Dare Me (13 page)

“Girl looks out for her Coach, like she’s a mama tit,” Beth says to PFC, shrugging. “Point is, scrub, we all wanna protect our top dogs.”

The PFC grates the back of his scarlet neck till it blazes, then nods, white at the mouth. White at the mouth like he’s a little scared of both of us. Like he might need to start whistling again.

That word
homicide
snakes through my brain, its tail snapping back and forth.

Walking side by side back to the car, Beth twirls a finger through the bottom of my braid.

“Foul play,”
I say, eyes rolling.

“He’s no JV runt, Hanlon,” she says. “You get more honey from that hive if you buzz softly in his ear. You with your fucking chainsaw. Bringing up the Comfort Inn.”

“I studied at the feet of the master lumberjack,” I say, sounding like no one if not Beth.

“But our goal isn’t to intimidate into silence,” she says. “It’s to find out what happened.” She looks at me. “Isn’t that right?”

Of course this is neither of our goals.

“And I’m sure Coach above all wants to know what happened to her man,” she says, dipping her head closer to mine, so enjoying all this. “I’m sure she’ll be grateful to know. I’m surprised you’re not more eager to help her.”

“I don’t want him getting any of us in trouble,” I say. “I’m looking out for the squad.”

“Spoken like a born captain,” she says, grinning. “I always knew you wanted to be captain.”

“I never did,” I say, turning from her to continue down the trail. It’s so dark now, and I can hear her behind me.

“Of course not,” she is saying, and I can hear a grin on her.

She’s wrong, I never did. Not once. It was hard enough being lieutenant.

“Besides,” she says, sidling next to me, “it
does
seem weird, now that I think of it. A man in the prime of his life. And
bang, bang,
puts a gun to his temple?”

“His mouth,” I correct her.

As the words come out I feel myself go ice cold.

“His mouth?” Beth asks, lightning quick.

My whole life with Beth, under the hot lights. Standing beside her as she hotlights someone else.

“That’s what I read, I think,” I stumble. “Wasn’t it his mouth?”

With her or against her, you better be on. Game on. Like when you’re out there, grandstands thrumming, sneakers squeaking on polished floor, and you gotta fake-smile till it hurts. Till you want to die from it.

Ramrod that back, hoist those tits, be ready, always. Because she always is.

“I don’t know, Addy,” she says, her eyes on me. “Was it Sarge’s mouth?”

“No,” I say. “I’ve got it all wrong. I’m blood-sugar bottomed-out.” I begin tugging my braid loose, bobby pins flying, scattering to the ground.

I can almost feel her disappointment at how poorly I’ve kept up with her, stayed in the game.

For hours after, I’m cursing myself for ever thinking I could run with Beth, for thinking I could keep up.

If you could have seen him, I want to say to Beth, you would know it was suicide. You would see. If you saw that dark smudge where his face was…you would feel his desperation and surrender.

Wouldn’t you?

Is that what I felt?

I’m not so sure.

I think briefly, darkly, of that apartment, legions deep now in my head. A glugging, boggy cove in the center of the earth.

Still, to me, it had felt like stepping in the marsh swirl of a man underwater, a man drowning.

Hadn’t it?

It had felt bad. That’s what I knew. It had felt like the worst place I’d ever been—and now that place, it was inside of me.

That night, at last, Coach calls.

“Addy, why don’t you come over?” The warmth in her voice, and the desperation. “Stay at my place tonight. Matt’s out of town, remember? It’s so lonely.”

I can’t guess at the haunted feeling in her, given how it is with me. I’m glad to know she’s feeling these things, because you’d never know it to look at her.

“I’ll make us avocado shakes and we’ll sing Caitlin to sleep and drag the velvet blankets out on the deck and wrap ourselves in them and look at the stars. Or something,” she says, trying so hard.

I’d’ve dreamed of such courtship a month ago, and something about it does speak to me even amid all this, maybe even especially. It’s a singular and troubling stake we share, but it binds us always, doesn’t it? A stake that gives me new panics by the hour, yes, but now, for the first time, it warms me too.

So I go, but Caitlin’s already asleep and Coach doesn’t have any avocados, and it’s raining slimily on the deck.

