The Fine Art of Truth or Dare by Melissa Jensen Read Free Book Online

Tenderness’ . . .”
    â€œThose are from the sixties.”
    â€œI’m sure Christina Aguilera has mangled them in concert.”
    â€œHow about ‘I Want to Know What Love Is’?”
    â€œI’ll vomit, Sadie. I really will. All that wailing. Nope.”
    â€œBut you’re not the one singing it,” Sadie pointed out reasonably.
    Frankie blinked at her. “Your point?”
    â€œFine. ‘You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me’?”
    â€œExcellent choice.”
    Sadie’s mother had dressed her again. This time, it was a shapeless black sack of a dress with an artfully shredded hem. “She looks like a crazy cat lady,” Frankie said sadly as Sadie climbed the single step to the plywood stage.
    She did.
    She got a smattering of applause. Other regulars. Everyone else just went on with their hummus and playlists. The table behind us was in the middle of a raucous game of quarters. “Powel freshmen,” Frankie had dismissed them after getting a glimpse of their fake IDs and oversize sweatshirts. All straight, none cute enough for him. Just loud and growing louder with each successive pitcher.
    The music started. The collegiates howled at what must have been a masterful shot. We ignored them. They were big and drunk, and we’re small (me), confrontation-averse (me, too), and rational (Frankie). We knew what was coming.
    â€œWhen I said I needed you,”
Sadie began. The quiet came on so suddenly, it was a noise in itself. By the time she got to the end of
“You said you would always stay,”
the only sound was the faint whirring of a quarter spinning to rest on the table behind us.
    Here’s the thing. When Frankie suggests Aretha or Dusty Springfield or even Adele to Sadie, he means it. Because when Sadie sings, everyone listens. Her voice is deep and velvety, and makes me think of smoky bars in 1940s Casablanca, where everyone wore white and drank contraband champagne. Of course, I don’t have the slightest idea what a 1940s bar in Casablanca was really like, which says a lot of what there is to be said about Sadie’s singing. It takes you.
    She looks pretty, too. She does this thing where she tilts her head and half closes her eyes and holds the mic really close to her mouth. When she sings, guys watch and occasionally get a slightly glazed look. I’ve seen a few come halfway out of their chairs as she sings her last note. Then she slumps back to the table, they slide back into their seats, and the moment’s totally gone. Sadie hasn’t had a date since . . . well, birth, unfortunately.
    I don’t get it. She’s fab. She’s certainly not unattractive. She has perfect skin, the best eyebrows I have ever seen, and no matter how much she and her mother insist to the contrary, an entirely decent body. Round, absolutely, but only in the right places. But she wears her shredded sacks, and when she’s not singing, I guess that’s what guys see. The one time I hinted that a belt would be a nice addition, all she did was give my turtleneck a long look. I didn’t think it was entirely the same thing, but point taken.
    â€œYou don’t have to say you love me . . .”
    Sadie could kill people in the bland musicals that Willing puts on every spring, knock everyone right out of their seats and through the back wall of the auditorium and onto the manicured lawn. But she won’t. No one at Willing has a clue. She pours her heart out in three-minute power-ballad measures on the Chloe’s stage and leaves it there.
    â€œYou know,” I suggested quietly to Frankie during a long pause in the lyrics, “maybe this isn’t the song you think it is. I mean, she’s telling some guy that he doesn’t have to love her as long as he comes home. Is that a message we want to send?”
    Frankie speared a bite of feta. “Who’s ‘we’? And who are you,