Truth & Dare

Y
OU KNOW THOSE
intriguing warnings you get before the start of a suspect TV show or movie, such as: “This show contains scenes that some viewers may find disturbing” or “This program contains strong language?” Or those little
letter-symbols
that pop up in the corner of the TV screen, such as TV-PG-S (parental guidance suggested, due to possible sexual situations)? Well, as a “responsible editor” I wondered—should we slap one or two of those on the front of the book? But then I thought … No, the title
Truth & Dare
does the job. It entices—just as those TV warnings focus rather than diminish our attention—and it kind of warns, too (I mean, truth-seekers and their daring lives aren’t all sweetness and light, are they?).

In fact
Truth & Dare
pretty much says it all, and gives a feel for all the glorious colors that you can expect to find in this anthology: from thrilling red to edgy black (not forgetting lots of banana-yellow laughs). So re-read the title, then it’s up to you—do you dare to read on?

When I was asked to gather some stories for an anthology called
Truth & Dare
I was jumping around like crazy. Because right away I wanted to do something really daring so I could write a story about it and put it in myself. But time was too short to achieve a shockingly daring incident (deadlines), so
instead I imagined, then I excitedly phoned, tweeted, emailed and searched under the bed for the utterly skilled authors who
really
know about/feel “this kind of thing.” I wanted the best: the biggest dares, the funniest dares, and I wanted truths—or at least an inkling of a few. Plus confessions—how teens feel as they search around looking for those Love, Sex, Work, How-Do-I-Look?, Friendship, and Who-Am-I? answers.

And I got all of it. I think so anyway. So many laughs along the way, too. After reading through the stories now—the whole anthology—I realize that, perhaps, the whole of life is like one big game of “Truth or Dare.” I wonder if you’ll agree?

Liz Miles

T
HE SAVIOR OF
the universe is a girl in a trench coat, a hoodie, and twenty-pound headphones, and more than anything I want her to kiss me.

Not to talk to me—because I’d try to pay attention, and then I’d get hung up on her intentions, and the sound of the words, and to whatever it is that she’d be saying to me in the first place—and I don’t want her to listen to me, either, since I doubt anything would get through those manhole-sized earmuffs anyway. And I definitely don’t want to kiss
her
, because there’s no way I could do justice to those thin, unwavering, Mona Lisa pencil-sharp lips of hers. Also, there’d be all these expectations. What would we do next? Whose move did it count as, since it was my stare but her kiss? And both of us wondering: what does it
mean
?

No. What I want right now is for her to smile at me like she knows that I need it, share a deep, eye-sex look that says she knows exactly what I’m thinking and she doesn’t want to talk about it either, in Russian, or English, or any other language that either of us might speak, and then I want her to make out with me.

I don’t mean kissing, in that soft, understanding,
grace-and
-stuffed-bunny-rabbits way. I mean grabby, desperate,
forget-everything-else-because-all-we-have-is-each-other Hooking Up.

And that’s why I say she’smy savior. Because she has the kind of eyes you can get lost in, and the kind of face you can believe in. Because—and I realize that looks don’t really matter, but I
need
something to believe in, something to trust—she looks like the kind of person who I’d want to be my friend.

The subway comes. It’s an answer to our prayers. It’s also a huge interruption to a conversation that we haven’t actually started having yet. By now, though, I know her so well that I can sit down right next to her and ask her why she’s not in school and tell her the reason I’m not there either—except that, again, there’s this whole thing of us not having spoken yet. It’s the most deserted hour of the subway day, past lunch and not yet rush hour, so we have a whole car to ourselves.

I climb in first and sit near the empty conductor’s booth, staring in through the one-way glass. She enters and, though the car’s completely empty, she sits down right across from me.
Victory
! my mind screams at me, which only compounds when, upon sitting in the next row over—in one of the backwards seats that’s actually facing me, no less—she offers me a smile.

And we sit.

And we sit.

We sit in silence as the subway rolls out of the station into open air, then disappears beneath the city’s steel belly. We ride through Margaret & Orthodox Station, then Church, Tioga, and on, halfway across the city, eyes focused severely on each other and not saying a word. At Girard Avenue, for a quarter of a block, the subway rises above the wall-to-wall row of houses brushing up against each other, stops running along Frankford Avenue and starts to soar above it, hovering over
the afternoon traffic (On its way to an early concert festival on the waterfront, racing to catch the first opening band? Leaving work early to make an Atlantic City casino run?) and you can see the Ben Franklin Bridge, a dreamlike periwinkle blue against the flatter and more mundane blue of the river.

