Dare Me (14 page)

It’s all we could talk about, dream about, for days, weeks.

“It’s always been Beth,” she slurs, grazing her temple with the back of her wrist. “And the squad is what counts. Cheer, I never knew it mattered so much. Not until Coach picked me. She changed my life. Now it’s all I can think about, Addy. I hear the counts in my sleep. Don’t you? I don’t ever want them to end.”

I tell her to stop talking.

“Don’t you see, Addy?” she says, words tumbling in her mouth, eyes shiny and crazed. “When we go out there Monday night, we need to show them what we can do. What we are. We need to make them know it. We need to give them more than awesomeness.

“We need to give them greatness.”

It hurts to turn the steering wheel. I can still feel Tacy’s grasping fingers, the fear my arm socket might pop. The sound of Beth saying, “Ride that bitch…ride her.”

And Beth, the way her hand fastened on me, stopping my fall.

And after, Coach saying, as I walked the limping Tacy across the gym, “Next time, Hanlon, when you let her go, keep those arms to the side. Don’t let her see your hands are there. If she does, she’ll grab for them. Wouldn’t you?”

Wouldn’t you? I want to ask.

I think of injured Emily again, withering up in the stands. And I remember how, last week, she posted on my Facebook wall: “U never call me anymore. None of U.” And I decided it was a joke, one of Emily’s endless LOLs.

I couldn’t be bothered.

At the games she sits, just barely separated from the bleacher crowd—in the borderland, the nowhere zone between our bronzed glory and the gray blur of everything, everyone else in this sad world.

At home later:

U put a hex on Slaus,
I text Beth.

U shoulda given *her* the hamsa,
she replies.

Like at a hypnotist’s cue, my head floods with the image of my bracelet in Will’s apartment. A crimson ring on his carpet.

But I keep hearing Beth’s words in my head:
…Coach must’ve told you they asked her about the bracelet. You two thick as thieves.

Why hasn’t Coach told me?

I think I should just call her and ask her about it. But I don’t.

I want her to tell me.

It doesn’t mean anything if I have to ask her.

A blipping text message comes hours later, but it’s from Beth:
Guess who’s flying Mon nite?

Tacy’s out, Beth’s in. A peculiar mix of terror and relief floods through me—and then the taunting mystery of what kind of conversation transpired between Beth and Coach during those hours after practice to lead to this.

R U happy now?
I text back.

But there’s no reply.

It’s the dark muddle of the night when I feel the phone hissing in my hand.

Come outside.

I flick my blinds with a finger and see a car out front, Coach behind the wheel.

The cold grass crunching under my feet, I bound across the lawn.

We sit in the car, which is Matt French’s and isn’t as nice as Coach’s car. It smells like cigarettes, though I’ve never seen Matt French smoke.

The cup holder is stained with three, four coffee rings like the center of an old tree.

Something’s wreathing my ankle, maybe the hand loops of a plastic bag, or the curled edges of an old receipt, some stray Matt Frenchness left behind.

Something about how messy the car is makes me feel things, like that time I saw him, after midnight, drooped over a bowl of cereal, and understood it was his dinner, that gritty bowl of Coach’s special holistic blend of organic gravel, soot, and matches, and Matt French hunched over it by himself on the kitchen island, socked feet dangling, headphones on, tuning out all our hysteria and gum chewing.

And now. Poor Matt, in some airport or office tower in Georgia, some conference room someplace where men like Matt French go to do whatever it is they do, which is not interesting to any of us, but maybe it would be if we knew. Though I doubt it.

Except sometimes I think of him, and the soulful clutter in his eyes, which is not like Will’s eyes were because Will’s eyes always seemed about Will. And Matt French’s seem only about Coach.

“He’s still gone?” I ask.

“Gone?” she asks, looking at me quizzically.

“Matt,” I say.

She pauses. “Oh,” she says, turning her face away for a second. “Yeah.”

As if he were an afterthought.

Hands curling around the steering wheel, she says, “There’s something new, Addy.”

The bracelet, she’s going to tell me at last.

“The police,” she says. “I think they’re hearing things. They asked me what the nature of our relationship was. That’s how they put it.”

“Oh,” I say.

“I told them again that we were friends. They’re probably just trying to understand his state of mind.”

“Oh,” I repeat.

“They had a lot of new questions about the last contact I’d had with him. I think they—and the Guard—they want to understand how he might have come to this,” she says.

The words don’t feel like hers, exactly. So formal, her mouth moving slowly around them like they don’t fit.

“I’m sure it’s fine, Addy,” she says, her fingers clenching tighter. “But it seemed like I should tell you.”

“I’m glad you told me,” I say. But she hasn’t told me anything. “Is that all?”

As if sensing my disappointment, she pats me on the shoulder.

