Truth & Dare (10 page)

I’m sucking the luke-warm gunk through a straw when Eve plops down beside me at our favorite wall outside in the quad. It’s a relief to be with someone who understands what I’m saying. I guess it’s like how a mom can decipher her toddler’s gibberish when nobody else can. Another talent gold star for Eve. Or maybe she just knows me?

“You aren’t athamed to be theen with me?”

“Hell no!” Eve blurts out, smacking on some minty gum. “How’s your day going?”

My eyes roll.

“What happened?”

“Everyone thought I wath on my period in P.E. becauth I wath wearing bloody thortth. Remember the zipper debacle in theater?”

“Shit! You serious? God I’d
die
. That sucks ass.”

“Tho embarrathing. Good thing wath Coach Clean took total pity on me becauthe of the obviouth,” (point, point) “and let me thit on the bench and watch.”

“That’s cool.”

“I gueth. Tho aren’t you eating?”

“No way. Now that you’ve lost all that weight, I need to as well.”

“Eve! I wathn’t
trying
to lothe weight. I jutht can’t eat. You know how dithguthting protein powder ith? Try thucking down thith fruit drink thing!”

I shove the straw into Eve’s face and she shoves the mug away. We start laughing (well, she’s laughing, I sound like a
hog in heat), and the mug slips out of our tangled hands, lands on the grass and rolls down the hill. Straight into Jesse’s back.

“Holyshitballs.”

“Hide me.”

I duck behind Eve’s suede vest, careful not to tangle my wires in her angel-food hair.

“Doeth he know it wath uth?”

Eve speaks in a low, slow voice. “He’s looking around, but I don’t think he sees us. Shit. He’s looking at me. What should I do? Okay, I’m waving at him. Oh no, Cher, he’s picking up the mug and walking over … Hi, Jesse!”

Should I flip my other leg over the wall and run?

What are my options?

“He’s coming,” Eve hisses.

So I do it. I fling my other leg over the wall and jump down, smashing my face into the concrete as I skim down the flat wall. I squat down just in time.

“Hey Eve … what’s up?” That voice. Melt.

“Nothing much.” Smack, smack, smack.

My nose is pressed hard into the wall. No one’s walking down the ramp, thank God.

“I’m returning Sonny’s mug.” Sonny’s? Did he just say my nickname?

“Oh, that’s not Cher’s.”

Jesse says in his eye-twinkling voice, “Nice try, Barbie. This mug says ‘Property of Cher.’ So do you know where she is?”

Property of Cher!? I’m going to
kill
my mother.

Eve’s voice is all sparkly now, too. “Haven’t seen her,” she plays along.

“Well, okay then. I’ll see you at After-School Club. Oh, and Barb?”

“Yeah?”

“Tell Sonny I said hi,” Jesse says.

Pause.

Pause.

Pause.

Smack, smack, smack. Bubble pop. “Fuuuuuuuuuuck.”

“Ith he gone?” I whisper, peeking over the wall on my tippiest tiptoes.

“Fuckin’ Aaaaaa …”

“Tho it’th thafe to come back up now?”

“I think so.”

“Ith Newman gone? Totally, completely gone?”

“He’s back down by the picnic tables joking around with his smelly skater friends.”

When I see she’s telling the truth and the coast is totally clear, I swing my pink Converse All Stars over the wall until I’m straddling it.

“Giddee up, cowgirl,” Eve oozes.

“Funny.” I gingerly take the mug from Eve’s delicate fingers.

“He thed to thay hi to me?”

Eve nods. “Totally.”

I stroke the side of the YMCA plastic mug where his fingers had just traveled and it’s like looking into a crystal ball at the county fairgrounds.

I see his soulful reflection in the green-room mirror as I put on his stage makeup. I see him running his fingers through his thick mess of hair when he can’t remember a line. I feel our fingers touching carefully, as if by accident, as we run the light board during rehearsals. If it wasn’t for this stupid mess of wires, we may have had a chance this year. Tears burn in my eyes. “He’th even cuter thith year ithn’t he?”

She flips her mane to the side. “That’s the fucking understatement of the year.”

I don’t like the sound of her voice when she says it.

Nor the expression in her eyes as she watches him lean back and laugh into the air about something one of his punk friends said.

“Eve?”

She’s still staring at his back. “Yeah?”

“Don’t even
think
about it.”

Cotton-candy pink, she faces me. “No. For sure not. YPN? Totally not my type. Plus, well, I know how you feel about him …”

My eyes narrow suspiciously, but I’ll let it go for now. She did cover for me just now and she is my Barbie doll BFF. She would never do anything to hurt me.

Jessie kicks a knit hacky-sack into the air. It bounces off his knee and he rockets it back up into the air.

I hold the “Property of Cher” tightly to my chest.

I am
never
washing this mug again.

“Okay, then what?” I’m yacking with my green-room spy, aka 007 Boy George.

The egg timer buzzes, and I quickly add five minutes while Mom’s in the bathroom.

“I’m telling you,
nada
. Barbie and Newman sat by each other, which is
not
unusual because you weren’t there.”

“No holding handth? No making out? Nothing?”

“Making out? Cher, you are seriously paranoid.
Nothing happened
.”

I’m still suspicious but let it slide. “Tho what are you doing for your monologue at auditionth tomorrow?”

“Ms. Tea said we’re reading cold from the script.”

“Really?” I had a monologue from this cool theater book I found at the library all memorized and ready to go. But I wasn’t sure I was going to do it. I mean, I slur the words I say.
Add a dental lisp to my long list of horrific traits.

BUZZZZZZ.

Egg timer again. This time it’s post-toilet-flush and Mom hears, too.