As soon as the subway hits open air, she jumps out of her seat and throws both arms in the air, spreading out her
glove-encased
fingers wide, like an orchestra conductor at the grand apex of the final encore of the night. And I hear that very same orchestra in my head, every violin broiling like an electric guitar, and I think to myself,
This is it. Now’s the time
.

If we are going to kiss, make it now, and give it everything you’ve got
.

The moment goes.

She sits down, offers me a brief but comradely conspiratorial grin, and literally collapses back into her seat. “Sorry,” she says to me. “Just needed to get that out.”

Da
, I am about to tell her,
I understand more than you would know
.

I am astounded. I am captivated. But I can’t do it myself. From here on out, it would only seem like an imitation.

The lights flicker. We are back underground.

We reach my stop. It occurs to me that the name has never sounded more appropriate:
stop
. Doors slide open, the exit beckons, and I feel like saying goodbye. The train station is looking its most splendid shade of desolate, as if, somewhere in Heaven, there is an angel whose job it is to run down this specific subway station. Half of it is boarded up, a man with bubbly cartoon eyes sits monitoring the other half, perched atop a fence, slurping up God knows what from inside a brown paper bag, and I regret ever coming here, and I wish I didn’t have to. I actually wish that I was back in school. For the past
half hour, the train car has become my own personal haven, sanctified almost, and I don’t want to give it up.

I especially don’t want to give
her
up.

I almost do say goodbye to her—my courage, though small, nonetheless exists—except that, while I’m doing my
getting-off
-the-train rite of checking the seat to see if I’ve forgotten the book that I forgot to bring in the first place, and sliding over to the nearest pole to lift myself up—I notice that she’s not sitting there any more, she’s already gone.

I jump up, breeze out the doors at the last possible moment, just as that voice is finishing announcing the name of the next stop. Why do they wait until after the doors close to tell you the stop’s name? So you can be absolutely sure you’ve missed your station? Everyone is against me. Everyone.

And, in that split second when the doors are shutting and most (but not all) of my body is through the door but I
know
I’m gonna get my leg or my shirt sleeve or my backpack caught—that thing has more subway door-torn strings than a rat’s ass—I realize, Jesus Girl’s already gotten off.

I am not imagining her
. I repeat this in my head like I’m trying to convince myself. Do I sound desperate? Yes, I’ve sounded like that since I started sounding like anything. Well, dreams are for desperate people. And people have always said I’m a dreamer.

The street yanks on the cuff of my dreams and smashes me into the cement of reality. Harsh daylight, screaming horns, and street vendors trying desperately to sell the passerby absolutely anything—bootleg CDs, AAA batteries, knitted pom-pom hats, even though it’s warm enough for shorts. This morning, the aluminum walls of my bedroom in our sorry white-trash excuse for a house were burning up. The outside
exacerbated the effect, rendering the place all but completely uninhabitable after 8 a.m.

I went into the kitchen and stuck my head in the freezer. My dad snored loudly, his head on the table where a bowl of cereal ought to be. Next to him, in place of the milk, stood an empty glass bottle. His phlegmy snores sounded eerily distended, warped by the wood polymer of the table.

“You want to buy that?”

The vendor’s cold voice cuts through my acrid daydream. I almost want to hand him a twenty and tell him,
Keep the change
, just to thank him for getting me out of there.

I take a final look at the film I’m holding. “Fifteen bucks for
Godfather
, man?” I spit, tossing it messily back on to the pile. “I could steal it from my grandfather for free.”

I’m lying, and he knows it. Poor Russian kid, doesn’t even have the money to spend on shoes that aren’t from Payless—this is a guy who makes his living reading people, and he knows that I sure ain’t in the market for new DVDs. “Right,” he snorts at me. “You gonna go to Siberia to do it?”

Everyone is laughing, even the other vendors. The people on the street. I move on, feeling like I did it again, tripped over my tongue and landed in a puddle of mud. I want to grow a shell, duck inside it, and twist myself into the turtle equivalent of the fetal position.

This is what they don’t know, what they can’t read in my face: I’ve got enough in my pocket to buy the whole table. The other tables, too. The idea that it’s right there in my pocket makes me suddenly nervous for the first time since getting on that bus, as if people could smell the scent of it on me. I take one last suspicious glance at the crowd—as if anyone’s going to be wielding a ski mask and a Saturday night special—and, two tables down, kneeling over a used book bin, is the girl from the train.

