TRUTH OR DARE. April came up with the game. We four sitting in back the bus playing it—no feeling people up or taking off clothes though.

Three of us are on the aisle seats on the last two rows. The baby is on my lap. I’m across from WK. April and that purse of hers is on the floor facing the front of the bus. She always got to see what’s ahead of her, she says.

WK looking at Blaine but pointing to me. “How old were you when you first kissed?”

I lay Cricket over my shoulder and burp her. “Ten. After school in the playground with Caleb. I made him.”

Everyone laughs.

“April, you next,” I say. “How many girls you kissed?”

She don’t kiss and tell, she say. So, she take the dare. It must be a lot of ’em, that’s all I can say. I dare her to kiss that girl up front with the purple hair. April take her time getting there. Almost everybody else is asleep. We cracking up when she lean over that girl, kissing the top of her head. Purple girl don’t even know it happened. She never moved or woke up. But that stupid driver sees everything. So, he calls April over. Lowers his voice. Looks through his mirror at us while he talking. “Yes, sir,” we hear her say. “No, sir, I don’t want to be kicked off.” She runs our way laughing. Saying this is the most fun she had in a long time. Then she get back to playing and watching. I ask what she looking for. Why she stare at people so hard? She smiles, turns her head, watching Mrs. Rodriguez on her way by. “No reason,” she say. But I know that’s a lie.

For the next hour we talk more than play. Find out all kinds of things about each other. WK is in the gifted program, runs track, the 400 and 200, still wears his old boyfriend’s ring. Blaine goes to private school, never had a boyfriend—spent last summer in France with his aunt.

“Why you riding on this thing?” I ask.

He like to travel. Got this plan to visit every state, even Hawaii, by the time he’s twenty-three. I ask how many states he been to already. “Twenty-five, including Puerto Rico.” Last summer he biked sixteen hundred miles to raise money for kids with leukemia.

WK bats his eyes. “You want company the next time you go to France?”

Blaine picks his eyebrows a lot. “I don’t think my aunt would mind.”

WK jumps up, walks over, and fist-bumps me, then accidentally knocks April’s purse off her lap. He get down on his knees in a hurry to pick up lip gloss, a silver earring, pens, her phone, and a bottle of pills that she snatch out his hands quick as she can. Putting her things away, she tells us some of the places she been—Mexico, San Diego, LA, Atlanta, DC, Erie, and Ohio. I ask which place she liked the best. She give us a fake smile. The kind where the bottom and top row of your teeth meet, but your eyes don’t seem to be having the same good time as your mouth. “I was really little. I don’t remember much.” She wanna work on a cruise ship and travel the whole world, she says. I look at Cricket but don’t ask what she plan to do with her.

My phone rings. It’s my sister. She said to call her from every rest stop. I woulda, but she’d ask a bunch of questions I can’t answer. Like, what time should my grandparents pick me up? Who did I meet on the bus? Did I do like she said and tell the driver about the man who tried to hit on me? She knew it would happen. It always do. But you can’t snitch every time somebody try to take advantage of you. You got to learn to stand up for yourself, ’cause sometimes all you got is you. Maleeka finally learned that. She got me to thank for it. “Right, Cricket?” I lift her high in the air and laugh when spit drips on my nose like syrup.

WK ends up on Blaine’s lap. “Truth or dare, Char. How old were you when you first had sex? And don’t lie.”

Blaine’s face turns red.

I take the dare ’cause who would believe I never did nothing like that ever? Nobody—not that old dude up front or the kids at school. So, when they say I have to chew and swallow ten sheets of wet toilet paper from that grimy, nasty-ass bathroom, I do it. But I don’t like it.