Dare Me (4 page)

Tacy’s mouth open, struck.

Airborne.

Her whole body quivering like a plucked string.

Too scared to tuck, pike, toe touch, anything.

“Soften!” shouts Coach.

Tacy sinking back down, all three girls scrambling, one of Tacy’s legs jamming into Mindy’s collarbone.

But they catch her. They don’t let her hit the floor.

Tacy, walking it off, crying like a little bitch.

For an hour, Tacy falls and falls, over and over again.

Foot to face. Shin to shoulder. Face to mat.

Mindy and Cori angrier and angrier the more knocks they take, elevatoring her up with greater and greater force.

Tacy starts sobbing a half hour in, and never stops.

Off to her office for a phone call, Coach deputizes Beth to count in her absence.

Beth, looking at her, her mouth a straight line, says nothing. But when Coach’s office door shuts, she starts counting.

One-two-three-four,

fucking ex-
tend
Slaussen!

Who can deny it is a masterful play? Take away the princess’s crown and give it to the lady-in-waiting. The handmaiden. The servant.

Never, in all my lieutenant years, have I seen anyone go toe-to-toe with Beth. Never anyone who couldn’t be felled with an errant Facebook rumor, a photoshopped image (
RiRi skanking it up over spring break
), the pilfered text message sent to the entire school. This was different.

Different because no one had ever taken her on, and different because no one had ever wanted to do so on our behalf. Coach did it for us.

And her will was strong as Beth’s maybe. Maybe.

Watching Tacy, shin red-streaked, a long bone bruise readying to bloom on her forearm, we all know what’s happened.

We all know why, that Saturday, Tacy will be landing, at terrible and just velocity, in our meager arms—arms weary from ten hours of dieter’s tea and celery shreds—we all know why.

Because Coach sees Beth for what she is and knows she has to overthrow her.

And Tacy?

A pullet-pawn.

Two days till the game, we are practicing like Tacy’s life depends on it, since it does.

I’m the front spotter because Coach says I have in focus what I lack in heft.

We start with a straight ride, no twists or toe touches or kick arches. We’ve practiced all week and never once missed, our hands wrapped around each other’s locked wrists, steeling our arms so tight, bolting them in place, a safe little girl-cradle for Tacy’s quaking feet.

Then, rubber-banding our arms to spring her shaking body up into the air, all our eyes on Tacy, making that promise to her, the birdy panic on her face as she flies, flies, flies.

But, had we slipped, any of us, had one of our arms weakened, her leg curled the wrong way, her body twisted an inch or less, she’d have hit a spring floor.

And when we try to get her higher, Tacy’s landings are rougher. There are incidents: elbow to the eye, index finger bent back, Tacy’s grasping hand clawing my face.

But I focus on Tacy, and I don’t show my fear. That’s what Coach tells me. “Don’t let her see it on you, or it’ll swallow her.”

Coach tells us you can fall from eleven feet and still land safely on a spring floor, our practice floor.

She says that knowing that, game time, Tacy will be flying high over not a spring floor but the merciless ground of the Mohawks’ football field.

“Slaussen,” Coach says, “you gotta want it. Don’t do it if you don’t want it.”

And Tacy, her back straighter, her eyes clearer, her chin higher than I’ve ever seen on this meek and weak girl, replies, “I want it, Coach. I want it.”

Tacy. Here was the head-smacking convert.

I can feel Beth’s eyeroll without even looking.

“I knew that one was wasting our time,” Beth says.

But I don’t say anything. I am watching Tacy’s avid eyes.

Friday night, when we set foot on the Mohawks’ field, the frosted ground beneath us, how can we not picture Tacy’s skull splitting daintily in two?

And two of the Mohawk squad bitches, the rangiest with legs like spires, circle us before and start gaming us with tales of blood sport. A mix of fish tales, trash talk, and camaraderie.

“JV year, the girl was fronting a new Flyer learning her twist,” the blonde Mohawk says, gum smacking, “and when the Flyer spun around her legs came apart and knocked out both Bases. One popped a lip and the other had to get a face cut glued shut. Coach caught it on video and replays it at all our after-parties.”

