Dare Me (21 page)

Snaking her fingers between mine, she swipes my hand from her hair and rolls her eyes with comic book magnitude.

“For fuck’s sake, fuck me if Coach’s husband mistakenly thought his wife was fucking the National Guard recruiter. Oh, wait,” she says. “She
was.
”

“You set it all in motion,” I say. Then wielding another hidden card, “You knew Coach was with Sarge that night. Prine told me everything.”

She doesn’t say anything, just stares at me, the angry blue war paint blaring.

“If you wanted me to believe Coach killed Will,” I say, “why didn’t you tell me she was there?”

And then I realize it. “You were afraid I’d tell Coach. Warn her.”

“I wasn’t
afraid
you would warn her,” she says. “I
knew
you would. You’re just her little pussy, and always were.”

I shove her shoulder, and she laughs, an aching laugh, a laugh I remember most from the worst times for Beth, the scariest times after bad nights with boys or her mother, and I’d try to say tender things and she would laugh, which was her way of crying.

“Prine’s gonna do what I say, Addy,” she says, curling her hand on top of mine, pressing it into her own sharp shoulder. “He thinks I might statutory him, or worse.”

“You knew all along,” I say, feeling her veins pulsing under my grip. “All your lies—”

“My lies?” she says. “All you’ve done is lie to me. All you’ve ever done. But you’ve always been the fox. Stone cold.”

“I’m telling everything, Beth,” I say.

Like there’s a fever in my brain, or Jesus in my heart, my hands are on her again, hurling both her shoulders back against the shower tiles, her eyes flashing and her mouth a tight grin.

She’s trying to smile, yes, but there’s a horror in it.
Push harder, push harder. Ride that bitch.

“What can you tell? All you have is Slaussen,” she says. “You think I can’t win back that rabbit heart of hers? I have my two front teeth sunk in it. I have things I can tell about her, about Coach, about you—”

My hand whips across her face so fast I gasp.

But she doesn’t flinch. Instead, eyes darkening, she slides back against the wall, tilting her face so it smears against the damp tiles, her spangled mask blurring blue.

She doesn’t say anything for a second and the silence feels heavy, epic. I don’t know what to do with myself except listen to my own breathing.

“He said he was sick with himself over it,” she says, quietly, darkly.

It takes me a second to realize she’s talking about Will.

“Like I was this dirty thing he’d done,” she says.

She puts a hand to the back of her head, rubbing it with an eerie softness, like she’s in slow motion. “Who is he to call me dirty?” she asks, her eyelashes slipping glitter.

I’m thinking of the snapshot of the two of them, the look on his face.

“You should’ve seen how he looked at me after,” she says. “Like you’re looking at me now.”

I don’t know what to say to this.

“Then I saw him and Coach together,” she says, “the way they just gloated in their fucking. So freaking enthralled with themselves, and you just so enthralled with them. With her.”

There is the secret song in me of an old Beth, schoolyard Beth, playground and sleeping bag and bikes with streamers Beth. The Beth who never wanted me to sleep over at Katie Lerner’s house, and would always wait in front of my house the night I got back from summer vacation. The Beth who always, chin to my shoulder, looked out for me, and I for her. Our bodies interlocked.

“But, Beth, you can stop now,” I say, shaking my head. “You can stop all this.”

Something stirs in her face and she’s looking down at my clenched, glitter-crusted hands on her arms.

“I did it for all of us,” she says. “I did it for you, Addy. Somebody had to. And it’s always been me.”

I let my hands go, staring, not sure what to do or what she means.

“The funny thing is, Addy, it turns out you were the dangerous one,” she says, voice steadying now, drawing strength.

She walks past me and, her palm clasped over her scarred left ear, adds, “You were the tough one, the cruel one. The fox. You just couldn’t admit it. You’ve always done whatever you wanted. It was always you.”

And she’s gone.

I hear her whistling through the locker room, and her voice, mournful but resonant now.

“Arrow in the quiver,” she sings. “At daggers drawn.”

GAME TIME: OO:OO:OO

We are phalanx-spread
four deep across the floor. Oh, the roaring, if you only knew. Like being crest-deep in a wave and all the pounding to go through you.

We are assembled soldiers. My eyes flashing past us, it’s like looking at fifteen duplicates of one shiny-eyed girl, midnight blue halters and silver-lined minis, spoking legs and bleached white sneaks, hair slicked back into uniform ponys, shimmer-blue foiled bows.

We all have our eyes on the woman in the red hat and mirrored shades, high up on the left flank. Whether she’s the scout or not, we’re giving everything to her.

RiRi, superstitious, singing softly,
“Jesus on my necklace,
glitter on my eyes,”
knuckles rapping against mine.

The pounding of our thirty assembled feet, pounding so it thunders all through us, as we undulate into a V.

There is Beth at the diamond tip, her face streaked indigo and, from afar, never looking more like the savage princess she is, like she might have a necklace of human tongues.

