The Fine Art of Truth or Dare Read online

  “Truth. I’m eating.”

  “Okay.” She sucked thoughtfully on an olive, then, “If you could commit one serious crime—and I mean a lots-of-years-in-jail kind of crime—and get away with it, what would it be?”

  “Ooh.” Frankie narrowed his eyes in gleeful contemplation. “I like that one. A raid on the men’s department at Barneys, maybe? A slow, painful death for certain elected officials? A forged check from a member of the Walmart family? Hard choice. Ah. I have it. I would steal the Hope Diamond.”

  “It’s cursed,” I told him. “Everyone who has owned it has died a terrible death.”

  “Don’t care. I want it.”

  “Why?” Sadie was genuinely curious. “You couldn’t exactly wear it around.”

  “Absolutely true. Maybe I’d keep it in a shoe box. Or send it to Haiti. No one would ever know where it went, or what brilliant criminal mastermind was able to take it. I would be the eternal Who.”

  I have to give Frankie credit; his answers are never boring.

  ToD, as we play it, has two rules: no lying, ever, and no dares that would cause the sort of humiliation that follows you into adulthood. Since it’s just the three of us, we’re pretty good at respecting those boundaries. After two years, we’ve gotten pretty creative. You’d think we would know every last thing there is to know about one another, rendering the game something less than entertaining. We know most everything about one another. We also each know something about the others that keeps ToD fresh.

  Like:

  Frankie exaggerates. Everything. So ToD is a good way for Sadie and me to find out whether he actually did meet Marc Jacobs as he hinted after a trip to New York (no, but he did see him coming out of Bergdorf’s), or locked lips with the cute sales boy at Sailor Jerry (yes, but cute sales boy has a boyfriend). It’s also the only way we ever find out anything about his life at home. He never volunteers. He will, however, answer what we ask, even if he looks like the words are burning his tongue while he does it—as long as it’s not about his brother’s shadier side. And Sadie is desperately curious about Daniel.

  Of course, Frankie almost always chooses Dare. And the one time Sadie tried to do an end run around that one by (gently) daring him to tell us the worst thing Daniel had ever done in his presence, he growled, “Not cool. Not cool at all,” and got up and walked out of Chloe’s. He was there waiting for us at school the next morning, and nothing was ever said, but we haven’t dared him to tell or asked about his twin since.

  When daring Frankie, it helps to know that, deep down, he is just as shy and insecure as anyone. Yes, his fave pastime is dancing in front of the mirrors at Neiman Marcus in Helmut Lang clothing he can’t afford. True, he sings frequently and enthusiastically at Chloe’s. Absolutely, he walked up to the drop-dead gorgeous guy in the vintage Bowie shirt at Head House Books last week and asked his favorite ice cream flavor. Turned out the guy was straight (“No, just closeted” was Frankie’s take), but nothing ventured, nothing gained. And it had, after all, been a dare. He probably wouldn’t have done it otherwise. The price of rejection is, quietly, too high.

  As for Sadie, in ToD it helps to know that she loves to be asked about her plans for the future. She’s not naturally garrulous, and no one outside our little cadre ever asks her anything about herself. She used to go to a therapist (one of Philadelphia mag’s Top Docs, of course), but her mother put a stop to that when Sadie wouldn’t tell her what happened in the sessions. Mrs. Winslow is pretty narcissistic. Sadie probably doesn’t need therapy half as much as her mother—or most of the people we know. She’s pretty centered. But she still likes to be asked. We never dare her to talk to strange boys. The only thing that scares her more than that is the concept of being naked in front of anyone.

  And me? When it comes to dares, on the rare occasion when I take them, anything is possible. I trust my friends not to humiliate me; they take great pleasure in making me do things that involve climbing. “Life is short,” Frankie likes to announce with great solemnity as I examine walls, trees, and statues of dead patriots for footholds, “and so are you!”

  The truths are often of the wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing variety: serious stuff in fluffy wrapping. Like, “A genie grants you three wishes, but they all have to involve sex . . .” or, “If you had to confess one of your biggest fears to Amanda Alstead, what would it be?” ToD and Edward are my therapy. Which means the undertruths Frankie and Sadie ask can be a little brutal. But interesting.

