Truth & Dare (20 page)

Your stomach feels empty, even though you've just eaten a small mountain of chips and spicy melted cheese, hoping to fill it and be a normal teenager again, when you'll
never
be normal or quirky or pretty or promising or lovable …

You can't fill yourself, and you grasp with your fingers, without even thinking about it—your fingers open and close, reach and pull. You want to get something, anything inside. Even if it's anger. Or self-loathing.

Nothing can go right when your heart is breaking. You get out your paints to try and show the darkness inside on the outside, and the brush flies out of your hand and is lost under the bed where you can't reach without getting a splinter in your belly. “Jesus fucking Christ, give me a break!” you yell in a whisper at the ceiling and at
all
the gods of all the religions who let this happen to you.

You get out another brush and paint anyway, but the color over color over color turns to mud, and it only drags your
spirit into the mess of your aching body and the final picture doesn't cover the hole inside you—it makes you cry. Before long you're wailing as you try to paint the canvas, and fail, and start painting yourself brown and ugly like you feel.

You feel like everything you've worked for—hoping and dreaming and praying so hard—it was all a lie, a great cosmic lie. The way you felt just hours before the party—swollen with excitement, fat with pleasure, open to possibilities, at one with the whole fucking fabric of the universe or some shit, well, it's all gone now because it wasn't just waking up and not remembering, and it wasn't just finding the only boy you ever loved in the room with your best friend—it wasn't just your innocence …

It was all of you.

I woke up with a start at 3 a.m., sitting straight up and shaking my head, as if a bucket of water had just been thrown on me. I rubbed my eyes frantically. I remember thinking,
Something's wrong! Casey!
and hurrying to her room. She wasn't there. Grabbing my keys and my cell, I was dialing her number as I slid my feet into my Berks. She didn't answer, and I left a quick, “Where the hell are you?” message before fumbling with the door downstairs, which—Shit!—always stuck in summer. I threw my shoulder against it and finally smashed through, ran to my car, left the house door open behind me and didn't care.

Brian Kepler's house was quiet. Too quiet.

“Casey!” I yelled in the backyard. “Casey! Casey!”

Backyard strewn with empty and broken bottles. Pool table in the garage, felt torn. Running, slipping, running, shouting.

“Shut up or I'll call the cops!” I heard from the house behind the back fence.

I should've called the cops, but I ran into the house through an open door instead, dialing as I went. “Casey!” I yelled into the house and the phone at the same time. Stupid voicemail. Stupid party. Stupid mom.

Upstairs, I threw open doors. Threw open one, and Kayla was in a boy's bed, but no boy. She was sleeping, tucked in all nice.

“Kayla! Kayla! Wake up! Where's Casey? Where's my daughter?”

Kayla opened her eyes, snapping awake the way I had back at home. “Mrs. Shaw?” Kayla fumbled under the covers. “Oh God,” she said.

“Looking for these?” I said, throwing her underpants at her. “Where is
Casey
?”

“I don't …”

“Forget it! You're useless. You stupid little—' I didn't say
bitch
, but I was thinking it as I left the bedroom and continued throwing open doors, shouting as I left the doors open, revealing girls and boys making out, having sex, passed out in vomit, stoned, stupid. “Casey!”

The door at the end of the hallway opened, and a boy,
Brian
, that was who it was,
Brian Kepler
, I thought.

He tried to stop me from going in. “You can't—”

“Casey!” I yelled, pushing past the boy, into the room.

I froze.

“Look, I don't know what happened, but I told them they have to go. I don't know—”

“Shut UP!” I yelled in Brian Kepler's face. I noticed the top button of his shorts was undone. He wasn't wearing a shirt. “Don't you move,” I told him.

God help me, I forgot about Casey when I walked into that room. All I saw was Rain Rikowsky, eyes shut, legs spread. (I don't know how to say this, I'll just do it.) A boy with his shirt
off and shorts around his ankles, pumping on top of her. A couple of half-naked boys, boys with their zippers undone and their hands moving fast, groans, shouts and cheers swallowed when I'd burst in. The boy on the bed jumped down and grabbed his shirt off the floor, tried to run. Brian Kepler stopped him. I tore a handheld video camera out of another boy's hand.