“Split the ‘V,’” she shouts, and forking her fingers at her hips, “Dot the ‘i,’” and sliding her finger down low, shimmying, legs vibrating, “Rock that C-T-O-R-Y!”

Seeing her like that. Seeing her, bright white sneaks on the gym floor, legs and arms together, chin up proud to the crowd, their howling and foot-thundering frenzy, I feel all kinds of things I can’t name.

Her face is so lovely, a perfect spritely smile carved there, lightning bolt tattoo streaked across one high cheekbone.

And on her wrist, the hamsa, plucked from the shower stall floor.

Marching in formation, our heads snapping, feet thumping, four-five-six across, the diamond splitting.

“Beat those Celts, slaughter that ball.

“We will die for you above all.”

“That’s not how it goes,” mewls Brinnie Cox, as if Beth has just flubbed the line.

“We will die for you above all,” Beth repeats.

Those words, I know them, but I don’t know how and there’s no time.

RiRi, Paige, and I darting to the mat’s far corners to spring across with our tumbling passes, everyone whipping past me and the noise like an ocean in my ear.

And I land it and Beth is there and I am spotting, Mindy and Cori popping her into the air, tick-tocking one leg to the other, her feet in their hands, her arms V-ed.

And Beth is shouting, and I am looking up at her, her chin trembling, her neck pulsing.

She is crying, but only I can see that. I’m the only one who’s seen it before. Her face like something precious split in two. A diamond cracked, a web spreading.

“It’s Coach,” comes Tacy’s squealing shout. “It’s Coach.”

My head whipping to one side, I can’t believe it, but I see her there, soft hoodie and hemp yoga pants, and her hair knotted tight on her head.

Coach.

Oh, my Coach.

And she is saying something, or she isn’t saying anything at all, but we know what to do and we do our back tucks in perfect unison, symmetric soldiers all in a line, then the whistle blows and the bounding boys come and we run to her.

We run to her.

And I see Beth, and her broken face, and I can’t help her at all.

I can’t.

It’s all a heady blur, the floorboard-pounding mayhem of the game, and Coach there, placing her hand gently on the backs of our heads, pulling, even, so un-Coach-like, on Mindy’s golden braids, and by the time the halftime horn thunders, I’ve lost Beth entirely.

In the locker room, the air clear from the tall windows lifted open by Coach with that long iron stick.

We are not actually on our knees, but it feels that way. It feels as if we’re on our knees, like prayerful Southern football players.

We are all bowing inside, to her.

Coach, you’ve not forsaken us.

“I’m glad to be here right now,” she says, and she’s speaking so low but somehow even amid the bumptious din coming from the gym we can hear her, hear every beat.

“I’m lucky to be in your company,” she says. “And I’m talking about all of you. You mighty women.”

Something catches in my throat.
Coach.

I feel a hand twist around my arm, and it’s RiRi, her curls shaking, and beside her Emily, half leaning, still casted, against the lockers, and all of us standing, craning our necks, huddling toward Coach’s clear eyes, clear face, clear voice.

How could the things we would laugh at out there, scoff at and eye roll and dismiss, move us so much in here? Because it is Coach.

“For all kinds of reasons,” she says, her voice wobbling so slightly I feel sure only I can hear, “we’re all going to remember tonight.”

All of us circling forward, wanting to warm our hands, our bodies to it.

“It’s the last game of the season, after all these months of sweat and blood. And, after all this, I want you to be able to speak proudly, to strip your sleeves and show your scars, and talk about what you did tonight.”

Her words are vibrating through me, touching my very center.

“After the night’s over,” she says, her voice lifting higher, “after you graduate, and you’re off to college or wherever you girls go—ten years from now, your little girl’s going to pull your dusty Eagles yearbook off the shelf and ask what you were like in high school.

“You won’t have to cough, look the other way, and say, ‘Well, sweetie, your mom was in the French Club and sang in the choir.’ You won’t even have to say, ‘Your mom waved pom-poms and shook her ass.’ Because you will know what you were, what you are forever.

“Squad,
take this moment,
seal it over your heart.”

The quiet among us, the devotional silence starts to break apart as we feel ourselves lifted, feelings and gasps and eager squeaks and throatier yeas and rustling and rumbling and most of all the sense of greatness rising from within us and hoisted high.

“You’re going to look your girl straight in the eye and say, ‘Baby, your mom rode to the rafters. Your mom lifted three girls in her hands, grinning all the way,’” she says, our voices rising to a baying now, all together.

“‘Your mom built pyramids and flew high in the sky, and back in Sutton Grove, they’re still talking about the wonders they saw that night, still talking about how they watched us all reach to the heavens.’

“Don’t you want to be able to say that?”

Our innermost selves, in some magnificent ascent, and a clattering as some girls leap onto the benches, crying out, overtaken.

But not me—me who wants to bathe in the moment’s sacredness forever.

“You may have the bodies of young girls,” she says, her voice deep and holy, “but you have the hearts of warriors. Tonight, show me your warrior hearts.