  Sometimes ToD is fun; sometimes it’s legitimized prying. Sometimes it’s our way of checking in. “How you doin’?” isn’t in any of our characters. Well, okay, maybe Sadie’s a little, but she’s too sensitive to pry, and when someone tells Sadie to bug off, even if they don’t really mean it, off she bugs.

  “Why do you think we ended up here, together?” Frankie asked once at lunch when the three of us were crammed into a two-chair space at Table 12. Even Invisibles have a stratum, and to sit at 13 would be an admission of . . . well, something. When I started to point to my scar, he slapped my hand. “No. No no no. It’s because we have private inner lives. They”—he gestured to the Phillites—“don’t.”

  I’m not sure that’s entirely true. I mean, everyone must have some sort of inner life. The alternative is a little too zombie-creepy. But I know what he means. Social networking sites, texting in class, and vaguely incestuous dating practices all make secrets a lot less secret, and a lot less interesting. With the Phillites, it’s all out there for everyone to see.

  Frankie waited until the next singer started her rendition of “You Oughta Know” before turning to me. “Truth or Dare?” He always asks, just to remind all of us—lovingly, of course— just what a complete coward I am.

  “Truth.”

  He sighed, but clearly had one on tap. “Five things you find adoration-worthy about Alex Bainbridge, and if you mention his eyes, I will spit hummus on you.”

  “I hardly adore—”

  “Five. No eyes. Now.”

  “Fine.” I thought for a sec. “One: He seems like actually a halfway-decent guy.”

  Frankie snorted. “Halfway-decent? Such praise.”

  “Oh, stop. Really nice, then. He seems really nice.” Despite the Cruella De Vil girlfriend. “Two: He looks like a god when he plays lacrosse. Ah! Don’t you dare roll your eyes at me. We, as female animals, are genetically programmed to go for the potent combo of grace and power. Right?” I looked to Sadie for backup. She nodded with enough enthusiasm to make her hair bounce in a wild pouf.

  I turned back to Frankie, who, I could tell, was going to launch into snarky mode. “Before you go all fake-wounded on me, Mr. Hobbes, I will remind you that you have admitted to having crushes on David Beckham, Roger Federer, and Gene Kelly—who is every bit as dead as Edward Willing.”

  “Whatever. Third?”

  “Third. You saw the drawings. Need I elaborate?”

  “No,” Frankie conceded sulkily. “I’ll give you that one.”

  “Thank you ever so. Now, fourth . . .”

  Fourth . . . It wasn’t so much that I was stumped, as that I was reluctant. I just didn’t want to share the fact that watching Alex in action, or even just watching him lounge in one of the school desks that are not quite big enough for tall boys, makes me feel just a bit breathless—and a bit angry (mostly at myself) that there isn’t likely an Alex Bainbridge in my foreseeable future.

  I hadn’t wanted to look at him during the declamation disaster. Partly because looking at him, then at Amanda, who stared back with a combination of amusement and utter contempt, as I was getting started had been part of the problem. Freddy . . . Freddy . . . Freddy. But I had looked at him, helpless, after, and had seen him punch a snickering Chase hard on the arm.

  Alex Bainbridge just might be a little bit wonderful.

  “Can’t do it?” Frankie poked me out of my thoughts. “I rest my case. This is not an adoration-worthy specimen.”

  I could have conceded. It certainly wo
uld have been the easiest thing to do. I’m ordinarily a big fan of the path of least resistance. Not this time. “I’m merely sorting through the options.” I poked him back. “Just what is your problem with him? Even you’ve admitted he never did anything nasty to you. So what is it, really?”

  Frankie gave me his lizard look, flat mouth and lowered eyelids. “I am the one doing the asking, madam. The next time I choose Truth and you’re asking, feel free to waste your question on such inanities. Finish the list. If you can.”

  “Fine. Fine. His breathtaking smile. And his money. If I had that money, I could do anything . . . everything I want.”

  I’d just make a whopping kink in the rules, if not a fracture. I’d kinda lied. Not that having the kind of money the Bainbridges have would smoothly open the world to me, but that I cared. I could see Sadie and Frankie staring into me, trying to decide whether to call me on it. They let it go. Sadie is rich and, not her fault, doesn’t really understand. Frankie, coming from a family with even less money than mine, does.

