Truth & Dare (4 page)

“So, do you guys …” I ventured, unable to help myself.

“Me and Stace? I really shouldn’t say.”

As let down as I was not to hear the nitty-gritty, I was relieved by his secret-keeper ethos.

For dinner we fried corned-beef hash and gobbled it in front of the TV. During a commercial break, I called my mom and told her not to worry, that I was at a friend’s and I’d probably stay the night. She asked if adults were present, and I promised her they were. I figured Pat’s parents had gone away for the weekend, or maybe worked the night shift.

We watched sitcoms untilmidnight, then retired to Pat’s loft. I hoped at last to solve the riddle of his pubes. He ducked behind the plywood that separated his “bedroom” from the john. I heard the gurgle and then squirt-squirt of his peeing, followed by an agonizing pause. I sat on the bed’s edge,
picturing
dead babies to drain my hard-on. When he came back he was shirtless but wearing baggy full-length pajama pants.

“You can take the bed,” he said, and burrowed into the laundry on his floor.

Not having pajamas of my own, I slipped under the covers wearing my jeans. I nuzzled the pillow—Pat’s pillow—and numbed myself with his scent’s anesthetic.

Saturday we woke late and wolfed huge bowls of Count Chocula cereal. We lounged in front of the TV again, then napped the way only boys can do just after sleeping ten full hours. Eventually we walked into town. We killed time. We did “stuff.” I was so lost in telling myself to memorize every moment that I didn’t notice much of anything.

At day’s end, Pat didn’t ask if I wanted to stay again, and I didn’t ask if I could. I just did.

His parents still hadn’t shown. No one watched us. We could have been on the moon. Again I slept in my clothes, wanting badly to strip bare, but petrified. Pat sprawled on the floor below me, his limbs twitching all night like a puppy’s.

Sunday brought the same aimless bliss. We didn’t need the crutch of “activity.” Being together was all:
¡
Compañeros!

When night came, I sank into depression. We dined on corned-beef hash for the third day in a row, but this time the routine sagged with nostalgia. Would things ever be this good again?

I was lacing my shoes to go home when Pat stopped me. “It’s late,” he said. “Stay another night.”

“What about school?”

“We’ll go together. We’ll take my bus.”

And the teetering earth was righted on its axis.

We stayed up till two, listening to records I pretended to know. I confessed to feeling different from the other guys at school. Friendships were important to me, I said.
His
friendship.

Pat understood. He was different, too, he said. And as he yawned his way to sleep, he mumbled something cryptic about a “special school for people like us.”

My brain sizzled. I dreamed of a vast classroom full of Pats: chisel-jawed redheads with winning smiles. We’d study love poems in all the world’s languages!

I sucked a breath. “
Te amo
,” I almost said.

In the morning we rode to school together. I was a mess in my four-day-rumpled clothes, but I relished my classmates’ stares, proud of each wrinkle and stain. That afternoon, in Spanish, we couldn’t talk; Señora Fuentes sprang a pop quiz. I caught Pat’s attention, though, when he handed in his answers, and he knighted me with a secret smile.

I burned to ask about the “special schools” comment. And kept burning for weeks. Then for months.

Pat never invited me home again.

He wasn’t cold—when we passed each other in the halls, he punched my shoulder and called me Carlito; we ate lunch together when we could. But on weekends he was busy. His father had grounded him to help around the house; Stacy booked his Saturday nights. “Maybe Sunday,” he sometimes said, then didn’t call.

Had I murmured something in my sleep that put him off? Or was he terrified, like me, of wanting more?

Spring shed its grace on Washington, D.C. The city flushed pink with cherry blossoms, pollen optimistic in the air. The first day warm enough to wear shorts, Pat saw me and called, “Hey,
hombre
, nice legs.” I convinced myself I could do it, I could ask him.

I picked the day before Easter break, reasoning that if things backfired, I wouldn’t see Pat for a while. I set the date on my calendar and counted down.

When the day arrived, world politics intervened. Argentine troops invaded the Falkland Islands, overtaking a squadron of  British marines. Señora Fuentes canceled her lesson plan to expound on imperialism’s evils. She insisted we say “Islas Malvinas” instead of “Falklands.” She lectured the full hour, past the bell. And then Pat sprinted out; I couldn’t catch him.

