Author: Barry Lyga
Date: 2013-08-20 04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Young Adult; Short Stories; Thriller; Mystery; Novella; Horror; Romance; Crime; Fiction; Realistic Fiction
Description: Connie is the new girl in town, but she already has friends...and maybe even a boyfriend. Her father isn't happy that Connie is dating a white boy like Jasper Dent, and things get even worse when she realizes that Jasper is the son of Billy Dent, one of the world's most notorious serial killers! This is the story of how Connie and Jazz overcame their early troubles and fell in love.
Publisher: B & Z Books

CONTENTS

Title Page

Neutral Mask

About this Story

About the Author

Also by Barry Lyga

Back Matter/Credits

NEUTRAL MASK
an I Hunt Killers prequel

Barry Lyga

CONNIE DID HER BEST to conceal her emotions as she entered the house. She was a good actress, but it wasn’t easy. Fortunately, her younger brother was already in bed by the time she got home, and he was the one who could read her most easily.

Mom and Dad were still up, of course.

“You guys didn’t have to wait,” she told them.

Her father gestured at the TV. “Someone great is on Letterman.”

Right. Connie found it beyond suspicious that those few times she’d been out late on a date just so happened to match up with her dad suddenly needing to catch someone on some late-night talk show. She bit back the tempting urge to ask who, even though she was curious as to what Z-list celebrity her father would conjure up.

“Well, I’m going to bed,” she said lightly instead, waggling her fingers at her parents. “See you tomorrow.”

In the bathroom, she ran the tap, then positioned herself at the door, listening carefully. It took less than a minute before the TV’s burble of audience laughter snapped into silence. The low murmur of her parents’ conversation maundered past the bathroom. She caught “—home, at least, and—” from her mother, then an indecipherable Charlie Brown again until their bedroom door closed.

Predictable.

At the sink, she gathered water in her cupped hands and nearly had it to her face when she caught sight of herself in the mirror. Pausing, she stared at herself, momentarily baffled by what she saw.

She looked exactly the same.

Somehow, she had expected to see something different in the mirror. An absurd notion, sure—to think that just kissing a boy would change her appearance —but it had lingered on the fringes of her conscious thought until just now regardless. Every time she’d kissed Jasper—no, wait, he wanted to be called “Jazz” now—she thought the act would transform her as much outside as inside.

She dumped the water and leaned in toward her flat doppelgänger. With one finger, she traced the outline of her lips.

I would kill for your lips.

Her lips should be different, shouldn’t they? After that first intense kiss out in the driveway (and thank God her dad hadn’t been peeking out the window right then, right?) and all the ones that had followed in the past couple of weeks, shouldn’t her lips be different? In the trashy romance novels she couldn’t stop herself from reading, the heroine always noticed her lips were swollen after such a kiss.

I would kill for your lips. They’re sooooo gorgeous.

Tracy. Or, depending on the time of year and her mood, Trécii. Connie’s best friend from when she’d lived in Charlotte. A walking blond cliché of Southern charm and long-lashed, early onset sex kitten.

I have to spend, like, a million years with that special lip balm and the cinnamon oil stuff, and I can’t get, like, half as awesome as your lips.

Connie pursed her lips at herself.

Your lips and your booty. I would kill, like, four or five people for them.

Of course. At first, Connie had been flattered by the girls who coveted her lips and her ass. But then it became so frequent a lament that all flattery drained from it and spiraled down some psychological sewage pipe. The white girls yearned for one another’s lashes and boobs and hair—hair, especially—and eyes and legs and nails and any number of anatomical permutations, but all they ever wanted from Connie were those lips, that “boo-tay.”

No one wanted her hair.

No one wanted her eyes.

She shook herself in the mirror. How had she managed to turn kissing Jazz—not her first kisser, but her very best, by a long shot—into this kind of self- recrimination?

After washing up, she made her way to bed, aware that her parents would have much more to say than who was on Letterman in the morning.

*****

SURE ENOUGH, SATURDAY MORNING at breakfast, her father cleared his throat with unnecessary force and said, “So, when are we going to hear about this young man who’s been keeping you out?”

“He didn’t ‘keep her out,’ Jerry,” Mom chided. “They were on a date. She was in before midnight, for God’s sake.”

“It’s been two weeks,” Dad said with almost preternatural calm. “I think we’re entitled to learn a few things at this point.”

“Connie’s always been responsible. She’s almost seventeen—”

“She’s still sixteen.”

“She’s right here,” Connie interrupted, waving a fork in the air as though signaling for a plane from a desert island, “and she can hear you.”

“Tell us about him. Is he black?” Dad asked.

Connie snorted. “Not a lot of options in that direction in this town.”

“You should—”

“You’re the one who moved us here,” she reminded him. “My dating pool selection is a function of your decisions.”

Her father gaped as her mother chuckled. “She has you there, sweetheart.”