“Okay, Cher. Hang up,” she says, moving her flabby arms in slow circles like a kid acting out a choo-choo train.

“Mom, come on, jutht a thec. I jutht have to athk George about—”

My evil mom comes over, grabs the phone from my hand and says, “Goodbye, Cher’s friend,” and hangs up on George. Just like that.

God, I could
kill
her sometimes.

“Why did you do that?”

She’s still pumping her arms in the air. “Ten minutes on the phone is the rule, Cher. It’s time for dinner. Besides, I don’t know what you possibly have to talk to your friends about at night. You’ve already been with them all day.

Just because she doesn’t have any friends to talk to doesn’t mean I don’t.

“I haven’t been with them all day. I had to go to the orthodontitht, remember? I mithed my firtht drama clath, we were talking about auditionth …” My eyes burn. If Dad were here he would take my side. He’d say, “Mellow out, Carol. Your salad’s not going to wilt if it sits five seconds longer.”

“Oh. Well,” Mom says, finally resting her arms. “You can call him back after dinner then. But I’m setting the timer.”

We glare at each other, willing the other to say something else to escalate this argument into a full-on Cher-sprints-
into-her
-room-and-slams-the-door fight. I don’t have the energy tonight, so I shrug and flop down into my usual seat at the dinner table.

Mom grabs her salad off the counter and we settle in for
one of our famous silent dinners. She crunches on dry lettuce and a tiny piece of steamed chicken breast while I barely choke down a yogurt smoothie with ultra-thick protein powder mixed in.

We don’t bother with the “How was your day?” thing any more.

It goes without saying we both know that the other one doesn’t give a crap.

And without Dad keeping the peace and Jason around for comic relief, it’s too depressing to even attempt to make small talk at the dinner table.

When we’re finished eating (sucking), Mom says that I can be excused to go up to my room to finish my homework. I remind her that she said I could call back George. She rolls her eyes, flashes five fingers, and then vanishes into the living room to lie on her back and do a thousand grunting stomach crunches.

Sometimes I think the silence is more depressing than all the yelling and screaming, and Dad and Jason should just ditch Sally-the-Perfect-Aerobicized-Realtor and move back in. But then I look at mom with her angry stubborn expression and her slick new workout clothes and I know that’s
never
ever going to happen.

So I was ill-prepared for auditions, but in a way I guess more prepared than some, because it turns out we weren’t reading cold from the script. We were reading cold from
our
script.

The script of our lives.

Ms. Tea was all prancy and dancy and peacock-
feathered-proud
as she paced back and forth on the edge of the stage—downstage as us theater geeks referred to the spot, where if you weren’t careful, one could easily teeter off into
the audience and land on the lap of a greasy icky football coach’s lap whom you just know is sitting in the first row so he can peek under the actresses’ skirts. Perv.

Not that that’s ever happened to me.

So she says, “Instead of reading from the script, I want you to read from your heart.”

Eve’s hand immediately flies up. “Our heart?”

“Exactly. I want this to be a free-flowing exercise. I want you to share with your audience a feeling—personified. Whether it be fear, love, admiration, shame …”

Shame. I got that one nailed.

I raised my hand, “How long doeth it have to be?”

“Under two minutes.”

I nodded while everyone else looked at me like I had just announced I was leading the Nazi Fan Club and … Who wants to join?

A harsh whisper in my ear. “Dude. Cher, we need to talk her
out
of this, not agree to do it, especially as compliantly as that.”

George.

I shrugged.

After the day-week-month-summer I had, who cares? I had plenty to say and maybe now someone to say it to.

“Who’d like to go first?” Ms. Tea asked. Her eyes glided over the crowd and fell on me, full of pushing-milk-toward-
a-hungry
-kitty kindness. Full of her knowing I had something to say. “Cher?”

Faux red velvet rocked back and forth nervously. Nobody volunteered to take my place, and I imagined nobody wanted to be privy to what I was about to confess; they were about to get an earful.

Scampering up the side stairs and slumping into my spot, I stood downstage center, under the spotlight, cleared my
metal-tasting throat and focused on dictation the best I could. And yeah. It reads clearer than it actually was. Headgarial Hazard …

Paranormal chickth are all the rage right now, right?

After. After. After I rubbed a piece of my shirt between my fingers in a vain attempt to figure out if this was real or just some sort of crazy nightmarish daydream, I finally got brave enough to glance out at the audience. Even in the shadows, even with the glare from the spotlight, I catch their expressions: Ms. Tea’s, Eve’s, George’s, Jesse’s.

They were all looking at me like blank-faced dolls waiting for their mouths to be painted with smiles or frowns. Like they didn’t know whether to laugh, cry, clap—and needed an artist to tell them. So I just sort of stood there awkwardly rubbing rubbing rubbing that material, waiting for Ms. Tea to tell us what to do next.

She’s the director. She’s the artist.

And then I think, why should I wait for Ms. Tea’s order?

This was
my
monologue.

This was
my
creation. If anything, I am its monster.

So I bent over in the most outlandish Shakespearean bow—Falstaff at his finest—and in my ears rang the most delicious round of applause. An applause so thick and rich it rivaled the curtains that hung behind me.

When I arched back to standing, a swan-like grace infiltrated my body, Jesse ran up on stage with a dozen roses pledging his undying love and …

Okay, who am I kidding. Truth is, I almost fell over backward, caught myself just before falling on my ass and after mumbling a most self-deprecating Elvis-style “Thank ya, thankya verry much,” I flop back into my seat awash in a sea of “Good job”/“nice going”/“That was awesome.”

The standing ovation part?

Totally true
.