Truth & Dare (3 page)

Rachel sighed. “Oh, if your drama class could see their little Socks now.”

I hadn't been lying, I was hungry. I never lie about food.

“We have to be ready to follow him,” said Rachel, future spy extraordinaire. “Maybe we should just get milkshakes.”

“Double cheeseburger,” I said. “Oh, and a chocolate milkshake. Good idea. Oh, and fries.”

“Okay, two fries,” said Rachel. “And a strawberry milkshake.”

As the one who'd ordered the cheeseburger, I was in charge of the tray while Rachel was in charge of finding a table where we could sit and watch Brad-Dave-Chris at our leisure and from a safe distance.

The only problem was that she couldn't locate him at all, let alone find a table.

“What if he just popped in to use the bathroom and left while we were buying food?” Rachel asked.

“Nobody uses the bathrooms in McDonald's except drug addicts—they're disgusting.”

“Well, he could have gone to the bathroom to do drugs,” Rachel said. “It's not like we know him all that well. In fact, you're attracted to the dangerous type. Look at Twizzler.”

I scanned the circular tables and the expanse of yellow tiles. There were a ton of kids, laughing around circular tables over crumpled wrappers and greasy boxes, but none of them was the man I was quite literally
after
.

“Don't talk like Twizzler was the guy I married who sold me for crack,” I said. “Twizzler was the guy I talked to by the hummus whom you later told me had a close personal relationship with glue. The arts and crafts cupboard was more his girlfriend than I was. And maybe Brad just went upstairs.”

“You made up a name for him?”

“You made up a
drug problem
for him,” I reminded her and marched up the stairs.

Upstairs there were booths. I looked around for our quarry in every one, squinting to make out individual faces among the squashed-together groups until people started glaring back at us.

“I don't see him!”

“I don't see him either,” said Rachel, chewing on her bottom lip. She looked really annoyed. She had Colin—she didn't have any interest in this new guy, but Rachel didn't
like to fail at anything, even at pretending to be a spy.

Besides, she'd felt the same rush I had, giggling and running in pursuit, having a break from the Sunday afternoon boredom. It was a bit deflating to have it all end like this.

I looked down the stairs, leaning against the rail, to the floor below.

Then I saw a head of really nice-looking brown hair.

“There he is!” said Rachel. “But is he coming up, or is he going to sit down there?”

“He seems undecided,” I said, leaning out further.

He had a tray with him and was sort of bobbing about the place. I leaned out against the railing as far as I could go in case he made any sudden moves. Silently, I ordered him to make up his mind—all this wavering about was unmanly. He should be more decisive. What I needed was a man of action!

As if he could hear my psychic berating, he started suddenly up the steps.

I wasn't expecting this. I was leaning too far over the railing.

I flinched.

The moment stretched out, as if time itself had slowed to savor my unbelievable humiliation. Endless seconds passed as the tray slid from my hands: there was the moment when its weight was still against the sweaty tips of my fingers but it was already irredeemably lost; the moment when the tray was flipping, its red plastic bright in the fluorescent lights; and the moment when I fully realized what was going to happen and felt my stomach turn in a slow churn of horror.

There was the moment when the boy whose name I didn't know looked up, just before the tray hit. His eyes were wide and bright blue, narrowing. He saw me.

Then the tray hit in an explosion of food and milkshakes.

Rachel hit the ground beside the railing, hiding herself from
view. I looked down at her in frozen horror—she had her face buried in her knees.

I had a very strong urge to hide, too. Only the boy had seen me when he looked up, and he knew exactly whose tray had hit him. Hiding would just be like putting my head under a blanket and pretending I was invisible.

Not that it wasn't tempting. I have never been so embarrassed in my whole life.

“Oh, wow,” I called down feebly. “I'm really sorry.”

There was a napkin dispenser on the table by the stairs. I took a paper napkin from it and wandered hopelessly down.

The boy had dropped his own tray when my tray had hit. His chicken nuggets had spilled out and were lying in a heap with Rachel's food and mine, reproaching me.

