Behind the Mask - A Sequel (of Sorts) to A Star Is Born

Better Safe Than Sorry

Better Safe than Sorry

I don't think I really had a chance to introduce you to Sarah. It's hard, because I guess I don't really know her either. High school crushes are hard to explain, especially when you never end up dating them. Sometimes they are mixture of reality and the image you build up in your mind. But she's the only thing that mattered much from my otherwise forgettable high school years, so here goes.

Sarah barely knew me. We had a few classes together, I made the occasional awkward attempt to chat, and she politely tolerated it. But I had a distinct sense I wasn't going to make her dance card, and her ambiguous and unclear body language toward me made me all the more reticent. Better to cherish the slight possibility that she saw me the same way I saw her, than to invite crushing disappointment by asking her out. That was my sad logic.

What made my crush all the more bittersweet was when she started playing our music. We were at a party one night when Sarah and a few friends started talking about this new band called Black Mask, and how they had all just downloaded our second album. A few drinks in, they started singing the song that had once been called Sarah until I rewrote it with Hektor into something our security czar (Phil) found more deniable — "Olivia." Sarah even nudged me to sing along. I was terrified, and mumbled a soft lipsync aimed to suggest I didn't know the words.

My quixotic pursuit of a crush on the high school social circuit got more complicated as our notoriety grew. At one point, a fan developed an app that supposedly could gauge if a singer was the "true" Black Mask. I never really knew if it worked, but you can imagine how I felt when the app started showing up on friend's phones at parties. I was at one such event hoping as always that Sarah would show up, when our host thrust his phone in front of my face as the screen glared ominously that it was "96.7 percent" sure I was Black Mask, based on a statistical analysis of vocal patterns. I feigned a cough to confuse it and the percentage dropped to 50 before I walked away. The next contestant, a girl, somehow managed a score of 82, giving me confidence it probably wouldn't be an iPhone that revealed our secret.