  “Truth or Dare,” Frankie offered Sadie. I decided not to mention it was my turn to ask.

  “Dare.” Sadie’s not afraid of dares when she’s had real food.

  “Sing. Something old. Decent. And I mean decent.”

  She nodded, flipping through the grease-spattered playlist. “I’m thinking about ‘Every Rose Has Its Thorn.’”

  “Oh, God,” Frankie groaned. “Too maudlin. I don’t think I can handle maudlin tonight. Besides, it’s a terrible song.”

  “You just don’t like anything recorded after 1970,” Sadie said tartly.

  “Wrong. Very wrong. I do not like terrible things recorded after 1970. If you have to stick to”—he made a quick gagging motion—“power ballads, splash out. Aretha: ‘I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You.’ Otis Redding: ‘Try a Little Tenderness’ . . .”

  “Those are from the sixties.”

  “I’m sure Christina Aguilera has mangled them in concert.”

  “How about ‘I Want to Know What Love Is’?”

  “I’ll vomit, Sadie. I really will. All that wailing. Nope.”

  “But you’re not the one singing it,” Sadie pointed out reasonably.

  Frankie blinked at her. “Your point?”

  “Fine. ‘You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me’?”

  “Excellent choice.”

  Sadie’s mother had dressed her again. This time, it was a shapeless black sack of a dress with an artfully shredded hem. “She looks like a crazy cat lady,” Frankie said sadly as Sadie climbed the single step to the plywood stage.

  She did.

  She got a smattering of applause. Other regulars. Everyone else just went on with their hummus and playlists. The table behind us was in the middle of a raucous game of quarters. “Powel freshmen,” Frankie had dismissed them after getting a glimpse of their fake IDs and oversize sweatshirts. All straight, none cute enough for him. Just loud and growing louder with each successive pitcher.

  The music started. The collegiates howled at what must have been a masterful shot. We ignored them. They were big and drunk, and we’re small (me), confrontation-averse (me, too), and rational (Frankie). We knew what was coming.

  “When I said I needed you,” Sadie began. The quiet came on so suddenly, it was a noise in itself. By the time she got to the end of “You said you would always stay,” the only sound was the faint whirring of a quarter spinning to rest on the table behind us.

  Here’s the thing. When Frankie suggests Aretha or Dusty Springfield or even Adele to Sadie, he means it. Because when Sadie sings, everyone listens. Her voice is deep and velvety, and makes me think of smoky bars in 1940s Casablanca, where everyone wore white and drank contraband champagne. Of course, I don’t have the slightest idea what a 1940s bar in Casablanca was really like, which says a lot of what there is to be said about Sadie’s singing. It takes you.

  She looks pretty, too. She does this thing where she tilts her head and half closes her eyes and holds the mic really close to her mouth. When she sings, guys watch and occasionally get a slightly glazed look. I’ve seen a few come halfway out of their chairs as she sings her last note. Then she slumps back to the table, they slide back into their seats, and the moment’s totally gone. Sadie hasn’t had a date since . . . well, birth, unfortunately.

  I don’t get it. She’s fab. She’s certainly not unattractive. She has perfect skin, the best eyebrows I have ever seen, and no matter how much she and her mother insist to the contrary, an entirely decent body. Round, absolutely, but only in the right places. But she wears her shredded sacks, and when she’s not singing, I guess that’s what guys see. The one time I hinted that a belt would be a nice addition, all she did was give my turtleneck a long look. I didn’t think it was entirely the same thing, but point taken.

  “You don’t have to say you love me . . .”

  Sadie could kill people in the bland musicals that Willing puts on every spring, knock everyone right out of their seats and through the back wall of the auditorium and onto the manicured lawn. But she won’t. No one at Willing has a clue. She pours her heart out in three-minute power-ballad measures on the Chloe’s stage and leaves it there.

  “You know,” I suggested quietly to Frankie during a long pause in the lyrics, “maybe this isn’t the song you think it is. I mean, she’s telling some guy that he doesn’t have to love her as long as he comes home. Is that a message we want to send?”

  Frankie speared a bite of feta. “Who’s ‘we’? And who are you, the Censorship Fairy? It’s a killer song. Just listen.”

  I did. Everyone did. Some of the guys in the room looked like they’d been drugged. Of course, a few of them probably had been; it’s South Street, after all, but a bunch were just vibin’ Sadie’s voice.

