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

teeth so we could do a spinach check, and was on his way. He moves like a cat. Within thirty seconds, he was seated next to his object of desire.
    â€œI watch,” Sadie said in wonder. “I watch and I take notes, and I still can’t master it.”
    â€œMe, either,” I admitted cheerfully.
    â€œThere has to be more to it than the fact he’s beautiful. There
has
to be. Otherwise, I might as well give up now.”
    I squeezed her hand. “Of course there’s more. Frankie’s . . . he’s . . . Well, he’s . . .”
    â€œFrankie,”
we said at the same time. We laughed, jinx-dibsed each other, and dug into the remains of the baba ghanoush.
    Frankie is beautiful. He’s also sharp as broken glass, fierce and charismatic, and out of the confines of Willing, he glows. Especially when he meets a new Mr. Maybe. Frankie loves to date. “Would you buy a pair of shoes without trying them on and walking around for a while?” he demands. He likes shoes, too. But the truth about Frankie is that he’s really looking to be half of one good pair.
    Aren’t we all?
    â€œIt’ll happen,” Sadie announced, mind reader and eternal optimist that she is.
    The words were barely out of her mouth, my pithy retort just forming, when Frankie slid back into his seat, a good ten minutes too soon. He looked crushed.
    â€œOh, sweetie.” Sadie scooted over and put an arm around him. “Clearly, he’s a taco short of a combo platter.”
    â€œElvis has left the building” was my contribution.
    â€œA few fries short of a Happy Meal.” Sadie is very fond of food analogies. Who can blame her?
    Frankie focused. A little. “What?” he asked vaguely.
    â€œTo say no to you.” Sadie smoothed a shiny comma of hair from his forehead. “He’s obviously insane.”
    â€œHe didn’t say no to me. We barely got past introductions before I had to leave.”
    â€œWhy?” Sadie and I demanded in unison. “He looks like a Norse godling!” I added.
    â€œI know. I know. Ragnor-Knut-Thor! . . . Only, his name is Biff,” he moaned. “I can’t go out with someone named
Biff
!”
    I patted his back. Onstage, one of the college boys was just launching into “U Can’t Touch This.”

6
    THE DOOR
    Once upon a time, before Willing was a school, it was a house. Not the Willings’ house; they always lived in Society Hill, until the various and sundry branches moved out to the Main Line and vast acreage. The house-that-became-a-school was built by a South Philly man named Vittore Palladinetti, who made a fortune building railroads. Literally building them. He started as a laborer and ended up owning a big chunk of the Reading Railroad (Monopoly, anyone?). He bought the equivalent of an entire city block and built his four-story, sixty-two-room mansion, complete with an acre of Italian gardens, an aviary for his daughter, and a hundred-seat theater for his opera-loving wife.
    Just over a year after moving in, Vittore caught the flu—most likely from one of his daughter’s beloved birds—and died. His wife and daughter moved, married, changed last names, and so, while I might have been a student at the Palladinetti School, which would have been coolly ironic as my mom is descended from Vittore’s far-less-successful younger brother, Beppo, it wasn’t to be. Edith Willing swept in, disinfected, and this Wednesday morning in October, I was sitting on the floor outside what had once been Daughter Palladinetti’s bedroom and was now the Regina Pugh Willing Romance Language Room, sketching the door. It’s copied from a bronze abbey door in Rome, filled with angels and demons that look like they are having a hell of a party.
    Downstairs, the period bell rang. It’s actually an antique gong that lives in the back hall. The school secretary has to leave her