Truth & Dare

by Liz Miles

  I swallow. The person at the window leaves, and the man in front of her steps up to the glass. I have no illusions—I’m not going to wow her into being my best friend for ever, much less a game of, what did Vadim call it, tonsil hockey?—but I might at least be able to get her to walk back to the subway with me.

  “It does,” I say to her, praying to God that my throat doesn’t spontaneously dry out or close up. “Worst part is, there is no reward at the end—you don’t, like, buy a CD or ride a roller coaster. All there is is more waiting.”

  She smiles—a real one this time, and it lasts. “You do this often?”

  I shake my head, and hope it doesn’t look too fake. Too many times, or too few. “Usually, my father. But he could not, today.”

  Her eyelids flicker. “So you’re the man of the house, then?”

  I shrug, not sure if she is teasing me. “If I was rich and owned a place like this, I would just let everyone keep their houses, none of this.”

  “You wouldn’t be rich for long.”

  This should be the part where I make my move. Let loose some line: That’s just the kind of guy I am or For you, it would be worth it. I have this one friend, he would know exactly what to say and be up against the wall with this girl by the end of the line, limbs writhing on top of each other, going crazy. Another friend, he would fantasize about this moment constantly and never get far enough to actually open his mouth and say something to her. I am neither of those, too embarrassed to either manipulate the situation to my advantage or let my real feelings be known. I guess that’s the kind of guy I am. But I wish I could be one of the others.

  The whir of the money-counting machine dies down. The man at the window, dismissed, moves quickly to the door.

  “Here goes, I guess,” she says, offering me the most generous and pretty of her smiles yet.

  “Hey, do you want me to take …” I start, but she is already at the window, perching her purse on the ledge, rifling through it. She pulls out a gun.

  The cashier screams.

  It takes everyone a moment to realize what’s going on, but once they do, they react. I am slow. It’s still early for me. A gnarled, heavy hand wraps itself around my arm, yanks it down hard, and I find myself being lowered to the ground by a grandmother half my size.

  The cashier, whose face I can see over the shoulder of Jesus Girl, is only a few years older than us, maybe eighteen or twenty, a bored and lost-looking girl with her hair in long spirally braids. She seems remarkably composed, although everyone in the room is pulsing with fear. The gun is pressed right between her eyes, which have grown wide in astonishment, if not in fear.

  My girl is composed, alert, on guard. “Don’t hit the alarm,” she says. Her voice is calm, meditative even, wary and collected. “And don’t think this glass is really bulletproof. It’s not. I can tell.”

  “How—how can you tell?” asks the cashier, whose hands are in the air, but who is still exuding a calm that I wish I could manage.

  “Bulletproof glass is a special kind; you can’t see your reflection in it. But I know no glass is bulletproof when you shoot from this close.”

  She jams the pistol forward. Its mouth bangs against the glass. The sound is as loud as a gunshot. Everyone jumps. Bodies pull closer to the ground.

  Her voice comes, calm and low and reassuring, as certain as a promise.

  “Just pack up the money,” she says. “All of it. And I won’t hurt anybody.”

  The cashier’s face disappears.

  From behind the wall, sounds of frantic packing. The whole time, Jesus Girl keeps a vigilant, obsessive watch over the proceedings through the window.

  Finally, the cashier reappears. “We’ve got it,” she tells the entire waiting room. “It’s in a sack. We’re going to open the door and pass it through.”

  Jesus Girl considers her lack of other options. “Fine,” she agrees. “You stay at the window.”

  “Me?”

  She nods. The gun stays pointed at the glass.

  This whole time, I’m thinking about her. I can’t not be. There are other things going on, too, in the back of my mind—what schoolwork I missed. If anyone’s going to believe me about this. Whether I’m going to die. These questions flash before me every time I run through a red light or step too close to the subway ledge. Now, though, with a gun in the room—my first real, live gun experience—it feels so tremendously realer.

