Truth & Dare (12 page)

Meanwhile, I was dying to say it, I was dying for someone to say it.
Never have I ever kissed a girl
. Maybe it was said, but the want, the need was just so deep that I don’t remember it, that I mentally hyperventilated over such a moment of coming of age. I didn’t care about giving blow jobs, or losing it, or the gross places girls had gone to fuck their boyfriends. I wanted to talk about girls. I wanted to say that I had kissed my best friend, slipped my tongue in her mouth. That I loved her so much. More than Tommy, I thought. But different. But yes.

No one asked. I didn’t ask. It hurt, like holding your breath until your lungs felt scarred.

Only when Joan had fallen asleep on a stray pillow, and Terry was getting anxious about how early we had to get up for class, did Mira turn to me and ask quietly, “How long have you been with your boyfriend?”

“Seven months.”

She nodded, then gave me a sideways smirk. “Have you guys had sex?”

I blushed hard, making her laugh. “No,” I said, “No, I just … we do other things. But sex, I just … I don’t know.”

“You don’t want to?”

“I can think of better things to do than the whole insert tab A into slot B,” I gushed, and she buried her head in my shoulder, laughing.

“Girl,” she cried, “You are crazy.”

Peals of laughter erupted from Kiana and Jackie. “I’m serious!” Lindsey was saying. “He looks just like Johnny Depp!”

“Who?” Mira demanded.

“The boy from the Astrology group. Who sat at our table at dinner.”

“You mean Astronomy?” Katie smirked.

“Whatever.”

“He’s okay,” Kiana conceded. “I’ve got my eyes on that fly boy who had on the Knicks hat.” Here she fanned herself with her hand.

“He
is
fine,” Jackie agreed.

“Where do you think their dorms are?”Mira asked, leaning forward with a glint in her eye.

Katie laughed. “You wanna go for a visit?”

“You know,”Mira shrugged, “it’s a long weekend. And that boy with the Knicks hat was
hot
.”

Jackie and Kiana cackled, leaning forward to give Mira a high five. I laughed along, I did. I was trying to picture the face of the boy in the Knicks hat, but I couldn’t place it. My mind swam with the faces of the other boys who had been in the cafeteria—just boys.

“Who do you think is cute?” Katie asked me. I rolled my eyes.

“I’ve got a boyfriend,” I said. Mira shoved my arm playfully.

“Yeah, we know. But still. Who’s your crush?”

I was trying not to look, I realize, but I could see her nipples underneath her shirt. She had no idea, I thought. I was stuck in the isolation I always felt when I checked out girls.

Just then, the door swung open. Jackie screamed, and Lindsey scrambled up to her feet.

“You girls are still awake?” It was Lisa, the warden. Her face was a scowl. She was wearing long cotton pajama pants with little lambs on them.

“Yeah,” Kiana answered.

Lisa glared at her, then straightened, pointing at the door. “You’re here to take college classes, and even though you might think college is all about staying up late, it’s not. Your first class is in, like, five hours. You all need to go back to your dorms.”

We exchanged glances, and Joan was the first to slink past Lisa, squeaking apologies. The rest of us stood up and followed. “Bitch,” Kiana mumbled as we walked back, to which Mira and Katie laughed loudly. Before Lisa could say anything, though, we were back in our rooms, the doors snapped shut in her face.

I never thought that writing could be exhausting, but after two days of classes, I was beat. They kept us constantly busy, herding
us from Comparative Literature, to lunch, to a lecture on Memoir, to our Poetry class, then to dinner. After dinner was the only time we could do our own things.

Tommy I talked to on the phone once while I was there. I had a phone card, and one of the wardens let me use the phone in her room while everyone else was downstairs, watching a movie. When I came out of the room after hanging up, there was heated talk coming from downstairs, in the lobby.

“This is completely irresponsible of all of you. You are here at Alfred by the recommendation of your families, your teachers. People who trust you.”