“I think you broke my thumb!” he yelled at me. I slapped him.

“Shut UP!” I said, rushing to the bed and throwing a stained bloody sheet over Rain's lower body. I rushed to her head. I said, “Rain, honey, wake up. Rain, are you there?” Her head lolled. Someone snickered, but mostly the boys were trying to get away. Many did escape. But Brian threw camera boy down and shirtless boy against the wall. For about half a second I wondered whose side Brian Kepler was on. He seemed to be on ours. But I hated him.

I called 911. I gently stroked Rain's face.

“Oh God,” I heard from the door. It was Kayla. “Rain … Brian … oh God oh God oh God oh—”

Brian tried to hold on to Kayla, but she shoved him, sudden power bursting out of her. She ran to Rain and held her hand. I dropped the camera I'd confiscated. I looked at Kayla. “Where's Casey?” I tried to say, but it was hard to talk. I couldn't get a breath, and I couldn't stop crying and I couldn't find the ground with my feet any more.

“Hey,” I say to Rain in the courthouse hallway. I haven't seen her since the night of the party, and now here we are. It's okay, I guess. I mean, it will be. I hope.

“Hey,” Rain says with an awkward smile that says she's sort of happy to see me,
but
… “You changed your hair.”

I run my hands through the longish strands of my hair. “Well, you know, the black—”

“I thought it looked more blue …”

“—was kinda growing out anyway. You like it?” My mother and I had a girls' night last night, mostly to chill me out, but her too, in preparation for the trial starting today. We wanted to give me credibility, too, so we bleached out my hair, and then put in chunky gold and strawberry-blonde highlights. Very normal high school student, very not who I am, but whatever. It's important for my friends that I look presentable for this trial.

“Been two weeks without a drink,” Rain's father says to my mother, digging into his pocket. He pulls out a tin coin. He shrugs. He seems smaller than I remember.

My mother squeezes his arm, and Rain leans into him. She bites a nail. She seems smaller, too.

“You wanna take a walk?” she says.

I shrug and nod.

“It's okay, Mom,” I say before my mother can say what I know she's thinking, which is something like, “Do you think you should?”

“My mother is afraid of me knowing the truth,” I say to Rain as we escape down the hall.

“
I'm
afraid of knowing the truth,” Rain says as we leave through the heavy front door. “And I was there.”

“I'm sorry,” I say. I'm sorry for what happened to her. I'm also sorry I wasn't there to save her. I'm embarrassed it had to be my mother. I'm ashamed.

Rain brushes her hand against my arm like she's checking I'm real, and I touch her hand with my fingertips like I'm checking
she
is.

“So, your mom is writing a book about us,” Rain says as we walk around the corner. She takes a pack of cigarettes out of her coat pocket.

“Yeah. Not sure how I feel about
that
,” I say.

Shrugging, Rain offers me the open cigarette pack, and I see that instead of cigarettes, it's half full of joints. Shaking my head, I look at her, shocked. We're on a pretty busy street, we're about to go into a courtroom for the trial of Rain's rapists.

“Oh, right,” she says, smiling an old, familiar, kinda evil grin. “You're doing the sober thing too, now.” Rain laughs, bitter, and I cringe. I know that to her it's too little too late. But what does she want me to do?

I don't know what to say, so I get out a regular cigarette of my own to cover up my embarrassment. She hot-boxes the joint, and we're quiet.

“Girls,” says a steady voice out of nowhere. Kayla's mom.

Rain holds the joint low and behind her back as Kayla hugs her. I notice Kayla gives Rain a look. While she hugs me, Kayla says, “Mom! I'll see you inside!”

Mrs. Crew leaves, and a tear slips over Kayla's pale, now nearly translucent, face. I can see the veins beneath her skin as she shakes her head.

“Oh, fine,” Rain says, carefully extinguishing the joint on the sole of her boot. She puts the roach back into her cigarette pack. To Kayla, she says, “I'm saving this one for you, blondie. It'll make you eat. You know, starving yourself to death won't make this go away. It happened. Deal with it. I am.”