“Wow, I am really, really sorry,” I repeated, just to stress this important point, and cringed with every step down.

“You said that already,” said the boy I didn't know at all, had been stalking, and had now assaulted. He didn't sound angry, just dazed.

Then again, he had just been hit on the head with a tray.

There were fries hanging on his shoulders like decorations. His T-shirt and his hair were splashed with sludgy brown and pink, and when he blinked I saw that there was milkshake stuck in his eyelashes.

“That's because I am really, really sorry,” I said and waved my napkin like a tiny paper flag of truce. I reached out and dabbed ineffectually at his T-shirt, because wiping his milkshake-stained face seemed invasive.

Whereas stalking him had been totally acceptable behavior.

“Um,” he said. “Thanks.”

I lowered the now soggy square of brown and pink. “You're welcome.”

“Could you, uh, give me a hint on where you found that
napkin?” he asked. “I think I could use just a few more.”

“Yeah, I can totally cut you in on some napkin action,” I said.

Okay, he wasn't yelling, and he hadn't accused me of dropping the tray on purpose, which would have been a horrible lie, or stalking him, which would have been a horrible truth. Things were not so bad.

“You look very familiar,” he said.

“I have one of those faces!” I yelped. “It is just one of those things! One of those faces … things.”

At that unpromising moment, a voice behind him said, “Sam?”

“Oh, God, Colin,” I said. “I mean. Colin, great to see you!”

There he was, in the flesh and at the worst possible time—Rachel's maybe-boyfriend Colin, standing in McDonald's looking tall, handsome and even more puzzled than usual.

“Oh, hey, I didn't see you there,” said Colin, who had obviously gone mad and was babbling nonsense. “Uh, has there been some kind of accident?”

“McDonald's: its vengeance strikes from above,” said the boy. “Could you point me to those napkins?”

“Right,” I said. “Follow me.”

My victim followed me, and so did Colin, as if it was any of his business. Some of McDonald's staff, who had been busy staring at the horrible spectacle with fascination, came over to clear up the mess I'd made, and I was at the top of the stairs before I realized that I'd led the boys straight to Rachel.

“Look who it is!” I shouted immediately. “COLIN! That's who it is! Right here!”

Rachel got up so fast she kind of wobbled as she rose. “Hi, Colin! Good to see you!”

Colin regarded her blankly. “What were you doing on the floor?”

When a guy is dating a girl, he thinks he owns her, I thought with passionate resentment. What right did Colin have to ask such a personal question?

“Oh, I dropped something,” Rachel said, quick-thinking as a future spy should be. “But I have it now. In my pocket. So that's all right.”

“What was it?” Colin asked.

“Er … gum,” said Rachel.

Colin kept smiling, but the boy I'd stalked gave Rachel a very doubtful look.

“Here are your napkins!” I said and shoved a big mass of them directly in his line of vision.

“Um … thanks,” he responded, and took them.

A few dabs of the paper against his face showed that the milkshake had dried a bit too much. Unfortunately the strawberry one had scored a direct head hit—he had a stiff, vaguely pink widow's peak.

“I think maybe I need to go to the bathroom,” he said eventually. He caught his reflection in the metal of the napkin dispenser. “Is my hair pink?”

“Slightly pink,” I told him. “In a manly and
stereotype-defying
way.”

“I'm definitely going to the bathroom,” he said, draping the napkin over his hair like a veil. “In a manly and
stereotype-defying
way.”

He sloped off with the napkin still on his head. There was a good chance he might be crazy.

Of course, I hunted strangers through the streets, so who was I to judge?

“This is lucky,” said Colin, settling with Rachel in the nearest booth and stretching out both arms to get one around Rachel's shoulders.

“It sure is. And not at all suspicious!”

Rachel laughed a little hysterically. Colin, a simple soul, looked at her and then laughed politely too.

This was going to be my punishment, then. I was going to have to spend the afternoon with a boy I'd ambushed and assaulted, witnessing the spectacle of Rachel romancing Colin, the so-dim-he-was-flickering bulb.

Well, I deserved it, and I would have to accept it. I slid round to the other side of the table.