“I was practicing my back handspring,” the scrubby redhead says, “and I kicked Heather and knocked her teeth right out of her face. It was insane. Teeth and blood were flying everywhere. I felt soooo bad.”

There is a breathless momentum to it. I know how it goes. It’s fun when you’re doing it, like hearing a ghost story.

Forty-five minutes from now, though, it will not be fun for Tacy, standing fifteen feet in the air, two spindly girls holding her up, ready to toss her.

Tacy is gray, into green.

Beth saunters over. She gives me a look, one I know from her captain days. I nod.

“That’s enough,” I interrupt everyone. “Don’t know about you hardcore bitches, but we’d rather spend our pre-game time getting pretty.”

But the blonde Mohawk, eyes hard on Tacy, won’t stop working her. “This one kid, she had a body just like yours. And she hit the tramp bar, hard. Her head was bleeding a
lot,
and she had to go to the ER. Turns out the skin on her head had split and you could see all this pink stuff underneath. She needed staples to pull it back together. We couldn’t get her to come back to cheer no matter how hard we tried. Now she’s isn’t doing anything at all.”

“Slaussen,” Beth shouts, looming over us now. “Coach wants you.”

Rabbit-like, Tacy skitters away.

For a second, I think it’s done. But it’s not.

Beth surveys the Mohawk girls.

“Once,” Beth starts, and I know what she’s going to do, and this is why she was captain. “I was standing on this girl’s shoulders and I slipped and fell flat on my back.”

Everyone gasps politely.

“The crack was so loud they heard it in the parking lot,” I add.

“My first thought,” Beth says, shaking her head, “was how am I going to tell my mom?”

Everyone nods appreciatively.

“I was lucky,” she says, her cool gaze on those Mohawks, shivering a little now in their long timbers. “I was only paralyzed for six weeks. They bolted this metal ring into my skull with pins to hold my head and neck in place. It’s called a halo, if you want to know.”

We two, in such sync, like the old days, like before Coach, before last summer.

Reaching across, I touch Beth’s hair lightly with my fingertips. “The doctors said if she’d been an inch to the right or left,” I say, “she would have died.”

“But I didn’t,” Beth says. “And nothing would ever stop me from cheering anyway.

“They gave me the coolest purple cast. And Coach tells me I’m the best Flyer she ever had.”

Under the bank of stadium lights, Tacy’s face poppy pink with purpose and mania, we raise her up, her hands releasing our trembling shoulders, and she rockets herself, thrusting her legs in either direction, arms pressed against her ears and flying higher than I’ve ever seen.

So high that a wild shake ripples through all of us, our cradled arms vibrating with awe and wonder.

Vibrating so strongly that it runs through me, it does, and I feel my left arm slacken, ever so slightly, and a shudder bores through me, and if it weren’t for RiRi next to me, feeling my tremor, flashing me her terror, a starry span of panic before my eyes, I wouldn’t have driven that steel back into my blood, my muscles, my everything.

Made it tight and iron-fast for Tacy, who seemed to be in the air for minutes, hours, a radiant creature with white-blond hair spread wing-like, finally sinking safely, ecstatically, into all our arms.

It’s hours later, and we’re in Emily’s dad’s car sneaking swigs of blackberry cordial, swiped from RiRi’s garage, where her brother hides it.

We’re waiting in the parking lot of the Electric Crayon, its neon sign radiating sex and chaos, the cordial tickling our mouths and bellies almost unbearably.

We’ve never been on Haber Road before, except the time we went with RiRi’s sister to Modern Women’s Clinic to get ofloxacin and she told us after how she almost choked when they stuck that big swab down her throat, but it was still better than what Tim Martinson had stuck down her throat.

We all laughed even though it didn’t really seem funny and none of us want to end up at Modern Women’s Clinic ever, the matted-down wall-to-wall, and the buzzing fluorescent lights, and the girl behind the front desk who sang softly to herself,
“Boys trying to touch my junk-junk-junk. Gonna get me some crunk-crunk-crunk.”

An hour slides by before Tacy finally comes out of the Electric Crayon, tugging her jeans down so we can see the Sutton Grove eagle soaring there, the envy so strong it almost makes me burst.

Coach, she wouldn’t come with us no matter how much we begged. But she did slip Tacy forty bucks for it. Two smooth twenties, tucked in our new Flyer’s trembling hands.