“Really? Because you seem
so
well adjusted,” I say in Kayla's defense, before Rain breaks her.

I can hardly look at Kayla—talk about getting smaller. Kayla's fingers look like tiny twigs, fleshless, as she puts them against Rain's face. “We'll be okay,” she says.

Rain rolls her eyes, but I can see she's about to cry. She snuffles, sucking it up.

Same old Rain.

Kayla—same old Kayla—puts a hand on the back of Rain's and my head and pulls us together. Our foreheads touch. It's corny, but nice. “We will always be okay, no matter what. We'll always be together, too,” she says, and with that, she links arms with each of us, and we walk into the courthouse together.

H
OW CAN A
girl be bad with a name like Margo Ferkel? That's a cartoon character's name, red nose and big, floppy feet that she's always tripping over. Or maybe the title of a highly evolved religious figure from a country high in the Himalayas.
In a rare audience today, Her Holiness the Margo Ferkel shared a message of hope and wisdom for the ages
.

But behind her name of hard consonants, I saw Margo's potential, a streak of longing to be more than just the daughter of Irv and Ann, a desire as desperate as my own to break out of the stultifying expectations of our Philadelphia blue-collar upbringing. We lived on the same street, a
one-block
string of brick homes, houses with shared walls and tiny lawns and marigolds in a line dance that screamed of conformity. The only way to tell the houses apart was by the front-door screens, Margo's decorated with an F in
wrought-iron
filigree, mine with a W.

It wasn't that we were great friends. Even in that bastion of consistency, we had our differences. To me, our looks said it all. Margo was blonde, pale, fragile-looking, bland, the salt to my pepper. I was dark and sharp-featured, all points and nervous energy. But Margo and I had been thrown together since infancy. Our parents took Israeli folk-dance lessons together; our dads were in the same weekly pinochle card
game and the moms played mah-jongg together. That's the way things were in our neighborhood. Kids weren't
overbooked
with music lessons and sports. You were bored a lot, so it wasn't unusual for me and Margo to wind up in each other's room looking for something to do. Especially in the summer. Especially that summer, when we had gotten too old for the street game of kick-the-can and were too young for any kind of job except babysitting.

That afternoon, my mother was at the hairdresser's and I was entertaining Margo with the details of my new life philosophy. She was transfixed. Margo may have been a year older, but in terms of self-assurance and social cache, I was the shit, just coming off my reign as queen of sixth grade. I had had a great realization recently, one of those shifts in understanding that cause your whole world to come tumbling down. Now I was rebuilding it to my own specifications. Margo hung on my every word.

“Here's the secret: grown-ups can't read your mind,” I pronounced.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, they can't. Parents and teachers can't get inside your head and know everything that you're thinking or planning to do.”

“I know that.”

“You know it, but you don't really
know
it. You only know it like you know the words to a song or something superficial like that. Because you
act
like they do know everything. I was like that until I had this big explosion of
getting
it, really understanding that they don't know crap about what's really going on in my head. So, I can do anything I want. All I have to do is widen my eyes and lie my head off. They don't suspect. Especially since I've been such a good girl for my whole life.”

I turned my eyes into two round pools of innocent indignity and pressed my palm to my collarbone. “Me? How could you think it was
me
who took that five dollars?”

“You didn't!” Margo practically shouted.

“Stealing was hard at first. I thought I'd puke. But then—I don't know—everything becomes easier the more you practice it.”

A few months earlier, I had started keeping a journal of all the bad things I had gotten away with. “If I show it to you, you're not going to tell your parents, are you?”

Margo shook her head almost violently, and I knew I had a willing student.

“Number one: stealing the money out of my mom's bag. Number two: writing a note and passing it around class.
If I ever get big, floppy tits like Mrs. Atkins, shoot me!
Three: cursing my grandmother behind her back, the F word.”

“You didn't,” she spat out.

“I did.”

“That's really bad.”

“I also let Alan Brickman kiss me.”

“Where?”

“Behind the girls' room at the rec center.”

“No, I mean
where
?”

