Dare Me (20 page)

“By then, I was Flyer, I was Top Girl,” Tacy says. “But Beth warned me I’d better do what she said, or she’d make it bad for me.”

Tacy’s voice goes baleful, the panic spiraling back through her eyes.

“She said I’d better not make her unhappy because I oughta know that she’s never unhappy alone.”

No, she’s not, is she.

“So I gave in,” Tacy says, sighing. “But I felt sorry for Coach. And then when the Sarge died, I felt rotten. I thought maybe Beth used that picture in some evil way. And that Sarge killed himself on account of it. Is that what happened, Addy?”

“I don’t know what happened,” I say, finally.

She stares up at me, glassy-eyed.

“Tacy,” I say, “you better show me that picture.”

“I deleted it,” she says, too quickly.

“You did not,” I say.

Sighing again, she reaches into the pocket of her yoga pants and pulls out her tiny phone, a searing purple.

The image on the screen looks like it was shot through a fuzzed screen door.

You can see Will’s uniform, the green suit coat, the gold buttons shimmering, the braid on the lifted sleeve, and part of his face, the rest concealed by the back of a female head, a swamp of dark hair and bare shoulderblades.

For a second, I think it’s Coach. It looks so much like Coach.

But then I recognize Beth’s green hoodie, the one slipping down, his palm spread across her back.

The look on Will’s face, how could I really name it, everything so pixilated into blurred nothingnesss.

His face, though, seems to me the saddest I’ve ever seen.

Both stricken and despairing.

Like the pictures you see of people standing in front of their burning houses, like one I saw once of a dad holding his nightgowned little girl in his arms, trying to put on her shoe, watching his house burn to the ground.

And I know, just like that, if Tacy had been standing on the other side of the truck, if her camera lens captured Beth’s eyes instead, it would show the same thing.

The picture, I can’t stop looking at it. Because it seems to me suddenly filled with truth. Because it seems so beautiful.

“I never wanted to get anyone into trouble,” Tacy says. “But Beth, she scares me. I mean, she’s always been scary. But since all this, it’s been different. It’s like she’s gone up three levels of scary.”

I stop looking at the photo and look at Tacy instead.

Things begin to shimmer into view.

“So you just gave Beth the photo and that was it?”

“That’s what I said,” Tacy says, flipping over, lying back on the mat beneath her. “Isn’t it?”

Resting on elbows, she stretches her skinny little toothpick legs, observing them, admiring herself.

Looking down at her, all I can think of is the time she’s cost me, these collusions, her weakness. The fact that this little tinkerbell got to be Top Girl.

Something in that puffball face of hers and I can’t stop myself, my foot pressing against her face. Pushing into her blighted chin, still vein-mottled from her fall. I push it hard, harder than I meant to, its softness giving way.

“Addy,” Tacy moans, scratching at me with her fingers. “Addy, what are you—”

“You sent that picture to Mr. French, didn’t you?” I say, my voice husky and surprising.

Hands flinging up, she tries to shove my leg away, but she can’t.

“Yes, yes,” she whimpers, tears coming in long syrupy strands.

I drop my foot back to the floor. And she tells me the rest.

How Beth got Matt French’s number from Coach’s phone and made Tacy send it, claiming she didn’t have a new phone yet.

And that Beth wrote the text herself:
Look at the kind of woman you’re married to. Look at the trash she opens her legs for.

Beth was always good with words. And knowing the times when simplest was best.

“But the picture didn’t mean anything,” Tacy insists. “A dumb prank. I guess Beth probably thought Mr. French would make her quit, or Coach would get fired. But wouldn’t it have made more sense to send it to Principal Sheehan?”

I shake my head at this stupid girl.

Heels of hands to her mascaraed eyes, she whispers, “Do you think that blurry little picture could have had something to do with all this? With Sarge and everything?”

I’m thinking of Matt French reading the text and looking at that picture. I’m guessing what he really thought:

Not,
There’s some man with one of my wife’s cheerleaders.

No, instead, There’s some man with
my
wife.

“And now Beth won’t back off,” she says, her hand back on my ankle, holding on to it, but eyes fixed straight ahead, at the locker room doors. “She keeps saying I better not tell anyone what we did. At practice the other day, when I fell, it was like she was showing me what she could do to me.”

Her gaze locked on the doors, fiercely vibrating from the school furnace’s blast, she doesn’t even see me click a button on her phone and text the picture to myself.

“She showed me all right,” Tacy says. “But I still told you, didn’t I? I told Addy Hanlon. I guess I’m not such a cottontail. I guess I’m not the little pussy she says I am.”

Her head dipping, as if from the weight of her ponytail slinging forward, she lets her body go lax.