“It’s not like we’re living in a fifties sitcom,” Dad grumbled. “You can find some appropriate boys to date here.”

Appropriate meaning black, Connie groused inside. Her father didn’t understand. He was too old-school. Yeah, his generation had come of age at a time when it was acceptable for interracial couples to mingle in public, but even that was just one generation removed from miscegenation laws and lynchings.

Connie, though, had grown up in a world of interracial couples on TV. In movies. On the sidewalks. And for the most part no one blinked, and those who did were pretty much universally seen as jackasses.

Which sort of made her dad a jackass, she realized, and immediately, abashed, scrutinized her huevos rancheros.

Jazz had told her that he would be busy all weekend with his grandmother. She was sick or something, Connie had inferred from Jazz’s demeanor when he spoke of the old woman. She was probably a real sweetheart. Connie thought that maybe she should bake something for her. People did that, right? Baked things for old people?

If she couldn’t see Jazz this weekend, she could at least do a little cyber stalking. That was harmless. After breakfast, she curled up with her laptop on the beanbag chair in the corner of her room. It was a relic of some long-past birthday and she was way too old for it, except that she wasn’t.

She couldn’t find Jazz on Facebook, even though she used every permutation of his name she could imagine. Twitter, similarly, came up empty. It was weird. She gnawed at a cuticle. He wasn’t even on Instagram, which...actually made sense when she thought about it. He hadn’t had a cell phone with him on their date. Even in Lobo’s Nod, everyone carried a cell.

Except for Jasper Dent.

Jasper Dent had no social networking footprint at all. It was like he was a teenager with the social skills of an eighty year old. Who wasn’t on Facebook? Who wasn’t on Twitter? Even if he never posted, he would have to be on just to keep up with friends, right?

Friends...

She remembered talking to Jazz on their second or third date. He wasn’t going by Jazz yet. And she had mentioned that ridiculous basketball-tall kid. “Why are you friends with that guy? He’s so creepy.”

Jazz had blinked at her in a way that was somehow reptilian. It caught her off guard. “Howie? Creepy?”

“He’s always staring at my boobs,” she said. “And he—”

She could go no further in her list of Howie’s sins because Jazz burst out laughing. It wasn’t an affected sort of laughter, a laugh designed to prove something about the laugher or the statement that preceded it. It was just an honest, balls-out eruption of disbelieving humor.

“Howie’s the creepy one,” Jazz said, relief and incredulity both skimming the surface of his voice. “Right. Look.” And here he took her hands, and she noted how cool and dry his were, and she found her breath suddenly deciding to hibernate somewhere north of her lungs and south of her mouth.

“Look,” he said. “Seriously. Howie is golden. Howie is like the moon, okay?”

“I don’t get it,” she managed, her breath returning in the nick of time.

“The moon wavers and the moon changes and the moon drives some people crazy, but the moon is always there. That’s Howie Gersten. He’ll drive you nuts, but he’s always there.”

“He’s your best friend.” Right. Noted. Connie was pretty sure she’d read an article on some website somewhere about not dissing your man’s bestie.

She had changed the subject quickly.

And now she thought: Howie Gersten.

Howie had a social networking profile. He was on Facebook. He was on Twitter. (His bio: “Raconteur. Stealth romantic. Ladies’ Man Supreme. It’s OK to want me so bad.”)

But nowhere in his list of followers or friends could she find a link to Jazz.

Other girls might have given up at this point. Other girls might have resigned themselves to the fact that Jazz just wasn’t an online kind of guy. But other girls weren’t as determined as Connie Hall.

Other girls, she admitted, probably didn’t have so much free time on a random Saturday, either.

She plugged Jasper Dent into Google, figuring that she would get nothing. After all, what were the odds of a kid without a Facebook profile doing anything Google-able—

A page of links came up. Connie tried to swallow, but her throat had clogged, had jammed up with something heavy and corrosive, something that blunted her breath and burned the back of her tongue. Something acid and primitive.

KILLER’S SON: JUST ANOTHER VICTIM? read the first link. An article by a man named Doug Weathers.

A photo. A boy. Definitely Jazz, though younger.

And beneath, a caption. Two names. She knew both of them.

JASPER DENT, SON OF WILLIAM CORNELIUS DENT, SEEN HERE IN A SCHOOL YEARBOOK PHOTO.

Why didn’t...why didn’t anyone tell me? Why didn’t anyone—

Because you never asked, Connie. Because you never told anyone you were seeing him. You were being careful. You were...

She closed the laptop and huffed in air through her nose. She forced herself to take a deep, cleansing yoga breath to crush and dissolve and gag down that ball of torment stuck in her gullet.

Billy Dent. She knew the name. Everyone knew the name. But Dent was such a bland last name that she’d never...

Oh, God, she thought.

*****

CONNIE READ EVERYTHING SHE could. She read for hours.