As I dangle on a kitchen island stool, without purpose, she makes a grocery list. She pays an electricity bill. She wrings out kitchen towels, twisting them across her hands and staring vaguely out the window over the sink.

It’s almost like Coach doesn’t want me there at all now that I’m here.

It’s as if I remind her of bad things.

Once, I come back from the bathroom and see her looking at my phone, resting on the kitchen island.

“Can you just turn it off?” she says. “You didn’t tell anyone you were here, right?”

I say no.

She pauses, fingertips still grazing the phone. Watching as I turn it all the way off, waiting for the screen to go blank.

“Oh, Addy,” she finally says, “let’s do something, anything.”

And this is how we end up in the backyard close to midnight, doing backbends in the rain. Extended triangles. Dolphin plank poses.

There’s a holiness to it, the wind chimes on the deck carrying us off to the deepest Himalayan climes, or wherever the world is peaceful and clear.

We sweat even in the cold, and I catch, amid a streak of light from some passing car out front, Coach’s face looking untroubled and free.

The crying starts just after, when we’re back in the house. Walking down the hallway, she bends over at the waist and sobs come hard and hurtful. I hold onto her shoulders, their tensile thew rocking in my hands.

She stops in the middle of the hall and I try to hold on and she cries for a very long time.

I sleep next to her that night, under that big dolloping duvet.

We face opposite directions and I think, this is where Matt French sleeps, and I think how big the bed is and how far away Coach is, the duvet snowbanking in the middle, and if she’s still crying, I wouldn’t know.

It makes me feel lonely for both of them.

Sometime in the night, I hear her talking, her voice hard and strangled.

“How could you do this to me?” she snarls. “How?”

I glance over at her, and her eyes almost look open, her fists wrenching the covers.

I don’t know who she’s talking to.

People say all kinds of things when they’re dreaming.

“I’m not doing anything,” I whisper, as if she were talking to me.

THURSDAY: FOUR DAYS TO FINAL GAME

Turning my phone
on, seven a.m., I see our squad Facebook page studded with new wall posts, from Brinnie, Mindy, RiRi:

Monday=FINAL GAME!

Go Eagles!

Slaussen, you better KICK ass! Our ticket to the tourney is on YOU!

I long to be a part of it. I long for it.

I find Coach in the kitchen, making toaster oven waffles for Caitlin, who chews on the bottom of her pigtail and watches the oven’s orange glow, hypnotized.

“Did the phone wake you?” she asks, spoon in hand, slicing a banana over Caitlin’s pearly lavender plate.

It’s then that I realize it did.

“I have to go talk to them at the station again,” she says, her eyes graying. “In a half hour.”

“They’re talking to the Guardsmen,” I say quietly, as if Caitlin might understand if I spoke more loudly. “The redhead PFC. Tibbs.”

The spoon, banana-slicked, slips from her grasp.

She pauses a beat, her hand still outstretched.

I go to reach for the spoon, but her hand shoots out to stop me.

“They have to talk to his men,” she says. “I figured on that.”

“But, Coach,” I say, with as much knowingness as I can impart. “No one wants to get anyone in trouble.
No one
does.”

She looks at me, searchingly, and I’m not sure why I’m being so mysterious—something about Beth, eyes on the back of her ponytail, something about Caitlin’s blinking stare.

“There’s plenty of trouble to go around,” she says, holding my gaze.

“Right,” I say. “I’m sure that’s what everyone realizes.”

“Is that what PFC Tibbs realizes?” she says.

“I think so,” I say.

But Coach must see something on me, some dread gathering under my skin.

“So what might make the PFC share such details with you?” she asks, her sticky hands still lifted in front of her, her body frozen.

“He shares them with Beth,” I say, after the quickest of pauses. It still feels queasy to tell her, but it would feel queasy not to.

It takes her a second for this new bit of knowledge to descend.

“It’s Beth,” I repeat.

“Got it,” she says, those slippery hands still raised up, like a doctor ready for surgery. Ready to lay his hands upon your heart.

In the first-floor corridor, after second period, after her visit to the police station:

“It’s fine,” Coach says, brisking by me. Her French braid is very tight, temple vein pulsing. “No problems. It’s all good.”