We never heard of any coach doing that, ever.

Nudging my fingers under the sticking bandage on her lower back, I touch that red-raw eagle, making Tacy wince with pained pleasure.

Me, me, me, it should be me.

WEEK FIVE

“I’ve heard some
things about Ms. Colette French,” Beth tells me. “I have contacts.”

“Beth,” I say. I know this tone, I know how things start.

“I don’t have anything to report yet,” she says, “but be ready.”

Like bamboo slowly sliding under fingernails. She has started.

But Beth also grows easily bored. That’s what I have to remember.

I am glad, then, when Beth seems to have found something—someone—else to do.

Monday morning, the recruiting table is struck in the first-floor hallway, by the language labs.

The posters blare red, the heavy ripple of the flag insignia.

Discover Your Path to Honor.

Recruiters, out for fresh, disaffected-teen blood.

“Who needs cheer?” Beth says. “I’m enlisting.”

They came last year too, and always sent the broadest-shouldered, bluest-eyed Guardsmen, the ones with arms like twisted oak and booming voices that echo down the corridor.

This year, though, they have Sergeant Will, who is entirely different. Who, with his square jaw and smooth, knife-parted hair, is handsome in a way unfamiliar to us. A grown-up man, a man in real life.

Sarge Will makes us dizzy, that mix of hard and soft, the riven-granite profile blurred by the most delicate of mouths, the creasy warmth around his eyes—eyes that seem to catch far-off things blinking in the fluorescent lights. He seems to see things we can’t, and to be thinking about them with great care.

He is older—he may be as old as thirty-two—and he is a man in the way that none of the others, or no one else we know or ever knew, are men.

Before practice, or during lunch, a lot of the girls like to hang around and finger the brochures.
Spread Your Wings,
they say.

Fresh off her latest breakup with Catholic Patrick, lovely RiRi spends pass time lingering at the table, leaning across it, arms pressed tight against either side of her breasts, framing them V-like and drawing one foot up her other leg, like she says men like.

“Personally, I find they like it when I lift my cheer skirt over my head,” Beth says, side by side with me on the floor in front of her locker. “You might try that next time.”

“Maybe you need some new tricks,” RiRi yawns, eyes hot on Sarge Will. “What worked with your junior high PE teach might not roll with the big brass here.”

This is how it starts, Beth rising to her feet like them’s fighting words, and asking RiRi if she’d care to make it interesting.

I can tell from RiRi’s face that she would not care to do so at all, but it’s the prairie whistle of the Old West, high noon at ole Sutton Grove High. You can hear Beth’s tin star rattling against her chest.

So much better to have Beth face off with party girl RiRi than with Coach.

It’s not that Beth just rolls for anybody or even most people, but when she does, it’s a star turn, it’s page one. Like with Ben Trammel, or the time everyone saw her and Mike LaSalle, ebony against her ivory, in the holly hedges at St. Mary’s after the game. All those forked nettles studding his letterman jacket, all up and down the felted arms, and his neck bristled red.

Everyone talked about it, but I was the one who saw her after. The bright pain in her face, like she didn’t know why she’d done it, the alarm in her eyes, pin struck.

We’ve been angling, I have.
Coach, what’s your place look like? Coach, we want to meet little Caitlin too, we do.

Coach, show us, show us, let us in.

None of us ever think she will. We’ve tried for five weeks. I dream of it, driving by her house like a boy might do.

The next Saturday at the home game, Tacy kicks out that basket toss like she’s been doing it all her life, and she adds a toe touch, and we do a hanging pyramid, with Emily and Tacy swinging like trapdoors off RiRi’s arms, which whips up the crowd to fierce delirium.

There is such an ease to it. In the parking lot after, we’re all feeling so good, like we could annihilate an invading army, or go to Regionals or State.

Beth is hoisting between her fingers a very fine bottle of spiced rum from some boy on the Norsemen team. He wants to party with us, and promises big excitement at his uncle’s apartment, up on the Far Ridge.

Just the kind of wild night we’d all maneuver endlessly for, trading promises and fashioning elaborate lies, a string of phone calls home to marshal a fleet of alibis no parent could pierce.