Her mother came by at one point, leaning in the door that way she did, as if not wanting to place a foot in her daughter’s space without permission, and asked if Connie wanted lunch. With one hand scrolling the laptop’s track pad, Connie waved her off with the other, far more dismissive and disrespectful than she normally would have been.

But Mom was part of some other world, and Connie was currently orbiting a whole different planet.

The planet of Billy Dent.

It had only been a few years since Billy Dent’s arrest, but those years to a sixteen year old might as well have been decades. There are eons between thirteen and sixteen. Millennia. The Halls had been living in Charlotte. Billy Dent’s arrest in Lobo’s Nod—a town that might as well announce “The Middle of Nowhere’s bedroom community” on its welcome sign—had not made enough of an impression at that age for her to remember the town, the state. She’d been latched onto her budding interests in yoga and acting. She’d been discovering boys, and they’d been discovering her.

A madman in the middle of the country held no interest to her.

And now she was dating his son.

“Is he black?” her father had asked, and Connie began giggling, snickering as if it could ward off disease or death or even—let’s say— a crazy serial killer.

Not only is he white, Dad, she could picture herself saying, but you know that guy they call “Butcher Billy” on TV? Guess what?

On YouTube, there was a clip of Billy Dent coming down the steps of a courthouse with his lawyer. He wore a gray pin-striped suit with a black-and-pale-blue rep tie. And holy God above, it was Jazz. Only older. The hair lighter, sun-kissed, and she instantly chided herself for adjoining such a bucolic adjective to Billy Dent.

She played the video. Billy spoke only once, as a reporter shoved a mic at him and said something unintelligible that sounded like “What are your regrets?”

Billy grinned, and Connie had seen that grin, had kissed the lips that made it. “Once this is all done and I’m a free man,” Billy drawled, “we can talk about that.”

His voice. God. His voice was just like—

She slammed the laptop shut, too hard, not caring.

Oh, Jazz. Oh, what the hell have I gotten into?

*****

THAT NIGHT, SHE DREAMED that Jazz came in through her window, handcuffing her to the bedpost before she was even entirely awake. She screamed for her parents, but Jazz just shrugged, and then there was somehow Billy, too, and Billy dumped a trash bag’s contents on the floor—her parents’ heads. Her brother’s.

“Two is better’n one,” Billy said offhandedly. Jazz nodded and, with a large, wicked knife, cut Connie’s oversized T-shirt—the one she’d snaked from her Dad’s dresser years ago, with his college crest over the left breast—from her body and leaned in, and she woke up, and everything was fine, of course. Everything was normal.

It was his father, she reminded herself, yoga breathing to bring her heartbeat —which had decided to Sousa march—back into line. You don’t inherit crazy.

That thought, plus the yoga, guided her back to sleep.

*****

MONDAY AT SCHOOL, SHE rushed through her normal locker routine—bio, English, trig books into the backpack, lip gloss check in the mirror—and made it to homeroom with plenty of time to spare. Van—Vanessa McCurdy, one of her new friends here in the Nod—was lazily sketching what looked like an astronaut in her notebook when Connie sidled up to her and said, “I need to talk.”

Van shrugged and popped her gum. “Now?”

“Before first period.”

“Def.”

Right after the first bell, they ducked into the girls’ bathroom and jammed into a stall at the far end. “What’s so urge?” Van asked. She was incapable of using more syllables than strictly necessary.

Connie hesitated. She hadn’t told any of her new friends that she had gone on a few dates with Jazz. First of all, it hadn’t seemed like anyone’s business. Second of all, she knew how territorial girls could be—lions on the Serengeti seemed more likely to share a patch of veldt sometimes—and she had no desire to be “the new black girl” and “the girl who stole the guy someone else was secretly into.” Lastly, she was “the new girl,” and she didn’t know the prestige (or lack thereof) of Jazz’s particular block on the flowchart of the Lobo’s Nod High School social scene. She thought he was cute. She didn’t want to prejudge him based on high school gossip before she got to know him.

Well, she knew him now. Never in her life had she felt such an immediate connection to someone. And never before in her life had she felt such an equally immediate need to know more about someone.

“Do you know Jasper Dent?” she asked.

Van’s eyes went so wide that Connie could see the curve of the orbs sinking back into the sockets.

“What about him?”

“I—” Connie paused. Had someone just come into the bathroom? She and Van held their breath and stared at each other through the silence until convinced they were still alone.

“Remember how I told you I went on a couple of dates with a—”

“Jasper Dent?” said Van, sounding like a woman who’d just gagged down a bowl of toddler stew. “Are you kidding me?”

“No.”

“He’s the one—”

“I know. That’s his father, though.”

“You don’t get it, Connie. You’re new to town. We grew up with him.”

“So what?”

“He was normal. He seemed normal. But the whole time, his dad was killing people and stuff, and he was teaching Jasper all about it.”

“We don’t know that,” Connie said with a confidence she neither deserved nor trusted.

