The Homecoming Masquerade

by Baum, Spencer

  THE HOMECOMING MASQUERADE

  Girls Wearing Black, Book One

  Spencer Baum

  Copyright 2012 by Spencer Baum

  www.spencerbaum.net

  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 lose
r 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?

  Now, as Jill and Annika stood in the ballroom, nine o’clock approaching, everyone thought all the girls wearing black had been accounted for.

  There was Kim Renwick, the daughter of notorious Washington lobbyist Galen Renwick. The odds-on favorite to win, Kim got a round of applause when she burst through the doors wearing a black dress.

  Five minutes after Kim arrived, Mary Torrance, the blonde bombshell daughter of a high-powered lawyer from Atlanta, showed up in black. Ten minutes after that, Samantha Kwan, whose parents were both executives at Ventigen Corp, arrived in her own black get-up.

  And that was it. Three powerful, popular girls had put themselves out there and would compete for the crown. The other girls who might have entered, girls like Serena Snow or Terri Weingarten or even Annika Fleming – they all were here and were not wearing black.

  Only Jill was aware that one girl from the senior class was still missing. But Annika was curious.

  “I’m sorry,” Annika said to Jill. “What was that? You have something to tell me about Nicky?”

  Jill took a deep breath. She had a lot to tell Annika about Nicky, but she needed to make it brief.

  “Nicky’s not here yet,” Jill said.

  Annika looked at her like she was crazy.

  “What?”

  “Annika, there’s a group of us, of families…we don’t want Kim to win but we knew her father would skewer us if we crossed her out in the open.”

  “You’re saying that Nicky hasn’t shown up yet?”

  “My parents are part of it,” Jill said. “It’s kind of like a secret club. We want you to join. I know you’d love to see Kim go down.”

  Annika held up her hand and spoke in a slow, deliberate voice. “You’re telling me that Nicky is about to walk through that door wearing--”

  She didn’t get to finish, for as she was about to say the words, the front door opened one last time, and Nicky Bloom stepped inside. She was wearing black.

  2

  Nicky stepped into the ballroom with all the swagger of an immortal.

  The entire senior class of Thorndike Academy, ninety-nine masked faces in all, stopped what they were doing and stared at her. The gleeful pre-party chatter having come to a sudden halt, those who had something to say now spoke in frantic whispers, leaning in close to one another,
spitting out short sentences, trying desperately to figure out what they knew about Nicky Bloom.

  Watching them whisper, Nicky thought of one thing they didn’t know. They didn’t know she could read lips, and understood what everyone was saying, even those all the way on the other end of the ballroom.

  Who is that?

  It’s the new girl.

  There’s a new girl?

  She got Shannon’s slot.

  The new girl wore black?

  Does she know what she’s doing? I don’t think she knows what she’s doing.

  Kim is going to crush her. She won’t last a week.

  She barely moved to DC last summer.

  Oh my God, Kim is gonna be so pissed.

  Who is she again?

  What do you think Kim’s going to do?

  That last question came off the lips of a pudgy kid from Florida named Norman Gayle. He didn’t have to wait long for an answer, for out of the stunned silence in Renata’s ballroom came staccato, angry footsteps. Kim Renwick had burst from the crowd, her sharp, Italian heels stomping her forward, the look on her face one of absolute fury. She marched into Nicky’s path, the rest of the ballroom giving her a wide berth. Nicky kept on moving, knowing it was important not to show fear. As she and Kim approached one another, the whispers stopped and the only noise in the ballroom was that of shuffling feet as everyone jockeyed for a position to watch.

  They met in the center of the ballroom and stood face to face.

  “Good evening, Kim,” said Nicky.

  “You’re dead, New Girl,” Kim responded.

  Kim was a near-perfect specimen on this night, looking slender and toned in her custom-made gown. It was a strapless A-line with see-thru features on the sides, its black fabric a sharp contrast to Kim’s ivory skin. Her shiny black hair was pulled back in a tight, wet look that gave a severity to her presence. She looked like a winner. Her mask was black silk with gold highlights and was narrow as a blindfold. Her shoes were custom-made heels with diamond-studded gold straps.