  But, for real, I just feel stupid. Spending all my time falling slowly in love with her while she spent the whole time plotting this. Humans use less than 10 percent of their brains, and I use 95 percent of that part thinking about girls. If I hadn’t, I could’ve discovered the cure for cancer by now.

  But, more than that, I feel ridiculous. In another few minutes, we are all going to lose our money. One month’s rent, gone just like that. It’s one-twelfth of what my parents make in a year. Barely. Counting the costs of food and clothes and birthday presents, they are totally in debt. And they are in debt instead of doing something productive like this—yes, robbing people is stupid and malicious, but at least it pays. Getting smashed on rent day—now, that was 100 percent stupid. And it didn’t take any thinking at all.

  I was so pissed off at her I could scream. I hated her more than our landlord. If I had a cell phone, I would have called the cops right then and there.

  The door slides open. A grocery-store-sized bag is pushed out, hesitantly but quickly. She tips it into her purse—which is, by the way, huge—a massive retro thing, vintage 1950s, which swallows all the stacks of bills easily. In the distance is the irritated squeal of a cop’s siren, and I don’t know how but I do know, as does everyone else, that they are on their way here.

  It doesn’t matter. She’ll be out the door, vanished, in another few moments. Real life will have kick-started itself back into existence, and she will have left us far behind. She is already halfway out the door, the siren still sounds semi-far away, and the woman who first pulled me down is struggling, haggardly, to her feet.

  Jesus Girl turns around, almost out the door.

  “Hey, cute boy,” she says.

  It takes me a while to realize she means me. “Da?” I say, too surprised to remember to speak English. Or maybe I said duh.

  “How much is your rent?”

  “Fifteen hundred dollars?” I say without thinking.

  She reaches into her newly full bag and counts out money with her thumb. “Damn,” she says. “You people have some seriously trashy cash.”

  Reaching for what I can only assume is fifteen hundred, she tosses it through the narrow slit of the cashier’s window. “That’s for him,” she tells them. “What’s your name?”

  “J-Jupiter Glazer,” I say, still not totally convinced that she is speaking to me.

  “Address?”

  I tell her.

  “Account number? Can I tell you, I hate it when they interrogate you like this? Name, rank, serial number. It makes you feel like a prisoner. God, I’ve always wanted to say that right to their dumb-ass, glass-protected faces.” Behind the window, the cashier, though thoroughly startled, is writing down my information. When she says that bit about prisoners, the cashier winces. You know she’s thought it, too.

  “You got that down? All right, then,” she says, turning the doorknob. “I’m sorry to inconvenience you folks. I hated every second of this, but we all gotta eat.”

  Another flash of the smile, cheeky and egotistical and so incredibly hot, and she’s gone.

  Not two minutes later, the police are crashing through the door, guns drawn, demanding to know What’s Going On? and Is There A Hostage Situation? and the like. Nobody tells them anything. According to witnesses, the perpetrator is either one man, three men, or an entire soccer team of middle-aged women, white, black, or something in the middle, extremely tall or extremely short, but not average height. “This happens to us all the time,” one of the cops confesses to me. “People are stunned. They don’t expect to be attacke
d where they feel most secure.”

  The cops leave, and the line recommences, shakily, where we left off. Two people have moved in front of me, an old man and a young mother, but I’m not bothered. When I do step up to the booth, ready to hand over my family’s hard-earned cash, the cashier looks me in the eye and says, with a soft feeling of kindness, “You’re already paid for.”

  I have a vision of returning home, thick envelope in hand, of going straight to the kitchen where my father is still asleep. He’ll shoot right up in his chair the moment I walk in, a big goofy smile on his face, his drunkenness fading like a bad dream. “What’d I miss?” he’ll ask, forever wacky, a true American sitcom father.

  And I will toss the money on the table, and tell him and my mother about my unexpected day. And we will all laugh together, knowing the story has a happy ending because all stories do. My dad will say, “Why didn’t you just leave it there? We could’ve been early for next month’s rent!” and my mom will say, “Thank God you’re safe, that’s the important part,” and we’ll all sigh warmly, because we’ll remember what really is important.