After lunch, Beth finds me in the school library, where I never go and where no one should ever have thought to look. But she looks.

“Back in my day, libraries had books,” she says, as we internet surf side by side at tall terminals, “and we walked five miles in the snow to school.”

“So that’s how you got such thick ankles,” I say, clicking aimlessly through sundry nothingness. Celebrity crotch shots, Thinspiration: Secrets to Fasting Only Anas Know.

“The PFC went in this morning,” she says. “He told me his sad, sad song over malteds.”

“And?” I say, twirling my finger in ballerina circles over the touch pad.

“He said they’d called Coach in.”

“Yeah, she told me. It went fine.” I don’t look at her. I don’t like the feeling that’s coming, that prickling in my forehead.

“Ah…,” she says, and though I’m not looking, I know she’s smiling, can hear the gum clicking to the corner of her grinning mouth.

It reminds me of the time Beth’s mother swore to me over her morning coffee that Beth was born with sharp teeth.

Better to drink the blood of JVs,
Beth had said.

“So,” Beth says now, “what has Coach told you about the hamsa bracelet?”

“What hamsa bracelet?” I say, fingers to my forehead.

“The one they found in Will’s apartment.”

I click on the ad for Wu Long Vanishing Tea.

“Wait a minute,”
she says, smacking her head. “Didn’t you have one of those bracelets? The one you gave to Coach. Back in your puppy dog phase. To ward off the evil eyes of wronged husbands, I suppose.”

I look at her. I hadn’t even realized Beth knew about the bracelet.

“What about it?”

“Well, I guess she must have left it at Will’s, at some point,” Beth says. “During some…encounter.”

“Lots of people have those bracelets,” I say.

She looks at me, and something pinches in my chest, a memory of something, a connection. But I can’t hold on to it. She’s watching me so closely, but I can’t grab it.

“Do they think it’s hers?” I say.

“
Is
it hers, Addy?” Beth asks, her left eyebrow lifting. “She must have told you they asked her about it. You two thick as thieves.”

“We haven’t really had a chance to talk,” I say, holding tight to the edge of the terminal.

“Well, she’s pretty busy,” Beth says, with a slow nod. “Four days to the Big Game and all.”

Turning away from the terminal, she flings one golden leg onto the nearest library tabletop.

“Look how tight I am,” she says, surveying herself. “I’ll grant Coach that. But you think Li’l Tacy Cottontail’s up for Top Girl? The balance is all. One of her calves is bigger than the other. Did you ever notice that?”

“No.”

“I bet you have. Your balance is impeccable. Four inches shorter, you would’ve been a perfect Top Girl.”

I pause a second.

“The PFC doesn’t know she has one, does he?” I ask.

“Has what?” Beth asks, maddeningly, surveying my legs now with her cold captain-appraisal gaze.

“A hamsa bracelet,” I say, fighting a panicky tilt in my voice.

“Not now, Adelaide,” she says. “Not yet.”

I grab my books and start to walk away.

“You’re going to have to forget how pretty and interested she is in you, Addy,” she calls after me.

Walking out, I hear her all the way.

“Tighten that gut, Addy. Lock those legs. Smile, smile, smile!”

Everyone is looking at me, but I only look straight ahead.

“Remember what old Coach Templeton used to say, Addy!”

I push open the shuddering glass exit doors.

“A good cheerleader,” she is calling out, “is not measured by the height of her jumps but by the span of her spirit.”

THURSDAY: AFTER SCHOOL

“Four days, bitches!!”
shouts Mindy.

RiRi is doing waist bends, flashing her panties, this time lined with sparkles.

The JV is clicking through YouTube on her laptop for the Celts squad’s stunts.

Paige Shepherd is twanging—
“Ima go for the gold, heart is in control, I’m a go, I’m a go I’m a go getta”
—lifting one long leg into a Bow ’n’ Arrow.

Cori Brisky shushes her hair up into her trademark extra-long white-blond pony whip, famous across three school districts.

Everything is as it ever was.

Still ground-bound since her spectacular fall, gimpy Emily is passing around the temporary tattoos she ordered for the squad. She has one on the apple of either cheek and she’s dotted her knee brace with them. Which all seems sad to me, like she’s our mascot. No one respects a mascot.