“He taught him,” Van shot back just as confidently, though Connie suspected Van’s confidence—deserved or not—was backed up by something more than Connie’s own. “But here’s the thing. Here it is. Look, the whole time his dad was murdering peeps, Jasper seemed normal.”

“You already said—”

“He acted normal. Like nothing was weird at home. Like everything was cool. Get it? His dad was a psycho freakazoid, and Jasper just came to school every day and acted like everything was normal. No one ever knew.” She shook her head. “Acting normal when that kinda shizz is going down at home? When your dad killed your mom? That’s not normal, Connie.”

The bell rang. Van swore briefly and stumbled out of the stall.

Connie sank onto the commode. She would be written up for being late to her first class, but right now she didn’t care. She had to think.

*****

AFTER SCHOOL, CONNIE CAUGHT up to Jazz in the parking lot, near his battered old Jeep. Howie was with him. Of course. Where goeth the Lone Ranger, so too goeth Tonto. Sherlock needs his Watson. Batman needs his Robin. And on and on.

She was wearing a modestly cut shirt with a cardigan to cover up, but even with the sweater, there was a little more cleavage than was probably prudent around a horn dog like Howie.

Connie frowned. “Hey, Howie, my eyes are up here, buddy.”

Howie recoiled, as though bitten. “I know that! But your boobs are down here,” he said helpfully, “so that’s why I was looking there.”

Connie gave up. Howie, she had to keep reminding herself, was completely harmless. Male or not, bigger or not, stronger or not, he was still a hemophiliac. He could be stopped with a strong hit to the head. If she raked her fingernails down his neck, he’d probably bleed out.

“You can’t handle it,” she said, drawing in her breath and thrusting out her chest.

Howie clutched at his heart and staggered back. “Oh, God!” he whimpered. “It’s a perfect chocolate valley of delight....”

“That’s enough,” Jazz said in a flat tone. Or was it flat? A couple days ago, Connie would have said so. But now...was that menace threading through his words?

Or was it just her imagination and the memory of Billy Dent’s crimes?

“You’re just jealous because my sweet, sweet line of romance is tempting her heart away from you,” Howie said, pouting.

“Wait for me in the car, okay, Howie?”

Howie loped off toward the dented, ancient Jeep.

“Sorry about him. He’s really—”

“—harmless. I know. He takes some getting used to.”

“I know. Sorry again.”

They stood there, staring at each other. She willed him to speak because if he didn’t speak soon, then she would have to, and the only thing she had to say to him was—

“I really enjoyed the other night,” Jazz said. “I was thinking maybe, if you can, we could—”

“I know about your dad,” she blurted out.

“Oh.” His expression did not vacillate or shimmer. “I didn’t realize you didn’t already.”

“Really?”

He shrugged. “I figure everyone knows.”

“I’m not from around here.”

“Neither were most of his victims.” He sucked in a breath, as if steadying himself against a strong wind, then nodded once, curt. Still no change in his face, his eyes. “Well, I really enjoyed our dates. Nice knowing you. Enjoy the Nod.”

As he turned to go, she reached out, unthinking, reflexive, and grabbed him by the arm, pulling him back and spinning him around. He stared at her with that flat, disinterested mien, but she knew something else—a spirit alive and vibrant and connected—loitered back there, eager for its chance to burst through.

“Don’t walk away from me,” she commanded with a tone that surprised her. “Who the hell do you think you are?”

He jerked slightly in her grip, his eyes now betraying shock. “I, uh—” he managed after a moment. “Well, I guess, uh—” he continued.

“Very eloquent,” Connie deadpanned. “You silver-tongued devil, you. You’ve swept me right off my feet.”

“Look,” he said, stabilizing. “I don’t know what more there is to say. I thought—”

“You thought I knew about your dad. And then you thought that when I did learn about him, I wouldn’t want to see you anymore.”

“Well...yeah.”

“Why?”

He shrugged. “Isn’t it obvious?”

“Not to you, evidently. Because before you thought I knew about him, but was still okay with dating you. And now you know I know about him, but you suddenly think I’m not okay with dating you. Does that make any kind of sense?”

Jazz’s mouth guppied as he tried to speak. Silent moments passed, and then he shrugged once more, suddenly nothing more than a sheepish boy, and said, “It made a hell of a lot of sense in my head.”

“I think I know a little bit about what it’s like to be an outsider,” Connie said. “We’ve been in four different schools since I turned eight ’cause Dad kept moving us around. And the solution isn’t holing up somewhere with your bestie and keeping your head down and hoping no one notices.”

“What is the solution, then?”

Now it was Connie’s turn to shrug. “Do something. Something meaningful to you. Something that resonates. Something that connects you to other people, even if only temporarily. Like, I do yoga and I also—” She broke off, a new idea forming.