“What have you guys been doing all day?” Colin asked amiably.

“Nothing!” Rachel yelped.

“All day,” I added with great firmness.

“Sounds boring.”

“Yes, that was our day,” I proclaimed. “Very, very boring. Tedious. Almost unbearable, really!”

Rachel proved she was one day going to rival Mata Hari by stretching and murmuring, “Missed you,” in his ear just when Colin was starting to look a bit suspicious.

Of course, that meant that Colin started nuzzling her and murmuring to her. They started rubbing their heads like seals in love, and I wondered if I had done something terrible in a past life to deserve this, before recalling that I had actually done something terrible to deserve this only ten minutes ago.

“So I might go down and get something to eat,” I said, staring at the fascinating wall behind them.

“Want me to get it for you?” asked Colin's friend.

He had returned. He'd returned damp.

It was a good look on him. He really did have excellent shoulders.

Not that I really noticed. Shoulders were a delusion and a snare. Shoulders had been what got me into this mess.

There was a small pause. Not that I was staring. I was thinking deep thoughts.

“It's no trouble,” he added. “I'm getting a Coke myself.”

“I'll get you a Coke,” I said. “And new chicken nuggets. Least I can do.”

He smiled at me. It was a crooked, brilliant smile.

“I'm a bit off milkshakes just now,” he added.

“Ray, this is Sam,” Colin said. “Sam, Rachel.”

Rachel and I exchanged looks. Hers was tolerant, mine not so much.

“Yes, thanks, Colin, we've met!”

“Sorry,” said Colin ridiculously. “I didn't know.”

“Er,” said the boy. “I think he means me.”

Rachel and I both looked at him. “Uh?” I said intelligently.

“I'm Sam,” said the boy.

“You can't be Sam,” I said.

He smiled again. “Please don't make me say it.”

“Say what?”

“Don't make me lower myself by saying the old Dr. Seuss line. You know. Sam I am. Oh, well, there I go. Sorry about that.”

“Don't be sorry,” I said. “Dr. Seuss is a classic. And Sam I am, too.”

“What a coincidence,” said Sam.

“Her name's Samantha really,” put in Rachel, in a noble effort to make me sound more feminine and alluring.

“Even more of a coincidence,” said Sam. “Well, the thing is, my mother wanted a girl.”

“Really?” Colin asked.

We all gave him pitying looks.

“Yes, Colin,” said Sam, straight-faced. “I had to wear pink until I was four. Also, I had the sweetest ringlets.”

I couldn't help it, I laughed.

Sam's eyes turned back to me. “So, fancy a Coke?”

“I think I do,” I said.

“Cokes all around,” Rachel commanded, nudging her true knight in the ribs. Colin sprang to obey. “Well, well,” Rachel said, as the boys went down the stairs. “What have we learned today?”

“Er,” I said, stealing another dazzled glance at Sam's excellent shoulders and wondering if this counted as narcissism. “Crime pays?”

I hoped that this wasn't going to lead to some lifelong stalking compulsion. I had a picture of myself in ten years' time, still making my move by buying binoculars and following guys while wearing a ski mask.

If  I hadn't gone over to talk to him, though, none of this would have happened. Possibly it was time to be less shy.

But not more criminal.

“We've learned that I am always right.” Rachel smiled like a cat. “Like a leopard on an antelope, baby.”   

I
N NINTH-GRADE
Spanish, Patricio couldn’t say his own name. A wide-jawed redhead with skin the shade of moonbeams, he seemed stymied by his Anglo facial features. “Pa
trrrricio
,” Señora Fuentes growled, modeling the correct roll of Rs. “
La lengua. La lengua
. Use the tongue!” But for all her urgent coaching, Pat still couldn’t introduce himself.

“Pat-dicio,” he spat earnestly, then shrugged and flashed his front-teeth gap, and even Señora had to forgive him.