“Addy, nothing can really happen if we keep tight,” she says, resting her fingers there. I don’t remember her ever touching me like that. “Keep strong. Focus. After all, it’s just you and me who know everything.”

“Right,” I say. And I want to feel the dazey warmth of sharing things with her, but she’s not sharing, not really, and so all I feel is Beth, the way she seems now, crouched, watchful, hovering.

“So we’re good?” she asks.

Part of me wants to tell her everything, all the ways she needs to watch for Beth, knives out. But she’s telling me only what she wants to. So I don’t say any more.

“I gave it to Beth,” Coach says, reading my thoughts, like she can. Like they both can. “She’s Top Girl. She’s flying at the final game.”

Coach, I want to say, what makes you think you can stop there? You have to give her everything until we figure out what she wants. Until she does.

“First I made her captain. Now I’ve made her Top Girl,” she says, eyes on me, searching.

She didn’t make me Top Girl,
I can hear Beth saying.
I made me Top Girl. I made myself.

She loops her fingers around the gearshift.

“I don’t know what else to do,” she says, a slightly stunned look on her face. “Jesus, she’s just a seventeen-year-old kid. Why should I…”

There’s a pause.

“She’ll get bored with it all,” she says, as if trying to convince herself. “They always do.”

At home that night I spend an hour, forehead nearly pressed to my laptop screen, reading the news.

No Answers Yet: Guardsman Cause of Death Still Under Investigation.

What would it mean if it were murder? What does it have to do with Coach, with me?

Coach, Coach, like my very own sergeant, who took me straight into the fog of war…

I wanted to be a part of your world, but I didn’t know your world was this.

That night, I dream about that time with Beth, the first drunk I ever had, both of us climbing up Black Ash Ridge. She kept saying,
Are you sure you’re ready, Addy. Are you?
And I promised I was, our heads schnapps-fuzzed and our bodies ecstatic. She said,
But you’re not afraid, Addy, are you? Show me that lion heart.

Later, I remember falling back, great big Xs for eyes and half delirious, and Beth crawling over to me, her shirt off and flaming red bra. She says she will stop me from log-rolling to my death. She promises she will save me, us.

Just don’t look down,
Addy,
just never look down.

…and her voice, like it was coming from a deep gorge inside me, vibrating through my chest, my throat, my head, my heart.

When you gaze into the Abyss, Addy,
she says, her eyes glowing above me like two blazing stars, laughing or even crying,
the Abyss gazes into you.

FRIDAY: THREE DAYS TO FINAL GAME

“Guess what I’m
doing?” Beth asks, calling me crack-o-dawn, while I’m standing at the mirror, trying to make my face over candy-clean. Streaming petal pink across my cheeks, my eyelids, slashing it across my trembling lips.

I don’t say anything. I don’t like the way her voice sounds. Cat-and-canary-like.

“I’m reading the newspaper. I thought the old lady would faint. She said, ‘Do you even know what that
is,
darling daughter?’ Oh, the morning wit in the Cassidy household.”

“Mmm.”

“‘A National Guard source indicated increasing doubt that the Sergeant’s death was suicide,’” she reads. “‘Results from a gunshot residue test on the victim’s hands showed only trace amounts.’”

I don’t say anything.

“Oh, and turns out you were right,” she says, pausing as if taking a bite. I have a sudden image of raw meat shearing between her teeth. “It was a gunshot to the mouth, not the temple. You said you were confused, but it turns out you weren’t confused at all, Addy.”

The dying fluorescent lights buzz above me mercilessly.

I’m in the first-floor girls’ room, second stall, having just thrown up, my right cheekbone resting on the porcelain. I’d forgotten what that kind of throwing up could be like, the kind where you’re not, Emily-style, nuzzling your finger down your fishtailing throat, begging for release from the dreaded sluice of cupcakes or from the acidic sludge of too many Stoli Citronas—cheer beer, they call it, we call it. No, this is throwing up like coming off the tilt-a-whirl at age seven, like discovering that dead rat under the porch, like finding out someone you loved never loved you at all.

Now I’m sitting on the floor of the stall, damp newspaper still folded in my hands, the smeary sentences:

I feel my stomach turn again.

Suddenly, Beth is there, standing above me, handing me a long sheaf of paper towels, still billowing, untorn, from the dispenser.

At first, I think I’m hallucinating.

“You wait your whole life for something to happen,” she’s saying, her face virtuous, princess-like, under the rimy fluorescents. “Then, suddenly, it’s all the terrors of the earth all at once. Is that how it feels to you, Addy?”

She winds the trail of paper towel around me, leans down, dangling one edge into my sick-moist mouth.

“I’m just sick,” I say. “It’s nothing.”

She smiles, tapping the newspaper in my blackened hands.

