of a blanked-out zombie-wolfgirl. The plastic teeth already looked more like bone. It wasn’t even the one he’d given her. “Jeddy, there are bugs in the woods,” she said, barely patient with his foolishness. “And Tynesha brought those rum balls. And it’s almost time anyway. We’d never make it out there. Your birdy girlfriend can wait, just come inside.”

“Actually it’s a juvenile male,” he heard himself saying, and wished he wasn’t. “Looking for a mate by showing off his repertoire.”

“You always want to go,” Kay told him, stubbing out her smoke and yanking open the Wildhaus door. “You always want to be somewhere else.”

“It’s not my fault most places suck,” he said to the door as it swung shut with awkward slowness.

“Maybe it is.” Danny sounded serious, but he smiled. “If you’re the common denominator.” He leaned on the wall and lit a second brown cigarette from the first. “You notice she said that while leaving.”

“I like that she’s not fake,” Jedward said, because it was what he always said in his mind when practicing for this inevitable conversation. “She says whatever she’s thinking and does whatever she feels like.”

“Yeah, you know who does that? Assholes.” Danny’s anger, always flittering around his head, dive-bombed into the discussion again. “You just like it because you’re all scrunched up on yourself. You go around like nothing means anything, like you’ll wake up any time now. And it makes everythink you think you’re better than them.”

Danny loomed up so close suddenly that Jedward was sure he was finally mad enough to actually hit him, and then for a second it seemed like maybe he was going to do something even weirder, but instead he fell back and sulked on the wall again. Nothing, Jedward realized. He just felt nothing at all.

“Something’s going to happen, Danford,” was what his mouth said this time. “You have to come and see.”

The woods were cool and the color of glowing scallions. Fresh green leaves filtered the moonlight into tinted planes and striated beams, so every gap in the canopy became a projector and every flat surface an empty movie screen. Back at Wildhaus, the plastic wolf-people were probably gathering under the big skylight, waiting for the peak, the final hit that would take them over the edge. Into nowhere. Nothing. Another party. Another night nowould remember, except who had the Herks to make it in. One plus up got you an hour. Everykept running in the same direction and noever moved.

Not tonight. They could hear it coming from two miles off—a rumble, a rustle that gained bass until it became a steady throb. Danny grabbed his hand and stood too close, and Jedward could see the silvery-blue ripples starting to pulse and shine along the seams of his mask—where they would be, anyhow, if he weren’t fully soaked now. Along the edges and between the lines, and the light was entirely unnatural, especially here, and then the wolf face