Try to see him as I did that first day: on the room’s left side, over by the windows, so the sun sparked his
cinnamon-sugar
hair. It was kind of parted in the middle, kind of not, disheveled and perfect and winging over his right ear as though he’d just woken from a nap. He squinted in the glare, providing my first glimpse of the dimples that flickered at his nose’s bridge when he was frustrated or laughing or—instantly, I imagined it—having sex. He’d come to class as Pat Banner, the wrestling-team stud: cocksure, suave, untouchable; but as Patricio, stuttering his way through this alien vocabulary, he was thrillingly waifish and exposed.

I doubt Pat noticed me that day. He had to, though, in the following weeks, because if his accent was the worst in class, mine was the best. My father had been a cultural attaché in
Bogotá, and my family lived there till I was three; by ninth grade, my Spanish knowledge had dwindled to
sí
and
no
, but the music of it lingered in my brain.

Señora Fuentes was a crusader for
español
. The most glamorous teacher at Lewis High School—impeccably coiffed and rouged, stiletto-heeled—she viewed our failures at fluency as ethnic denigration. With an Argentine propensity for drama, she latched on to Pat and me as examples.

“Patricio,” she demanded one mid-September Monday, strutting model-like before the blackboard, “
Repite por favor: ‘A mí me gusta el béisbol
.’”

Patricio tried to state his fondness for baseball, but it came off like a drunk saying the alphabet backwards.

“
!
No!
Escúchame bien
, listen close.” And then Señora, hands on her high, elegant hips, repeated the sentence at
Sesame Street
pace: “
A mí me gus-ta el béis-bol
.”

Pat scrunched his nose, the indentations at the bridge as dark as scars. He tried again, but the language was elusive.

“
Ay ya yay
,” Señora lamented. “
Chicos
, what are we going to do?
Patricio tiene la lengua gorda
. But maybe Carlo can say it right. Would you, please, Carlo?”

I feared offending Pat with my proficiency, but I couldn’t defy a teacher’s request. I spoke the words, my accent deft, impatient crispness balanced with lush exuberance.

“
Perfecto
,” Señora cheered. “
Perfectíssimo!
”

I hardly registered her praise. I was fixed on what she’d said about Patricio, that he possessed “
la lengua gorda
.” She’d meant it as stammery, tongue-tied. Literally, it translated that he had a “fat tongue.”

I was young for my class, having skipped the second grade. Sometimes I blame that difference for my trouble fitting in,
but I suspect another year wouldn’t have changed things much. I just wasn’t good at being a kid.

I tried. I eavesdropped on the cool guys’ conversations, panning for nuggets about the trends of 1981. But the fickle logic of adolescence foiled me. I couldn’t have told you why The Knack was awesome and the Village People worthy of scorn, why Pumas were cool shoes and Stan Smiths for geeks.

On weekends, while other kids skated or watched cartoons, I marched on the Capitol. It was the first year of Reaganomics, and growing up in suburban Washington, D.C., the chances for dissent were plentiful: the nuclear freeze, Central America, handgun control. My jeans were speckled from painting protest banners.

The big rally that fall was Solidarity Day. Downtown swarmed with disaffected unionists. I joined the Liberation League, a group of college students, and we marched behind the thuggish Truckers for Justice. We got so near to Pete Seeger we could count his banjo’s frets. The real triumph was finding a T-shirt to add to my collection. (P
REVIOUS HOLDINGS:
B
READ
N
OT
B
OMBS;
A M
AN OF
Q
UALITY
I
S
N
OT
T
HREATENED
B
Y A
W
OMAN
S
EEKING
E
QUALITY
.) The new one was a green shirt shouting D
EFEND
A
TLANTA’S
C
HILDREN,
N
OT
E
L
S
ALVADOR’S
J
UNTA
. Genius! Twenty-three black kids had been killed recently by a madman in Atlanta. Why was the U.S. propping up a murderous regime in El Salvador instead of stopping the slaughter here at home?

Monday was misty and cool—windbreaker weather—but I wore just the T-shirt anyway, the goose flesh on my arms a badge of pride. At the bus stop, kids stared quizzically. By school time, the stares turned to sneers.

