Truth or Dare
POV: Charlie
Charlie Whitlock was seventeen years old, six weeks from homecoming, and a hopeless virgin.
She had never even been kissed.
This was the kind of thing one could get away with for a long time when your mother was the headmistress of a three-hundred-year-old New England boarding school, when you had lived your entire life in faculty housing on campus, and when literally every boy you had ever met was someone whose disciplinary file your mother could pull from a drawer in under thirty seconds.
One could ride out a decade of it. One could turn it into a personality. One could, if one was very careful and very busy and very, very good at not thinking about it, get all the way to senior year — without anyone making you say it out loud.
And then, two hours into a stolen-wine sleepover in Margot Van Doren’s dorm room on the last Friday before senior year, Charlie’s best friends made her say it out loud.
***
Margot’s dorm room in Sutton was a corner double on the third floor with a view of the river and a fireplace that hadn’t been used since 1962 but still smelled, faintly, like old smoke when it rained.
She had inherited it from her older sister, who had inherited it from a Van Doren cousin, who had inherited it from God knew who.
Margot’s mother had once mailed the school’s housing director a Hermès scarf with a Post-it that said for your trouble. The room had been Margot’s ever since.
By eight on Friday the room had become its own ecosystem. Priya was on the rug in flannel pajama pants and a hoodie three sizes too big, sorting takeout cartons. Jules was on the bed in something so skimpy that should not technically have qualified as pajamas, painting her toenails black. Margot was at the desk in an actual silk robe, pouring four mugs of wine because she refused, on principle, to drink anything good out of plastic.
Charlie sat cross-legged on the floor in flannel shorts and an Ashford hoodie that had belonged to her mother in 1996. She had brought a contribution: a tin of her mother’s lemon shortbread that had been earmarked for the trustees’ tea and that she had absolutely not been authorized to take.
“You stole from the headmistress,” Margot said, delighted, popping one into her mouth.
“I borrowed it from the headmistress.”
“You committed a felony from the headmistress.”
“Eat your felony.”
“I love her,” Jules announced to the ceiling. “I love that this is who we are. I love that this is who we are now. Senior year Charlotte is going to be unstoppable.”
“Don’t,” Charlie said. “Don’t put it on me yet.”
“I am putting it directly on you.”
“Priya, defend me.”
Priya, without looking up from the lo mein: “No.”
“Priya.”
“You said you’d do something this year. You said it in May. I have a screenshot.”
“Of course you have a screenshot.”
Margot handed out the wine. Charlie took her mug, smelled it, and could tell immediately that it was better than any wine should have been in a dorm room. Margot raised hers.
“To senior year,” Margot said. “To the last year we will ever be this kind of stupid together.”
“To not getting expelled,” Jules added.
“To Yale,” Priya said, looking at Charlie.
“To Yale,” Charlie agreed.
“To Yale being done," Margot said. “And therefore to Charlie Whitlock finally, finally, having a single second of her life back. To Charlie Whitlock having a year.”
They clinked. Charlie drank. The wine was good and the room was warm and outside the window the river ran black under a moon that had not bothered to come up properly yet, and Charlie thought, with the small sharp feeling of someone noticing a fact for the first time, this is the last September I will ever have here.
It made her chest do a thing.
She drank again to cover it.
***
They were two hours in when Margot proposed truth or dare, and an hour after that when the dares had escalated to the point that Jules had eaten a spoonful of cinnamon and Priya had texted her ex-boyfriend a passage from Wuthering Heights and Margot had run barefoot down the third-floor hallway and back, and at some point the four of them ended up in a sloppy circle on the rug with a third bottle of wine open.
“Okay,” Margot said. “Okay. Whitlock. Truth or dare.”
“Truth.”
“Coward.”
“Truth.”
“Fine.” Margot tilted her head. The fire was off; the lamp was low; her red hair looked dark and wet in the lamplight. She had her courtroom face on. “When was your first kiss.”
The room went, the way rooms in old novels go, very still.
Charlie looked at her wine.
Charlie looked at her friends.
Charlie looked, for a long second, at the painting over Margot’s fireplace, which was a watercolor of the boathouse that Margot’s grandmother had done in 1971 and which Margot had hung on the wall like it was no big deal that she lived in a room with hereditary art.
“Charlie.”
“I’m thinking.”
“You’re stalling.”
“I’m — okay. So.”
Priya had put her chopsticks down. Jules had stopped breathing in the loud showy way she breathed when she was excited. Margot had not blinked.
“Technically,” Charlie said.
“Oh no.”
“Technically I —”
“Oh, no."
“It’s not a big deal —”
“Charlotte Eloise Whitlock.”
“You haven’t been kissed,” Jules said. Just the fact of it, flat and astonished, as if Charlie had told them she had never seen the ocean. “You haven’t been kissed."
“I’ve been kissed!”
“By who.”
“By —” Charlie made a vague gesture that she hoped communicated somebody, at some point. “By people.”
“Name one.”
“That’s not —”
“Name one person.”
