The Fine Art of Truth or Dare

by Melissa Jensen

  He slapped both knees and stood up. “That was my point. But what do I know about it? I like pictures of peaches that look like peaches.” He took the bowl and spoon from me. “Okay?”

  “Um . . .”

  “I don’t mean the soup, hon.”

  “I know.”

  “So.” He picked up the tray and headed for the door. “You digest.”

  “You don’t mean the soup.”

  “See? You know what you think you know.”

  He left chocolate biscotti for my dessert.

  I heard the beep of the answering machine in the kitchen. Nonna always turns the volume down (“Like the voices of the dead, that awful box!”). Considering the fact that she is the only one who spends any real time in the house kitchen, messages can wait a long time to be answered.

  “Ella,” Dad called up to me. “Some boy named Alex left a message. You want I should erase it . . . ?”

  My phone thudded to the floor when I got tangled in the quilt trying to get of bed headfirst.

  3.

  “Ella, um, it’s Alex. I hope this is the right number. I had to get it from a really old phone book. I would have gotten your cell number from Sadie Winslow, but . . . well, every time I got near her today, Frankie Hobbes showed his teeth. He’s a little scary for such a skinny guy . . . Anyway. You weren’t in English today. You weren’t anywhere that I could see today. Um . . . call me. I was thinking I could come over . . .”

  26

  THE KISS

  My closet door wouldn’t close. I pushed. I leaned on it. I eventually realized that my bathrobe sleeve was blocking the latch. When I opened the door to deal with the problem, most of the clothing I had tried and rejected tumbled out onto my feet. I shoveled my jeans, two of Sienna’s sweaters, and one of her skirts back in. She would have a fit if she saw, but I reasoned she would have more of a fit if I shoved her things under the bed, with its resident dust wombats and lost charcoal pencils.

  Alex was late. I was grateful. I was also incredibly nervous, and I’d gotten mascara in my eye. I blinked a lot as I did a last check. Actually, everything looked pretty much like it usually did, including me. I’d wiped off most of the mascara and all of the lipstick. I was wearing the new blue-and-white turtleneck Frankie had made me buy. I thought I looked very slightly French.

  I went into the hall and looked out the front window for the twentieth time and told myself to relax for the fiftieth. It could not be healthy, this breathless, silly, heart-pounding state I’d been in since I’d called him back and left a message and he’d called me back and I’d been convinced he could hear my heartbeat through the phone. All so I could run around my room like a hamster on crack, tripping over discarded jeans and trying to figure out where I’d dropped yesterday’s bra.

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” I scolded myself, channeling Frankie. “It’s just a French session. It’s just a French session with a cute guy. It’s just a French session with a cute guy who no longer has a girlfriend, who drunk-e-mailed me about my name, and who makes me feel like I’ve swallowed a caterpillar.” I thought maybe I should sit down.

  The green hood of Alex’s car nosed into view at 5:09. I flung myself out of my room, down the stairs, and then had to lean against the sofa for a second to compose myself. Then I stood right behind the door, counting a slow ten after he knocked before opening it. Wouldn’t want to look too eager, now, would I?

  “Hi,” he said.

  “Hi.” What else could I say?

  It had turned seriously cold over the break. He was wearing a big black peacoat with Russian symbols on the buttons. I tried to remember if I’d ever known the Russian world for “hi.” I didn’t think so. He waited patiently for a minute, then asked, “Okay if I come in?”

  I flushed and stepped back. We don’t have a foyer. Alex walked a few paces into our living room. I imagined what he was seeing: the matchy-matchy three-piece sofa set (a slightly dingy beige on beige, with some flowery throw pillows), the pastel beach scene (seagulls on a broken dune fence) on the wall, Nonna’s Madonna statue (brilliantly blue). For a fleeting second, I was embarrassed. Then, suddenly, it didn’t matter. It was what it was and wasn’t going to change until my mother got another bee in her brain and decided to go Southwestern Chic with rough wood and cow skulls.

  “Can I . . . take that?” I asked, pointing to the paper bag in his hand.