“I’m not doing yoga,” Jazz said into the void of her distraction. “For one thing, I’m just not putting my butt in the air like that and for another—”

“Shut up.” She actually put a hand over his mouth. “Don’t worry about yoga. Even though it would totally help relax you. Yoga’s solitary. You need to be around people. You’re going to join drama club with me!”

Jazz shook her hand away. “I absolutely am not,” he said with finality.

*****

THE NEXT WEEK, CONNIE met up with Jazz after school, linked arms with him in full view of God, Van, and everyone else, and marched him to Ms. Davis’s classroom, where drama club met.

A ’whipped man is a happy man, Howie had intoned, but ’whipped nonetheless.

“I can’t believe you talked me into this,” Jazz grumbled.

“I’m very persuasive.”

“I’ve noticed.”

“Don’t pout,” she told him outside the classroom and pecked him on the lips. “Just watch today. We’re doing neutral mask exercises.”

“What’s a—”

“You’ll see.”

Inside, the fifteen other drama clubbers all stared as Connie and Jazz entered, hand in hand. She had known them for less time than Jazz had, but she was sure she knew them better. And the teacher in charge of drama club—Ginny Davis—was only in her second year teaching, so she hadn’t been there long enough to form an opinion of Jazz. It was the perfect way to ease Jazz into the real world. Connie was supremely, sublimely proud of herself.

“Jasper!” Ginny cried. “I am so thrilled to see you here! When Connie told me you’d be joining us, I was so excited. When we do the spring musical, I know you’re going to be perfect.”

Jazz looked at Connie as though to say, “What the hell have you gotten me into?” then grinned and said, “Well, thanks, Ms. Davis, but—”

“Ginny,” she corrected. “After hours, it’s Ginny. Now, let’s get started, everyone! Who wants to go first? Jasper, you can go next week with the second group.”

Connie leapt at the opportunity to do her neutral mask performance first. She’d been prepping all week.

It was a simple enough exercise—on the surface. She wore all black. Ginny handed her a stark white mask with an utterly blank expression—eyes not too wide, not too narrow; mouth a straight line. Connie handed Ginny a flash drive with some music on it. For the exercise, Connie had to be completely silent, her face hidden by the mask, her body neutered by the black clothing.

Using nothing more than her body language and the music she’d chosen, she had to, as Ginny had put it last week, “show a transformation from one state to another.”

Connie stood in the center of the room. The chairs and desks had all been pushed back, and everyone sat in a circle around her. She deliberately ignored Jazz; she had to focus.

She signaled Ginny to start the playlist she’d assembled on the flash drive.

Music started. Funereal. Somber. Connie slumped her shoulders forward and mimed a trudge. As the music continued, she tried to shield herself from above with an arm, warding off imaginary rain. Trying—and failing—to blot out misery.

Acting wasn’t just about pretending. It wasn’t just about trying to fool the audience. In a way, you had to fool yourself, too. She had rehearsed this over and over, and she knew she could pull it off.

The mask was neutral, but beneath it, she was not. Live your emotion under the mask, Ginny had told them. Project through the mask. Make the mask come alive to us.

She grimaced. She stared. She pouted. She tried to force her emotion through the dead, white wall between her and the world.

She paused. The music change was coming any second now. She needed to time this properly.

She reached out for the rose.

It wasn’t really there, of course. There was just the linoleum floor of Ginny’s classroom. But she made herself believe that a wild rose was growing there, that this was a field, not a school, that rain was battering her, wind buffeting her. If she believed it, she could make the drama club believe it, too.

She crouched down by the rose, stooped and bent over it, cupping her hand to protect it from the fierce rain. Again, the mask was neutral, but she was not. She allowed her face to express caution, then surprise.

Tilting her head this way and that, she explored with her eyes every facet of it, every petal, every glistening drop of rainwater clinging to it.

She willed the mask to reflect the delight on her own face.

And now...the change.

The music shifted. Connie pretended not to notice at first, still fascinated by the rose. Then, as the music became more and more upbeat, Connie craned her neck up and around, gazing at the sky. With infinite slowness, she unfurled herself, rising to meet a sky no longer clouded, but now radiant with sunshine, as the music swelled to a triumphant crescendo.

She held her pose for a beat as the music faded. Ginny clapped and everyone else joined in.

“Excellent, Connie!” Ginny said. “Brava!”

She whipped off the mask and finally made eye contact with Jazz. He was clapping, too, worrying the corner of his mouth at the same time.

*****

WHEN THE CLUB MEETING ended an hour later, they walked out to his Jeep together.

“I have to do something like that next week?” Jazz asked.

“You’ll be fine,” she said, though she was not entirely sure. Throwing Jazz into the deep end of the pool and trusting that he would figure out how not to drown had seemed like a good idea at first blush. She didn’t want to make his sense of isolation even worse, though. “I’ll help you, if you want,” she added.

He shook his head. “No, that’s okay. I’ll come up with something.”

