Dare Me (7 page)

“Freaking rock star,”
RiRi marvels, finger spotting me.

I am doing perfect back tucks, one after another.

I know suddenly I was born to do them. I am a propeller.

“
This
is what a coach can do.” RiRi grins. “Beth would never have let you get this good.”

As soon as she says it, she seems almost to take it back, laughing, like it’s a joke. Maybe it is.

“Knees to nose, Hanlon,” Coach barks, a sneaky smile dancing there as she walks back into her office.

“
Pffht-pffht
,”
comes the sound from the bleachers, where Beth has slunk. “Watch that neck, Addy-Faddy, or it’s the ventilator for you.
Pffht-pffht
.”

“Très J,” whistles Emily. But I know Beth isn’t jealous of my tuck. She can back handspring, back tuck me into the ground, her body like a twirling streamer.

In the locker room after, Emily kicks her leg up, grabbing her toes as she stands on the center bench. Pea-shoot thin now, fifteen pounds lighter since the month before, she’s set to fly with Tacy at the Stallions game. All the hydroxy-hot and activ-8 and boom blasters and South African hoodia-with-green-coffee-extract and most of all her private exertions have made her airy and audacious.

Eyeing her, Tacy is sullen, uneager to share Flyer glory.

Lying on the far end of the bench, Beth stares abstractedly up at the drop ceiling.

“Cox-sucka,” she calls out to Brinnie Cox, who is curling her hair into long sausages and singing to the locker mirror. “How’s your head?”

“What do you mean?” Brinnie asks, her arm frozen. “My head is fine.”

“That’s a relief,” Beth says. “I wondered if maybe you were still feeling the blood pushing against your brain. From that header you took a few weeks back.”

“No,” she says, quietly.

“Beth,” I say, a faint try at warning.

“As long as you’re not a purger, you should be okay out there tonight. It’s the regurgitators who drop like dead weight.”

At the other end of the long bench, our girl Emily releases her leg and looks at the reclining Beth, who is staring straight up at the fluorescent lights.

“Chumming all the time,” Beth says, “they bust all those blood vessels in their eyes. Then one day, out on the mat, they hit their head and…
ping.
”

Beth snaps her fingers beside her temple.

“Once,” she continues, “I heard a ’mia girl fell during a dismount and an eye popped out.”

Propping herself up on her elbows, she looks down the long bench straight at Emily.

“But let’s not talk of ugly matters,” she says. “Our girl Em’s going to rock it out tonight. Going out a youngster and coming back a star.”

“She’d really miss the Stallions game?”

Ten minutes before kickoff, Beth is nowhere to be found.

She’s never no-showed a game. Everyone wonders if something happened, like that time she followed her dad and his paralegal to that Hyatt downtown and keyed the words
MAN WHORE
into the hood of his car.

Without her, we have to reconfigure the whole double-hitch pyramid. We count on Beth to be the Middle Flyer, holding onto Tacy’s and Emily’s inside legs as they swing out their other legs and stretch them sky high. She’s the only one light enough to be that high and strong enough to support both girls. It’s like juggling jigsaw pieces that don’t fit and I can see Coach’s face tighten.

“Should we skip the stunt?” I ask Coach.

“No,” Coach says, eyes on the field, breeze kicking up. “Cox can stand for her.”

I look at flimsy Brinnie with her chicken bone legs. Now I see what Beth’s game was, putting the scare in Brinnie.

RiRi looks at me, squintingly. But I shrug.

“Coach knows what to do,” I say.

Brinnie’s right arm starts shaking during the double hitch.

I can see it from the back spot and I’m shouting at her, but fear hurtles across her eyes and there is no stopping it.

On the half-twist Deadman fall, that pin-thin arm of hers gives entirely and Emily, now just an eyelash of a girl, her head dizzy with visions of blood burst, slips and crashes, knee-first, into the foam floor.

Oh, to see her fall is to see how everything can fall.

Her body popping like bubble wrap.

In the back of my brain, I know that the clap we all hear from Emily’s knee, like a New Year’s champagne cork, is about that back tuck of mine.

Is about Coach and me.

I had epic cramps,
Beth texts me that night.

You had it last week,
I say. We all had our periods at the same time, the witchiness of girls.

Infection,
she texts.
Cranjuice all nite, and mom’s narvox.

Come clean,
I text. She has never missed a game, ever. Not even when her mother slipped on the living room carpet and dented her forehead on the coffee table, forty-seven stitches and three years’ worth of vicodin.

Clean as a whistle, Merry Sunshine,
she texts back.
Cleaner than yr coach.