  Alex looked away from the mantelpiece. The uprights are copies of pillars from the Colosseum in Rome. They’re big. “Oh, yeah. It’s pierogis. From Svichkar’s. Probably cold. It seemed . . . Oh, crap. It was a really stupid thing to bring, wasn’t it? My mom just has this thing about never arriving empty-handed.”

  I tugged the bag out of his hands. “It’s perfect. Merci beaucoup, Monsieur Bainbridge.”

  “Je t’en prie, Mademoiselle Marino.”

  Okay, so it’s just the semiformal way to say “You’re welcome” in French, but anyone who says Italian is the language of romance is probably Italian. I carried the bag into the kitchen and put it on the counter between the freshness-guaranteed Handi-Vac (“put the food in the bag, suck the air out . . .”) Mom bought on the Home Shopping Network and Nonna’s hand-painted biscotti jar (“What, you think they stay there long enough to go stale?”) that she carried with her from Calabria. It’s decorated with fig leaves and, for some reason, fish. I never look too closely when raiding it; the fish that makes up the handle always seems to be giving me the serious malocchio.

  I opened the fridge to get the waiting lemon soda. I looked at the paper bag again and grinned. I’d expected Doritos. This was just so much better, even if slightly less appetizing.

  “Do you want a pierogi?” I called.

  “I really don’t,” Alex called back. Then, “I mean, they’re good, and if you want one—”

  “Cookie?”

  “Excellent.”

  I got a plate for biscotti. To avoid the fish eye, I flipped the lid over in my hand. There was a little painted scroll on the inside. I’d never really thought about it before. Now I looked closely. And looked again. This time, instead of just a pretty design, I saw an M, entwined with an E, encircled by a C. Michelangelo Costa, I thought. Nonna’s Darcy of a great-granddad. And Elisabetta. Then again, it could just have been Nonna’s parents: Magda and Euplio.

  I put a few biscotti on the plate, balanced a pair of tall plastic tumblers over the neck of the soda bottle, and went back to the living room. Alex was right in front of the mantel now, bent forward, his nose mere inches from a picture of me.

  “Oh, God. Don’t look at that!”

  It was from the year-end recital of my one and only year of ballet class. I was six: twig legs, a huge gap where my two front teeth had recently been, and a bumblebee costume. Nonna had done her best, but there was only so much she could do with yellow and black spandex and a bee butt. Dad had found one of those headbands with springy antennae attached. I’d loved the antennae. The more enthusiastic my jetés, the more they bounced. Of course, I’d also jetéd my flat-chested little self out of the top of my costume so many times that, during the actual recital itself, I’d barely moved at all, victim to the overwhelming modesty of the six-year-old. Now, looking at the little girl I’d been, I wished someone had told her not to worry so much, that within a year, that smooth, skinny, little bare shoulder would have turned into the bane of her existence. That she was absolutely perfect.

  “Nice stripes,” Alex said casually, straightening up.

  That stung. It shouldn’t have—it was just a photo—but it did. I don’t know what I’d expected him to say about the picture. It wasn’t that. But then, I didn’t expect the wide grin that spread across his face when he got a good look at mine, either.

  “Those,” he announced, pointing to a photo of my mulleted dad leaning against the painted hood of his Mustang, “are nice stripes. That”—he pointed to the me-bee—“is seriously cute.”

  “You’re insane,” I muttered, insanely pleased.


  “Yeah, well, tell me something I don’t know.” He took the bottle and plate from me. “I like knowing you have a little vanity in there somewhere.” He stood, hands full, looking expectant and completely beautiful.

  The reality of the situation hadn’t really been all that real before. Now, as I started up the stairs to my bedroom, Alex Bainbridge in tow, it hit me. I was leading a boy, this boy, into my very personal space.

  Then he started singing.

  “‘You’re so vain, I bet you think this song is about you. You’re sooo vain . . . !’” He had a pretty good voice. It was a truly excellent AM radio song.

  And just like that, I was officially In Deep:

  Interested in art. (Me, charcoal; him, colored ink.)

  Not afraid of love. He’d stuck with Cruella de Vil for a long time.