“I keep waiting for them to write about that hamsa bracelet,” she says. “Put a picture of it to see if anyone recognizes it.”

“They don’t write about it because it’s not important,” I say. “They know it could’ve been left there anytime.”

“It could’ve been. Except it wasn’t,” she says.

“How do you know?” I say, a fresh round of dread rising in me.

“Because of where they found it,” she says. “Or didn’t our fearless leader tell you?”

“Where they found it…?” I say, fighting the moan in my voice.

“Under Sarge’s body,” she says. “PFC told me. Riddle me that.”

Her smile is so faint and yet so piercing, I feel I may go blind.

And the picture in my head, that nubbed carpet, Will’s spent body, head black like a mussel’s glistening shell.

Under
his body.

“It doesn’t matter,” I say, shaking my head quickly, my words coming faster and faster. “Maybe it was lying there from before, kicked there.”

“Hanlon,” she says, bending down, a waft of coconut and sweet vanilla, her girliest perfume, worn only on days of biggest trouble and mayhem. “You should be careful here. After all, you may have given it to her, but it is
your
bracelet.”

“Everyone knows I gave it to her,” I blurt. Which is true, but I realize I’ve given Beth a new gift. Shown her a crack in the armor.

I’m ashamed of myself.

Smiling down at me, she extends her hand, but I don’t take it.

“I know what she means to you, Addy,” she says, hand dropping. “But this is bigger than your virgin crush. You best watch your back.”

My head jerks up, smacking the wall tile.

“This is epic,” she continues. “This is too big to girl out on me. Sack up.”

She starts telling me about a show she saw on truTV about a man whose wife killed herself, or so it seemed. It turned out he’d murdered her.

“You know how they knew? Her teeth. They were all fucked up, like the gun had been forced in there.”

The blade through the center of me is sharp and exacting.

“What’s that got to do with anything?” I whisper.

“PFC and his captain ID’d the body. They said Sarge’s top front teeth were shattered. Caps, by the way. In case you want to know.”

I don’t say anything. I’m picturing Will confiding in us at Lanvers Peak, showing us his counterfeit smile, like taking off a beautiful mask and revealing a more beautiful one underneath.

“So someone jammed a gun in Will’s mouth,” she says, tapping her own front teeth, I can hear the clack, “against those ivory tusks of his and went…
POW.
”

Sliding back against the wall, I am too weary for her.

“That’s not right, Beth,” I say. “He jammed it there himself.”

“How do you know?” she says, laughing with a kind of giddiness rare and unnerving in Beth. “Were you there?”

In class, in the hallways, trying to shake off Beth’s sly hustle, the way she can whip me up into it with her, the way it can sweep through my body, like a fever.

What does she know? I think. She’s just guessing. Wanting.

But the bracelet, the bracelet.
Under
his body.

There are a million explanations, I tell myself. And Coach will tell me, she will.

This isn’t like before, when the boom of Beth’s voice in my head could drown everything else out.

Once it was, and I did what she said. Even last summer, at cheer camp, when she told me about Casey Jaye and how Casey was lying about me behind my back. Finally I believed her. I surrendered to it.

But not this time. There’s things I’ve seen that she hasn’t. Lanvers Peak, the three of us there, Coach, Will, and me. The way the two of them nestled around me, knowing I’d take care of them. The smell of burning leaves, the way we shared it, that sense of a lost world of beauty and wonder.

The three of us, what we shared. It was a fleeting thing, but it has a radiant power. It is something just mine, and I won’t have her take it from me.

And the boom of Beth’s voice isn’t enough to make me give it up.

Because Coach would never let anything happen to me.

You can,
she told us,
fall eleven feet and still land safely on a spring floor.

Except later that day, in English class, Beth’s text popping up in my phone. The link to the second article,
Hunt for Answers at The Towers.

It will not stop now.

It talks about police going door-to-door, interviewing every resident in the apartment building.

And about how lab technicians are going through everything found in the apartment, pulling up carpet samples.

My flip-flops, did they leave a print?

But I remember Coach, with what I now recognize as a stunning presence of mind, had us both remove our shoes. Staggering presence of mind, really.

But then the article says, in a throwaway line, the last in the piece:

“Detectives will be reviewing security camera footage of the lobby.”

Security camera footage of the lobby.

Coach and I padding out, her sneakers in hand, at two thirty a.m.

I feel a curtain fall over me.

A second text from Beth, just three words this time:

Truth will out!

In Coach’s office, blinds pulled tight.

She’s behind her desk, my phone lying on the blotter in front of her.

I have never cried in Coach’s office and I don’t intend to now.

“Beth sent this article to you?” she says, nodding to herself.

“Yes, yes,” I say, waving my finger at the phone screen. “Security camera, Coach.”