We all feel sorry for her. She can’t even hall-stalk with us, can’t keep up with that club boot, and has already become a recruiting target of lacrosse players and the golf team, which could not be sadder, and of the predatory courtship of the field hockey furies, promising to get her knees skinned.

I remember, sort of, being friends with her. Holding her hair back while she gagged herself pea-shoot thin. Even calling her at night instead of Beth, confiding things. But now I don’t know what we’d talk about.

At three twenty Coach, chin high, strolls through the doors to the gym.

Beth, standing in front of the mirror, doesn’t even look up, too busy oil-slicking her lashes with a mascara brush, no cares furrowing her face.

“I have some news, guys,” she says.

I reach out to hold onto my locker door.

“I heard from my source at State Quals. There’s gonna be a scout at Monday’s game. We rock them, we’re rocking Regionals next year.”

Everyone whoops and woo-hoos, jumping on the bleachers, grabbing each other around the necks like the ball-ers do.

Poor boot-braced Emily bursts into tears.

“By next year you’ll be flying again,” RiRi says, hand to her shoulder.

“But not on Monday,” she whimpers. “That won’t be mine.”

“Let’s focus,” Coach says, clapping her hands sharply.

We snap front.

Looking at her, I can’t fathom it. I’d never guess anything else was going on at all. She is ready to ride us. She is sweatless and bolt-straight.

“We need to think about the Celts,” Mindy says.

The Celts squad has serious game, famous for their facial expressions, head bobs and tongues stuck out and dropped jaws and wide eyes when their Flyers hit, when they spring back, the crowd gasping ah, ah, ah.

“They do two-girl Awesomes,” Brinnie Cox says with a sigh, which is how she says everything. “A girl my size can catch both the Flyer’s feet in one palm.”

“Their facials are hot,” RiRi admits.

“I don’t care about their wiggling tongues or bouncing ponytails,” says Coach. “I don’t care about the Celts at all. All I care about is that Regionals scout. The scout’s gotta see our star power.”

We all look uneasily at Tacy.

“Your Flyer isn’t your key to the castle,” Coach says. “It’s about the squad. You gotta show you’re the posse straight from hell. And there’s only one way to do it. We’re going to give that scout something that will guarantee our slot. We’re going to show her a two-two-one.”

The two-two-one.

It will be our shining achievement, if we nail it.

Three stories high of golden girls, two Bottom Bases holding up two Middle Bases in shoulder stands, the Flyer tossed through the center, Bottom Bases platforming her feet, the Middle Bases’ arms lifted to hold her arms outstretched, crucifixion style. Spotters standing behind, waiting for the Flyer’s death-defying Deadman fall.

It’s illegal in competition, but not at a game.

And it’s the kind of stunt you need to nail to make it to Regionals. To a tourney.

“Cap’n,” Coach says, looking up at Beth, halfway up the bleachers again, her hovering black presence. “All yours today. Drill them hard.”

She tosses Beth the whistle.

Beth, one eyebrow raised, catches it.

In an instant, a flare of energy seems to shoot up her body, that sullen slouch uncoiling for the first time in months, since…I can’t even remember.

Coach has just handed her the Big Stick, and thank god she still seems to think it worth taking.

“Gimme some handsprings, bitches,” Beth says, making her slow, willowy way down the stands, arms dangling, snapping her fingers low.

“Don’t fuck with me, RiRi,” she says. “Loose limbs may fly for your Saturday night specials, but I need you tight as a cherry. Time-travel me back.”

So Beth wrangles us for a while, and it does feel good. And Beth is so on, so animated.

She is enthroned and magnificent.

At some point, I see Coach slink into her office.

Later, while Beth’s busy trash-talking Tacy for a weak back tuck, calling her a sad little pussy, I slip over and peer in, see Coach on the phone, her hand over her eyes.

I think: it’s the cops. It’s the cops. What now?

An hour in, we’re ready to run the two-two-one pyramid.

Because I’m not too big and not too small, I’m a Middle Base, one of the two shoulder stands in the middle.

Beneath me stands eagle-shouldered Mindy Coughlin, my feet curled around her collarbone, her body bracing.