  Or of telling the truth. “Three things it costs a little to tell.”

  Hot. Like, smokin’.

  Daring. Sharks. Ocean. He swims where Here Be Monsters.

  5, subsection a. Daring enough to take a chance on me.

  Oh, that one, always the glitch in If My Prince Does, in Fact, Come Someday, It Would Be Great If He Could Meet These Five Criteria. But I had one thing when it came to Alex that I’d never had with Edward. Hope. Well, that and a drunk e-mail.

  So up we went. His house had paintings going up the stairs. Mine has . . . yup, school pictures. Sienna, Leo, Ella. Sienna, Leo, Ella. A few different schools, more than a dozen years. Sienna looking beautiful and dissatisfied, even at six. Leo in second grade with the last vestiges of a black eye from a fight he’d picked with three fourth graders. Me with one missing incisor and my hair in two pigtails. Sienna looking beautiful and bored, in the huge hoop earrings that she’d bought with her twelfth-birthday money and that my father kept threatening to smelt. Leo with gelled hair. Me with my hair half over my face and completely covering my neck. Sienna with boobs and pale pink eye shadow. Leo with an earring Dad pretended not to see. Me with my hair half over my face and covering most of my chest.

  This time Alex didn’t say anything. He did, however, pause at the life-size framed print that took up most of the landing. “Wow.”

  That was one way of putting it.

  “My mother likes Klimt,” I explained. She had this, The Kiss, on coasters, a tote bag, and a tea set she’d bought herself for her twentieth wedding anniversary.

  It wasn’t Klimt the painter she liked, so much as the combination of lots and lots of metallic paint and a red-haired woman in the arms of a dark-haired man. “It’s me and your dad,” she used to say to our collective distress. Little kids don’t want to see their parents canoodling. Older kids really don’t want to see it. “Hey. You keep rolling your eyes, Sienna Donatella,” she would snap, “and they’re gonna stick like that. See then if you can find a guy to kiss you!”

  Sienna’s Tommy is a nice guy. He’s okay with the fact that she wants as much metallic gold in their future home as possible.

  “Edward Willing called it ‘the most beautiful monstrosity in the history of art,’” I told Alex. “He saw it in Vienna the year after it was painted. I’ve never been able to decide whether he liked it.”

  “Everyone likes The Kiss,” was Alex’s response.

  I’m not so sure. But I know my mother would agree completely. She had a half-dozen much smaller versions framed. She puts them in the houses she stages for sale, convinced that no one can resist a little bit of gold and smooching.

  Now, standing under our beautiful monstrosity, I couldn’t help thinking that if Alex were to kiss me, it would look like that: me small and blissful and clinging, him so much taller, completely enfolding me.

  I averted my red face as I headed down the hall.

  My room is a quarter the size of his. It felt even smaller with him in it. “Make yourself at—”

  He’d plunked the snack on my desk, deposited his coat on my chair, and was already roaming the room, looking at the walls. “Wow,” he said again, staring at a quartet of Victorian door knockers made to look like hands. “Cool. You are seriously good.” He stared for a long time at the single study I’d put up from the Willing Romance Languages Room door: the leering devil. “I would put that on my wall,” he said.

  I hadn’t said anything while he browsed, swallowing all the automatic denials of my abilities.

  He turned and grinned at me, looking exactly like the little demon. No surprise, since it was essentially his face in miniature. “This is the part where you remove that tack and give me the picture. For keeps.”

  “Are you serious?” I wasn’t sure.

  “Yes, Ella. I am serious.”

  So I removed the tack and handed him the picture. He rolled it up very gently and put it in his coat pocket. Then he wandered over to look out my window. “That’s the restaurant, right?”

  “Yep.”

  “Is that your dad?”

  I went to stand next to him. He radiated heat. It was distracting. “Um . . . Yeah. And my mom.” She was brandishing a piece of paper. Dad had pulled out his pants pockets so they stood out on either side of his apron like mouse ears. “My sister and mom want surf ’n’ turf at the wedding. My dad doesn’t want to pay for it. It’s been a long battle, and we’re down to the wire. The wedding’s in three weeks.”