I stuck out my tongue and took it on a slow, sloppy tour of my lips. After allowing some time to let that transgression sink in, I asked, “So what's the worst thing you ever did?”

I watched Margo's eyes. She didn't know how to control them yet, hadn't practiced that flat innocent look like I had, so I knew she was about to tell the truth.

“I watched TV on Shabbat.”

“No!” I said with admiration. It wasn't a particularly big deal to me, but Margo's family was religious. This was a major violation of the rules, maybe even on the same level as cussing
a grandma. I didn't think Margo had it in her. Here was an opportunity to drive home my point, to be the teacher to this willing student.

“And did your parents somehow find out?”

“No.”

“And did God send down lightning to punish you?”

“No.”

“See! You can do whatever you want, whenever you want. You just have to be sneaky about it.”

I took her by the hand and led her downstairs to my father's liquor cabinet. I had been eager to add this one to my list. “My personal favorite is Seagram's Seven.” I poured a capful and handed it to her. Then I removed the cap from a vodka bottle and filled that cap with whiskey as well.

“Are you sure they won't notice it's missing?” she asked. My answer was to tilt back my head like I had seen my father do and swallow. She did the same, and we both fought the urge to cough it back up. “Nectar of the gods,” I said.

“Delicious,” Margo agreed.

After that, it was just a short, easy downhill slope to more bad behavior. Lunch was my idea. The first bite of a salami sandwich washed down with a gulp of milk—the unholy pairing of meat and dairy on a bed of whiskey—unleashed the wildness in her.

“Fuck,” Margo said.

“Fuck a duck,” I added.

“Fuck a big fat shit damn piss mother-fucking duck.”

She wasn't laughing. She was dead serious. “What else? What's next?”

Back in my bedroom, from under the mattress, I pulled out a magazine that I had stolen from my cousin Harriet's creepy new husband. “He may be my cousin, but he's a total
sleazebag.” We were on our bellies in bed, hip to hip, turning pages. “Look at those bazooms,” I said.

“Knockers,” she agreed, then without pausing said, “You know what would be really bad?”

“What?”

“If we kissed.”

I sat up. “You mean, me and you. You and me.”

“Yeah, so we can practice to be with boys. But I want to be the girl.”

“Okay, I've already kissed a boy, so I know how they kiss. I'll be the boy.”

We leaned toward each other. Our eyes closed, our lips met. I felt the awkward pressure. It wasn't much different than kissing Alan Brickman. “Next, tongues,” I ordered. She tasted like salami, so I knew I did, too.

“Now touch this.” She pointed and I put my hand over the right side of her chest, felt the hard softness there. When I said in a low boy voice, “Yum, bazooms,” she started laughing and then I started laughing back and we couldn't stop. We were shaking with it, bouncing on the bed, hair flying, our feet in each other's faces.

“That was really bad!” I finally managed to say.

“Next time, we can be even more bad.”

Almost two hours had passed since this blitz had begun. I had my mother's schedule planned almost to the minute. She would be back soon, so we probably had time for only one more thing. “Let's make it good. What do you really, really want to do?”

“You decide. Your choice.”

We were still lying in the bed, my hand resting on her leg. The skin was so smooth, almost hairless. I pushed her aside, sat up and pointed to my own legs. Just the week before, I had gone to the school nurse and while taking my temperature,
she took note of the thick, dark hair on my arms and legs. “Hmmm,” she had said casually. “You must have a lot of testosterone in your system.”

I couldn't get that out of my mind. “I wanna shave my legs,” I announced. “My mom says I'm not old enough.”

Margo nodded with sympathy. “You're old enough. Definitely. Me, too.”

“My mom will be so mad.”

“My mother will
kill
me.”

“They don't have to know. Just wear pants.”

“But it's summer.”

“That's why we need to shave our legs!”

With that logic to spur us on, we locked ourselves in the bathroom, which was hardly big enough for two. Margo sat on the closed toilet lid. I opened the medicine cabinet, watching her image in the mirror swing by, and then disappear. My mother always used an electric shaver, dainty and pink,
Lady
something. It wasn't here. But I spotted my father's razor on the first shelf, thin, sleek and gunmetal gray. “Ta-da!”