Beth is the dark mistress of such nights and seems always to know where the secret house party is, or the bar with the bouncer who knows her brother, or the college boy hangout by the freeway where no one ever cards anybody and the floors are sticky with beer and the college boys are so glad for girls like us, who never ask them even one question ever.

But as we conspire around Beth’s car, my hand stroking the borrowed bottle, mouth clove-streaked and face rum-suffused, Coach walks past us, car keys jangling loudly.

“Going home, Coach?” Emily asks, swiveling her nutraslimmed hips madly to the music thudding from the car stereo. “Why don’t you come out with us instead?”

We all look wide-eyed at Emily’s pirate-boldness, Tacy’s head perched merrily on Emily’s shoulder, like a parrot.

Coach smiles a little, her eyes, thoughtful now, wandering past us, into the dark thicket of trees banded around the parking lot.

“Why don’t you all come to my house instead?” she says, just like that. “Why don’t you come over?”

 “The smell of desperation,” Beth says, “is appalling.”

Beth does not wish to go to Coach’s house.

“It’s not my job,” she adds, as we all look at her blankly, “to make her feel like she matters.”

Standing in the front hallway, we wait while Coach sends off the babysitter, an older woman named Barbara in a peach chenille sweater that hangs to her knees.

She lets us poke our heads in and see little Caitlin fast asleep. The room is blushing pink with one of those rotating lanterns that wobble pretty ballerinas all over the walls.

Caitlin, strawberry blonde, nestles under rosy gingham with a doilied edge through which she hooks one pink thumb.

Her breath is light and fast and we can hear it even huddled in the doorway, Emily and me, we’re the ones who want to see. We look at her, the soft ringleted hair and the peace on her flushed face, and wonder what that peace is like and if we ever had it.

We sit out on the back deck—me and RiRi and Emily and the newly brave Tacy, the li’l cottontail whom we once ignored but whom we now gird to our chests proudly, our newly branded recruit, our soaring rocket.

Our cold arms buried inside our varsity jackets, at first so formal, we sit legs crossed tight, backs straight, speaking in light hushy tones, asking questions about the house, about Caitlin, about Coach’s husband, Matt.

We sit in the chilling air, on long benches flanking two sides of the deck. And there’s Coach, on a lounger, slowly sinking back, hands tucked in her jacket pockets, her hair spreading across the teak slats, her face slowly, slowly releasing itself from its school day tethers, its rigor and purpose.

The night feels important even as it’s happening.

Once, Beth and I had a night like this, the night before we started high school. Kiddie-like, we’d hooked her brother’s Swiss Army into our palms and pressed them tight against each other, and later Beth said she could feel my heart beating in my hand, her hand. She swore she could. We knew that meant something. Something had passed between us and would endure. We don’t talk about it anymore and it was a century ago, wars won and lost since then.

And, Beth, you’re not even
here
now.

On Coach’s deck, we all talk in the echoey night, first shyly, awkwardly, of nothing things—the Mohawks’ forward with the bowlegs, the way Principal Sheehan spins on one heel like a lady when he turns in the hallway, the doughy chocolate chip cookies in the cafeteria, the tang of the raw eggs and baking soda churning in your stomach, making you sick.

Slowly, slowly, though, we feel the dark night opening among us, between us, and RiRi talks about her dad, who moved out last month and cries on the phone whenever they talk, and Emily shows us the very first ballet step she ever learned, and Tacy says she never felt so perfect as when she was flying in the air.

Would a boy ever make her feel that way? she asks. Would a
man?

We all look at Coach, who’s smiling and nearly laughing even, leaning back on the lounger and flinging one leg over the other.

“Girly,” she says, lively and light, like you rarely hear, “you have no idea the wonderful things men will make you feel.”

Tacy smiles, we all do.

“And terrible things too,” Coach adds, her voice tinier now. “But the terrible things are…are kind of wonderful too, I guess.”

Tacy props her feet up on the foot of Coach’s lounger. “How can something terrible ever be wonderful?” she asks, and I cringe a little.
I know how,
I want to say.
I know how, everything wonderful is terrible too.
I don’t know how I know it, but I do.

“You don’t know enough about wonderful yet,” Coach says, her voice smaller still, her face growing more somber, more meaningful. “Or terrible.”

