Dare Me (23 page)

I tell her Coach has left town, has taken Caitlin to her mother’s, will only come back for the trial.

But she doesn’t say anything and it’s a while before she talks again.

When she does, she starts in the dreamy middle of something, her words caught in her lips.

“I’ll never forget seeing it. How she came in one day and I saw her wearing it,” she says, her voice wool-thick and plaintive. “I couldn’t believe it when I saw it. It was the worst part, worse than anything.”

I don’t know what she means, and wonder about the things happening in her brain.

“I couldn’t believe it,” she said. “You gave it to her, the very same one, the very same.”

She keeps looking at me, a barely banked fire there, hovering behind her eyes.

“How could you give her that bracelet, Addy?” she asks.

The bracelet. I can’t believe we’re back on the hamsa bracelet after everything that’s happened. The fluid pressing on Beth’s skull, that’s what it is, like when it happened, the black blood pooling in her ear.

I shake my head. “It was just a bracelet, Beth. I don’t even remember where I got it—”

“I mean, that was the worst part,” she says. “It really was.”

That’s when I remember.

A present for you,
Beth had said when she gave it to me a year ago, or more.
Wear it forever.
Which I think is the same thing I’d hoped for Coach.

“I forgot,” I say. Which must be a lie, but it’s one of the pieces I don’t look at. Like Beth says, I choose what to look at. I choose what to remember. Beth is my memory, remembering for me.

“You’ve given me lots of bracelets. We all do that,” I say. “It’s what we do.”

It’s a terrible thing to say, but I’m ashamed.

“I shouldn’t have kept it,” she says. “I should have thrown it down the gorge. Down at the bottom of the gorge with the Apache maidens.”

“I can’t believe I forgot,” I say, softer now.

Her eyes glassing, she turns away.

“It was you and me, Addy,” she says.

Something plucks inside of me, something deep and near forgotten.

“Addy, are we going to pretend forever? I know you remember,” she says, her back to me.

But of course I remember. I know precisely what she is holding tight.

A year ago, early spring, drunken sky-searching at midnight up on the ridge, cold enough to see our breath, but Beth, stripped to streaky-white, and the way I leaped after her, foot sliding in wet leaves, and my hand on her back, hot to the touch.

Collapsing to mossy soil, our backs sinking into it, our faces pitched up to the sky. Just back from two weeks with her mother in Baja, she has something for me, and asks me to lay my hand across her belly and close my eyes. The feeling of the soft leather on my wrist, the cold amulet, the Hand of Fatima charm.

And she told me the story of Fatima, how she was stirring a pot when her husband came home with a new wife. Brokenhearted, she let the ladle slip from her fingers and kept stirring with her own hand, not noticing the pain.

“The hand protects you,” she said. “Nothing can hurt it now. Nothing can touch us now.”

We raised our arms in the air and let our wrists touch, the beam from its mirrored hand, its promise of protection.

Wearing it, it made me feel strong and safe. Powerful. It made me feel like her.

Lying there, our shorts riding up, we compared the plummy bruises that marked both our right hips, matching thumbprints from where Mindy, Cori, and other girls would press hard to spin into their stunts.

She pushed at mine and I poked hers, and, wincing, we kept pushing on each other’s, the pain mysterious and soothing and strange.

How did it happen, us tangled upon each other?

My breath on her neck, my mouth on her ear. I started it, but I don’t even remember why or how. We never tugged our shorts all the way off, and we never did what things we might do, but if I let myself, I can still feel my cheek on her knee bone, still feel the pressure of her hands on my thighs. My mouth on her mouth, her laughing.

We never talked about it, and things were maybe different after. Maybe I felt different.

Then the season ended and there was a boy or another boy, and cheer camp, and I bunked with Casey Jaye and wore the love knot Casey gave me, and things got bad and were never the same again. And when she saw Casey and me, legs swinging from the upper bunk, laughing—the look on her face, and the look on mine. I can guess what mine looked like.