“I was always afraid of you,” she says, touching her cheek lightly, the tread of my shoe dancing faintly there. “Even more than Beth. I heard what you did to her. That scar on her ear.”

This time, I don’t correct it. What I’d done to Beth. What
I
had done to Beth, the scariest badass we ever knew.

I fold my arms and glance down at Tacy. She looks so small.

“I just wanted to be Flyer,” she says. “I’m going to be again.”

“Sure you are,” I say, handing her phone back to her.

She looks up at me as she takes it, and something passes over her face.

Dropping her phone into her pocket, she flings her hand upward, as if I should help her to her feet.

“Sure I am,” she repeats, brightening. “I mean, you’re gonna bust Beth now, right?”

A smile wiggling there, she adds, “Then I’ll be Flyer again.”

I was there, but I didn’t do anything.
That’s what Coach had said.

I was with him, but I found him too. It’s all true.

Matt French’s phone blips, he looks at the screen, he sees that picture, reads those words:

Look at the kind of woman you’re married to. Look at the trash she opens her legs for.

A mistake that also happens to be true.

So Matt French, he sees the military uniform and goes hunting. Finds out who the recruiter is. Or he just checks his wife’s phone, her e-mails, something. Anything.

He finds out where this recruiter lives, and he drives out there, to that empty steel tower on the edge of nothing, and he finds his wife and her lover.

And…and…

And he wants me to know.

And then there’s Coach, the alibi she built for me.

“So last Monday you were there with your coach and her husband?” the detective had asked.

“Yes,” I said.

Coach protecting Matt French, Matt French protecting Coach. The things between them, their webbed history and hidden hearts, and so instead of turning on each other, they are raising the ramparts high. The two of them locked in something blood-deep. Who knows what lies between them now? Wrists crossed, head to head, they are closing so tight, but they need me.

They do.

And Beth. There is Beth.

MONDAY: TWELVE HOURS TO FINAL GAME

Work hard and
believe in yourself.
That’s what they always tell you. But that’s not really it at all. It’s the things you can’t say aloud, the knowledge that what you’re doing, climbing high, jumping, hurling yourself into the air, hooking arms, legs around each other to create something that will collapse with the bobble of one knee, a twist of a wrist.

Standing back,
Emily said, saying the thing you’re never supposed to say,
it’s like you’re trying to kill each other and yourself.

The knowing that what you are all doing, together, is the most delicate thing, fragile as spun glass, and driven by magic and abandon, your body doing things your head knows it can’t, your bodies locking together to defy gravity, logic, death itself.

If they told you these things, you would never join cheer. Or maybe you would.

In the morning, it takes a long time under the showerhead to get my blood moving. To pinprick my skin to life. To get my head game.

I stand under the bracing gush for so long, looking at my body, counting every bruise. Touching every tender place. Watching the swirl at my feet.

I’m really just trying to jack up my heart.

I think,
This is my body, and I can make it do things. I can make it move, flip, fly.

After the squall of a blow-dryer, I gather my hair, sliding in bobby pin after bobby pin, pulling it all into place.

I stand in front of the mirror, my face bare, flushed, taut.

Slowly, my hands lifting, the sticky nozzle, dusty brushes, oily wands waving in front of my face, fuchsia streaking up my cheeks, my lashes stiffened to brilliant black, my hair stiff, gleaming, pin-tucked.

The perfumed mist, thick in my throat, settling.

I look in the mirror.

And it’s finally me there, and I look like no one I’ve ever seen before.

“
Game Day—Kill Celts
!!” shrieks the banner across the school entrance, a tissue paper eagle, wings stiff and high, rising behind it.

I let my heart rise to it.

The morning passes, I don’t see Beth at all, and Coach has called in sick. That’s all anyone can talk about.

She’s abandoned us twice, three times over. We are losing count.

She doesn’t care about us at all.

She hates us.

“What did we do wrong?” the JV girl sobs, pressing her face against her locker door. “What did we do?”

School skitters by without touching me, and Tacy, face bleach-white, will not meet my gaze.

I am thinking of things, of the Abyss and its greasy stare and how I won’t blink. I can’t.

At three fifteen we are in the gym, jumping high.

“Scout’s a-coming!” RiRi hollers. “Wait till she sees what we got!”

Everyone screams.

And it feels like God touching me. What would I do without this, because here I am, propelling to heaven itself, soles resting on Mindy’s knotty shoulders—or on the floor, knees sponging, lifting Brinnie Cox, nimble feet in my palm, surging her straight to God.

That feeling, it is God’s greatest gift.

Just like that adderall. Found that morning in the corner of my hoodie pocket from a long ago act of Beth’s generosity, it gallops through me, and I know I can do anything.

When you have nothing inside you, you feel everything more, and feel you can control all of it.

With Jesus in my heart, and with that seismic blast, who could stop my ascent? Any of ours?

