Read Homecoming Masquerade, The Online

Authors: Spencer Baum

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Homecoming Masquerade, The

BOOK: Homecoming Masquerade, The
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THE
HOMECOMING MASQUERADE

Girls
Wearing Black, Book One

Spencer
Baum

––––––––

C
opyright
2012 by Spencer Baum

––––––––

w
ww.spencerbaum.net

Table of Contents

Copyright Page

Part 1 | New Girl | 1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

Part 2 | Her Name Was Celeste, But Her Dad Called Her Nicky | 15

16

Part 3 | Intermission | 17

18

19

20

Part 4 | The Hunt | 21

Part 5 | A White Orchid Corsage | 22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

Part 1
New Girl
1

Homecoming at Thorndike Academy
was different than at other high schools. There were no pep rallies. There was
no football game either, as Thorndike’s brief experiment with a school football
team ended in 1952.

There was no rival school
brought in for a competitive celebration. After all, who could rival Thorndike?
Located in Potomac, Maryland, Thorndike Academy was the wealthiest high school
in the nation by far. Children of congressmen, senators, judges, lobbyists, and
corporate bigwigs made up the student body. Annual tuition was well in excess
of six figures, and the endowment was larger than the Gross National Product of
many countries.

There was a Homecoming dance at
Thorndike, but it wasn’t in a gym. The Homecoming dance was held in the mansion
belonging to Renata Sullivan, chair of the school’s Board of Regents. Renata’s
mansion, located on a fifty-acre plot west of town, housed a ballroom suitable
for an affair as prestigious and important as Homecoming.

Like other Homecoming dances,
the event at Thorndike was a formal affair, with the guys in tuxes and the
girls in gowns. But there was no DJ. Renata wouldn’t dream of allowing bumping
and grinding to teenage jungle beats or other such nonsense inside her mansion.
In Renata’s mansion, the dancing was just as formal as the attire, having been
codified over the years into rules and routines all students were expected to
know. Minuets, waltzes, cotillions – all the great formal dances of the
Victorian Age, all of them set to live music, with a small chamber orchestra on
the stage playing the tunes – these were the dances Renata liked to have played
in her mansion. And the students didn’t dare show up to Homecoming without
learning all the dances first. Stepping onto the floor for a minuet and not
knowing how to do it was a terrible insult to the school, the students, and the
hostess, and the last thing anyone wanted to do was insult Renata Sullivan.

Renata Sullivan, who had helped
create and maintain the traditions that now governed Homecoming, was a proud
graduate of Thorndike Academy. After her own graduation, Renata moved straight
into administration at the school, and had overseen the Homecoming event for
nearly seventy years.

Not that Renata was elderly.
Despite walking the earth for the better part of a century, Renata looked
exactly the same as the day she graduated. Renata, like all the true power
players in Washington, was immortal, having earned the honor to live inside her
eighteen-year-old body for as long as she could keep it. She didn’t age, she
didn’t get sick, and she wouldn’t die until someone managed to kill her.

One of the first traditions
Renata instituted at Homecoming was the masks. Starting three years after
Renata’s own graduation, and continuing ever since, Homecoming at Thorndike was
a masquerade ball. The immortals liked it that way. Not only did the masks help
Renata and the other immortals blend in when they stepped onto the floor, but
masks also made the party into a kind of game, and immortals loved games. They
got bored, living so long. They saw normal humans as their playthings. They
invited all the high school seniors to one of their mansions and had them learn
formal ballroom dances and drink wine and dress up in masks because it all was
just so amusing.

And the masks...the masks had
become a tradition unto themselves.

For the guys, the masks were
simple and plain. Understated pieces of black fabric to match their traditional
tuxedos.

