Excerpt: The Thespian

Now she was really ready to yell at him. Get out of my apartment. Get out of my room. Don’t come looking for me. I don’t even know who you are! And yet there was still something about him that looked eerily familiar, like she’d known him from somewhere. Like she’d known him from a dream or a memory or something along those lines. The words she wanted to yell out remained stuck in her throat, and instead, she ended up stammering, “S-so you never told me who you were exactly.” She swallowed, and she was sure that they both could hear it. “Who are you? What’s your name?”

“Me?” He pointed to himself, tugging on the hem of his shirt with his free hand. “I don’t have a name exactly. I’m called The Thespian. You can call me that, too, if you want. I don’t mind it.” She heard him stifle a laugh, and she narrowed her eyes at him. “What, you couldn’t tell from this magnificent mask of mine? Did you think I was related to the Phantom of the Opera or something like that? Come, stand up.” He extended his hand to her; she only stared at it and got to her feet by herself, never once tearing her eyes away from him.

“You’re The Thespian. What kind of name is that? And what’s that supposed to mean?” She took a step away from him—she had to keep her wits about her. He had a mask that stuck to him, a mask that allowed him to speak and that forbade him from speaking if he didn’t have it on, and now he was saying that he was called “The Thespian”? The alarms started to go off in her head, the same ones that went off when she met Brandon. The only two conclusions that she could come up with now were that he was someone who was a complete psycho and was pretending to be something in order to get something strange from her, or that he was really mentally ill and had no clue who he really was. “I want to know who you are.”
“Well now. Why do you want to know who I am when you barely know anything about yourself, Roxanne?” He paused, probably for that dramatic effect, and she was pretty sure that he was grinning behind that mask of his. “I’m your drawing, Roxanne. The one you’ve been spending so much time on this past week? The one you’ve been so confused about lately?” He paused again, dropping his hands into his lap and pulling his legs up onto the bed. “That’s me.”