Before Spanish, Tim Jeeter challenged me. “Junta?” he said, pronouncing it with a hard J, seedy and suggestive. “What the hell’s a junta?”

“Not ‘
djun
-ta,’” I corrected him. “‘
Hoon
-ta.’ It’s a military government.”

“I still don’t get it. What does Atlanta have to do with El Salvador?”

Other kids joined in the jeering. “Defend hooters?” one snickered.

I shrank.

And then, in sauntered Patricio, all smile and squint lines and casual backhand swipe of the nose. He glanced at my shirt, seemed to sniff the air like a danger-sensing dog. “Hey, man,” he said. “Dig your shirt.”

They were the first words he’d ever said to me. In those early lonely weeks of school I’d hoped for acknowledgment, but I’d never dreamed of such deliverance. He had swooped me from the fire, untied me from the railroad tracks.

For the whole of class I stared at Pat. When Señora asked him to conjugate
poder
and
querer
—irregular verbs he flubbed for the hundredth time—I attempted a reciprocal rescue. “
Queero
,” he guessed, and I mouthed, “
Quiero
,” but he never thought to look in my direction.

After class I tailed him to his locker. “Hey,” I said. “Thanks. Thanks a lot.”

Pat’s brow creased in the same pattern as when Señora stumped him. Then he looked at my chest. “Oh. No problem.”

I spun the numbers on the neighboring locker’s dial. “No offense,” I said, “but with the trouble you have in Spanish, I was kind of surprised you even know what a
junta
is.”

“A what?”

Then it hit me: Pat couldn’t pronounce
junta
, let alone argue why El Salvador’s was evil. He had no clue what my
T-shirt
meant. Why, then, had he shielded me? Maybe he had a soft spot for underdogs in general. Maybe his soft spot was more specific.

I spied on Pat, pestering mutual friends with questions. I didn’t find out much, but in my imagination the bits of story bloomed: Pat was adopted; he was allergic to walnuts; he had never lost a wrestling match.

I’d been attracted to guys before, but that was all skin and quickened breath. This was deeper. My toes curled when Pat said my name. I got teary at the thought of his hairline. When I pictured something as innocent as holding his hand at the movies, my brain’s folds seemed to unfurl and snap back into a new design.

In Spanish, we learned rule-flouting verbs, exceptions that were listed in our textbook. “Don’t question,” Señora told us, “memorize.” But no one had ever given me a primer for my passions. Could I trust the broken grammar of desire?

In my fantasies over the next few weeks, I spent so much time with Pat that, seeing him in person, I’d forget we weren’t best friends. I concocted excuses to approach him. I’d found a pen on the floor—had he lost one? His surfer shorts were rad—could he tell me where he’d bought them? Pat generally greeted my buddyness with a “Wait, I
know
I know you from somewhere” look. I should’ve been angry or disheartened, but I was grateful to be granted an audience.

Then, just when I thought all hope was lost and that our brief connection had been a fluke, he astonished me with a show of thoughtfulness. In October, Anwar el-Sadat was assassinated, and Pat brought me
The Washington Post
. “I know you’re into politics,” he said. I’d read the paper already at home, but I studied his copy, every word, unable to keep from grinning despite the grim and bloody news.

A week later, a Friday, Pat followed me when Spanish class let out. “Carlo,” he called. “Wait up, Carlo.” After a pause,
during which he seemed to search the air for subtitles, he wished me a good weekend in not-too-badly butchered Spanish: “
Tienes el bieno fin de semana
.”

“
Tú también
,” I managed. “That means …”

“I
know
,” he said. “You too.”

Around Thanksgiving, our entire grade was bussed to the Smith Center, a nature retreat in western Maryland, for an overnight of hands-on science. I was nervous about rooming with my classmates. They’d see me get dressed; they’d hear my bathroom noises. Who knew what secrets they might guess? But my fear was balanced by the prospect of being close to Pat: hearing
his
noises, watching
him
get dressed.