*****

MUCH TO CONNIE’S SURPRISE, Jazz didn’t ask for help in the ensuing week. She had assumed that his casual dismissal of her offer had been teen boy bravado, a testosterone-driven inability to accept assistance, especially from a girl. She waited for him to break down and call for help.

But even though they’d seen each other in school every day that week, gone to a movie on the weekend, and spoken on the phone several times, he’d never so much as mentioned his upcoming neutral mask exercise. Connie yearned to ask him about it, but some mulish part of her refused to be the first to capitulate on this. Let him ask for help before she offered it.

He never did.

They walked together to drama club, Jazz dressed in a black turtleneck and black jeans. Connie ached to ask if he was prepared, if he had any last-minute questions, if he needed any advice, but if he was going to be all stoic and tough- guy, then she could be hard-core, too.

Aaron Plummer went first, miming a decent enough moment of a baseball player hitting a ball that seemed to be going over the wall...only to fall short at the last possible instant. He was followed by three more, and then it was down to the last two—Jazz and Eddie Viggaro. Jazz had managed to avoid his turn so far, but Ginny wasn’t about to give him a pass.

“Jasper. Looks like you’re up.”

A part of Connie felt sorry for him, but she also knew that this was—by and large—a supportive group. Ginny would have it no other way. This was the best possible place and manner for Jazz to learn to start trusting people.

Jazz said nothing. He simply handed an old iPod to Ginny, then—instead of standing in the center of the ring as everyone else had—walked to the farthest point in the room, near the door. For a moment, Connie thought that he might just keep going and disappear into the corridor, but he stopped. Turned. Ginny plugged the iPod into her speakers.

He slipped on the mask.

The entire room fell silent. Which was nothing new, really—they’d been silent for each actor so far—but there was something different about this silence. It was the silence of a caught breath. The silence of trying not to breathe at all.

Jazz signaled Ginny, then stood ramrod, arms at his sides. There was something about him, all in black—

Is that how his father dressed when he would stalk—stop thinking like that, Connie!

that made him fearsome and sexy all at once, and Connie went woozy for a moment with the dichotomy of it.

In perfect synchronization, Jazz took a step forward as the iPod made a single beep.

Not music. Just a beep. Followed by another. And another. And another, as Jazz slowly made his way to the center of the room.

It was a heartbeat, Connie realized. A heartbeat measured in EKG tones, as Jazz came closer.

Suddenly—again, in perfectly rehearsed synchronization—Jazz clawed at his own chest as the faux EKG went wild, its synthetic beat racing wildly. The mask betrayed nothing, preternaturally and cruelly calm in counterpoint. What was going on back there, Connie wondered. What was happening right now in his eyes, to his lips, his cheeks, his brow?

Connie bit down on her lower lip as Jazz staggered against the audio coronary, his body bucking and jerking as he dropped first to his knees, then flat on his stomach, his cloaked face turned toward Connie, who could find nothing of him in the expanse of the mask.

Jazz had transformed all right. From living to dead.

The class had applauded Connie’s neutral mask exercise, as well as many of the others. At the very least, at the conclusion, Ginny had said something, thanking the student, offering a comment, teeing up the next exercise.

But no one spoke. No one moved. Not even Ginny. Everyone stared at Jazz, lying on the floor, so completely and so convincingly—

He’s just pretending, she told herself. He’s just acting. He’s fine. He’s not really dead. He’s not—

Then why is he lying so still? How can he be lying so still? It doesn’t even look like he’s breathing. Should someone do something? Should I say something?

It couldn’t have been more than ten or twenty seconds, but it felt as though years had passed in shocked silence as Jazz lay there.

Connie could bear it no longer. She opened her mouth to speak, but just then, the iPod fired a pebble through the windshield of quiet, spiderwebbing it.

Beep!

A single beep. A pause.

Another beep.

The index finger on Jazz’s right hand spasmed.

Beep!

His whole hand trembled. His leg shook.

Beep!

The rhythm building now. Still bradycardiac, but building now, as Jazz—slowly, weakly—gathered his strength. He managed to get one hand flat on the floor and lever himself into a partial crouch, leaning on the other elbow.

Beep! Beep!

Stronger heartbeat now. Blood rushing through veins and arteries. Connie imagined she could hear the lub-dub, lub-dub of Jazz’s heart through his rib cage, his chest muscles, his flesh, that black turtleneck, and the seven or eight feet of empty air between them.

Beep! Beep! Beep!

Jazz finally stood, at first shaky, his legs trembling, his whole body threatening to collapse under its own uncertain weight, but then—just before he fell—he rediscovered his balance, and the EKG spun up into a victorious rhythm as Jazz thrust both fists in the air as though in conquest.

Connie realized tears had gathered and now threatened to spill down her cheeks. She rubbed at her eyes to eradicate them.

“Jasper,” Ginny said in a slightly strangled voice, “thank you very much.”

