Paul's truth

He looked like he’d been picked first to play basketball in high school gym class, an experience I’m sure he never had in reality. Don’t be mean, I thought to myself. It was probably true, but I didn’t have to be catty about it. While he thought on the very easy question, I glanced at Molly. She was pretending not to notice what was happening, looking anywhere in the room but at Paul or his secret admirer. Joan wasn’t capable of hiding things and she wasn’t capable of keeping her mouth shut. She went on and on about her crush, almost every night. Every time the three of us spent an evening together, for sure. They barely interacted. I didn’t know how she consistently found new things to say about him.

“Truth,” he decided at last.

They really are birds of a feather, I thought.

Joan pressed her lips together. I wondered what qualified as perversion in her mind. The most out-there question she could think of would probably be small fries even compared to what I would ask most people. “Do you have a crush on anyone here? You don’t have to say who it is! Just if you do or not.” I didn’t know a face could go so red. She went for her cup and finished it, nearly in one big gulp, while she waited for Paul’s answer.

He wasn’t any more composed. He glanced around the circle. I and everyone else could see what he was thinking without him needing to say it. Why didn’t they both just come out with it so they could actually enjoy each other’s company? They were just torturing themselves this way. “Yeah,” he admitted, keeping his eyes down.

Jack clapped him on the arm. “There we go, boy!” he said. I tried to think of any other half decent thing he had ever said to Paul and couldn’t. Getting stuck together brings out the best in people.

Paul seemed eager to get everyone’s eyes off of him. He took a second to decide, but only a second. “Molly, truth or dare?” he asked.

“Oh!” Molly said, looking surprised. She glanced back at Joan with a nervous look, but it wasn’t like Paul could send it right back to Joan after she had been the one to ask him. “I say… dare.”

“Oh, I bet,” Jack groaned. Second only to me, he hassled Molly like a man obsessed. It all went back to one of the first weeks of the semester, when she had accidentally left the door to the bathroom unlocked and he had mistakenly walked in on her in the shower. Unfortunately I couldn’t really hold it against him; the doors were so solid in Bean Hall that you couldn’t hear a sound from the bathroom unless you were already inside. After that, nobody had forgotten to lock the door again, but that didn’t mean Jack had forgotten what he saw. He brought it up constantly.

“Fuck off, Jack,” Molly groaned. “Dare, Paul.”