“Teddy Marsh.”
“Spin the bottle does not count,” Priya said gently. “That was sixth grade. I was there. He missed and got your chin.”
“Priya.”
“It was a chin kiss. I’m sorry. I have to be honest.”
“Oh my god.”
“Oh my god," Margot said. “Oh my god, Whitlock.”
“It’s fine."
“It is not fine. It is the opposite of fine. It is an emergency."
“Margot.”
“This is aggressively not fine.”
Charlie, who had been ready for this, who had in fact rehearsed an explanation in the shower many times that involved phrases like focused on academics and not in any rush, could not get any of those phrases to arrive.
The wine and the friends and the lamplight and the small sharp last September feeling had stripped them all out of her. What came out instead, in the same flat voice Jules had used, was:
“I have just. Never had time.”
“You have never had time," Margot repeated.
“My mother is the headmistress.”
“Yes.”
“And I live in faculty housing.”
“Yes.”
“And literally every boy I have ever met has either been someone I have known since I was six or someone whose disciplinary file my mother could pull from a drawer in under thirty seconds.”
“Yes,” Priya said, soft. “That is true.”
“So.”
A pause.
“So we fix it,” Margot said.
“Margot.”
“We fix it. This year. Senior year. The year of Charlie Whitlock having a year. First kiss by homecoming.”
“Margot.”
“By homecoming, Whitlock. That’s six weeks. That is a generous, sober, considered timeline.”
“By homecoming,” Jules echoed, like a vow.
“By homecoming,” Priya said, which was the worst, because Priya never agreed to anything she did not mean.
Charlie laughed. She did not mean to laugh. The laugh was a defense mechanism and the laugh was also, somewhere in it, real. There was a small bright something in her chest that she could not have named, and the something was yes.
“Okay,” she said.
“Okay?”
“Okay. First kiss. By homecoming. Fine.”
“And —” Jules raised her wine. “And —”
“Jules.”
“AND, lose her virginity. By homecoming.”
"Jules."
“What. We need to go big. She can’t go to Yale as a virgin loser.”
“That is — Jules, that is not — ”
“Vote,” Margot said.
“Margot —”
“All in favor of upgrading the Whitlock Project to full devirginizing by homecoming.”
“In favor,” Jules said immediately.
“In favor,” Margot said.
They both looked at Priya. Priya, who had spent four years reading romance novels under her desk during math, who knew Charlie better than anyone in the room. Priya hesitated. Then she smiled, slow, like she was watching the first page of a book she had been waiting for.
“In favor. Charlie needs a life.”
“Then it’s unanimous. Charlotte, you have been outvoted by your own dare.”
“You can’t outvote me on my own —”
“We can and we have. The motion carries.”
Charlie was laughing now in a way that had gotten away from her.
She was also, somewhere underneath the laughing, terrified, because the laughing was real and the yes in her chest was real and her friends were looking at her like she had just agreed to something none of them, not even Margot, fully understood.
“Fine,” she said. “Fine. Fine. We’ll see.”
“We’ll see yes," Jules said.
“We’ll see what we see.”
“Charlotte.”
“That’s what I’m offering. Take it.”
“I’ll take it.” Margot raised her mug a third time. “To Charlie Whitlock. Finally getting hers.”
They drank.
****
At three in the morning, Charlie woke up on the rug with Margot’s spare quilt over her and her mouth tasting like the inside of a wine bottle and a small precise wrongness in her chest that she could not at first identify.
The others were asleep. Priya on the bed. Jules in Margot’s reading chair with her bare feet on the radiator. Margot on the floor next to Charlie, mouth open, one hand still loosely curled around her phone.
Charlie stepped over her and padded down the dark hallway to the bathroom, the cold tile against her bare feet a small slap of consciousness.
She locked the door. She turned on the light. She stood in front of the mirror.
The girl in the mirror had wine-flushed cheeks and slept-in eyeliner she had let Priya put on her at eleven and her hair coming loose from its braid and a face that was — she had to admit it, sometimes, late at night, alone — a perfectly nice face.
Not a face that had been kissed.
A face that had been the answer to questions teachers asked when no one else had the answer.
Live, before life closes around her.
She didn’t know where the sentence had come from. It wasn’t a sentence from a book. It had arrived in her head fully formed, in her own voice, and she knew the second she heard it that it had been waiting there for a long time, possibly years.
She looked at the girl in the mirror.
She thought, very calmly, okay.
She thought, okay, then.
She unlocked the door and went back to the rug and lay down under Margot’s quilt and closed her eyes and said, into the dark, very quietly so no one would hear:
“Okay.”
Margot stirred beside her on the floor. Without opening her eyes, without quite waking up, she said: “Mm?”
“Nothing,” Charlie whispered. “Go back to sleep.”
“Mm-hmm.”
Margot rolled over. Charlie lay on her back and stared at the ceiling of the room of a girl whose family had been buying their way into Ashford since the Eisenhower administration.
She closed her eyes.
She slept.
Love their friendship