In the locker room, forty minutes to game time, we are Vegas showgirl–spangled. The air thick with biofreeze and tiger balm and hairspray and the sugared coconut of tawny body sprays, it is like being in a soft cocoon of sugar and love.

There’s RiRi, slinging her curling iron like a gunfighter, shaping the spring-shot ponytail, its helix curls.

There’s Paige Shepherd, temp tattoo blazing across her tan face, kicking her leg high and twisting, tumbling into Mindy’s arms, her wrists black duct-taped like Roman gladiator cuffs.

See Cori Brisky, rubbing flexall on her numbing wrists, her smile showing all her teeth, and how sharp they are, and I know that there’s a jungle princess in there who’s ready for hot blood.

See even shell-shocked Emily, our fallen comrade, fingers glazed with icy hot, running it across Mindy’s armor shoulder blades, whispering in her ear.

And there I am. If you could see me—tall, tight, lightsome, and powerful, flipping my back tucks on the slippery tile, afraid of nothing, no one. Just try to stop me.

That’s what people never understand: They see us hard little pretty things, brightly lacquered and sequin-studded, and they laugh, they mock, they arouse themselves. They miss everything.

You see, these glitters and sparkle dusts and magicks? It’s war paint, it’s feathers and claws, it’s blood sacrifice.

But where’s our fearsome leader? Either of them?

We need somebody to gather all this hectic energy, to link these pulsing organs into one powerful, unstoppable body.

What if that somebody were me?

Moving girl to girl, I start back-stroking, French-braiding, tiger-balming, offering rallying words,
C’mon girls, let’s show them what we got.

I even talk, for the first time ever, to that poor yellow peep JV, the one who will have to fly tonight if Beth doesn’t show, the one shivering like a downy chick.

I know I can lift her, I can.

She’s not a girl but a butterfly resting on my fingertips.

But then there’s a clatter from the backdoors, and a flurry of whoops and bratty squeals and, baby lamb JV tucked under my arm, I turn and know I will see her.

Beth.

Leaping up on the locker room bench, eyelids scorched with blue glitter, she heaves her throaty voice to the drop ceiling.

“Hella, bitches!” she bellows, rocking her feet on the bench so it shudders. “Our scout, that Regionals scout, I can feel her out there, waiting. And, bitches, she is so ready to be fucked.”

The gasp from us is loud and exultant.

“I’ve just trawled through that gym to check out the Celt squad and I’ve never seen anything so appalling. Ana girls with accordion ribs, a coupla dykey ringers with treebark legs and Charlie Brown faces. And those Celt ballers, skidding and squeaking, tossing that baby’s ball around like they’re kings of the world? Pathetic.”

Everyone, so eager, twirling near her, just like the old days when she’d preen and twist and flash her blue Eagles tatts and we’d clamor,
Give it to us, Captain, rise up, rise up!…

“You know who the stars are? We are. Why? Because we don’t throw around a fucking rubber ball. You know what
we
throw around? Live girls. Do you know who flies? We do. You know what we hurl to the rafters? Each other.”

I hear Emily’s tender gasp behind me, her boot brace clacking, and the muffled squeal of the JV Flyer.

“Tonight, you’ve got to spill their blood,” she says, her raised arm, her temples, her neck pulsing, “or I promise you they will spill yours.”

There’s a dark roiling on Beth and it’s starting to sweep through us. We are letting it, all of us.

“Brace those arms. Bolt those knees. Look at that crowd like you’re about to give them the best piece of ass they ever had. Sell it.”

The feelings charging through the room, they’re complicated and incendiary and none of us, not even me, can name them all. Everything in Beth, in her swarthy energy, so repulsive and so captivating—

“Bases, eyes on your Flyer, she is yours. You lock her to your heart. You lose her, blood on the mat. She is yours. Make her.”

All the swirling ponytails nod in unison, as if they know, as if any of us know what Beth, veins tight on her upstretched arms, means or could ever mean.

“JV,” Beth says, pointing her witching finger at the yearling under my arm, and because none of us really know her name. “You fail, you fail all of us. So you will not fail.”

The JV shakes her head back and forth, looking like she might cry.

“Girlie, you’ve been a chick long enough. I need you to show me that egg tooth,” she says, slipping her fingers under JV’s tank top, heaving her up on the bench with her. “Tonight’s the night, you’re gonna pip through the shell.”

Beth tugs the girl under her own bronzed arm, stares her down and nearly laps her face. “So stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood. We’ve come to bury them. We’ve come to plow their bones by the final bell.”

She pounds her pumas until that bench rattles, our bodies shake.

“It’s harvest day, girlies,” she says, her voice like crackling lightning. “Get busy when the corn is ripe.”