U know what I mean,
I text.
Em might have a torn lig.

There is a long moment and I can almost feel something black open inside Beth’s head.

I have a torn life. Fuck all of you.

 “Two-game suspension,” RiRi tells us. “No Beth for two games. Em’s down. And with Miz Jimmy-Arm Brinnie Cox spotting us, it means our heads’ll be popping all over the mat.”

“Tough break,” Tacy Slaussen says, trying not to grin. She has her eye on the prize. With Emily and Beth out, she’s the only bitty girl left to fly.

“Beth blames it all on Coach,” RiRi says.

“Coach?” I say, my eyebrow twitching.

“She said Em fell because she’s been living on puffed air and hydroxy for six weeks to hit weight for Coach.”

I look at her. “Is that what you think?” I say, surprised at the hardness in my voice, the old lieutenant steel. It doesn’t go away.

RiRi’s eyes go wide. “No,” she says. “No.”

I find Beth lying on the bleachers out back, sunglasses on.

“I look at all of you, how you are with her. Your paper-heart parade,” she says.

“You never like anyone,” I say. “Or anything.”

“She never should’ve staked Brinnie Cox, she’s too short and too stupid,” she says. “And you know how I feel about her teeth.”

“You should’ve showed up,” I say, trying to peer behind the black lenses, to see how deep this goes.

“Coach can’t top-girl anyone else,” Beth says. “She’ll beg for me back.”

“I don’t think so,” I say. “She’s a rule-keeper.”

“Is that so?” Beth wriggles up and stares at me, eyes like silver-rimmed globes, an insect, or alien. “That hasn’t been my experience of her.”

I look at her.

“She may have the clipboard and the whistle,” Beth says, “but I have something too.”

“We’re not saying anything,” I say, my voice going faster. “We said we wouldn’t.”

“Are we a ‘we’ again?” she says, sinking back down onto the bench. “And I didn’t promise anything.”

“If you were going to say something,” I say, “you would’ve.”

“You know that’s not how to play. That’s not how to win.”

“You don’t understand,” I say. “The two of them. It’s not like you think.”

“Yeah,” she says, looking at me, nail-hard. “You know better? You’ve seen into her knotted soul?”

“There’s things you don’t know,” I say. “About him, about them.”

“Things I don’t know, huh?” she says, something less than a taunt, more urgent. “Illuminate. Like what? Like what, Addy?”

But I don’t tell. I don’t want to give her anything. I see something now. She’s building a war chest.

The next night, Coach has everyone over for a party for Emily, whose fall has put her on the DL for six weeks, maybe more.

No one can even imagine six weeks. It’s a lifetime.

It’s too cold to be outside, but after the wine swells in all of us, we’re even taking off our jackets, lounging lovely across the deck, watching the sky grow dark. Emily gets prime seat, high-kicking her boot brace for all to see, her eyes stoned on percocet. The happiest girl in the world, for tonight.

I decide to banish Beth’s hex from my head.
She fell because she’s been living on puffed air and hydroxy.…

Coach maps out our Saturday stunts on napkins spread across the glass-top patio table. We huddle around eagerly, following Coach’s sharpie as it plots our fates.

“We have three weeks until the final game against the Celts,” Coach says. “We shine there, we have a qualifying tape to submit, we go to Regionals next year.”

We are all beaming.

No one asks about Beth until Tacy, Beth’s former flunky, our little stone-drunk Benedict Arnold, bleats, “And who needs Cassidy? We don’t need the haters. We’re going to Regionals with or without the haters.”

We’re all a little nervous, but Coach smiles lightly, looping her bracelet around her wrist. I smile to see it’s my hamsa bracelet, its eye flashing in the porch light.

“Cassidy’ll be back,” she says. “Or not. But she won’t be our Flyer again.”

She looks down at her squiggled hieroglyphics.

“She’s not the straw that stirs the drink,” she says.

Eyeing the Flyer spot on the diagram, I watch her pen skim right and left, a big black X right in the center.

It’s not until very late that we’re jarred by Matt French’s car door slamming from the driveway and, the same instant, Coach’s deck chair shakes to life.

Dad’s home,
that’s what it’s like, and everyone jumps. We all scurry to the kitchen, start stacking plates and shaking wine glasses empty over our mouths, and I’m helping RiRi hide the empties behind the evergreen shrubs. The bottles clanging loudly. Matt French must know. He must hear everything.

We’re swooping around the kitchen island, loading the dishwasher and chomping on our organic ginger gum, and Coach is talking to him in the other room, asking him, her speech so slow and careful, about his day.