  “Jeez, Marino, don’t you want to feel that?” Frankie rapped his fork against his plate. “To love so much that you don’t care if he loves you back? To be so into someone that pride goes out the ’effing window?” When I got very interested in my olive pits, he sighed. “It doesn’t count, your sad, sad thing for Edward Willing.”

  “He won’t leave,” I offered, trying for levity.

  “He won’t come, either.”

  “Nice.”

  “Virginity is not a commodity in our world, my vestal friend.”

  Maybe not, and no one had expressed all that much interest in mine recently. There was Dieter, a German exchange student freshman year, who smelled a little like paste and spent nine weeks in perpetual surprise that I wouldn’t let him feel me up before dumping me for a yearbook girl who would. And there was Bryan, who I met during my week at the Shore last summer. He had carroty hair and wore high-necked, long-sleeved sunblock shirts because he was prone to crisping. I let him get a half of a good feel under mine. He e-mailed once, from his home in North Jersey, ten words with six of them misspelled. I didn’t reply. I’ll take dead over dumb.

  Much to my don’t-wanna-have-this-conversation relief, Sadie slipped back into her seat. “Sublime,” Frankie told her, and she glowed a little, because while he might exaggerate, he never lies to us. Then, “My turn.”

  He glided into place, did an expert hair toss that brought all attention to his model-perfect face, and acknowledged a wolf whistle from behind us with a flick of his fingers. I glanced over my shoulder at the table full of pretty boys. None were familiar, but I pegged one as Frankie’s type to a tee: Norse godling, all icy blond and blue.

  “This is for you, Marino,” Frankie said, and my attention snapped back to the stage.

  Yes, he did. The first notes of “Like a Virgin” came on, and seconds later, Frankie was channeling Madonna for all he was worth. He was saved from cliché-dom by the sheer fact that he can’t sing for his life. No one minded, and after the first curious glances, no one was looking at red-faced me. Because, of course Frankie wasn’t singing to me. Every word, every wink, every shimmy and hip thrust was for Gunnar-Björn behind us. By the second verse, most of the audience
was singing and thumping along.

  He finished to full-blown appreciative howling from the crowd. He waved it off as he strolled back to us, eyes sliding once, and again, toward the pretty boys. Once seated, he folded his hands neatly on the table and looked at us expectantly.

  There was no question what he wanted. He was silently and eloquently daring us to dare him.

  We’re good friends. “Truth or Dare?” Sadie asked.

  He pretended to think about it. “Ah . . . dare.”

  Sadie pretended to think about it. “I dare you to go ask for his phone number,” she said with perfectly earnest enthusiasm. She pointed discreetly. “The cute blond one.”

  “Ragnar-Knut-Thor,” I elaborated.

  Frankie blinked at me in surprise. “You know him?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Very funny.” He leaned into me, until his lips were inches from mine. He blew. “Okay?”

  “A little garlicky.”

  “Hummus,” he muttered. “Doctor?”

  Sadie was already on it. From her huge, fringed bag (Balenciaga runway, one of her mother’s rejects), she pulled a tin of Altoids. She also can be counted on for Kleenex, Band-Aids, bottled water, and dried seaweed snacks. Frankie popped his pill, bared his teeth so we could do a spinach check, and was on his way. He moves like a cat. Within thirty seconds, he was seated next to his object of desire.

  “I watch,” Sadie said in wonder. “I watch and I take notes, and I still can’t master it.”

  “Me, either,” I admitted cheerfully.

  “There has to be more to it than the fact he’s beautiful. There has to be. Otherwise, I might as well give up now.”

  I squeezed her hand. “Of course there’s more. Frankie’s . . . he’s . . . Well, he’s . . .”

  “Frankie,” we said at the same time. We laughed, jinx-dibsed each other, and dug into the remains of the baba ghanoush.

  Frankie is beautiful. He’s also sharp as broken glass, fierce and charismatic, and out of the confines of Willing, he glows. Especially when he meets a new Mr. Maybe. Frankie loves to date. “Would you buy a pair of shoes without trying them on and walking around for a while?” he demands. He likes shoes, too. But the truth about Frankie is that he’s really looking to be half of one good pair.