For the girls, sky’s the limit.
Glittered, bejeweled, artistically rendered to match their outfits, some barely
covering their eyes, some stretching over their foreheads and into their
hairdos. The masks would become treasured heirlooms, reminders for each girl of
the night she claimed her birthright and entered adulthood as a member of the
power elite. The girls at this ball had been dreaming about their masks since
childhood, sketching them on the pages of their math notebooks, talking about
them the way some people might talk about their children. When a Thorndike girl
first entered high school, her parents began interviewing designers who might
bring the dream of a perfect mask to life. By the start of junior year, every
girl in school had a portfolio of potential mask designs collected from
different artists. Mothers, grandmothers, fashion designers, and respected
plutocrats in DC went through these portfolios and selected one design, then
the family hired the hottest, trendiest artist they could afford to bring that
design to life. The morning after the ball, the masks were put in glass cases
protected by magnetic locks and laser alarm systems, and for the rest of their
lives, the girls would look at their masks, displayed as the most prominent,
significant works of art in their homes, and remember. Their self-worth would
be defined by how good they thought they looked at Homecoming.

A girl’s choice of dress was
very important as well. Red, blue, gold, green, silver, white (well, nobody
wore white) – these were all acceptable colors around which a girl might
arrange her outfit. A red dress might go well with a gold mask. A blue dress
might do well with silver. Girls in green dresses might highlight their masks
with emeralds; girls in red with rubies.

And girls wearing black dresses
would cover their masks in diamonds, for a black dress signified something
entirely different than the other colors, something special. A black dress at
Homecoming was a special privilege, a form of self-selection reserved for the
boldest, most daring girls at school. Those girls who wore black dresses
entered themselves in Thorndike’s prestigious, demanding, and high stakes
Annual Fundraising Tournament, commonly known as “Coronation.”

In Coronation, the girls wearing
black went on to compete in a year-long fundraising contest. They raised money
in a series of parties, games, and events. All money raised was collected into
a trust, or, in DC parlance, “the pot.” Every donation that went into the pot
was on behalf of one of the girls wearing black. At the end of the year,
whichever girl had the most money donated in her name was crowned Queen at the
Senior Prom.

And made into an immortal.

Vampires. That’s what Jill
Wentworth called them, but only behind closed doors. Vampire was their old
name, the one that had identified them for centuries as bloodsucking creatures
of the night. Now that they had come out of hiding and taken over Washington,
they wished to be known as “immortals.” Immortal sounded better. It didn’t have
that connotation of evil, of Counts from Eastern Europe wearing long cloaks and
turning into bats. Vampire was a name for a monster to be hunted down and
killed, but immortal was a title one could aspire to. Immortal had better spin
to it, and spin was everything in Washington.

Jill didn’t care. To her they
would always be vampires. Vampires like Renata could join polite society,
infiltrate Capitol Hill, point the Washington gravy train their way, and name
themselves the new lords and masters of it all, but they were still filthy
bloodsuckers. They were still manipulative, greedy parasites whose eternal life
was one side of a coin on whose opposite face was a collage of victims, of
innocent people that were now gone because the vampires didn’t see them as
humans, but as food.

Jill kept these opinions secret,
of course. The immortals weren’t just held in high regard, they were
practically worshipped. They were more than leaders. They were symbols of what
everyone wanted to be. They were proof that anything is possible, that, for one
lucky girl from the senior class, dreams do come true.

The girl who won Coronation
would get everything she could ever want: wealth, status, power, immortality.
But if the contest were left at that, every girl in the school would enter. To
make it interesting, Coronation also demanded the ultimate sacrifice from the
loser. While the winner got a visit in the night from a vampire who made her
immortal, the loser got locked in a cage and became the winner’s first meal.

Disgusting. To Jill, Coronation
was a horrid, vile event that celebrated the worst parts of humanity, and
Thorndike was a disgusting place for hosting it. Jill had never wanted to come
to Thorndike, but here she was, now in her senior year and on the ballroom
floor, waiting for the party to start. For Homecoming, Jill’s Aunt Ruth helped
her assemble an outfit built around a sleeveless satin dress whose dark green
color was, in the words of her aunt, “A nice way to offset your hair.” None of
her aunts liked Jill’s hair. Black, curly, “unruly,” it was her mother’s hair,
and none of her aunts approved of Jill’s mother.

The dress went from her chest to
just below her knees, and had a silk sash that hugged her waist and “gave some
shape to that stick figure of a body” (another trait that came from her
mother). Jill’s mask was a small gold oval with high relief designs worked into
its edges, created by a Brazilian sculptor named Cristiano. Her shoes were
green sparkly heels that looked to Jill like something more suited for a St.
Patrick’s Day parade than a formal dance, but all her aunts declared the shoes
to be “just perfect,” and, in fairness, so did everyone else who saw the
outfit.