Through the swinging café doors, he looks very tired and he’s talking but I can’t quite make out the words.

He reaches out to touch her arm just at the moment she turns to hand him the mail.

I think how exhausted he must be, how maybe if he were my husband, even though he’s not handsome at all, maybe I’d want to sit him down and rub his shoulders, and maybe get one of those lemony men’s lotions, and rub his shoulders and his hands. And maybe that’d be nice, even if he’s not good-looking and his forehead is way too high and he has little wiry hairs in his ears and I never think about him like that, really.

But he’s tired after his long day and he comes home and there we are, bansheeing all over his house, all cranked high and slipping-free braids and ponytails, and Coach talks to him and it’s like how she talks to the other teachers at school, holding their mottled coffee mugs and making the smallest talk ever.

His shoulders tucking in wearily, I see him flinching at all the clamorous girl energy radiating from the kitchen.

“Colette,” I think he says, “I was calling all day. I called all day.”

I’m not sure, but I think I hear him say something about Caitlin, about the day care center phoning him, asking where she was.

Coach’s hand is over her mouth and she is staring at her feet in a way I recognize from myself, the nights when my dad still waited up, demanded to know things.

Suddenly, there’s a loud crash from the back deck, like glasses falling.

“Coach!” someone hollers from outside. “We’re sorry. We’re really sorry.”

“Everybody give the
chicken a warm welcome,” Coach says, giving a gentle shove to the latest recruit, a JV cheerleader getting her shot at the show. A hammer-headed girl with a body like a tuning fork. No one will mind her landing headfirst on the spring floor. She’ll just
ting.

“She’s on me,” Mindy surmises, curling her neck side to side. “I turn her out.”

Mindy knows she can lift the shavetail rafters-high, a girl like that, not more than ninety pounds soaking wet, and she even looks wet, a dew on her that’s probably flop sweat.

“Not before she pays her dues,” RiRi says, arms folded. “We all fly her first.”

New girls get tossed hard first time out. Initiate-style. And we like to rock them side to side.

“Mat kill,” mutters Tacy, newly hard, suddenly a senior statesman of the squad.

No one asks about Beth. She’s barely been in school these past three days, and Coach seems very calm in her victory.

It’s after midnight when my phone hisses, rattling my bedside tabletop.

Can u pick me up? Cnr Hutch & 15.

Beth. The first text in five days. The longest stretch since she went to horse camp in the mountains after seventh grade, returning with a ringlet of hickeys from a counselor and fresh revelations about the world.

Creeping through the house, I unhitch the car keys from the kitchen door hook. Anyone could hear the car shaking to life in the garage, but if they do, they ignore it. My father nuzzled close to my stepmother, she muzzled by her nightly dose of sleep aids.

Beth is standing on the corner, and her face when the headlights hit is a surprise. It’s Beth bare-faced, which is scarier than her hooded eyes, her teengirl snarl.

Her face splayed open, like it almost never is, and mascara-spattered eyes blinking relentlessly, staring straight into the center of me.

With the headlights in her face, she can’t really see me, but it feels like she can. She knows I’m there.

It’s a thing to see, her face so bare. I almost want to turn away. I don’t want to feel for her.

By the time she’s in the car, her face is shuttered tight once more. She doesn’t give me much of anything, not even a hello, and sets about punching text messages.

“Where were you?” I ask.

“Guard duty,” she mutters, thumbs flying on her little keyboard.

“What?” I say.

Thump-thump-thump that thumb of hers, thumping.

“What?” I say again. “What did you say?”

“Sarge Stud…,” she says, and I hold my breath, “…ain’t the only stars and stripes in town.”

She sets her phone down and glances at me, sly smile playing there.

“Which one?” I ask. All those rawboned soldiers who stood at that table with Will, rawboned and callow, steel-wool scrubbed.

“Bullet head,” Beth says. “Prine. Corporal Gregory Prine. Gregorius, let’s call him. You know the one.”

I picture him, tongue waggling at me, fingers forked there, that acne-studded brow and sense of frat menace.

“Well,” I say, feeling sick. “Bad Girls’ Club for you, eh?”

“Hells-yeah,” she says, a rattle laugh.

But I look at her hands, which are shaking. She clasps her phone to try to stop them. When I see it, something in me turns.

“Beth.” I feel all the blood rushing from my face. I can’t quite name it, but it’s a sense of abandon. “Why?”

“Why not?” she replies, and her voice husky, her hair falling across her face. “Why not, Addy? Why not?”

I think she might cry. In her way, she is.