8. Then The Sleepover

Some lighting equipment and cables in milk crates were stacked against the classroom's rear wall by the door. The mask, along with the rolling wardrobe, had been packed up into Dan's van.

I felt silly immediately upon being the last one left inside the classroom, but I worried I'd be sillier if I locked up and vacated right behind everyone else. The classroom windows overlooked the cracked pavement-turned-parking-lot, and I watched the cars, their drivers woozy with fatigue and the work that lay ahead, leave one by one until my shitbox was alone. That hunk of junk wouldn't scare off any would-be nocturnal explorers. They'd assume it had been abandoned.

The classroom was warm, the air sticky. I shuffled around the room, the floor creaking under my weight, and I followed the dusty beam of my flashlight, searching for the reason why I'd stayed. I questioned who I thought I was. Did I think I was a real actor? Was I this precious? My request to stay in the classroom was a momentary lapse of impulse control, something so cliché to my age that I was embarrassed all over again. I promised myself that I would later discuss this evening in such honest terms when asked about how my sleepover went. I could already hear Valentina dismissively describing this, whatever this was, as my sleepover.

I scanned the floor for the marks that Cleo had described when she found the mask. I didn't believe her story, but I wanted to. I eventually made my way to the supply room, which had been left open. The flashlight illuminated a rash of scratches and gouges on the rear wall. Had they been there before? I didn't notice them earlier. Did Valentina have the marks made for the film? Did Cleo? Were the marks supposed to mimic what Cleo had claimed to have found on the floor beneath the mask? (At that point in the shoot, I didn't know there wouldn't be a scene related to the finding or creating of the mask.)

I once had a substitute teacher in third grade who gave us the following art assignment: We were to scribble randomly all over a blank page with a black crayon. When we finished that, we were to color the page in, filling gaps and spaces between the arbitrary lines with whatever color we wanted. We weren't supposed to be actively drawing or creating anything. She wanted an abstract explosion of shapes and color. The teacher claimed that when we finished, she would be able to see a secret picture emerge from the patternless mess we'd made, and she would be able to get us to see it too. I accepted her assignment as an ultimate challenge, and I scribbled and scratched and colored and made something I thought was as indecipherable as static. When I presented my page, she squinted and looked and looked and I thought I had won, but she said, "Ah, there," as though disgusted with herself for not seeing the obvious sooner. "A bird sticking its head through a cocoon-shaped nest." I blinked, unable or unwilling to initially see the image, but then I saw it too. The multicolored bits of shapes, like the digital blobs of an old tube television when your face was inches from the screen, formed a bird with a wide pumpkin-shaped head peeking out from its cavelike nest. It looked too big for its nest and angry at having been discovered or disturbed. I was angry too. I couldn't articulate this at the time, but the teacher demonstrated that I wouldn't always be able to see, to really see, what I was looking at.

The memory of that monstrous bird image struck the first chord of fear. Standing alone in the dark classroom of a dead, condemned school, I didn't want to see the secret within the supply room wall's slashing pattern. I didn't want to see that same bird; maybe this time its head would be larger, beak opened wider, and finally free from its nest. I aimed the flashlight beam back to the floor.

Stripping down to my underwear again was not part of my reenactment plan, if only because I wanted to remain dressed and ready to sprint from the room. I cleared my throat and said, "Okay," out loud, the verbalization a trespass. I stepped inside the closet, turned my back to the rear wall, but was careful to not brush up against it. Before I could lose my nerve, I swung the door most of the way closed, leaving a gap an inch or two wide, like there had been in the final shot, the final scene of the day. The flashlight was clutched against my chest, beam pointed up and out, and the boxy space glowed a ghostly, jaundiced white. Keeping my mind preoccupied with my assignment, with my next steps, I slowly sank to the floor and sat with my legs crossed. I slid backward until my back was supported by the rear wall. I panned the flashlight right and left. Toward the right, ceiling and wall tapered into a shallow crawlspace meant for forgotten boxes filled with old, graffitied textbooks. I briefly imagined the Thin Kid with his mask still on, unable to sleep sitting up, so he'd lie down, stretching his matchstick legs and flipper feet into the crawlspace void. To my left, the space kept its height for another five feet. Built into the back wall was a warren of empty shelves and, across from them, two crooked coat hooks set at child's height.

I said, "Okay," again, a whisper this time, and I shut off the flashlight. The sudden darkness was total and disorienting. I tried to blink away leftover ghostly images caused by inadvertently looking directly into the flashlight. Unmoored, I reached for and spread my fingers on the gritty floor as I momentarily thought I might've somehow been spun upside down. My breaths were fast, nasal, and obvious. I concentrated on my sputtering machine sounds, attempting to recalibrate, and I stared at where I thought the sliver of open door would be. Eventually my light-starved eyes adjusted and found weak light from within the classroom, or the weak light that filtered into the classroom. With the eyesight toehold, that slash of vision into the lighter dark outside the door, my breathing became more under control and shallower, lower in volume. Then there was a scrabbling within the wall behind me.

Waves of chills ran up the length of my body, converging and crashing onto my neck and head, pulling me into an undertow. Dizzy, I was convinced that I was experiencing the aural aftershocks of what had originally made the looping, slashing scratches on the rear wall, or worse, that I was hearing more of them being made. I could feel the claw depressions and grooves on the cold skin of my back, and everything inside me screamed to get up and run. I briefly imagined the frenzied path through the school and the doom-leaden salvation of my first breath of night air outside. But I stayed.

I wasn't a brave person, and I am still not a brave person, and I don't know if sitting in that tiny supply room qualified me as being almost brave, but I willed myself into staying by pretending I wasn't me. I was him.

The Thin Kid listened to the small claws, scratching their way toward the right, to the walls outlining the crawlspace, and beyond, before returning partway and pausing. That the sound was consistent and changed in timbre and volume with distance made him feel, if not in control, then at least tethered to the present. The sound was real and not imagined. He could identify what the animal source might be. He could now focus on other sounds: sharp creaks and groans from the ceiling and somewhere out in the hallway, the low whistle of wind entering the classroom, and most concerningly, a delicate clink of chain against the classroom door. Those noises were harder to explain and too easy to extrapolate into phantasmagoria. The Thin Kid's circumstances were already fraught and fearful enough without supernatural intrusion. That thought resulted in a cynical brand of comfort. He listened and watched and waited, expecting someone—maybe one of his friends—or something to step into the small, fuzzy field of vision. He regretted unlatching the door, leaving it open, and perhaps the sounds and their accompanying paranoia and fear were his punishment. But what was he being punished for? What had he done to deserve this?

He felt an odd sense of relief when the scratching noises in the wall approached his space again. He rapped his knuckles on the wall, and the scrabbling rodent (a mouse? a small gray squirrel?) stopped as though to acknowledge that they both were frightened, confused, and alone.

The Thin Kid didn't want to hear more secret noises, so he spoke, his voice dusty from disuse. He wondered aloud why his friends were doing what they were doing to him. He wondered when they would come back for him. Would they let him go home after one night? Would they, in the days or even years later, talk about why this happened? He asked himself why he was staying there and what it meant that he would do whatever his friends asked of him.

I didn't remember falling asleep. I awoke early the next morning, lying on my side, my cramped, cold hands my pillow, and my feet stretched into the crawlspace. I'd taken off my clothes at some point in the evening and found them in a discreet pile underneath the blackboard.