I crept to the top of the stairs and watched from the banister. Mira, Terry, Kiana, and Jackie were lined up against the wall. Three wardens were across from them, along with a woman with a black bob whom I recognized as the Director. She was the one speaking. Mira noticed me above them, but didn’t register it—her face was a deep scowl, which made her look younger than any of us, like a baby. Other girls who had been watching the movie crowded around the doorway in their large T-shirts and flannel pajama pants. Slippers. Flip-flops.

When Lisa saw me, they all turned and looked. The Director whipped her head around to look at me.

“You need to come down from there,” she said sternly.

I quickly came down the stairs, thinking of defenses, even though I hadn’t done anything. “I was on the phone with my boyfriend,” I said quietly, darting looks at my warden.

The Director, though, had turned her attention to Kelly and Lisa. “I need to speak with you and the other interns.”

Kelly nodded. Lisa even uttered a “Yes, Ma’am.” To which Mira rolled her eyes.

We were all told to go to our rooms for the rest of the night. Lindsey was on the stairs in front of me when we were herded up.

“What happened?” I whispered.

She glanced to see that Kelly and Lisa were ahead of us, then shook her head. “They went over to the boys’ dorms and then walked around in their bras!!. Pretty dumb.”

“Are you kidding?”

Lindsey shook her head. “It just sucks that we’re all on lockdown now.”

In our room, Katie wrote in her journal, the reading lamp clipped to her bed shining warmly. I shifted in my own bed, opening and closing my book.

“How much trouble do you think they’ll be in?”

Katie shrugged, her pen still bobbing across the page. “I don’t know.”

After a few minutes, she added, “The program ends on Sunday. I can’t imagine they’d send them home now.”

“Yeah.” The book I had brought—
Letters To A Young Poet
, which I had already read, but brought in the hope that one of the girls would see me reading it and think me cool—was covered in cellophane and stuck to my bare legs under my shorts.

“It’s kind of dumb,” I added. I wanted to be more specific, to say it was dumb to go to see the boys. If we had all walked around here in our bras, just us girls, we probably wouldn’t have gotten into trouble. I thought of the awkward sight of Mira Albany, lanky in her white cross-my-heart bra, the way the fabric would cut across her small breasts. How Jackie probably wore a bra that was black, or purple, or brown. It was probably made of silk.

Katie didn’t say anything.

The next morning at breakfast, Mira, Jackie, Terry, and
Kiana had to eat with their wardens. They looked pissed off. Their wardens just looked nervous.

I went back to the buffet to get more strawberries. From across the room, I saw Mira get up from her table and walk quickly toward me. I paused, pretending to pick good
strawberries
from the rotten ones.

Mira slid her tray next to mine.

“Are you in trouble?” I whispered. Mira shook her head, smirking. She glanced dramatically back at her table, then turned to me, her head bent low. She began spooning yogurt into the same bowl her oatmeal had been in.

“Whatever,” she said. “How fucking stupid. They threatened to call our parents.”

“They didn’t?”

“Nah.” She dropped the scoop back into the yogurt, and some splattered on her hand. She licked it off. “They’re just gonna tell them on Sunday when it’s over.”

“That’s dumb.”

“Totally.”

Mira’s warden was now on the other side of the buffet, picking out an orange. She watched Mira, then looked away when I noticed her. Mira and I tried not to giggle.

“Hey,” Mira whispered, both of us sliding our trays slowly toward the end of the buffet. “You never told me who your crush is.”

I felt my heart clamp shut, just for a second. “Oh.”

Mira laughed, her eyes and mouth both wide. “I bet he was with us last night.”

I tried to smile. She stood up taller, looked at the warden, then smiled at me. “I totally made out with John.”

Here I had to smile. What else could you do?

We were back in Poetry, our last class. When we came in, there
wasn’t an assignment on the whiteboard. Our notebooks were still in a pile. It was just George, sitting on the table. He nodded at us as we came in. I wondered if he knew about the bra incident.

“Something different today,” he said. “I know I promised you the most poetry writing you could cram into a classroom, but today, we’re not gonna write.”

