Chip Kendrick
WCT: Writer as Lawyer, Writer as Detective

Truth or Truth

	A while ago I had stopped watching the person actually being asked the question.  
His role, after all, was either to keep an absolute poker face or to exaggerate an 
embarrassed response.  Each other person in the room, upon hearing the question, reacted 
genuinely and secretly.  Here was the real truth.  Even the stories occasionally forced out 
of a person who had answered positively were less revealing than the split second of 
watching a memory surface behind another person's eyes.
	It had started out that the questions were asked of the group.  One person would 
state that he had never done something and those who had done that thing would have to 
admit to it by raising their hands.  If only a one lonely hand shot up, there would be a 
story.  The subject of the question could in principle be anything.  In fact the first few 'I 
have never' statements had been totally harmless assertions about skydiving and bunji 
jumping.  With this group, or any similar group, the questions would immediately turn to 
sex.  They did.
	After a while we decided that the game was flawed: each person would think of 
what she had done in order to come up with questions to ask.  We tried to keep the game 
going by bestowing questions on one another, and then, by some unspoken agreement, 
the questions were being asked of single people, with a ball going around the room to 
mark the asker.  Now all eyes would go to the target of the question, and no one but the 
target was bothering to put up false expressions ( perhaps, in some cases, because they 
were a little drunk ).
	I had gleaned so far that the girl sitting across from me had had a really good 
experience the first time she'd had sex.  It was a cattish smile and twinkling eye that 
tipped me off.  Someone had been asked who they would pick if they could have 
gratuitous sex with anyone in the dorm.  His answer was boring and obvious: he named 
the most beautiful girl in the dorm.  The person I was watching, however, shot a glance at 
someone in the room and lowered her eyes quickly.  It was so easy, it was making me 
guilty.  At one point I asked a question that I had already gotten the answer to by 
watching someone during another question.  Getting that same knowledge within the 
context of the game eased my conscience.
	A few turns ago there had been an unusual question about masturbation, the 
response to which I had totally missed because the situation we had created had suddenly 
seemed strange to me.  There were no longer any stakes to this game, where usually there 
was a dare or at least a shot glass waiting for whoever was too shy to answer a question.  
We had turned it into a group information session, a kind of sexual check-up.  My 
enlightenment was then suddenly obvious to me: we had started with this eventual case in 
mind, or in the back of our minds.  It just took a moment for the rules to fade.