By the end of vacation, ten thousand Argentines occupied the Malvinas. The British navy sailed south at full alert. Because ofmy activist’s reputation, I was expected to take a stance. Loyal to Señora Fuentes, at first I supported the Argentines. But Tim Jeeter accusedme of hypocrisy. “Defend Atlanta’s children,” he mocked, “not Argentina’s junta.”

I wasn’t the only conflicted leftist. The Liberation League convened an emergency meeting. Some students called for picketing the British embassy; others threatened to quit if we sided with Argentina.

As General Galtieri and Prime Minister Thatcher traded ultimatums, I finally issued one to myself: I must talk to Pat by the beginning of the month.

I waited until the final hour, the night of May first. I locked myself in the guest room in our basement. I took my noteboook so I could jot down anything important Pat said, and a Rubik’s Cube for nervous fidgeting. As I worked up the guts to lift the phone, I twisted the cube, trying to match reds with reds, blues with blues. The manufacturer boasted of
forty-three
quintillion configurations, but only one, of course, was correct.

In a blind, breathless rush I dialed Pat’s number.

Yes, he said, he was alone; he could talk.

Alone
, I scribbled in my notebook, then added,
TALK!

“Crazy stuff in the Falklands, huh?” I started.

“
Las Malvinas
,” Pat corrected. “
¡Por favor!
”

I noted that his accent had improved. “You’re right,” I said. “Don’t report me to Señora.”

The line was staticky. Breath. Trepidation. I had two languages, but neither one was helping.

“So, um, Pat?” I finally asked.

“Yeah.”

“What I was wondering was … well, you know how when I slept over that time, you mentioned a special school?”

“Um,” he hedged. “What exactly did I say?”

I wrote
special
, then added a question mark. “A special school. For people like us?”

“I guess I’m not sure I know what ‘people like us’ means.”

“Right,” I said. “I mean, me neither. That’s what I wanted
to ask about. I wondered how you think we’re similar.”

I could picture him in his derelict loft, his brow creased in sexy puzzlement. I cranked the Rubik’s Cube; three yellows locked in line.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Don’t
you
think we’re similar?”

“Yeah,” I said, brightening. “But I feel different from other people. People besides you.”

“What about those hippie protest freaks?”

“They’re not really freaks,” I said.

“Nah, it’s cool. But you’ve got to admit, they’re kind of freaky.”

“Okay, so am
I
freaky, then? Because I do these things. Well, I don’t
do
them. They’re more like
feelings
I have? And I’m wondering if maybe you have them, too.”

“What kind of feelings?” he asked.

Here was the line: if I crossed, I’d
always
be across.

I wanted to, but didn’t, say
love
. I said
like
. “I like you a lot … you know, in
that way
.”

Silence.

I doodled in the notebook, my palms greased with sweat.

Pat finally coughed and started talking, and the music I heard, the sweet resurrecting song, was: “Come on, Carl, of course you’re not a freak.”

How long did that harmony ring—a split second? Two seconds? Three? I would’ve sworn it was time enough for a room full of monkeys, typing randomly on as many keyboards, to compose all of Shakespeare’s love sonnets.

Then Pat said, “I’m flattered, I really am. I like you a lot as a friend. But I don’t, you know … not like
that
. Not at all.”

I lost my wind. I almost wished he’d screamed “fag” and slammed the phone. I wished he’d never speak to me again. Then I could hate him back for how he hated.

I spun the Rubik’s Cube, careless of pattern, letting entropy
do its dirty work. Eventually Pat said bye, he’d see me Monday. I stared down at the notebook, which trembled in my hands, my words as illegible as monkey scrawl.

The next day, Sunday, a British sub sank the Argentine cruiser
General Belgrano
. News reports showed the ship engulfed in flames. Because of the oil that slicked from the wreckage, even the sea appeared to burn. Three hundred and sixty-eight Argentines drowned.

In school on Monday, kids gossiped about Keith Rosen’s having felt up Lisa Kelly. They traded crib notes for afternoon tests. Didn’t they know the world was on fire?

I stumbled through the halls, stupefied. At lunch someone asked what was wrong. What could I say? I’d seen my future; it crushed me. I shrugged and blamed my tears on allergies.

I considered skipping Spanish, but why bother? I couldn’t skip the rest of my life. I claimed a chair at the very back of the room.