The teachers split us into groups, and Pat and I were separated. All day we bushwhacked, collecting specimens. We poured plaster casts of possum tracks, brewed sassafras tea. Dinner was army-style in a giant mess hall, where we then watched movies on a sheet hung from the rafters. The entertainment was supposed to sedate us, but the main selection —
M*A*S*H
, with its buxom Major Houlihan—only fanned our hot, hormonal flames.

Later, in the boys’ bunkhouse, the air was galvanic with arousal, as though sex was a gas seeping from hidden vents. Tim Jeeter expounded on the merits of big tits versus small. Then Keith Rosen took a poll as to whether pussies smelled like tuna fish or burritos. No one would admit to first-hand knowledge.

I don’t remember who brought up the Smurfs, the tiny blue gnomes that were the latest cartoon craze. Did they have gnome-sized privates, someone wondered? If they had pubic hair, was it blue?

I had claimed the bunk below Pat’s upper berth. Now the
springs creaked, and Pat leaned his head over the rail. “Forget the Smurfs,” he said. “You know what grosses me out?” Silence shrouded the room. “Red pubic hair. Fire crotches. They’re nasty.”

Giggles of assent!. Mock upchucking.

A teacher knocked on the door and warned us to settle down. Within minutes phlegmy snoring could be heard.

I lay awake, confounded by Pat’s remark. He himself had such lustrous red hair—
pelirrojo
, Señora Fuentes called him. Was he saying that he grossed himself out? (I knew the feeling; my body betrayed me, too.) Or could his pubes be different from the hair on top of his head? He might be blond down there, or brown, or Smurf blue.

The next day, on the ride back to school, I was devastated to learn that Pat had hooked up with Stacy Stokes, a girl known for her bouncy, precocious breasts. While I was tracking mammals, they’d gone to third base.

I was miserable, and envious, and turned on. For days after I would jerk off to the vision of them doing it, then get so fraught I couldn’t finish, then finish anyway, pretending I was Stacy.

Spanish class was both comfort and punishment. Pat sat, as always, by the windows, mullion shadows like prison bars on his face. Señora Fuentes continued her crusade. As beginners we were condemned to the declarative:
I
am
,
I go, I say, I do
. But Señora hinted at tricks we’d later learn. “It’s really the subjunctive,” she said once, when asked to translate a phrase. Then dismissing the thought, she offered a more simplistic version.

The word “subjunctive” goaded my curiosity. I asked Señora after class what it meant, and, gratified by my interest, she revealed the tense of contingency, of
what if
? In Spanish, she explained, verbs took different forms when
referring to fantasy. She taught me key words—
quisiera, pudiera, tuviera
—plaintive, vowelly cries for help.

For weeks, while the rest of class tackled the simple future, I filled up my notebook with a more advanced endeavor: if I were to tell Pat, to kiss him, if he were mine …

After New Year’s, a surprise: Pat invited me to his home. It felt like extra credit for my efforts.

Pat’s small house sat off-kilter on its lot, as though it had been wide-load-trucked there and the driver, in a rush for his next job, never bothered to position it correctly. Shrubbery choked the yard. The neighbors must have thought the place an eyesore.

When I walked in, that Friday afternoon, I tingled with a tourist’s edgy thrill; Pat’s house was the shocking opposite of my own. The furniture was chintzy and undusted. Trinkets adorned the walls. No books.

His room was up some stairs, tucked into an unfinished loft. Actually, the loft itself was the room. There was no door, no clearly marked boundary, just a bed plunked amid a space of splintery wooden studs. I couldn’t decide if the rawness was sad or hopeful. Pat said his dad, for years, had promised to finish the room.

He elbowed a heap of dirty laundry from the bed, kicked off his shoes, and lay down. I lay down next to him, in the skinny space he left, and finally, for the first time, we really talked. School stuff at first, petty gossip: who’d been caught smoking in the bathroom. Eventually we steered toward the personal. Pat asked about my dad—“He was an ambassador or
something
, right?”—and the lesser truth didn’t dim his awe. I asked Pat about being adopted. He said sometimes he wished he were an orphan. His folks, when they bothered to be around,
got on his case. They hated Stacy. His dad called her a slut.