  The Young Stalker’s Handbook

  BY SARAH REES BRENNAN

  “JUST BECAUSE HE’S wearing skin-tight gold trousers doesn’t necessarily mean he’s a homosexual.”

  I was in a music store with my friend Rachel when I said these words. In a way, I feel like that sentence summed up my personality completely. Anyone who overheard us would have known immediately that I was optimistic, a dreamer, and utterly clueless about men.

  “No,” said Rachel doubtfully. “But it does make you wonder.”

  She bent and picked up the CD we were both transfixed by. A strand of her hair came loose over her blue jacket, a circle of pale gold in the store’s fluorescent lights.

  Rachel was my best friend. She was also ice blonde, beautiful, funny and clever—you know, the friend who always makes you look a bit of a mess when she stands next to you, but is so generally awesome that most of the time you don’t care.

  She was also very sensible, which right now was making me sad.

  “Don’t put him in a box,” I said sternly. “We all have the right to wear what we want without anyone drawing unwarranted conclusions about our sexuality. This is a free country and a new millennium. I hope we’re open-minded enough to give him the benefit of the doubt.”

  “I think I might be kind of close-minded,” Rachel said, apologetically. “Whenever I tilt the CD case, his ass gleams. And every time his ass gleams, I doubt his heterosexuality. Look—there it goes again. Gleam, doubt. Gleam, doubt. Gleam …”

  I whipped the CD out of her hand and restored it to its rightful place, where the lead singer’s ass could gleam benevolently down on us both.

  “Anyway, it is his music that counts,” I said firmly. “I, for one, could not care less about his orientation or, indeed, his superficial good looks. He’s an artiste.”

  Rachel had many talents. One of which was that she could raise a truly excellent skeptical eyebrow.

  “What about the guy over by the posters you keep sneaking looks at?”

  Damn. I’d thought she hadn’t spotted me doing that. I was going to have to learn to be sly about stealing looks. I’d be like the cat burglar of looks from now on, I promised myself. Quick as a cat. Nobody would ever catch me.

  “Be fair, Rachel,” I said with dignity. “I don’t know if he’s an artiste or not. Sadly, all I have to judge him on are his superficial good looks.”

  “Yeah,” Rachel murmured. “That is a tragedy.”

  She glanced casually over her shoulder, and then away. She was a true master; perhaps I should be asking her for look-burglary lessons.

  “Right,” she said. “I think he looks okay. At least his ass isn’t gleaming.”

  “It certainly is not,” I said, but I kept an eye on it just to be sure.

  “You should go talk to him.”

  I looked at Rachel with complete disbelief.

  “You’ve got to be less shy, Sam,” she said. “Men need to be chased. Think of yourself as a leopard bringing down an antelope.”

  That was easy for her to say. Rachel always went for guys who were about as smart as antelopes—gorgeous guys who looked like knights who had wandered out of fairy tales and were really confused about the real world. I called the latest Sir Colin the Dimwit.

  “What would I say?”

  Rachel made a dismissive gesture. “Whatever comes to mind.”

  “Oh yes,” I said. “Splendid idea. You were there at the party last week, weren’t you?”

  Sadly, a lot of people had been at the party last week.

  “It wasn’t that bad,” said Rachel, a loyal friend and a terrible liar.

  “Our tale begins on a warm summer evening, full of wine coolers, women and song.” I made a grand gesture, as if I was a bard of old, and kind of hit a dad-aged guy in the belly. “Sorry, sir. So, our heroine was standing in her usual glamorous position by the hummus, and then her gallant suitor, known only as Twizzler for some reason we don’t know and prefer not to inquire into, sidles up and says the magical words, ‘You look great, Sam.’”

  I wasn’t actually being as facetious as I was trying to sound. At the time, I had been pretty thrilled he’d come over. Despite the name, he was tall and he seemed nice, and it wasn’t like boys were forming an orderly line behind the hummus to talk to me.

  “And what did I say then, Ray?”

  Rachel closed her eyes, apparently overcome with being the best friend of the party fool.