Jazz pulled off the mask, and nodded as though he’d been complimented on his shoes.

“Thank you very, very much,” Ginny said, and went silent, and everyone stared at Jazz in the center of the circle.

She finally cleared her throat, a dream-woken sound, and said, “Eddie? You’re last. Jasper, please give—”

He held out the mask to Eddie, who looked like he totally—totally—did not want to take it.

*****

ON THEIR WAY OUT to Jazz’s Jeep, Connie had to ask. She couldn’t stop herself.

“You’re sure you’ve never acted before?”

Jazz started to speak, stopped. Shrugged. Started to speak again. Shrugged again.

“Not really,” he said at last.

“Because, Jazz, that was...I don’t even know where to start.”

“It was just a thing.”

“Ginny was gobsmacked. She could barely talk.”

“No one applauded. It couldn’t have been that good.” He said it without recrimination, as though the lack of response were merely factual, not a personal snub.

“No one applauded because they couldn’t remember they had hands after that.”

“You’re overstating.”

“Not by much.”

“I have to admit. I’m sort of curious what Howie would think of all of this.”

She chuckled. “You don’t have to wonder—just tell him about it.”

“It’s not the same as having him there.” And for the first time since she’d met him, Jazz seemed wistful. Regretful.

She felt bad for not liking Howie. For that brief fantasy of shredding him with her nails. She resolved to make an effort. In spite of his leering and his flirting-with-offense rambling. It mattered to Jazz, so it mattered to her.

“He really is your best, best friend, isn’t he?”

“Pretty much my only friend.”

Connie shrugged. “Not anymore,” and leaned in to peck his cheek with those coveted lips.

Jazz kissed her back and then leaned in for a longer one, bringing up one hand and running it through the carefully braided cornrows draped down behind her ear. She jerked away from him, tossing back her beaded braids.

“Whoa!”

“What?” He seemed panicked. “What did I do?”

“Here’s an important lesson for you,” she said. “Don’t touch my hair. Never touch my hair.”

“Why not? It’s just hair.”

“No. It takes a hell of a lot of effort and product and money to get it right. It’s not like white girls’ hair where they can just wash it and blow it out and tie it back or whatever. It takes forever to get it right. So don’t touch it.”

“Got it.”

“Unless I’m wearing it natural. Then you can touch it. But that will never, ever happen.”

“So don’t touch it.”

“So don’t touch it.”

“You have beautiful eyes,” Jazz said.

Caught off guard, Connie blinked rapidly and nearly stuttered in response.

“They’re just brown,” she said.

“They’re beautiful.”

“No. Blue or green or even, like, yours, hazel, but brown is just boring. It’s —”

Jazz cocked his head to the left, and something deliciously cold tiptoed up her spine.

“Boring? Are you kidding me?” Without asking, without preamble, he touched his thumb and forefinger to the flesh of her left eye socket, gently holding her eye open. Connie couldn’t tell if the liquid heat that pulsed through her heart was fear or lust, but she realized she didn’t care. She could only stare into Jazz’s eyes, those hazel whirlwinds, coruscating flecks of gold and gray, threaded through with darker shoots like the veins of leaves gone autumnal.

“There’s a gentle blend to them,” Jazz whispered, his voice now low because he was so close that she could feel his words. “They’re not just brown, Connie. They’re deep. They’re unchanging and warm, like someone took everything about you and distilled it down into these whirlpools of—”

She lunged at him, grabbing him by the shoulders, and smashed her lips to his.

She was no longer in control of herself. Her heart was. Her soul was. Or maybe her hormones—she didn’t know and didn’t care. She just knew now, in this moment, that Jazz was hers and would be hers and had to be hers.

Or...no. That wasn’t true. Maybe she’d realized it in this moment, in this beautifully sinfully hot kiss, but it had come true in Ginny’s classroom, during Jazz’s neutral mask exercise. She’d fallen in love with him then. Wholly.

No one could produce something so demonstrative, so passionate, so alive, and be a soulless killer. Parents passed down much to their children, true, but she couldn’t believe they passed down madness. The children of alcoholics often never touched a drop of alcohol, for fear they would also fall into a bottle. Jazz, too, would never hurt anyone. She knew it. He would spend his life avoiding even the opportunity to harm someone, for fear of lifting his eyes to a mirror one day and seeing Billy Dent staring back at him.

They broke the kiss. Jazz gasped for breath.

“What was that for?”

“For liking my eyes,” she said, and went into his arms, putting her ear to his chest and finally hearing his strong, strong heart.

“We really should be going,” he murmured. “I should get you home. And my grandmother—”

“In a minute,” she said. She did not relish that eventually she would have to tell her dad that not only was she in love with a white boy, but that he was the son of the local psychopath to boot. Let them have this moment. This respite. The parking lot of Lobo’s Nod High School could be their safe haven for now.

He held her for a while, and then she pulled back and gazed up at him.