I had promised myself I wouldn’t look, but I did. Pat was in his usual spot. He wore a Sex Wax shirt, his surfer shorts and Pumas with no socks. When he turned to me, I yanked my gaze away.

Señora Fuentes was slumped over her desk. Hair had pulled free from her bun, and skewed like a defunct engine’s wires. Wet mascara blotched around her eyes.

“I’m sure you’ve heard,” she began, barely audible. She rested a wobbly hand on her heart. “Forgive me,” she said, “today I can’t—” and sobs consumed the rest.

I had never seen a teacher cry. She wept and wept, beyond the point of shame. “My brothers!” she cried. “
Perdidos
—everyone lost.”

I looked then at stoic Patricio, who stared out the window,
away. Backlit by the sun, he was centered in a force field, golden-red as the highlights in his hair. He tapped a rhythm on the desk with his pencil—maybe the drumbeat of The Knack’s newest song? I could hear it, but I couldn’t guess the tune.

M
Y FRIENDS WONDERED
how I could fall in love with a guy who gave me chocolate brains for my birthday. The brains had peanut-butter filling, and Connor ordered them from a medical-supply company that also sold life-size skeleton models, eye charts, and T-shirts with the digestive system outlined on them. I liked the candy brains not only because I loved chocolate, but also because they symbolized the dream Connor and I had, that we were going to become doctors someday.

“It’s disgusting,” Annie said, eyeing the box when I offered her some. “You mean you bite into those things and stuff leaks out?”

“Not ‘stuff,’” I said. “Peanut butter.” I held out the box to Monica, who shook her head.

“More for me,” I shrugged, and by the time Connor came over that night to study calculus, I had eaten a third of the box.

Connor and I started our open-book calculus final by sitting on the couch with the TV on. We liked to ease into our homework, calculus being like a cold pool that you
could
just dive into if you wanted to flash-freeze your nervous system,
but if you had any sense you would lower yourself into it an inch at a time.

Of course, when I sat next to Connor, the only calculation I was doing was measuring the space between us in heat and electricity. When he first sat down and Mom looked in on us, that space was the width of my hand (with fingers spread). Gradually we edged closer, until there was maybe half an inch between his blue-jeaned leg and mine. His arm rested on my shoulders, his skin hot against the back of my neck.

My grandfather stalked into the room. “Shove over,” he said to Connor.

We moved over. Connor took his arm from around me, and Gramps dropped on to the sofa cushion next to him.

We all stared at the screen. I was so close to Connor that I could feel his heart beating, hear how his breath had shallowed and sped up. My grandfather glowered at the end of the couch.

“Sarah! What’s this crap you’re watching?” Gramps said.

I honestly had no idea. I’d been paying attention only to Connor, calculating the narrowness of the gap between us, breathing the scent of his soap. But on the TV screen in front of us, a guy dressed in camo fired off a machine gun.

“He’d never be able to hold that weapon,” Gramps said. “Firing over and over like that. It’d be too hot to hold!”Which was as much as I’d ever heard about Gramps’s experience in the war.

Connor’s eyes slid sideways, toward me.

“Why are you watching this, anyway?” Gramps went on.

“I don’t know,” I said, thinking,
Because Connor’s thigh was about one centimeter away from mine, and I wasn’t actually watching the screen, thank you very much
.

“Where’s the remote?” Gramps leaned forward and saw my
birthday present on the coffee table. “What the hell are those?” He stabbed a finger at them.

“Brains, sir,” Connor said. The only time I ever heard Connor say “sir” was when he spoke to my grandfather.

“What? Speak up.”

“Brains, sir! I got them for Sarah.”

“Brains?” Gramps raised his eyebrows at me, and I nodded.“Well.” He hooked one out of the package with a long,
white-bristled
finger and popped it into his mouth. We watched him chew and swallow.

“You’re a very strange young man,” he said to Connor, and licked peanut butter off his teeth.

“Yes, sir.”

“Is that some kind of fad now? Chocolate brains?”

“No, sir.”

“I didn’t think so.” Gramps grabbed the remote.

“It’s because we’re going to be doctors.”

I poked Connor’s thigh. The rule about dealing with Gramps was,
Never volunteer information
. The less Gramps knew about my dreams, the less material he would have for hollering questions at me about why the hell was I doing this or why the hell was I planning that.

“We really need to get going on that homework!” I said, jumping up. Connor jumped up, too, and we left Gramps on the couch, popping another brain into his mouth.

“I don’t get it,” I groaned, rolling over on the bed onto the papers full of Connor’s diagrams and explanations.

I hated not getting calculus. I’d always been good at school. In chemistry, I knew the reactions backwards and forwards. In bio, I’d been the one who drilled the parts of the cell into Connor’s head and helped him remember all the steps of
protein synthesis. Now, with calculus, he was the one whose brain made all the connections while I floundered in the dust.

Numbers used to be sure and definite and straightforward. They didn’t change; 4 was 4 and 77 was 77. But the further we went in school, the stranger things got. I suppose my first hint of trouble came when they threw “imaginary” numbers at us. I mean, seriously, imaginary numbers? And now I was drowning in a pool of derivatives and integrals. Now I could hardly find numbers at all in the homework: it was all ds, xs, ys, and squiggly symbols.

“Take it step by step,” Connor said. “Like, in problem fourteen …”

“Forget problem fourteen.” I threw an arm around his neck.

“Fine with me,” he said and kissed me. “You’re the one whose exam isn’t done.”

“I can’t think about it any more.” I’d just begun to kiss him again when my phone trilled.

“Don’t answer it,” Connor whispered.

“That’s Annie’s ring. If I don’t pick up, she’ll just keep calling.”

Connor groaned while I scooped the phone off my nightstand. “Yeah?” I said.

“Bridesmaid Emergency,” Annie said.

“What do you mean?”

“We got the dresses, and they are
repulsive
.”

“What? No. Emily said she knows how bad the dresses usually are, and she promised …”

Annie cackled. “Just wait till you see them. We’re all going to look ridiculous.”

“But Emily has such nice clothes, and she promised …”

“Apparently there’s something that gets turned on in the brain when you become a bride. Some kind of filter that makes
you inflict horrible dresses on your friends and delude yourself that they look good.” Someone screamed in the background. “You hear that? Monica just tried hers on.”

“Where are you?”

“At the bridal shop on Vega. Come on over and get fitted, and see the horror that is your dress.”

We hung up. “Change of plans,” I said to Connor. “The bridesmaid dresses are in. You want to bike over to the store with me?”

“No,” he said, reaching for me again.

“Later.” I kissed him once more and hopped off the bed. “Annie says they’re awful, but you know how dramatic she is. Let’s go see.”

“Sarah,” Connor said, “I don’t give a crap what the dresses look like.”

“Don’t you want to see how I’m gonna look?”

“You could wear trash bags and you’d look great.”

“Keep saying stuff like that, and I’ll let you be my boyfriend.”

“I heard your current boyfriend is a great guy—bought you chocolate brains and everything.” He tried to pull me back down on to the bed. “So exactly how humiliating is it that you’d rather look at these dresses than make out with me?”

“These are
bridesmaid
dresses,” I said, yanking a comb through my hair. “Almost nothing comes out ahead of that. And hey, you beat calculus hands down.”

I felt only a small pang about leaving my exam half done. I still had a day and a half until Monday morning, right? Plenty of time.

Connor biked over to the bridal shop with me, but he left without even coming inside. The store was a flurry of lace and
measuring tape, veils and mirrors. Monica stood in front of a triple mirror while a woman with pins in her mouth knelt at the hem.

“Whaaaaat?” I said.

“Told you,” Annie piped up from a nearby chair where she had collapsed in a bundle of fabric.

“What’s with the color? Is it
supposed
to be that color?”

“It’s called pineapple,” Annie said.

“Who picks out pineapple as their wedding color? And what’s with that thing on the shoulder?”

“It’s a bow,” Monica said.

“It’s too big to be a bow. It’s like a giant cabbage landed on your shoulder.”

“It’s not the bow that’s the problem.” Monica brushed a bit of it away from her cheek. “What I don’t like is the asymmetrical neckline. I’m too lumpy for a dress like this. It looks like half of it’s missing or something.”

“You’re not lumpy,” Annie and I said together,
automatically
.

Both Monica and Annie looked sallow, even jaundiced, in the mustardy color. I could only imagine how my olive skin would look. We’d all look like candidates for the hepatitis ward.

“What about Emily’s sister?” I said.

“With her posture, she can carry off almost anything, including the lopsided neckline and the weirdo bow, but the color looks muddy on her.” Annie scrolled through a menu on her phone. “Mon, let me take a picture and send it to Emily. Just in case the sight of us actually
in
these dresses can bring her to her senses.”

The woman on the floor finished pinning Monica’s hem and stood up. “Oh, I think they’re very flattering,” she said.

“We know you mean well,” Annie said, waving the woman away. To us, she muttered, “She’s
paid
to say that.”

The dress did look as bad on me as I thought it would, the bow resembling a second, less-defined head sitting on my shoulder, the color giving my skin a reptilian hue. I collapsed into the chair next to Annie.

“What did Emily say about the pictures?”

“That she’s all tied up with wedding stuff; she’ll get back to us later.”

“I can’t believe she’s actually getting married.” Emily was only a year older than Monica and I; she was the same age as Annie.

“When I tell people she’s getting married at eighteen, they all ask if she’s pregnant. And I say, ‘No, just stupid.’”

I snorted. “Don’t you think she and Brian are good together, though?”

“Oh, Brian’s fine. But he’s only nineteen. They’re talking about the
rest of their lives
. I don’t even know what color sheets to get for my room next year, and they’re making lifetime decisions.”

“I know.” I thought about pairing up with Connor for the rest of my life, and something squirmed inside me. Not about Connor himself—because right now, I loved being with him. But it was bad enough to think of the commitment it would take to become a doctor: the years ahead of me, laid out in a planned track. I didn’t want to lock up too much of my life too soon.

I took another stab at calculus that night, but didn’t get very far. Monica and Annie said that the exam should be easy since it was open book, but I told them what Connor and I had
always said:
These exams are worse because what open book means is that the book can’t save you
.

I couldn’t work on it anyway, because I had to answer a Frantic Bride call from Emily. I didn’t have the heart to complain about the pineapple monstrosities while she freaked out about the fact that forty of Brian’s relatives still hadn’t RSVPed and the caterer was demanding the final count, and Brian’s uncles were too busy arguing about who was going to drive whom to the ceremony and whether Brian’s cousins could afford to miss their karate class, and nobody wanted to sit in a car with Great Aunt Sophie for three hours. And then I had to soothe Emily’s worries that her hair wasn’t going to look right because she’d just cut it, and what on earth had made her cut her hair so soon before the wedding? She just knew she was going to look totally ugly and weird. Her older sister had had a terrible hairdo on her wedding day.

“It looked like a giant toadstool on her head,” Emily moaned.

“I promise you, your hair will not look like a toadstool,” I said.
And I promise you, I will never ever get married if this is what it’s like
, I added silently. “You’re going to look beautiful. Everything will go fine. Everyone who needs to be there will be there.”

And she believed me for about three minutes, before she started agonizing all over again.

By the time I got off the phone, exhausted from surfing the giant wave of Emily’s emotions, I glanced at the calculus book and couldn’t even bring myself to pick it up. Tomorrow, I promised myself, and popped a chocolate brain in my mouth. Maybe the peanut butter would be good for my neurons.

On Sunday afternoon we met at Connor’s house, and shuffled
through the pages of our calculus books. Then he started rubbing his foot against my calf, and I stroked his shoulder blade, and then the books were on the floor and his tongue was in my mouth. Emily interrupted us with another Wedding Freak-out Call, and we revisited the exciting world of calculus where Connor tried to explain why I should care about a bathtub being filled at one rate and simultaneously emptied at a different rate.

“Let’s just turn off the faucet and be done with the stupid problem,” I said. “That’s what any fool would do if they were worried about the tub overflowing.”

“Well, it’s not just bathtubs.” Connor was always straining to show me how calculus could be used in real life. “Imagine if you had a leaking tank.”

“If you have a leaking tank, you shouldn’t be adding anything to it, don’t you think?”

He sighed. “Okay, let’s start over. If—”

My phone went off again, Annie this time. Connor said, “I’m gonna throw that phone in—”

“—a leaking bathtub,” I finished, clicking on the phone. “Yeah, Annie, what’s up?”

“We have head things,” she said.

“What? What are you talking about?”

“For the wedding. We have these things we’re supposed to wear on our heads.”

“Hats?”

“No, not hats. Hats would be something normal people could at least recognize. These are big poufy things that clip on to your hair.”

“What are they? Bows? Flowers?”

“They don’t look like anything you’ve ever seen before.”

“Imagine if a yellow marshmallow exploded,”Monica yelled in the background. “That’s what they look like.”