But I think it’s worse for me, no floor beneath me, and ninety-four pounds of quaking panic above.

Once we’re up, Tacy will get rocketed between RiRi and me, and we will grab her legs and lock her body in place.

Then she’ll wow them all, flipping backwards into a Deadman, falling into the waiting embrace of the cradle-armed spotters fifteen feet below.

Everyone will gasp, grip their bleacher seats.

The Deadman, that’s our moment of shock and awe.

Despite what Coach says, it really is all about the Flyer.

We can hold her steady as she comes, but if Tacy wobbles, twists, turns the wrong way: snap, crackle, pop.

Which is probably why she looks like a doomed tail gunner waiting to be wedged into a quaking turret.

“You all need to man up for Slaussen,” Beth tells us. “Or she’ll be mat-kill. Two years ago, at the Viking game, I saw a girl jiggle just an inch up there. Her girls didn’t have her. Smack! Her neck hit the ground, skidded so hard that a piece of her blond ponytail ripped from her scalp.”

Tacy’s face goes from green to white to gray. Beth, with that power to annihilate with a single breath. Two months ago, Tacy galloped hard at Beth’s side, lackey under her mighty sway. Oh, the turns of fortune…

Eyes on Tacy’s toned legs, which look like mini-butterfingers, Beth shakes her head.

I realize she’s right. One calf is bigger than the other.

“You always were such a hoodrat,” Beth says, shaking her head. “Always quick to hoist your legs in the air for my sloppy seconds. But I guess you were only hoisting the left one.”

Beth kneels down on the mat in front of Tacy’s dainty body.

Then, she wets her finger and runs it along Tacy’s thigh and calf.

We all observe, like watching a gang recruit get jumped in.

“I thought so,” Beth says, rising and wiggling her index finger, smudged with what looks to me like Mystic Island Radiance. “All the spray tan in the world won’t give you what you don’t have. You either have muscle or you have twig. Or, in your case, Q-tip.”

“I can do it, Beth,” Tacy says, voice pitching high. “Coach knows. I’ve earned my spot.”

“Then let’s see it, meat,” she says, standing back. “Make a believer out of me.”

Stepping back, she turns the speakers up and our game music, bawdy pop with baby-doll vocals cut through with a molasses-throated rap,
“Get down, girl, go ’head get down.”

I swing up to Middle Base, above Mindy’s ramming shoulder, her hand foisting up, palm spreading over my bottom.

At that moment, Coach walks back into the gym.

“You got it, Slaussen,” Coach nods, strolling past Beth to the back of the pyramid. Hearing her, such a relief. “You nailed it once, you’ll nail it again.”

Coach inexplicably becoming the good cop in this strange new world.

But RiRi, the other Middle Base, and I feel a joint twinge, our eyes on Tacy’s legs, like little cinnamon sticks that might snap.

When we raise her up, air-puff light, she is shaking like a bobblehead doll, like Emily was. I can feel her try to make herself tight, can feel it radiating through me, but the cartoon terror eyes put a chill in me.

“Ride that bitch,” Beth’s voice booms at us. “Ride it.”

Our arms shaking, we’ve got to lock it in place, but it’s not locking. It’s like trying to make a pair of gummy worms stand straight.

We bring her back down for a second.

“She can’t do it,” Beth pronounces. “Either no two-two-one or we need a new Flyer.”

We are all quiet.

Suddenly, RiRi’s voice rises from behind me. “What about Addy?”

I turn around and look at her, my heart speeding up. She smiles and winks.

“What if Addy were Top Girl?”

Coach looks over at me, eyebrows raised. I feel Beth’s gaze on me too.

“Addy doesn’t like to be on top,” Beth says, poker-faced.

“Hey!” Tacy cries. “I’ve been flying all season.”

Coach nods. “It’s something to think about, long haul,” she says. “But for now we need Addy right where she is, in the middle. She’s our spine.”

I don’t like all the eyes on me. I wish RiRi had never said anything.

It doesn’t matter anyway because, a second later, everyone is just looking at Tacy again.

“She can’t, Coach,” says Beth, as simply as she’s ever said anything.