Now, having been in the mansion
for a little more than thirty minutes, Jill couldn’t wait to get out of this
crazy outfit. The dress restricted her movement. The mask cut off her
peripheral vision. The shoes...well, the shoes were just something a girl had to
live with, weren’t they? Jill’s aunts had ensured that she knew how to wear a
pair of heels, as much as she hated to.

They were half-way through the
arrival portion of the night, an hour-long look at me celebration before the
dancing began. Arrival was the time when the girls showed off their fabulous
outfits and the guys stood and stared. It was a time to be seen, to grab a
drink, to develop the social skills that would become so important to all of
them when they graduated into the world of their parents.

After engaging in all the
pleasantries of arrival, Jill went to the bar, where she pushed her way through
a throng of her impossibly giddy classmates to order two glasses of wine. The
bartender had filled them nearly to the top. Now she was walking to the center
of the ballroom with sloshing glasses of red wine in each hand. It was kind of
ridiculous, like some test of her womanhood. Spike heels on her feet, a crowd
of teenagers in formal wear all about, some of them barely able to see out of
the giant showpieces on their faces, glasses of night-ruining stainmakers in
each hand – could she make it to her target without spilling a drop?

Her target was Annika Fleming,
the daughter of the governor of Oklahoma, and despite all the obstacles in her
way, somehow Jill reached her with both glasses of wine intact.

“Thanks, Baby,” said Annika as
she took one of the wines.

“You’re welcome,” said Jill.

Thanks Baby. Sure thing,
Honey. What can I do for you, Sweetie?

This was the way Annika talked.
She got away with it because: a) She was a knockout who was extremely well
endowed and knew how to dress in a way that showed off her assets. b) She had
that cute Oklahoma lilt in her voice that drove guys crazy. c) She was a
skillful flirt who had a way of getting what she wanted. d) She was a social
butterfly who knew how to party like nobody’s business.

It was that last one that really
worked for her. Annika’s ability to bring life to any party was legendary. On
this night, as Jill approached, Annika was just finishing up a story about some
mishap in the school courtyard involving a freshman and an exploding bottle of
soda. She had a crowd of people around her who were struggling to catch their
breath after laughing so hard.

For Annika, this was either the
second or third glass of wine since the doors had opened. For Jill it was the
first, and she had every intention of nursing it for the rest of the night. No
one in Thorndike’s senior class was older than eighteen, but silly things like
the legal drinking age didn’t apply in Renata’s mansion. The vampires wouldn’t
think of hosting any party, even one for high school seniors, without red wine.
Later in the night, when the vampires stepped onto the floor, their own masks
making it difficult to distinguish them from anyone else, all the students
feeling tipsy, it would be impossible to tell the difference between a glass of
wine and a glass of blood.

“Hey Honey, have you seen
Nicky?” Annika asked.

And there it was. The question
everyone should have been asking but wasn’t. Annika said the words with such
innocence in her voice. To Annika, it wasn’t even a possibility that Nicky
hadn’t arrived yet. Nicky Bloom was the new girl, having just transferred in.
Nicky filled the vacancy left by Shannon Evans, who had died in a boating
accident a few months before school started.

“Yeah, about Nicky,” Jill began.
“I have something to tell you.”

She’s not here yet. She’s
coming any minute. She’s going to blow your mind when she walks through that
door.

Jill couldn’t bring herself to
say any of those things. She was too nervous. As soon as she spoke the words,
it was game on. As soon as she told Annika that Nicky wasn’t here yet, the real
night would begin.

There was an arrival schedule to
Homecoming, as formal and orderly as the dance itself. Boys came first, then girls
in colorful dresses, then, late in the evening, just before the dancing was to
begin, the girls wearing black showed up.

Having the girls wearing black
arrive last added some dramatic tension to the event. With a hundred students
in the ballroom, all of them wearing masks, it took a little bit of time to
confirm who was present and who was absent. As the minutes passed, and word
started to spread that no one had seen this girl or that girl yet, rumors
started to fly. Was that girl going to wear black? Was she entering herself in
Coronation?

BOOK: Homecoming Masquerade, The
12.81Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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