No, I don’t think about it ever, that night with Beth up high on the ridge.

There was a wonder in it, and who needs to talk of such wonders? We nestle them away, deep in the fury at the center of us, where things can be held tightly, protected, and secretly cherished as a special notion we once held, then had to stow away.

“You never could look at yourself, Addy,” she says. “What you wanted, what you’d do to get it. But here you are.”

Here I am.

“You wanted it. It’s yours now,” she says. “It was always you.”

AUGUST CHEERLEADER TRYOUTS

“The one shining
thing about high school for me has been cheer.”

Pacing in front of the fifteen soon-to-be JV girls in the epically hot gym, first day of summer cheer camp, that’s me, offering it up. The words, true and real.

“There are people who say it isn’t cool,” I say, “who make fun of it, but I’ve never cared. I know they don’t have what I have.”

Sitting on the long mats, their fluffy faces, eyes cartoon-wide, they gaze up at me as though I were passing along all the wisdom of the world, which I am.

“Cheer has given me a purpose. It has given me a hard body and a strong mind. And I’ve made friends for life.”

RiRi at my side, I walk the length of the mat, back straight, chin high.

“Don’t you want to be able to say that?” I say. “If you do, you have to hang tight and tough with your girls.”

They all nod, soundless.

“If you don’t trust each other,” I say, “this mat becomes your gangplank.”

The hush falls even greater now. I’m swinging my whistle and all you can hear is the faint scratch of it as it brushes against my sweats.

Emily marches up beside me, her wounded leg back in fighting form, her mind swept clean of her Cassandra-like horrors. She is finished with all that. I know. I showed her how.

Lifting her elbow, she rests it on my shoulder, jaw up. She and RiRi, my deputies, my bad lieutenants.

“We’ve got five weeks before the new coach begins,” I say, “but I choose not to waste those weeks. Do you?”

Clicking jaws, flipping ponytails, rocking in their Indian-style poses, their jelly legs waiting to be molded. Rescued from mediocrity. Saved.

“I choose to excel, not compete—do you?

“I choose to make changes, not excuses—do you?

“To be motivated, not manipulated.

“To be useful, not used.”

Beth could come back this fall, couldn’t she?
Emily keeps asking.
She’s at home, she took her finals, I even saw her in her car.

But I know she never will. She never will and I took something from her and I won’t even look at it. I won’t—

“I choose to live by choice,” I say, “not by chance—do you?”

Their fingers twisting into each other’s linking hands, looking up at me, at RiRi and her magnificent body, and Emily and her beatific grin. All of us.

“Cheer taught me to trust my girls to catch me when I fall,” I say,
and it’s Beth’s face I see when I gaze past them, into the empty stands, not Coach’s. It’s Beth’s face, all the darkness and mischief and mayhem and, beneath it, that beating heart.

Turning from the stands, facing my girls, I gather everything in my chest. I hold it there. I have to hold it tight. These things I’ve learned.

“It showed me,” I say, pulling in my breath, “how to be a leader.”

With tremendous gratitude and ongoing debt to the inestimable Reagan Arthur and her brilliant team, especially Miriam Parker, Theresa Giacopasi, Peggy Freudenthal, and Sarah Murphy.

Deepest thanks are also owed to the wonderful Kate Harvey and Emma Bravo at Picador UK, and to Angharad Kowal, Maja Nikolic, and Stephen Barr at Writers House. And most of all to Dan Conaway, without whom.

For ongoing and bottomless support and love: Phil and Patti Abbott; Josh, Julie, and Kevin; Jeff, Ruth, and Steve; Darcy Lockman; Christine Wilkinson—and my blood sisters, Alison Quinn and Sara Gran.

Megan Abbott is the Edgar Award–winning author of five previous novels. She received her PhD in English and American literature from New York University and has taught literature, writing, and film studies at New York University, the New School, and the State University of New York at Oswego. She lives in New York City.

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