“I began pawing frantically through the drawer, tossing all the socks onto the floor.
No mask. Gone.
The balled-up socks bounced all over the room. My heart was bouncing too.
Then I remembered that I had moved the mask. Before school that morning. I was worried that my mom might do laundry. And open my sock drawer. And see it there.
So I had shoved it to the back of my closet, behind my rolled-up sleeping bag.
Letting out a long whoosh of air, I dropped to my hands and knees. I quickly collected all the socks and stuffed them back into the drawer. Then I opened the closet door and pulled down the mask from the top shelf.
Steve, you’ve got to calm down, man, I told myself. It’s just a Halloween mask, after all. You’ve got to stop scaring yourself like that.
Sometimes it helps to scold yourself, to give yourself advice.
I started to feel a little calmer. I smoothed back the stringy yellow hair and rubbed my hand over the craggy, scab-covered skin of the mask.
The brown lips sneered at me.
User Reviews: