The Fine Art of Truth or Dare

ONE LOOK

“Look, Alex. It's pretty simple. I don't want to do this; you certainly don't want to. So . . .”

I hadn't realized he was slowly bending his knees until his chin entered my line of vision, followed by the rest of his face. He wasn't grinning now. He looked very serious. “Ella. I really do want to do this. Help you, if you'll let me.” He sighed again. I was completely fixated on his eyes. They're a pretty amazing combination of green and bronze. “I don't know what's going on, but it's weird, and it shouldn't be. I'm a decent guy.”

“Of course you are.” I sighed. And caved. Apparently, my Phillite defenses were worthless around this particular specimen, no matter that he couldn't seem to make up his mind whether I was worth noticing or not.

Truth:
Yes, I am that naive.

O
THER
B
OOKS
Y
OU
M
AY
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NJOY

Aurelia
Anne Osterlund

Cindy Ella
Robin Palmer

A Countess Below Stairs
Eva Ibbotson

Enthusiasm
Polly Shulman

Faithful
Janet Fox

Falling in Love with English Boys
Melissa Jensen

Geek Charming
Robin Palmer

Just Listen
Sarah Dessen

Little Miss Red
Robin Palmer

My Most Excellent Year
Steve Kluger

The Reluctant Heiress
Eva Ibbotson

The Truth About Forever
Sarah Dessen

SPEAK

Published by the Penguin Group

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Registered Offices: Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

 

First published in the United States of America by Speak, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2012

 

Copyright © Melissa Jensen, 2012

All rights reserved

 

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA IS AVAILABLE

 

ISBN 978-1-101-56693-0

 

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

 

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

 

For my guys.

Chris, Aidan, Duggan.

And my dad, who used to take me to the de Young Museum on Sunday afternoons, and who first took me to the Louvre.

 

*THAT I AM VALUABLE, I KNOW.

Contents

THE BEGINNING

THE BOOK

THE DECLAMATION

THE SCAR

THE GAME

THE DOOR

THE HISTORY

THE MENU

THE APOLOGY

THE OPPORTUNITY

THE ARCHIVE

THE REVIEW

THE MAGIC

THE QUESTION

THE FOLKTALE

THE PIT

THE LIST

THE ISLAND

THE BATHROOM

THE DANCE

THE WOMAN

THE ADVICE

THE BEGINNING

THE COMMUNICATION

THE MESSAGE

THE KISS

THE LIE

THE CORNER

THE COLD

THE PARTY

THE SOLUTION

THE RAY

THE CANNOLI

THE RECEPTION

THE END

Preview of
Falling in Love With English Boys

1

THE BEGINNING

Truth
(according to Edward Willing): People who rely on first sight are either lazy or deluded.

Truth
(according to Ella Marino): I fell in love with Edward Willing the first time I saw him.

 

It was Day Three, Freshman Year, and I was a little bit lost in the school library, looking for a bathroom that wasn't full of blindingly shiny sophomores checking their lip gloss.

Day Three. Already pretty clear on the fact that I would be using secondary bathrooms for at least the next three years, until being a senior could pass for confidence. For the moment, I knew no one, and was too shy to talk to anyone. So that first sight of Edward: pale hair that looked like he'd just run his hands through it, paint-smeared white shirt, a half smile that was half wicked, and I was hooked.

Since, “Hi, I'm Ella. You look like someone I'd like to spend the rest of my life with,” would have been totally insane, I opted for sitting quietly and staring. Until the bell rang and I had to rush to French class, completely forgetting to pee.

Edward Willing. Once I knew his name, the rest was easy. After all, we're living in the age of information. Wikipedia, iPhones, 4G networks, social networking that you can do from a thousand miles away. The upshot being that at any given time over the next two years, I could sit twenty feet from him in the library, not saying a word, and learn a lot about him. Enough, anyway, for me to become completely convinced that the Love at First Sight hadn't been a fluke.

It's pretty simple. Edward matched four and a half of my
If My Prince Does, In Fact, Come Someday, It Would Be Great If He Could Meet These Five Criteria.

 

1. Interested in art
   . For me, it's charcoal. For Edward, oil paint and bronze. That's almost enough right there. Nice lips + artist = Ella's prince.
   
2. Not afraid of love.
   He wrote, “Love is one of two things worth dying for. I have yet to decide on the second.”
   
3. Or of telling the truth.
   “How can I believe what other people say if I lie to them?”
   
4. Hot.
   Why not? I can dream.
   
5. Daring.
   Mountain climbing, cliff diving, defying the parents. Him, not me. I'm terrified of an embarrassing number of things, including heights, convertibles, moths, and those comedians everyone loves who stand onstage and yell insults at the audience.
   5, subsection a.
   Daring enough to take a chance on me.
   

 

Of course, in the end, that No. 5a is the biggie. And the problem. No matter how much I worshipped him, no matter how good a pair we might have been, it was never, ever going to happen. To be fair to Edward, it's not like he was given an opportunity to get to know me. I'm not stupid. I know there are a few basic truths when it comes to boys and me.

 

Truth
: You have to talk to a boy—really talk, if you want him to see past the fact that you're not beautiful.

Truth
: I'm not beautiful. Or much of a conversationalist.

Truth
: I'm not entirely sure that the stuff behind the not-beautiful is going to be all that alluring, either.

And one written-in-stone, heartbreaking truth about this guy.

 

Truth
: Edward Willing died in 1916.

2

THE BOOK

You might think lunchtime at Willing would be different from other high schools. That everyone would be welcome at any table, united by the knowledge that we, at Willing, are the Elite, the Chosen, stellar across the board.

Um. No. Of course not. High school is high school, regardless of how much it costs or how many kids springboard into the Ivies. And nowhere is social status more evident than in the dining room (freshmen and sophomores at noon; upperclassmen at one). Because, of course, Willing doesn't have a cafeteria, or even a lunch hall. It has a dining room, complete with oak tables and paneled walls that are covered with plaques going all the way back to 1869, the year Edith Willing Castor (Edward's aunt) founded the school to “prepare Philadelphia's finest young ladies for Marriage, for Leadership, and for Service to the World.” Really. Until the sixties, the school's boastful slogan was “She's a Willing Girl.”

Almost 150 years, three first ladies, and one attorney general—not to mention the arrival of boys—later, female members of the student body are still called Willing Girls. You'd think someone in the seventies would have objected to that and changed it. But Willing has survived the seventies of two different centuries. They'll probably still be calling us Willing Girls in 2075. It's a school that believes in Tradition, sometimes regardless of how stupid that Tradition is.

I eat lunch under the plaque that tells me for three years running, 1948–1950, Gertrude Wharton was Willing Oral Girl of the Year. And the one memorializing 1919, when eight girls were given the award for Willing Service to Soldiers of the Great War. Really.

Apparently, there is a plaque on the window wall for Willing Contribution to Nature. Honestly, I don't know if that's organic contribution or monetary, all those rich Philadelphia families spreading their money like fertilizer over verdant fields. Frankie says the first name on the plaque is Edna Moore Willing. I'm not sure if I believe him.

There is one not too far away for Willing Contribution to the Arts. The entire plaque is definitely Willing-, Moore-, and Biddle-heavy; Frankie says it could use a good Marino to shake things up.

For the most part, I don't know what's on the plaques between the windows. I've never wandered between those tables, let alone had a meal there.

This is how it works.

 

Tables 1 through 4, near the big windows that overlook the lawn:
The Phillites.

The term was coined by a local journalist and Willing alum a few years ago in a magazine article titled “Supreme Court: Philadelphia's Young Royalty.” Really. Phillites (Phil-Elites) are expensive, smooth, and shiny, and they stick together. Like caviar. They're the product of impeccable genes, cutting-edge orthodontia, and weekly sushi. Most of the Phillites are sporty; some are brainy. Two or three are on scholarship. They are all a little blinding.

 

Tables 5 through 8, one row from the windows, middle of the room:
The Bees.

Less wealthy and less beautiful than the Phillites, still cherished by the school for their sheer usefulness. The yearbook and school paper editors, the leads in the spring Shakespeare play, the student tour guides and class fund-raising chairs. Once a Bee Boy, always a Bee Boy, but the girls occasionally move up by dating well. Miss Edith would probably approve.

 

Tables 9 through 11, west corner:
The Stars.

Extra smart, extra talented, completely unconcerned with fashion, popular culture, or social mobility. Mathletes, chamber music society, debate team. Will absorb people from the bottom tier, providing the commitment to the activity is sincere and complete. Love mathletics or leave. There is no halfway.

 

Tables 12 and 13, flanking the kitchen doors:
The Invisibles.

Willing can't have outcasts. That would look really bad in a school that prides itself on social and academic excellence. Anyone who needs to be alone—or has a visible drug problem or pierce-toos—quietly disappears between semesters. The ones who go to rehab sometimes come back. The others don't. Leaving the bottom tier to the kids who write obsessive
Lord of the Rings
fan fiction, who don't have enough money to make up for chronically bad skin, who just don't shine or fit in anywhere else.

• • •

So, as usual, Sadie, Frankie, and I were at Table 12, under Gertrude. Having arrived last, I was in the death seat, the one that gets pounded every time a member of the kitchen staff comes through the swinging doors. I scooted my chair forward for the third time since sitting down, ending up with the table edge wedged firmly under my ribs. It's hard enough to breathe in that seat, let alone eat.

“So what are you going to do with it?” Sadie whispered.

The European history book lay on the table in front of me, Winston Churchill scowling up at the ceiling. He was not pretty. Alex Bainbridge is. It was his book, with his name written in sharp, bold script inside the front cover. Unlike at Sacred Heart, where every year you hoped to be handed books without desiccated pizza cheese between the pages, Willing students always buy their own books. Then they write in them.

I can't do that. The Sacred Heart nuns still scare me, two miles and two years away. The name inscribed in gold ink inside my history book is Erin Costantini. I've never met Erin Costantini. She graduated from Willing before I arrived, charitably leaving her used books, some of which I got as part of my scholarship, and a plaque near Table 5. She won the Willing Sportsmanship Award two years in a row.

Alex's book was new, of course, and filled with markings that have nothing to do with European history.
“D'oh!”
occupied a speech bubble next to Napoleon. Stalin wondered if we
Got Ex-Lax?
There was a phone number scrawled across Marie Antoinette's chest. No name with it.

I wondered if Amanda Alstead knew about that phone number. Amanda, queen of the Phillites to Alex's king. I wondered if it was Amanda Alstead's number.

“Ella?” Sadie nudged me. There was a huge button on the elbow of her gray sweater. It didn't fasten anything. Her mom is into deconstructed Japanese couture. On her, it says “
Vogue
.” On Sadie, raw seams and upside-down pockets say “Schizophrenia.” “The book?”

“She'll give it to him.” Frankie poked at his burger and winced. It was the same color as Sadie's sweater. “Simple.”

Only it wasn't, and Sadie knew that.

“Maybe you should just leave it in front of his locker. Or drop it off in the office,” she suggested. “They'll get it to him.”

She'd finished her bagged lunch (celery and an off-season plum from Australia) ten minutes ago and was now chewing on the ends of her hair, making one thick strand sleek and dark. When she let go, it bounced back into her mass of slightly fuzzy brown curls. Her mother takes her to Alphonse (his extreme talent with hair-care products renders a second name unnecessary) for thermal conditioning treatments once every four weeks. Sadie comes out looking like she's been greased. Frankie and I say nothing, and a few days later, she's back to normal.

Sadie's one of the rich kids. Which means she should be able to walk up to Alex Bainbridge, hand him his book, and make a quip about being an American in Paris. She's been, multiple times. She has also known Alex pretty much all her life.

She thinks she might have hit him with a pretzel wand once when they were in the Society Hill Tiny Tots program. She's not sure; they both left SHTT to start kindergarten at Madison, so the pretzel incident would have been at least twelve years ago. She doesn't think they've spoken to each other since.

It works that way sometimes.

“Oh, for God's sake.” Frankie rolled his eyes under his green porkpie hat. The color perfectly matched the V
INCE
stitched onto the pocket of his brown bowling shirt. Frankie is all about vintage chic. “Give me the book. I'll throw it at him.”

Frankie's daring. He's also conversant in postmodern art and tells me he loves me on a regular basis. He does lie like a rug, but only to people he doesn't care about, like the gym teacher. “Badminton?” he gasped once, early in our friendship, when I assumed I'd found a gym partner (him) who would actually talk to me. “And risk this nose?”

It's a good nose. In a really, really good face. Frankie's mom is Korean; his dad is a former model from Bryn Mawr. Frankie's theory is that his dad is gay, too. “Four years with an ordinary Asian girl who, no offense to her, looks like a pretty Asian boy? Then, poof (pardon the pun), off to raise goats in California? Please.”

He reached for the book. I held on. I might even have hugged it a little.

Frankie groaned. “No. No no no no no. Not you, too! Is there
one
girl in this school who doesn't have a thing for Alex Bainbridge?”

He looked to Sadie, who shrugged and offered, “He is gorgeous.”

“He's a Neanderthal.”

Frankie was a slightly earlier entrant into the Phillite solar system than I was. He did seventh and eighth grades at Madison, entering just at the point when boys started flexing their muscles and noticing whose shoes came from Kmart.

He'd explained it to me freshman year when the miraculous score of a pair of clearance D&G chinos (it helps to have a twenty-nine-inch waist) loosened his tongue about his pre-Fab days. “Gaysian? Poor? Five foot nothing? I might as well have had ‘dunk me' tattooed on my forehead.”

They dunked him.

“Now be fair.” Sadie is all about being fair and open-minded. She insists it's because she's a Libra. I credit ten years of being the bat her parents use to whack at each other. “Alex never actually put you into a toilet. It was his friends.”

“Oh, excellent defense, counselor. Case dismissed.”

“Pissy does not become you,” she informed him.

“Neither does piss,” he shot back.

I completely understand how that sort of thing would be hard to get past, even after a couple of years. You don't forget the mean stuff, even when the mean stuff ends. Or at least gets less obvious. It might have been Frankie's growing seven inches in two years that ended the dunkings. Or the Phillite boys growing up a few years. More likely it was the whispers that Frankie's twin brother, Daniel, had joined an Asian gang. Whatever—he hasn't forgotten.

“Ah, the Bainbridge Fan Brigade. I thought better of you, Fiorella.” Frankie doesn't keep his opinions about anything to himself. I usually admire that a little desperately. This time it stung. “I really did.”

Why? I'm only human. And invisible. In part (not that I kid myself that it's the major part) because I am still not much over five foot nothing. Alex Bainbridge is a foot taller than I am, with bronze hair that turns up at the front and a mouth that turns up at the corners, even when he's not smiling.

“It's better than her obsession with a dead man,” Sadie said gently.

“Not much,” was Frankie's grumbled reply.

He's probably right. I can sit blissfully under Edward's portrait in the library, scouring the Web for auctions containing his paintings, reading and rereading his letters and the handful of biographies about him, and no one notices. This year, it's even legit: research for my honors art history project. Besides, Edward was real. Everything he wrote and said was real, true. Unlike Fitzwilliam Darcy, who, drool-worthy as he might be, was really just Jane Austen in breeches. And look how many women dream about marrying him. I know for a fact that two of the girls at Table 13 are regular contributors to an online Darcy fanzine. They read aloud from it during lunch. It's not bad.

As for the possibility of Alex . . . well, he's
alive
. I could reach out and touch him almost any day September through May. I could actually invite him to a movie or pizza, or Marino's, where my nonna would make the calamari and my brother would have to serve it to us at a table in front. But I wouldn't. More the point, I
couldn't
. Because of his seat near the windows. Because of Amanda Alstead and lacrosse and the fact that he probably doesn't eat squid. I know the closest I'll get to Edward Willing is his portrait and an honors thesis. Of course I know that. As for playing footsie under a red-checked tablecloth with Alex . . .

 

Truth
: For me, it's easier to accept the impossible than the pitifully improbable.

 

I should probably have left the book where I found it, half hidden under the statue of Samuel Windsor Willing, Edith's grandfather (the Revolutionary War uniform is misleading; a little math tells us that he was only nine in 1776, but the Willings were never short on ego). I was coming out of the east corridor girls' room, which makes me wonder if school bathrooms are going to have ongoing significance in my life. I wish it didn't seem so likely. I certainly don't spend much time in them. Even at Willing, they smell like dirty water and that industrial pink soap that doesn't come out of the dispensers, no matter how many times you pump. Besides, I'm not a mirror girl. I have Frankie and Sadie to tell me if I have lettuce in my teeth. I don't have shiny lip gloss to check. I don't do anything that necessitates Visine. Still, sometimes I'll come out of a stall or look up from washing my hands and catch sight of myself: a small, startled person behind a curtain of dark hair who looks away quickly, as if embarrassed by being caught staring.

This time, I could have used the bathroom closer to math class. I mean, I didn't have to pee all that badly. But Amanda and her cadre can usually be found in the bathroom closer to math class before math class. Since the only word she has spoken to me since freshman year was “
Ewwwww!,”
it makes sense to avoid her.