As if doing weird synchronous exercises, she throws down the book she’s reading the inside front cover of and jumps into a heady walk, moving as though she’s on a tight deadline. I have to remind myself, I’m on a deadline too—and I follow up her briskness with my own.

It feels pretty amazing to walk in the city. Some days, the skyscrapers reduce you to a maggot-sized nothing. Others, they reflect the sun so bright that you feel like you own them. It’s impossible to predict what kind of day you’ll have until you’re in the middle of it. Today, in spite of everything, was turning out to be a Number Two kind of day.

To get to the office, I didn’t have to make any turns or deviations—just follow Girard Avenue all the way down. I’d heard my dad talk about the walk countless times, from when he’d gone there to pay the rent before. The managers for the landlord company were all-right people. Have the check in the mail by the first of every month, and you were square in their books—but miss that deadline, and you were straight out of luck: straight to their office in North Philadelphia, with cash only (no personal checks accepted) in a plain white envelope, due by 3 p.m. on the fourth of the month, or else.

Usually my parents made the mail deadline. Sometimes they forgot about it till school let out, and they’d send me running to the post office, a twenty-minute walk away from our house, fifteen minutes before it closed. Other times there’d be something—a payout they were waiting for, a check that wouldn’t clear for another day or two—and then my dad would go to the bank, withdraw our entire fifteen-
hundred-dollar
rent in cash, and brave the Philadelphia subway for a morning full of fun.

And usually he wasn’t too drunk to.

He’s a good man, my father. Funny, clever, good humored and well read, always ready to jump into a conversation or take
a friend’s good news with as much joy as he would his own. There were men in Little Russia who beat their children, or their wives, or who always veered on doing so. My father has never so much as raised his voice at either one of us. But life is hard, and things are expensive, and I can feel the strain in his voice when I ask for a bus fare, or when bills come in, or when I say I don’t feel like running errands for them.

He’s completely imperfect, and within that, he’s kind of perfect at being that way. And I feel guilty for feeling this way, but I know that I hate him for it.

And now you see why I don’t like to talk about it. And why having someone to ride the train with, in complete and utter silence, and not having to start a conversation or talk about what was on our respective minds, was just fine with me.

For a moment I fear losing her, but I cross the street and she’s right there, halfway down the block, like a promise of a better day.

The buildings are starting to thin out, skyscrapers giving way to fast-food restaurants and blocks of once-mighty Victorian homes in Ozymandian condition. It’s sad how everything crumbles, but that’s what it’s supposed to do, as my father would say. Only he’d say it all cheerful, like death is a part of life and it’s one more thing to look forward to. It’s living that’s no walk in the park.

Park
! I pass a sign with the name of the street I’m supposed to turn onto, a street that couldn’t look less like a park if it really put its mind to the task. Slabs of concrete, a
computer-monitor
shade of gray, alternate with rusting shacks that should be condemned and probably have been, except no one had bothered to knock them down. At the far corner of the street sits one house, similarly crumbling, but newly painted
and with people milling about. Its stairs are freshly swept, and the sign outside is in a healthy, not-cracked state, with red block letters that look as though they might be indicating a government office. It announces, as if everything else about it didn’t, that this is my destination.

I sigh. I cram my hand in my pocket once more, checking for the thousandth time that the envelope is still where I left it. It is. The sky clouds over. I turn the cheap new doorknob, which feels like plastic, and enter.

The room is small and bare and crowded, just like my father said. There is one generic art print on the wall, probably bolted there, of a cabin in the woods. A window is cut into one wall, like a bank teller’s, small and cased in glass. A huge line starts here and spirals around the office. Everyone in the line is pressed close together but it’s cold, so at least that part isn’t awful.

It
is
still disgusting, though. These people are vagrants, unemployed, on drugs. How they have the money to pay a few hundred dollars’ worth of rent each month, I have no idea. I get a wave of revulsion, and then I feel revolted at being revolted because I start to think of my father, unconscious in the kitchen, and I remind myself: I am one of these people.

I dip my head, stick hands in pockets and mope all the way to the end of the line. I’m so distracted—not by anything, just by the loud and rapid sucking of life—that it takes me a full five minutes before I realize I’m standing directly behind my Jesus girl.

And then, a curious thing happens.

It doesn’t bother me that she’s here.

I expect immediately to be turned off. I stand there, growing fascinated by the way her hair meets the back of her neck. Her hair is a soft, girlish blonde, cut like a bell curve, and beneath it the soft, girlish fur of her skin. This is broken
up by the triple layer of the collar of her jacket, her hood, and the band of her headphones. It was iconic, her own private insignia. I drew a letterbox around it in my mind.