Truth or Dare
Page 12
Smoothly, Moz lays his other hand on top of mine, trapping it.
“The dick who’s handing you your dream on a platinum platter, Truth Girl.” But then he’s turning to Sef, who’s returned from the loo, making the same apology he just made to me. Big grin, expansive gestures, faux humility.
I remind myself: Moz gets the power, we get the money.
The wait until 11.45 is agonizing as I sit at my designated table in the food court, several plates of throwable food in front of me – doughnuts sticky with icing, a plate of chips, little pots of barbecue and tomato sauce with the tops peeled open to detonate on impact, the most aerodynamic vegetables the salad bar had to offer and three paper cups of ice slowly turning to water.
It’s down to me to be the first to throw. Apparently our viewers need to see more of my personality.
I think of the crowds around me now, the people who are going to watch me do this in real life as well as online. Would I have been so keen to help Sef if I’d known it would lead me here?
Six minutes to go.
Fear spirals up from the bottom of my gut, swirling through my stomach and stroking the back of my throat. I’m as frightened of succeeding as I am of failing. Getting caught means my parents finding out, getting into actual real trouble, but not getting caught… What if this video’s as successful as we want it to be?
What then?
A human body shouldn’t be allowed to feel all these things at once. It’s too confusing to be excited and frightened and anxious and impatient.
There is nothing I want to do less than stand up on this table in … four minutes’ (oh God…) time.
Every nerve in my body is fired up ready for action and I’m more fidgety than Sef as I glance round, looking to where he’s positioned, wishing he was here to tell me that I can do this the way he did in that alley off Covent Garden.
He should have my GoPro rolling to make sure he captures a nice wide shot of the opening scene and I worry briefly about him lining it up perfectly. Sef’s not the best when it comes to cinematography…
Two minutes.
You can see Moz on the far side of the food court. He hasn’t bothered with a mask or T-shirt – he’s confident his fast talk, fame and fortune are enough to get him out of anything.
It’s something I’ve seen echoes of in Sef – hints of recklessness showing through in some of our latest videos and in the way he drove here today…
Seeing Sef acting like Moz, like he too believes nothing can go wrong, makes me wonder what Kam, who’s lost so much, would make of the things his brother’s doing to help him.
I look down: time to start filming.
Pulling down my mask, I press record on the camera harnessed under my top, then turn to my phone.
“Hey hey.” It comes out exactly the way Moz says it. “It’s me, Truth Girl. Behold my weapons of mass destruction.”
I pick my phone up and scan my arsenal before flipping it back to film me.
“Locked and carb-loaded and ready to go.” Unzipping my top, I reveal the rolling camera underneath. My hand is shaking as I hold my fingers up for the final countdown. “Five … four … three … two…”
I don’t want to do this.
“… one.”
My limbs lock and I stay exactly where I am, frozen to the chair. I can’t do this.
I’m back in the park, people turning to look at me, but before I can fall into that trap, I grasp for memories of Kam, of finally finishing Moon last weekend, the bookmark tucked between the pages of the graphic novel we’ve been reading since someone gave it to him for Christmas, the comms app that allows him to say so much by doing so little.
I will do this for him.
In a series of scrapes and bangs, I clamber onto the table, pick up a doughnut and stand tall, one arm drawn back, ready to fire.
“FOOD FIGHT!” I yell and I throw my doughnut in a perfect lob across the food court, aiming right for Moz’s bright blue head.
It is chaos. Stationed all around the tables, people who’ve paid for the privilege jump up to start hurling foodstuffs. A spring roll sails past and there’s a scream as someone slops spaghetti right in one girl’s face. Drinks go flying, showering the tables they pass with a rainbow of different slushies. There are kids crying, parents shouting – some of the people who work behind the different counters are yelling at us to get off the tables.
Now it’s started, I’ve no control over the situation. I barely feel in control of myself as I jump down, scooping up my ammunition, and run. Spinning round, I hunt for Sef, but with food flying, surrounded by masked strangers in our TRUTH and DARE T-shirts, it’s impossible to tell who’s who. My aim is appalling and I’m aware that I’ve just iced a couple of innocent bystanders too slow to get under their table. Some of them are joining in, though, and I wince as I hear a plate smash.
“FOOD ONLY, YOU TWAT!” Moz yells at the top of his lungs.
An arm snakes out of nowhere and grabs at my T-shirt, but my momentum carries me back out of their grasp.
I’m coated in slops, there’s curry in my ear and something cold and wet sliding down into my knickers. All of us draw gradually closer to Moz, who’s getting the worst of it, until someone who’s standing on the table in a DARE T-shirt shouts from his vantage point, “Get Truth Girl!” and a volley of pizza slices thwap me right in the chest as I throw my arms up Platoon-poster style as if I’ve been shot.
We’re laughing, shouting, squealing and I forget why I’m here, what I’m doing, lost in the allure of complete abandon. Enjoying myself.