I almost fall for it, for Beth’s hoodoo grandiosity.

Our captain, like Beth from before, our noble, proud, heart-strong Beth, and this Beth too, a warrior nearly vanquished but not quite, never quite.

We few, we happy few,
she might say,
we band of sistuhs, for she today that sheds her blood with me, shall be my sistuh always.

Couldn’t I just let that be enough for these two hours?

But then Tacy sputters in, late, her face still bruise-dappled and her eyes lightless, damned.

And I’m reminded of everything.

Including the feel of my foot pressed against her face, what she made me do.

This feeling, this high, it’s not real. It’s that Jesus-love flooding through me, by which I mean the adderall and the pro clinical hydroxy-hot with green tea extract and the eating-nothing-but-hoodia-lollipops-all-day.

And most of all the high that comes from Beth’s dark supply.

I don’t want it.

Ten minutes to game time, and no Coach to stop the squad, everyone’s breaking rules and whirring through the back bleachers, scout-spotting.

Back in the locker room, I sit, trying to get my game head on.

SCOUT! 3 row frm top, lft — lady w. cap + mirror shades!
RiRi texts.

I hear a rustling one row over and there’s Beth, hands in her locker, tugging off her rows of friendship bracelets, tightening her pin-straight ponytail. Eyes on herself in her stick-on mirror, face blue and frightening.

Were it not for the angle of her locker door, the way the parking lot lights slant through the high windows, I might never have seen it.

But I did.

The hot glow of an evil eye, lurking between a pile of hair ties and toe socks.

A hamsa bracelet. Coach’s hamsa bracelet. My hamsa bracelet.

Hands to her slick shea-buttered arms, I catch her by surprise, flipping her around.

“What, did you think I wouldn’t show?” she says, and her blood all up in her cheeks and temples. “I’d never let the squad down.”

My chest lurching, I grab the bracelet with one hand and, with the other, shove her into the shower stalls.

“You did it. You took it. You lied about all of it,” I shout raggedly, my voice echoing to the slimy ceiling of the showers. “It was never in Will’s apartment, was it?”

“No,” she says, with an odd stuttering laugh, “of course not.”

“Why did you tell me the police found it?”

“I wanted you to see,” she says. “She was hiding everything from you. She never cared about you.”

“But you stole it. You were going to try to plant it, something,” I say, squeezing her so hard I feel one of my nails start to give. “My god, Beth.”

“Oh, Addy,” she says, still laughing, her head shaking back and forth. “I took it a long time ago. That time we slept at her house.”

I think of it now. That long-ago night of the Comfort Inn party. Beth, the wounded kitty. Those hours I’d abandoned her to Coach’s sofa, left her free to prowl the house, her viper’s crawl. Shadows flitting by all night.

“But that was before everything,” I say. “Why?”

“She didn’t deserve it,” Beth says, her voice rising, throaty, the laughing gone. “She’d tossed it on the kitchen window ledge, like an old sponge. She didn’t deserve it.”

Wrestling away from me, she shoves hard, her face a blue smear.

“And now her time is up,” she says, husky-voiced and deadly grave. “Now she’ll see what I can do.”

Face so close, painted shooting stars slashing up her temples, she’s heated up on her own words. But I can smell something dank and musky on her, like she has been clawing hard through loamy earth. Like she has very little left.

Which means it’s my time.

“You’re not going to the cops,” I say, voice as cold and hard as I can manage. “You never were. You don’t want them to find out what you did.”

Maybe I thought I’d never see surprise on her face again, but there it is. It almost frightens me.

“What
I
did?” she says. “I gave you your goddamned day, and you used it to let her spit more venom in your ear. When I think of the yogi hold that cheer bitch has over you, I wanna puke.”

“Beth, I know it all now,” I say, pushing myself close to her, towering over her. “You used Tacy to send that picture of you and Will to Coach’s husband. Tacy told me everything.”

A stitch of panic rises over that high brow, her back rustling against the vinyl curtain, and here I am, I suddenly realize, five inches taller than the little shrub, the little Napoleon. I just never felt it before.

“Slaussen. I should’ve guessed it,” she says, grinning wryly. “I never saw a fox eat a rabbit before. I’d like to. How did she taste?”

 “Did you hope Matt French would look at the picture and think you were Coach?”

“I didn’t care what he thought,” she says, chin jutting high, graveling her voice. “All I cared about was getting her out. Someone had to get us out—”

Somehow my hand has a hold of the bottom of her ponytail, fingers slapping against her scarred ear.

It’s like how it sometimes is with me and Beth, the closeness that comes from being hand to hand, arm to arm, body to body, and always spotting each other. I know her body and the way it turns, the way it moves, and what makes her shake.

“You started all this,” I say, fingers gripping tight. “It was you.”