We’re so close in that moment it feels like a humming wire between us, and no one wants to say a word for fear of snapping it, silencing it.

It’s very late when RiRi plucks the pint from her boiled wool pocket. Smirnoff vodka, the slummer’s choice.

RiRi’s move is bold, but without Beth here, somebody has to be.

“How about we all do one shot,” she says, rising, stretching her arms to either side, as if to insist on the importance of the moment, “to toast the squad, and most of all Coach, who’s made us…”

She pauses, then looks around, all of us watching nervously, eagerly. Watching her and watching Coach, who hasn’t moved from her luxuriant slouch, whose eyes lock with RiRi’s, as if deciding.

“To Coach,” RiRi says, then, her voice building, “who’s made us women.”

Who’s made us women.

This from RiRi, who’s never said anything significant, ever.

Suddenly, I’m on my feet, my toes even, raising my arm high too, as if I held a champagne flute, a whole frosty magnum in my grip.

Emily and Tacy follow fast and we’re all standing now, looking down at Coach, her chin lifting regally to receive us.

RiRi takes a gentle tug from that pint, then rocks her head back and forth from the kick of it. The rough, smutty smack of it. We all do. I feel it heating in me, firing up my whole body.

Then, I tender the pint to Coach, my hand trembling a little, wondering what she’ll do, if we’ve done something here, swept her up in something with us, something we all want.

Her arm lifts serenely, without pause, her hand slipping around the pint.

Tilting it, her fingers nuzzled tight, she drinks.

Hand to hand, our warming fingers, we pass the pint until it’s empty. My eyes tearing, my body blazing and strong.

Emily and Tacy go home, and RiRi is drunken-texting a new boy, who seems just like the last one and may even be the last one’s brother, so Coach and I drift into the house.

 “Hanlon—
Addy,
” she says, and we pluck fruit from the big wooden bowl on her kitchen island as we walk by. “And you can call me Colette. These are Smirnoff rules.”

She snags a tangle of grapes and we slide them into our mouths one after another as she gives me the big tour.

Coach’s eyes are a little blurred, and it’s just a gentle buzz we have, and I drop a grape on the carpet, and it smears beneath my sock, and I apologize four times.

“Fuck it,” Coach—Colette—says. “You think I care about this carpet?”

And soon enough we’re both kneeling on the carpet, woven wool in the deepest forest green.

“It’s the face weight,” she says. “That’s what counts. Matt says you have to have forty ounces per square. And at least five twists per inch. He read it on the internet.”

“It’s beautiful,” I say, and I’ve never really looked at carpet before. But now I can’t seem to get enough of the feel of it on my knees, between my fingertips, dug deep.

“Addy,” she says, pulling me up to my feet, dragging me from room to room, “you should’ve seen the wedding. We had a picture pool filled with rose petals. A harpist. Pin spots on every table.”

She tells me they couldn’t afford any of it, but Matt worked harder, until they could.

Five, six days a week, he left for work at five, came home at ten. He wanted to give her things. He let her have whatever she wanted. She didn’t know what to want, but she cut out pictures from magazines. Assembled them in a book.
My Wedding,
it was called.

“I was barely twenty-one,” she says. “What did I know?”

I nod and nod and nod.

“He found the house,” she says, looking around, eyes blinking, like it’s all new to her. Like she hasn’t ever seen any of it before.

And so, age twenty-two, she had this house. And had to fill it.

He said,
Whatever you want.
So she cut out more pictures from magazines. She made a big bulletin board and called it
My House.
He saw what she wanted and he made it happen—as much of it as he could.

“He’s very hardworking,” she says. “He looks at numbers all day. And at home, that laptop is always open, those long columns of numbers, flashing and blinking. They never stop blinking.”

Her hand skates across the pleated shade of an amber lamp.

“He does it all for me, Addy,” she says. But the way she says it, it doesn’t match what she’s saying. The way she says, it’s like it’s some leaden thing.

My head isn’t straight, though, the vodka still stirring in me.

But I’m not so drunk that I don’t understand that the house is like any of our houses. Not as nice as Emily’s, where everything is white and you can’t sit on anything, but nicer than RiRi’s, which has brown ceiling stains and wall-to-wall.