Until someone blasts a whistle so piercing that everyone – bystanders and participants – pauses.
The signal to get out.
CHAPTER 27
We get away with it. The food fight goes viral. Like properly viral. It gets posted onto one of the big share sites – spat out into everyone’s feed so that people from all over the internet – the world – come to watch our video.
On Moz’s channel.
After all, he’s the one who took the risk, the one who thought up the challenge, who got caught. It’s his agent who talked the shopping centre out of pressing charges and into hosting an apologetic fundraiser where members of the public can pay to throw foam pies at a penitent Moz as he stands in stocks.
I wonder whether anything has ever gone wrong for Moz?
But.
The challenge has done something to Sef. Broken him. Made him angry. From the moment he picked me up this morning, his mood has been toxic and we’ve already had a row about the angry email he sent Moz yesterday, asking if what Moz is paying his agent costs more than the amount we’ve raised in donations. Now he’s returned to grumbling about what we’ve filmed.
“We’re so stupid. We should have done something to tag onto the end of the food-fight video saying what we’re going to do next.”
“I know, you said.” About twenty times already. At least he’s stopped grumbling about how long it took Moz to edit and upload the video – if he’d said it one more time, I might have screamed. Moz had so much footage to cut together it must have been a nightmare and it only took him five days to do it. That video is an incredibly impressive achievement and Moz is a little bit my new hero for it.
“Everyone’s just stopped donating!” Sef sits back down and pulls the laptop over to show me. “Look.”
It’s not like I need to. Sef might think he’s the only one who keeps an eye on these things, but that’s not the case.
Miss Stevens once talked us through the take-up ratio of advertising campaigns across different media streams and the figure was shockingly low. We always knew this. It’s just that even if it stayed the same percentage, the amount should have increased with the views, right? Like, two per cent of a million is bigger than two per cent of a hundred.
But the point Sef is driving at is that no one donates without an incentive, and we haven’t given them one.
“Should we try Skyping Moz?” I suggest.
Next to me, Sef scrolls listlessly through the latest batch of comments.
“Look,” I say, reading one of the less pleasant ones over his increasingly tense shoulder. “We can either sit here getting worked up about it, or we can—”
“I’m not in the mood.”
I take a second to absorb that verbal slap before carrying on, “… film some dares, or a truth, like we used to.” When there’s no indication that he’s listening, I lean over and push down the lid of the laptop. “Sef. I’m serious. What you’re doing won’t make you feel better.”
“And you’d know?”
I think of all those hours I wasted scrolling through #MilkTits. “Yes, I would.”
Sef scowls at me, trying to find something he can fix his anger on.
“What’s the point, anyway?” He throws his phone across the room and shoves my laptop roughly off his knee. “We’ve got about a month to do the impossible. No one gives a shit why we’re doing this.”
“I do.”
“You say that, but it’s not your way of life that’s at risk.” His voice is so bitter it takes me a moment to react.
“No, it’s Kam’s,” I say quietly, hurt when Sef glances away. “I don’t know what you want me to say, Sef.”
“Why do you always have to say something?”
“So I should just shut up?”
“Sometimes.” Sef retreats deeper into himself, folding his arms around his body, slouching into the cushions.
“I can’t touch you, can’t talk to you. Remind me why I’m here again?”
“You don’t have to be.”
“Fine. Fine. I don’t want to spend the day watching you swim about in self-pity when this is exactly what you wanted.” I start gathering my stuff together, but Sef’s between me and the laptop and he stands up to block me.
“How is this what I want?” he snaps.
“You wanted Moz to help us raise our profile – he has. You wanted him to help us raise money – he has.”
I want to shout at him that this has come at a cost to me too – that every night I struggle to sleep because I can’t help worrying that the next hit the food fight gets might be someone who knows me. That I’ll wake up in the morning to find that it isn’t just a few hundred people who know what my boobs look like, but a few hundred thousand. The video has been taken down and James’ phone and hard drive wiped by his enraged parents, but I’ll bet Isaac or Vijay have a copy stashed somewhere.
Sef puts his hands to his face, roaring into them in frustration before opening them out, his eyes blazing behind his glasses.
“It’s still not enough to save him!”
If I wasn’t so upset, his words would have made me crumble. But anger makes me strong. Brutal.
“Stop saying we’re going to save him. That’s not what we’re doing – Kam had an accident and nothing you do will change that. You know how hard it’s been for him to get this far – it’s impossible for him to recover. You get that, don’t you?” I search his face for a comprehension I can’t see. “Sef? Tell me you understand.”
His eyes flutter closed for a moment before he turns away. “Yeah. Whatever. I know.”
The window seat creaks as he collapses onto it, his head falling into his hands and I sit next to him to slide an arm round him. For a moment it seems like he might shrug me off, but then he leans into me, my nose and lips pressed into his hair as I kiss the back of his head.
