Truth & Dare Read Free Page A

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 mymind—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