“What about it,” she says. “If they’d seen me on that camera, don’t you think they would have said so?”

What about
me,
I want to say. But don’t.

“Coach,” I say, trying again. “They think it’s murder.”

“It’s not murder,” Coach says, with such firmness, flicking my phone with her fingers, swatting at it like a fly. “You can’t let them scare you, Addy. The Guard’s looking out for themselves. It’s all about bad publicity.”

I don’t say anything.

“Addy,” Coach says. “Look at me.”

I do.

“Don’t you think I’d like to believe more than anything that Will didn’t do that to himself? To me?”

I nod.

Something creaks open in her, a place she does not want to go.

“We saw him, Addy,” she says, her fingertips to her mouth, her face sheeting white. “We saw what he did.”

I want to hold tight to her hand and say soft things.

“Addy,” she says feverishly, her fingers fisting. “You have to understand. People will always try to scare you into things. Scare you away from things. Scare you into not wanting things you can’t help wanting. You can’t be afraid.”

“Three days left!” shouts Mindy. “I hear scouts
always
sit high left in the bleachers. We gotta work toward that corner.”

My chest lifts. Our weird little universe where a word from Mindy Coughlin, her face red and brutish, can suddenly make me care again about the Big Game. Our qualifying shot.

But Coach is nowhere to be found.

“Why does she keep going away?” Tacy asks, mouth muffled with bandages. She’s standing next to Cori, who’s rotating her left wrist anxiously, taped tight where wavering Tacy’s foot lodged.

And Emily. Gimpy Emily, still boot-braced, near forgotten.

This array of casualties, and I wonder how I’m still standing.

We happy few, we band of bitches, Beth used to say. Don’t you forget it.

As if on cue, Beth strolls in front of us, hip-slinging gangsta.

“Let’s get started, kitties,” Beth says. “The Celts wait for no sad-ass chicken hearts.”

This, I think, is good for her. I think,
Yes. Yes, Beth. Take it and let it feed you. Feed off this for a while, please.

“The way to win is to sell it,” Beth shouts, her voice rising high and thrumming in all our ears.

“Whip your heads,” she says, and we do.

“Make your claps sharp,” she says, and we do.

“Make your faces like you’re wired for pleasure,” she says, and we gleam ecstatic.

“Give ’em the best blow-job smiles you got,” she says, and if she had a bullwhip, she’d be slapping it against our thighs. “Turn it on, on, on.”

We ride rough and work hard for her. We have three days until the final game and we have to call up another JV whippoorwill and we will work hard for Beth because we want to show our hot stuff, our epic impudence, our unholy awesomeness in front of the sneering Celts masses on Monday night.

But most of all, we work hard because it raises a din, a rabid, high-pitched din that can nearly drown out the sound of the current and coming chaos. The sense that everything is changing in ways we can’t guess and that nothing can stop it.

Or maybe that’s not it at all. Maybe all we’re trying to drown out is the terrifying quiet, the sense that all there is to hear is our own thin echoes. Our sense that Coach is slipping from our clasping hands, that maybe she is already gone. That there is no center anymore and maybe there never was.

All we have is Beth. But that is something, her thunder filling up all the silence.

In the locker room, the din dissolving, girls scattered and then gone, I find myself alone, or nearly so.

With no Coach, everyone leaves a mess. This is how it was under Beth before. Flair strewn about, rolling empties of zero-carb rockstar and sugar-free monster, tampon wrappers and crushed goji berries. Even one cobwebby thong.

Bobby pins crunching under my feet, I walk through, surveying the damaged girlness.

My heart still hammering from the practice, I’m thinking of how hardcore Beth was out there today, like I haven’t seen her since sophomore year, when it still beat in her so hard. When she hadn’t gotten distracted by petty grievances and her own miseries of life, her own creeping boredom.

Maybe she has never been this good, cared so much.

This is what Coach has done for her,
I think.
She helps us all.

Then, lurking in the open doorway of Coach’s office, she is there. The shadow she throws seems so large that her five feet swallow the office hall. Beth.

“Cap,” I say, wanting to help sate her, “you bled us today.”

Her back to me, I can’t see her face.

I walk closer.

I’m hoping, praying for elation.

I mean, isn’t she the Coach Itself now, for the moment at least?

“Beth,” I say again. “Return of the King.”

The sunfall flooding everything, her whole body lit darkly gold, I stop a few feet from her ambered back.

“Beth,” I say, “you got everything.”

Finally, slowly, a half turn of her head. A whisper of her profile, darkened by her shudder of black hair.

That’s when I see that nothing’s been had at all, nothing’s been saved. She thought this would be it, and it wasn’t.

“The sun’s down and the moon’s pretty,” she says, her voice hushed. “It’s time to ramble.”

And I say yes. Of course I say yes.