Relying On Ben and Jerry (Waltham #1)

Prologue: I Dare You

Superman had kryptonite. Spock had emotions. Everyone has their own weakness that just eludes us, the one thing that they could not triumph over no matter the consequences, no matter the skill. My weakness was three little words: I dare you.

Truth or dare was a game played with friends that you know will inevitably embarrass the snot out of you, and normally it was thought of as something childish or only to be played while intoxicated, but with my friends it was just a way of life. They knew I couldn’t resist a challenge, no matter what. Throughout my life, I had walked a whole day on my hands, replaced the American flag with a pair of knickers, faked a panic attack in kindergarten, and stole the principal’s shoe during a football game and took off running across the field. I had knocked on friend’s windows in the dead of night and I had hidden in closets in a Scream mask, and I had once tap danced on the roof. In eighth grade, I humped a wall. No matter what they said for me to do, I couldn’t say no.

There had been many times in my life where there wasn’t something that I couldn’t say no to. When my parents announced that my father had gotten a job in Boston and that we were moving in the middle of the school year, I had told them I wasn’t going. After a lot of screaming and packed duffle bags and a temper tantrum, my boxes were packed, my cat was in a cage, and it was the last night in the one place I knew better than I knew my left toe; the one I had broken during my tap dancing routine, seeing as immediately after I took a bow I then took a tumble off of the roof, but that was ancient history, and my toe was still crooked.

It was my last night in my house, and I was sitting on the floor and roasting marshmallows over a cheap machine that was pretending to look like a campfire, my best friend’s eyes watching me carefully over the artificial bulbs. I kept my eyes on my marshmallow, noting that despite the ten minutes absolutely nothing was happening, when all of a sudden the light went out, and Aubrey held in her hand the dangling cord, swinging like a pendulum between her fingers.

“Alright,” she said, narrowing her eyes and pursing her lips. “What are you moping about?”

I shrugged, but she didn’t believe me for a second. I understood why—I had perfected the poker face when my fourth grade teacher caught me shoving a lizard down my pants.

“Would you want to leave?” I demanded a little too harshly. She made a face. “I’ve lived here for the longest time. I just didn’t think I would be going back.”

Back was being used as a relative term—I didn’t live much longer in Boston than six months before my parents made the pilgrimage down to the Sunshine State. I didn’t remember a thing about it, but my mother seemed more than overjoyed when she announced that we would be going back, while my father looked like he would drown a box of kittens to get out of it. Both native from New Jersey, both very flippantly so, they fit into Boston the same way as that one piece in the jigsaw puzzle looks like it should and goes in, but it still doesn’t look like the right shade of sky. My mother had the hair and my father had the accent and the attitude, but my brother and I were Florida bred with Pac Sun and Tilly’s clothing and tan with sun-bleached hair. I don’t think either of us had seen a Parka in our entire lives. I had to Google what a Parka even was.

It was my last night in paradise before we began to make our descent into a recreation of Dante’s frigid hellhole.

Aubrey seemed to be reading my mind, because she reached out and gave me a good shaking.

“Stop thinking, man,” she chided me. “You’ll make smoke pour all out of your ears. Relax, okay? I know that no one wants you to go, and I’m planning on lying down behind your car to keep you here, but there isn’t much we can do about it at this point.”