  “I said, ‘Ha! Thanks!’ I was afraid that my lipstick made me look like I was eating crayons again.’”

  “You were six when you ate crayons the last time!”

  “I know that, Ray. You know that. Sadly, Twizzler does not know that.”

  Rachel crossed her arms over her chest.

  “Well, I don’t see why Twizzler had to make that face. Anyway, he should be into the creative use of arts and craft supplies. I heard he sniffs glue.”

  “The moral of the story is that I am never allowed to attempt any dangerous solo missions like talking to members of the opposite sex. It never ends well.”

  My voice had got a bit loud while I’d been telling the Twizzler story. I glanced nervously at the guy perusing the posters, but he seemed absorbed by a picture of a girl in leather who looked like an anorexic vampire. Another time I might have been upset by the blatant objectification of women, but since I was busy objectifying him I gave him a pass on that.

  “He’s much better looking than Twizzler.”

  “And with any luck, he isn’t called Twizzler,” I said. “A good name is a much more important feature in a man than people think. I mean, think about calling out some names in the throes of passion. ‘Oh, Adrian, you’re an animal.’ ‘Rock me like a hurricane, Nigel.’”

  I stole another glance at poster boy. He had excellent shoulders, and the kind of brown hair that was especially nice—soft-looking and falling in a natural drift over his forehead. I thought longingly that he looked like a Chris.

  “So you’re going to go and talk to him?” Rachel asked eagerly.

  I looked at him again. Possibly he was a Dave; he had the strong chin of a Dave. “Yeah,” I said uncertainly, and then with more conviction, “Yeah, okay.”

  Rachel, a woman of action, seized both my shoulders and spun me around. Then she gave me a solid push between the shoulder blades.

  “Remember,” she said firmly, “you’re awesome! You’re beautiful. And you haven’t eaten crayons in years.”

  She pushed me again. I bit my tongue a little.

  “Right,” I mumbled through the pain.

  I shuffled forward, mostly because I was afraid of Rachel. I recited her mantra under my breath.

  “You haven’t eaten crayons in years. You haven’t eaten crayons in years.”

  A man browsing through the jazz section gave me a very startled look. I found that extremely unfair—he wouldn’t have
wanted to hear me say I had been eating crayons recently.

  I stared at my feet so I wouldn’t get unnerved by the handsomeness I was approaching. I took one step, then another, and another.

  I looked up. There was no sign of excellent shoulders or a strong chin.

  He was gone.

  I felt robbed.

  “Oh my God,” I said and stomped over to Rachel. “Can you believe that? It’ll take me months to work up the courage to approach another guy. You know what would solve this problem? Radar. If humans were like bats and we all had a way of sending some kind of getting-hit-on radar. That would solve everyone’s problems.”

  “Okay,” Rachel said. “If we ever meet Batman, I understand that you have dibs. Failing that, Colin has a friend who he thinks you might get on with. What do you say we go down to GTI’s and grab a coffee?”

  “After him!”

  I don’t know why I said it. I don’t know why I grabbed Rachel and towed her behind me. I guess I was just all keyed up; the adrenaline I’d worked up bracing myself to talk to the guy was just floating around in my system doing nothing.

  I saw the excellent shoulders and the drift of nice hair out of the corner of my eye. I saw Possibly Dave heading out the door and out of my life.

  I had an adrenaline-related burst of insanity. It could have happened to anyone.

  • • •

  I followed him, dragging Rachel in my wake, and kept his gorgeous back in sight until it stopped. I pressed Rachel against the side of a garage and prayed we hadn’t been spotted.

  No, he was just going into a shop.

  I stopped squashing Rachel and went after him. Given a chance to draw breath, she had some objections.

  “Please tell me we’re not really doing this!”

  “If you think about it, this makes complete sense,” I told her. “We’re practicing a skill we could have a lot of uses for in the future. Think about it—what if we grew up to be spies? Or snipers? Or dogcatchers? We’ve got to learn how to track down our prey.”

  “I’m not growing up to be a dogcatcher,” Rachel said flatly.