My hands fresh off Tacy’s kindling hipbone, I feel certain Beth is right.

“Look at her,” Beth scoffs. “She’s not trained up.”

These are fighting words and we all know it. It’s spit in the eye to any coach.

“She just wants my spot, Coach,” Tacy nearly whimpers. “I can do it. Elevator me up again.”

“Slaussen?” Coach looks over at Tacy. “Are you ready?”

“Yes!”

Beth sighs loudly. “What happens,” she practically sings, “when a pretty young coach takes a ragtag team of misfits and feebs under her wing? Why, they fly, fly, fly.”

Coach looks at her.

“We just needed someone to believe in us,” Beth finishes.

“Stop gaming her, Cassidy,” Coach says, staring her down, duel-at-dawn, but her tone still flat, toneless, “or I’m gonna ground-bound you instead.”

“Look at her leg,” Beth says, “like a wishbone twanging.”

“Cassidy,” Coach says, like she’s forgotten the caution she’s supposed to use with Beth, or she’s just stopped caring. “When you start showing me you can do more than flash your tits and treat your mouth like a sewer, then maybe we’ll have something to talk about.”

Don’t, Coach,
I think.
Don’t.

“You heard the coach,“ Beth says, turning to us with a smile. “Load her up and let her fall.”

The music thumping again, Beth counting off, Mindy and Cori line up, Bottom Bases. Spotters Paige and a JV stand behind them and load up the second level, RiRi and me, our bodies springing up to shoulder stands, their palms cradling our calves.

Facing each other, we lift Tacy between us, throwing her above us into a stand, our arms lifted high, hands tight on her wrists. Her arms outstretched, Jesus-style, her left leg knee-bent in front of her, the girls beneath grasping her right foot to hold her in place.

For a second, she is solid.

Seven, eight,
Beth counting off until the Deadman and it is time. Time for us to drop her backwards into a stiff-spined horizontal fall. Ready for Paige, the JV, all her spotters to catch her down below.

We let go.

Her eyes wild, Tacy drops, but her body seems to rubberize, limbs like spaghetti. As her hand grapples for me, I feel myself sliding down with her, Paige and Cori, on the ground, shouting, “Slaus, here, here, here. Hold it!”

But she plunges, our hands empty.

The sickly sound as Tacy, still half in Paige’s sloping arms, hits the mat, face first.

RiRi and I still on high, I think my knees might give, but I hear Coach’s voice, iron smooth, “Hanlon, slow down that dismount,” as RiRi and I sink down.

I feel something clamping on me, and Beth is right there, her hand gripping my arm all the way down. Depositing me safely on the mat, feet first.

Coach is on the floor with Tacy, strewn from the spotters’ tangled arms, her feet still in their grip even as her head, neck tilted, her chin split wide open, swabs the mat.

“At least she can fall well,” RiRi mutters.

Her mouth opening in a strangled sob, Tacy’s teeth blare bright red.

“You come at the king,” Beth says, “you best not miss.”

RiRi and I take Tacy to Nurse Vance, who slaps on the butterfly bandages and tells me to take Tacy to the hospital for stitches, which sends her into a new round of sobs.

“Your modeling career is over,” I say.

Walking to her locker, Tacy is purple-lipped and cotton-tufted, crying about the Game and the scouts and how she’s
got
to do the two-two-one, she’s the only one light enough, which isn’t even true, and Coach damn well better let her cheer, no matter what she looks like.

Then, a new sob choking in her, she takes a deep breath.

“But it should be Beth anyway,” she whispers, dramatically. “Beth’s Top Girl.”

For a second, I hear RiRi.
What about Addy? What if Addy were Top Girl?

But it never has been me, has it? I never wanted it to. I was never a stunter, I was a spotter, a hoister. That’s what I am.

And Top Girls were different from the rest of us.

I think of Beth last year, after the Norsemen game, all of us drinking with the players up on the ridge, and Brian Brun thrusting her above his head, hands gripping around her ankles, her feet tucked in his palms, then one leg flung behind her, rendering her celebrated Bow ’n’ Arrow, as she spun and lifted her right leg straight in the air, slipping it behind her glossy head, making one beautiful line of Bethness, all of us gasping.