We’ve five weeks to make double what we did on the food fight and for the first time since we started, I feel like giving up.
They’ve mixed up Kam’s speech and language therapy over the past few weeks. Although he’s still using the app, he’s also talking. It’s been hard. His words are slurred and ill-formed and he’s quick to anger if you take too long to understand, but this is his voice and for all it’s stressful, it’s also kind of wonderful.
We haven’t done much reading today, or talking really, but in the months we’ve been friends, I’ve learned that Kam’s life is less about quantity and more about quality.
“OK?” Kam says, gesturing towards me.
“Yeah, sorry. I’m just…” I was thinking how Kam would react to having to move somewhere new, starting a different programme, working with different therapists.
“Sad.” The S is hard for him to get out.
“I am,” I say. “Can I have a hug?”
Kam nods.
I lean across and wrap my arms around his shoulders. He smells like a hospital, but also like the person he is underneath.
“Thank you.” My voice is strong and true with gratitude for Kam being in my life.
Kam laughs when I let go, and I smile so much that it hurts.
The second I’m out of his door, the smile crumbles into tears and I barely get as far as the closed-off stairs before I have to sit down, head in my hands as I cry from the deepest depths of my soul for everything that Kam’s been through. I cry for the accident that happened, the pain he suffers and the fear and darkness and apathy that recovery has brought with it. I want to howl with rage at the thought of him having to face yet another battle that is not of his own making.
I cry because I nearly failed him.
Whatever comes next, I will do it.
It’s late on Monday and I’ve already gone to bed when my phone lights up.
I’ve made up with Moz.
That’s fantastic!!!
The only chance we have – the only way to make the last four months matter – is to keep rolling the dice, and it’s Moz who’s keeping us at the table. The joy I used to get from planning our dares and editing our videos has drained away since we met him. Neither me nor Sef have ever been in this for the fame and I’m finding the price hard to pay – the pressure to log in every day and interact with everyone, the racist slurs against Sef and the endless comments about my weight that have multiplied with more consistency than the donations.
Moz is a fool’s golden ticket, but it’s the only one we’ve got and I’m pleased Sef’s made up with him. I wonder how much crawling it took…
My phone flashes again.
And we’ve settled on a new dare, way bigger than the food fight.
…? It’s late and I’m tired and I want him to get to the point.
Moz thinks we should keep it a surprise.
From the viewers?
Yup.
But he’s still typing.
And you.
Me???
Trust me, it’ll work.
But it’s becoming harder to trust Sef the way he’s been behaving and rather than reply, I turn my phone off for the first time in months and close my eyes. If he wants an answer from me, he’s going to have to wait.
Even if we both already know I’ll say yes.
FEBRUARY
CHAPTER 28
The video we cobbled together of Dare Boy and Moz challenging me to a mystery dare has been super popular, but the donations aren’t taking off the way they did before, which is a problem.
We’re 40k short. Sef typed.
And?
We’ve been through this and I imagine Moz rolling his eyes.
So we need to do 2 x dares before the end of the month. Not just this one.
Moz is adamant we can’t set the target higher than twenty thousand pounds or
we won’t make it. The problem is that the food fight had a three-week build up and Moz was able to bait people into making larger donations in order to come on board. Not an option for this one, apparently.
Can we get this one out of the way first? I type. I’m sitting next to Sef on the window seat of the caravan and wiggle my feet further under his thigh to keep them warm.
I’m worried about him. Something’s not right about this dare, but no matter how hard I push him on it, he won’t give in.
Saturday 15th?
Can’t. It’s my mum’s birthday.
Sef tuts.
“Well, it is,” I say. “We’re going out for dinner that night.”
“Means moving my Sunday shift,” he grumps, but when Moz agrees to the sixteenth, he doesn’t argue.
What if we’ve not met the target, do we still film?
YES. Sef types, shooting me a furious glare. We’ve already had this discussion.
“I want Moz’s opinion,” I say.
We film on schedule, I’ll tease the footage and get people to meet the target before we release the full thing.
“See?” Sef mutters and I give him a gentle nudge with my socked foot.
“I wasn’t trying to be difficult. I’m pleased there’s a solution.”
Sef relents and runs a finger down the sole of my foot so that I scream out and try to snatch it back. I send Moz a typo-riddled reply before leaping up and running from the window seat to the bedroom.
When Sef catches up, tickling turns into kissing, which turns into things we don’t have the time to be doing when we’ve filming still to do.
“You can tell me what the dare is, Moz doesn’t need to know you’ve told me,” I whisper into Sef’s skin. It’s not the right time to have brought it up, but I can’t seem to let it go.
“Don’t do this, Claire. You know I can’t…” He kisses me, but I’m no longer comfortable with what we’re doing, not when all I can think about is that he’s keeping secrets from me.
“Friends are supposed to be straight with each other, Sef,” I say, echoing his words back to him.