“What was going on behind the mask?” she asked. “I have to know. The whole time you were acting, I wanted to see your face.”

Jazz stroked the pads of his fingers along her cheek. She fell into his hazel eyes. He said:

“You did.”

ABOUT THIS STORY

This story, like the other I Hunt Killers prequels, grew out of a very natural process. When I started writing the books, I knew that the “present” of the story took place four years after the notorious Billy Dent had been arrested, tried, and convicted. Furthermore, I knew that Billy’s “career” stretched back twenty years, longer than his son had been alive.

This meant that I had a lot of backstory in my head and in my notes as I wrote. Some of it leaked out in dribs and drabs over the course of the trilogy.

Now, one thing authors have to drum into their heads early on is this: Backstory is not story! We have a tendency to fall in love with our backstories, which oftentimes leads to terminally dull prologues or extended, boring flashback sequences. It’s easy to forget that the audience cares about the story, not the backstory.

But when it came to I Hunt Killers, there were bits and pieces of the backstory that I thought would be of interest to readers…as long as they didn’t interfere with the action in the story itself. How did Jazz get his nickname? How did Jazz and Connie fall in love, given the circumstances? These were the sorts of character-driven backstory elements that I thought readers might enjoy.

My solution? This story you’ve downloaded, as well as some others. I hope you agree that they were worth the time!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Called a “YA rebel-author” by Kirkus Reviews, Barry Lyga has published novels in various genres in his career, including the New York Times bestselling I Hunt Killers. His books have been or are slated to be published in a dozen different languages in North America, Australia, Europe, and Asia.

After graduating from Yale with a degree in English, Lyga worked in the comic book industry before quitting to pursue his lifelong love of writing. In 2006, his first young adult novel, The Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy and Goth Girl, was published to rave reviews, including starred reviews from Booklist and School Library Journal. Publishers Weekly named Lyga a “Flying Start” in December 2006 on the strength of the debut.

His second young adult novel, Boy Toy, received starred reviews in SLJ, Publishers Weekly, and Kirkus. VOYA gave it its highest critical rating, and the Chicago Tribune called it “…an astounding portrayal of what it is like to be the young male victim.” His third novel, Hero-Type, according to VOYA “proves that there are still fresh ideas and new, interesting story lines to be explored in young adult literature.”

Since then, he has also written Goth Girl Rising (the sequel to his first novel), as well as the Archvillain series for middle-grade readers, the graphic novel Mangaman (with art by Colleen Doran), the I Hunt Killers series, and the (very) adult novel, Unsoul’d.

Lyga lives and writes in New York City. His comic book collection is a lot smaller than it used to be, but is still way too big.

For more information, visit barrylyga.com.

ALSO BY BARRY LYGA

If you enjoyed “Neutral Mask,” you might also enjoy these other books by Barry Lyga:

The I Hunt Killers Series

Jazz is the son of the world's most infamous serial killer, and for Dear Old Dad, "Take Your Son to Work Day" was year-round. Jazz has witnessed crime scenes the way cops wish they could--from the criminals' point of view.

In an effort to prove murder doesn't run in the family, Jazz joins the police in the hunt for a new serial killer. But Jazz has a secret — could he be more like his father than anyone knows?

A riveting series about a teenager trying to control his own destiny in the face of overwhelming odds.

- I Hunt Killers
- Game
- Blood of My Blood

- Lucky Day (prequel novella)

The Brookdale Books

Controversial. Award-winning. Critically acclaimed. From a comic book geek meeting the girl of his nightmares to a baseball star with a shameful secret to small-town politics to a girl figuring out how to be a woman, the Brookdale Books form an “unseries” of loosely linked stories that “proves that there are still fresh ideas and new, interesting story lines to be explored in young adult literature” (VOYA).

- The Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy & Goth Girl

- Boy Toy
- Hero-Type
- Goth Girl Rising

Unsoul’d

“That day, I had a bagel for breakfast and sold my soul to the devil. In retrospect, the bagel was probably a mistake.”

Randall Banner is thirty-five years old, a middling mid-list author who yearns for more of everything: More attention. More fame. More money. More fans.

Then, one quiet morning, he meets the devil while pounding away at his laptop at his usual coffee shop. Soon, a deal is made, a contract is signed, and Randall is on his way to fame and fortune unlike any he ever imagined.

What follows is a bawdy, hilarious, yet harrowing tale of one man, one devil, and a deal that could change the world.

"Like Nick Hornby writing an episode of Californication!" — Sarah Maclean, New York Times bestselling author.

BACK MATTER/CREDITS

Copyright © 2014 Barry Lyga LLC

All Rights Reserved

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Cover art from www.shutterstock.com | young black child with braids over face: Michael C. Gray/Shutterstock.com | Plaster mask isolated on black: pummyoohoo/Shutterstock.com

Cover font: Holstein (http://www.fonthead.com)