“That’s all.”

And she turns and pushes through the locker room doors into the brightly lit hallway.

But instead of turning in to the clanging gym, its frenzy pitched to madness, she walks straight out the loading dock doors, into the starred night.

It’s like when a fever breaks, and you don’t know what’s happened, or what all those voices in your head meant, but the Celts squad does their halftime routine and all I see are flying bodies and cries and the greater and greater sense of a battlefield of fallen enemies on which we will march.

And I realize, Beth gone again, I don’t even know who Top Girl is.

“It’s gotta be the JV, right?” whispers RiRi. “We’re tossing her up, right?”

But there is no time, and there we are, running out on that gym floor, and I feel my body flipping into my handspring, and Brinnie Cox’s legs spiraling next to me, and suddenly we’re twenty seconds in and I can hear myself shouting:

I’m looking for the JV Flyer, but I don’t see her.

I feel her before I see her.

Dark hair shimmering, the thunderbolt seared to her face.

Beth, in the JV’s place. Lining up in the top Flyer spot for the two-two-one.

And if you could understand how time can stop, it did for me.

Mindy has her hands on my waist, my hands gripping soft shoulders, my toe slipping into the pocket of her bent knee, pushing off with my right foot and lifting my other knee as high as I can, planting it on her shoulder, front-spotting Paige below, propelling up my other foot.

RiRi and I face each other, feet fixed on Mindy’s and Cori’s shoulders, their hands tight on our ankles.

“Who’s counting?” I shout.

Emily, swinging her boot brace across the front row, her eyes avid, her fear gone.

“I’ll do it,” she cries. “I’ll count. No one knows better than me. No one knows—”

We are now ten and a half feet high, my eyes fixed on RiRi’s wild green ones, her face cobalt-brushed, ecstatic, mouthing,
“B-E-T-H!”

“One-two, three-four,” Emily’s fierce counting like a pulse in my brain, like a hammer over my heart.

The whole pyramid sponging, rubber-banding as it should, the living thing, the beating heart.

Below I see Beth’s black hair, and she flings her head back, her eyes squeezed shut.

I will die only for you above all.

That’s what she’d said, and I remembered it now, from long ago. Age nine or ten, poring over a Time-Life book in my dad’s library, an old picture of a Japanese pilot tying his headband, eyes determined, jaw set.

And the caption: “I will die only for you above all.”

Beth loved that picture and tore the page out and pasted it in her locker with rubber cement, and at year’s end, we tried to claw it free, but it came off in shreds and there was nothing she could do.

I will die only for you above all.

Six hands on her and she’s propelled up between RiRi and me. Lying flat, her arms outstretched, and we pop her up so she is standing.

Blocking out Emily’s dire warnings of what it’s like from out there, from the stands, as they see all of us spring-loaded into the air, defying gravity, logic, the laws of physics itself, I know all I must think of is Beth’s wrist in my tight-clawed—

One

shah shah shah shah booty

and loading her forward, slingshotting her back to life, pitching her higher, locking her in place, holding her widespread arms like points on a star,

Two

shah shah shah shah booty

I can feel, fingers to Beth’s wrist, the veins pulsing, the beat slower than it should be, and I think—

Three

you ain’t got

—her pumas balancing on the gathered hands below, a pinched tightrope and she is cheering, oh, is she cheering.

Waiting for Emily to count EIGHT, then
DEADMAN,
we drop Beth’s wrists, she falls backwards, limbs outspread, into the waiting arms below…that is what she is to—

Four

you ain’t got it, you ain’t got it, ain’t got it

She is so high, fifteen feet, sixteen, seventeen, a thousand—and the whole gym shaking victorious, her body still like a fierce arrow—when I feel her suddenly yank her wrist from my clasp.

My body pitches forward, but terror-eyed Mindy has hold of me, and RiRi bobbles to keep hold of Beth’s other wrist.

I have my eyes on Beth, I think I am calling out to her, her name choked in my chest, but she won’t turn, she couldn’t or she’d—

Five

…and I know and I’m not going to stop her, there is no stopping her.

This is what she wants, after all.

Six-and
—and two beats too soon, she propels herself backwards with such force.

The gasp from the bleachers lashes through the air.

The power with which she thrusts her body backwards.

The force with which she twists her body, spinning it, and then kicking backwards

RiRi and I teetering on our Bases, nearly falling forward toward each other—

—and all our hands grabbing for her, and the will with which Beth pitches her body, legs kicking so far back, so far back.

All the way back.

The air sucked from me, the sounds gone from the world.

The way, for a second, her body seems to lift, dance to the rafters, then the way everything shifts, all our bodies tilting in space as I feel myself falling, as I feel Beth falling.

It’s like she doesn’t weigh anything at all, and she might never hit the floor, until she does.

Then the sickening crack and seeing her head click backwards, like a doll’s.

But you must see:

She never really wanted anything but this.

The Abyss, Addy, it gazes back into you.