  Mom threw her hands up into the air and stalked away. Dad picked up a really big chef’s knife and went to work hacking up an eggplant.

  Alex turned his back to the window and leaned against the sill. “Just out of curiosity, do they know I’m here?”

  “Yep.” My mother did, anyway. Mention of a French tutor had effectively headed off any possibility of shopping.

  “I take it they trust you not to do anything inappropriate.”

  I couldn’t tell if he was being serious. I assumed not. “Absolutely. In fact, my mother would probably pay you to do something to make them trust me a little less.” I took a look at his face. He looked a little stunned. “Oh, no. I didn’t mean—”

  Or maybe I did. But Alex was backing away from me, hands raised. “Okay.”

  “J’étais stupide.”

  He sat down heavily on the edge of my desk, narrowly missing the biscotti. “I wouldn’t say that. But your use of the imperfect is improving.”

  “Just what I always wanted,” I said sadly, “to get better at imperfection.”

  “Look, Ella . . .” He stared down at his hands, opening and closing his fists. I waited.

  I think we might have little bit of a misunderstanding here . . .

  You’re a nice girl and all, but . . .

  I really like you, but I don’t really like you . . .

  The unmistakable notes of “Don’t Stop Believin’,” electronic version, suddenly filled my room, followed by the audible and visual treat of my phone vibrating its way across my desk toward Alex’s hip. I flung myself on it. In a clearer-headed moment, I would have just turned it off. As it was, I did manage a “Sorry!” to Alex before flipping it open.

  “Are you dead?” Frankie demanded from the other end.

  “No.” I edged away from Alex, who was very politely pretending to be interested in the biscotti.

  “Are you even sick?”

  “No,” I admitted.

  “Of course not. Okay, I’m coming over.”

  “No!” I cringed as Alex jumped a little. I took a breath. “God, no. Don’t. It’s wedding central here. Sienna will have you tying up birdseed in little purple pouches.”

  There was a long pause. “You okay, Marino?”

  “Yeah,” I managed.

  “Truth time. Where were you today?”

  Could I do it? Could I actually use the word cramps with Alex Bainbridge standing three feet away? I could only imagine how the actual truth would sound. Here, in bed, hiding because I thought I’d made the queen of all fools out of myself e-mailing Alex Bainbridge over the break, and I can’t even tell you about it because I promised . . . But it’s okay—or maybe not—because he’s h
ere now, in my bedroom. Just about to tell me I made the queen of all fools out of myself. Sure. Come on over. The two of you can bond over my idiocy.

  “The archive,” I said, stepping away from the desk, like a few feet was going to make a difference. “Look, I gotta go. I’ll call you later.”

  “Promise?”

  “Absolutely. Love you.”

  “Love you, too.”

  I turned off my phone before putting it in my pocket. “Frankie,” I said. Like Alex cared.

  “Does he know I’m here?”

  “Didn’t come up.”

  Alex shrugged. He clearly didn’t care. “Not the friendliest guy.”

  I could have. I could have invoked the swirlies and body slams and cracks about limp wrists and cheap jeans. Maybe I hadn’t been there, but I believed every word of Frankie’s stories. And knew it had cost him something to relive them. So I didn’t. “You just have to get to know him,” I said instead.

  “Right.” Alex nodded. Clearly, he didn’t care. “Anyway, I was saying . . . I know you’ve heard about Amanda and me. I mean, everyone has heard that we broke up.”

  I waited, standing statue still in the exact middle of my room.

  “It’s just that the story going around isn’t the whole truth. I figured you deserve that.” His gaze met mine, but just for a second before sliding away. “Ah, you want to sit down?”

  It was getting worse. Not much good has ever been prefaced by variations of “Have a seat.” I thought of headmasters’ offices and electric chairs. I wondered what I could say to head him off.

  Alex studied me for a second. “You look scared. It won’t hurt much. I promise.”

  I am scared of a lot of things, including scary now-ex-girlfriends, sharks, pit bulls, and the odds of being struck by lightning. The possibility that Alex might hurt me, even unintentionally, again was petrifying.

  “Okay,” I managed.