I called up the mental image of my dad shaving and fumbled with the razor, twisting the handle until the hinges dropped open like the halves of a peach. I tipped the old blade into the trash can and inserted a fresh one from a new pack. To cover up my uncertainty, I kept talking. “The secret to a really good close shave is a fresh blade. And of course, the shaving cream. You do the honors.”

I handed the can to Margo, miming how she was supposed to shake it first. Then I positioned myself on the edge of the sink, balancing on my bottom and resting my extended right leg on her lap. I felt the pleasure of the pepperminty smell, the pressure of her hand as it smoothed the cool cream into a thick layer on my legs.

“Like that?” she asked.

“Perfecto. Don't forget here.” I pointed to my inner thigh.

“You're sure you know what you're doing?” she asked as she sprayed the cream on her own legs.

“Of course. I've watched my mom and dad shave hundreds of times. Thousands.”

Maybe I had convinced myself that I wasn't lying, or maybe I was just eager to look nonchalantly bad. I didn't stop to question or plan. I reached down and drew the blade across my right thigh, down the leg and up the left one. Then I reached over and did the same on Margo's legs, plowing through the shaving cream like a shovel through snow. And for a split-second longer, the snow remained white, freshly fallen, until a thin line of red, a worm rising to the surface of the bank, made itself seen. A worm and then two worms and then four and then eight growing thicker and fatter. There was no pain, not even a sting, just these hideous, twisting snakes spilling their red guts all over our legs.

Margo screamed. She was a screamer. That's another way we were different. “Stop it!” I ordered, and when she didn't, when she kept screaming and accusing me, when she pushed aside my offer of a towel and her high-pitched hysteria multiplied in volume in that tiny bathroom, when blood and shaving cream were flung everywhere, the floor, the walls, the mirror, I felt myself go blank, a strange, dead calm inside. I slapped her across the face.

“I wanna go home!”

“So, go,” I said. “Go!”

The front door slammed behind her and I settled into cleaning up the horror film around me. I bloodied three towels, a half-roll of toilet paper and used up most of my father's styptic-stick, which turned from white to putrid pink. I dabbed, painted and winced until the snakes shriveled into dried-up worms that could be contained by half a box of plain
old Band-Aids. The bathroom mess took even longer, but by the time my mother came home with her newly set hair, the towels were in the washing machine and the trash can was emptied. It was bathroom beautiful.

“I cleaned the bathroom for you,” I announced with an extra measure of cheeriness.

“What?”

“You're always complaining that I'm a bathroom pig, so I cleaned it.”

“Well, miracles never cease.” Mom planted a kiss on my forehead. “I thought Margo was coming over.”

“She did already.”

“And you girls had fun?”

“It was all right. She's not, you know, the same kind of girl as me.”

All that night, I waited with dread for Margo's parents to come pounding on our front door. I would be the bad one. I made their daughter do all these terrible things. I almost killed their daughter. I was the ringleader. But they didn't show up that night or the next one or the next week. That's when I realized that Margo didn't tell them and wasn't ever going to tell them. We were bonded in blood, in badness. We never talked about that afternoon, or anything else. If one of us saw the other sitting on her front stoop, we waved and walked in the other direction.

Right before school started that fall, the Ferkels moved, not too far, but two miles was a different world, a slightly classier neighborhood with more space between the houses, a different school system, a different rec center and a whole different circle of pinochle and mah-jongg-playing adults.

Over the next few years, I heard things. Margo joined the school band, then gave it up. Her parents divorced; it was ugly. She took a part-time job in a donut shop. But by my sophomore year in high school, even tiny bits of information about her dried up.

I had another new boyfriend by then, but things didn't work out too well with him. I flunked math, then history, switched from the college-bound track to vocational. Then I dropped out, got a waitress job, another boyfriend, got stoned a lot, lost another job, another guy. Don't get me started on the problems with my parents. Things happen to me. Things that aren't always good. Disappointments, lies, crises, numbness, betrayals, hurts, treachery, things that a lot of my so-called friends say that I only bring on myself.