He slid the pile of books closer to him. “Today, I want you to share them.”

“But what about the ones you said we never had to show?” Jackie said, clutching at the strap of her bag across her chest. “The ones at the back of the book?”

George held up his hands like he was surrendering, closing his eyes. “Those,” he said slowly, “you do not have to show anyone. I’ll keep my word. But I’ll take a shot in the dark and say that those poems may be the best of what you’ve written here.”

“You read them?” Joan squealed.

“No,” George laughed, “No, honest to God, I haven’t read a damn one of them.”

“You better not have,” Jackie deadpanned, and everyone giggled.

“He means that your best writing happens when you’re totally uncensored.” Everyone swiveled their head to look at Mira, who had taken her usual seat at the desk at the back of the room. I’d sat on the table next to her, and beamed—so close to her.

George picked up the first of the notebooks, glanced at the cover, then held it like a frisbee.

“Albany.” He nodded.

She leaned forward, gracefully catching the notebook between both palms. He tossed the others back to us—Joan and Katie, Jackie, Kiana, Terry, Lindsey. Mine he tossed
last, just as I had stood up, walking toward him to retrieve it, afraid that if I tried to catch it it would just land on the floor.

“Here are the rules,” he said. “Everyone can read a poem. Just one. No feedback. No workshopping. Not a word. Then when everyone’s read, we can discuss.”

Everyone nodded. “Just one?” Kiana asked. He nodded. “Make it a good one.”

He hopped from the desk and went to the front of the room. “I forgot to rearrange,” he said, and there was a loud dragging noise as he pushed a table away to the edge of the room. We hopped off our tables and followed suit, creating a semicircle of awkwardly placed tables, with a blank space of dirty green linoleum floor in the middle. From down the hall there was the sound of a power washer, echoing off the emptiness. George shut the door with his foot, then clapped his hand.

“Sacrificial lamb?”

Jackie hopped down. I thought about flipping through my notebook, finding the poem I wanted to read, even though in my heart I knew which one I was going to share. There was the safe poem, the one about my mother and the divorce, the one I knew everyone liked from workshop. But there was a poem at the back, one that I wrote after we played Never Have I Ever, a poem that scratched at me like an itch. That was the one for me.

Jackie, for all her swagger, rocked her leg back and forth while she read. Her poem was peppered with pauses, full phrases that got caught in her mouth, a cocked eyebrow at the end. Kiana let out a whoop and we laughed and clapped. “
Girl
!” Kiana started, but George threw an arm out like a referee.

“Nope!” he said. “Next!”

It went like that, some people popping forward—Kiana, then Terry—others needing a few moments of peer pressure. After Katie read, I nervously put my hand up and made eye contact with George, smiling.

He made a hand motion telling me to go ahead.

“I hope she reads that one about her mom,” Kiana said, eliciting another bug-eyed look of exasperation from George, and giggles from the rest of us.

“This one,” I said, “is called ‘Back of the Book.’”

I closed my notebook with one hand and sauntered back to my seat. Kiana and Katie hollered, and Mira had a grin on her
face a mile wide. It made me laugh. George was clapping, smiling down at the ground.

“The back of the book,” he remarked. Kiana gave him an exaggerated hush, and we all laughed. The only person who hadn’t read a poem yet was Mira.

She slid from her spot on the table and walked forward. Then she looked at George. “Do I have to read something I wrote this week?”

George shrugged. “I suppose not,” he said. “If you have something else.”

“I do,” she said, and turned to put her notebook on the table to her right, long arm stretching to reach. Then she closed her eyes, took a breath, and began. Her poem, from memory, started out loud, with short words sewn together, a pace that slowed, her eyes meeting ours, then quickened, a dramatic pause, a careful gesture forward. It was about being an adult in another life, why being a teenager sucked because she had been here before—a poem drawn with what-ifs and tongue-in-cheek metaphors, and the ending—an ending about love, about how sad it was to be a girl who had loved big but couldn’t find anyone her age to love big, too.