Being Fooled - Darcy Vebber

The mask was feathered and delicately jeweled. There was a little beak that covered the nose. It was held in place by ribbons that tied at the back of the head. (Another version was held up on a little white, beribboned stick like a lorgnette but that seemed too chancy to Lisa, too likely to be lost.) She loved it from the moment she saw it. Normally, she was not a girl who liked costume -- hard enough to dress herself in her regular clothes when she had the guidance of the whole of East High to study -- but she loved this mask.

Most of the store was given over to antiques of uncertain provenance and interest, apparent even to teenage girls, but the area in the back was for clothes, a small dress up corner with its own dusty changing room, and a display case of personal adornments. Masks, beaded necklaces, earrings and scarves.

Lisa looked up from the masks to watch Darla, the girl who had brought her here. Darla knew about places like this, hidden away in Scottsdale between a candle shop and a moccasin store.

Darla studied the rack of clothing for a long moment then snatched something big and dark off its hanger, revealing a flash of red satin, the inviting shine of dark red velvet. A cape.

"Would you wear it?" Lisa heard her mother's voice come out of her open mouth as if she had no will of her own.

Darla shrugged. She slipped it over her shoulders and turned to the mirror, clearly auditioning the cape and not, as was usually the case with Lisa, her own self. Darla's pale skin glowed in the dim light of the back of the store. "Maybe."

Lisa had heard about parties at college, at Yale and Harvard, places on the other side of the moon, where people went naked. It was a requirement. Nakedness. Naked parties.

A man appeared from the front of the store to open the case Lisa was gazing in to. He slide the glass back, making it all accessible.

Keeping one eye on Darla, in case she was making a mistake, Lisa lifted out the mask she loved.

The man nodded towards the mirror.

Lisa held it to her face and turned to look over Darla's red velvet shoulder. Naked would be easier, really. Naked with a mask, her familiar skin, the undisguised shape of her not made the most of or concealed in any way, just a body the way it was just her body when she was small and happy to run around in whatever was light and comfortable in the desert. It wasn't her body that was the problem, that caused the difficulties.

Darla pulled the cape closer around her, even though the store was warm and the spring day outside warmer yet. She was small and when she hunched a little, Lisa's chin and neck and the collar of her plaid shirt were revealed. Like a teacher looking over an actor's shoulder. Darla was an actor, the girl who had the lead, with Sam, in the musical. She'd brought Lisa here because she wanted to be Sam's friend, too.

Lisa dropped the mask, hid it from Darla -- as if she would look, as if she noticed Lisa, really and waited, to pay when the other girl was busy with her own costume. The mask was expensive and Lisa knew, without her mother being there to tell her, that she would never, ever wear it.