by Megan Abbott
Everyone looks at Beth.
I’ve known Beth since second grade, since we braided our bodies together in sleeping bags at girl camp, since we first blood-brothered ourselves to each other. I know Beth and can read her every raised eyebrow, every toe pivot. She holds certain things—calculus, hall passes, her mother, stop signs—in a steely contempt that drives her hard.
Once, she dunked her mother’s toothbrush in the toilet, and she calls her father “the Mole,” though none of us can remember why, and there was that time she called our phys ed teacher a cunt, though no one could prove it.
But there are other things about her that not everyone knows.
She rides horses, has a secret library of erotic literature, is barely five feet tall and yet has the strongest legs I’ve ever seen.
I might also tell this: In eighth grade, no, summer after, at a beer party, Beth put her scornful little-girl mouth on Ben Trammel, you know where. I remember the sight. He was grinning, holding her head down, gripping her hair like he’d caught a trout with his bare hand, and everyone found out. I didn’t tell. People still talk about it. I don’t.
I never knew why she did it, or the other things she’s done since. I never asked, that’s not how we are.
We don’t judge.
The main thing about Beth, though, is this: she has always been our captain, my captain, even back in peewee, in junior high, then JV, and now the Big Leagues.
Beth has always been captain, and me her badass lieutenant, since the day she and I, after three weeks of flipping roundoffs together in her backyard, first made squad together.
She was born to it, and we never thought of cheer any other way.
Sometimes I think captain is the only reason Beth even comes to school, bothers with any of us, anything at all.
“I just don’t see any need for a captain. I don’t see what it’s gotten you,” Coach says, glance passing over Beth. “But thank you for your service, Cassidy.”
Hand me your badge, your gun.
Everyone pads their sneakers anxiously, and RiRi peers dramatically at Beth, arching her whole back to see her reaction.
But Beth gives no reaction.
Beth doesn’t seem to care at all.
Doesn’t even care enough to yawn.
“I was sure it’d be bad,” whispers Emily to me, doing jump squats in the locker room later. “Like when she got mad at that math sub and keyed his car.”
But, knowing Beth, I figure it will be some time before we see her true response.
“What’ll cheer be like now?” wonders Emily, lunging breathlessly, paring that body down to size. Fixing it. “What does it mean?”
What it means, we soon see, is no more hours whiled away talking about the lemonade diet and who had an abortion during summer break.
Coach has no interest in that, of course. She tells us we’d best get our act together.
End of that first week, new regime, our legs are loose and soft, our bodies flopping. Our moves less than tight. She says we look sloppy and juvenile, like Disney tweensters on a parade float. She is right.
And so it’s bleacher sprints for us.
Oh, to know such pain. Hammering up and down those bleacher steps to the pulse of her endless whistle. Twenty-one high steps and forty-three smaller steps. Again, again, again.
We can feel it in our shins the next day.
Our spines.
We can feel it everywhere.
Stairwell to hell, we call it, which Beth says is just bad poetry.
By Saturday practice, though, we’re already—some of us—starting to look forward to that pain, which feels like something real.
And we know we will get a lot better fast, and no injuries either because we’re running a tight routine.
4
WEEK TWO
The bleacher sprints are punishing, and I feel my whole body shuddering—pound-pound-pound—my teeth rattling, it is almost ecstatic—pound-pound-pound, pound-pound-pound—I feel almost like I might die from the booming pain of it—pound—I feel like my body might blow to pieces, and we go, go, go. I never want it to stop.
So different from before, all those days we spent our time nail painting and temp tattooing, waiting always for Cap’n Beth, who would show ten minutes before game time after smoking a joint with Todd Grinnell or gargling with peppermint schnapps behind her locker door and still dazzle us all by rocketing atop Mindy’s and Cori’s shoulders, stretching herself into an Arabesque.
Back then, we could hardly care, our moves so sloppy and weak. We’d just streak ourselves with glitter and straddle jump and shake our asses to Kanye. Everybody loved us. They knew we were sexy beyotches. It was enough.
Cheerutantes, that’s what they called us, the teachers.
Cheerlebrities, that’s what we called ourselves.
We spent our seasons prowling, a flocked flock, our ponytails the same length, our matching nfinity trainers, everything synchronous, eyelids gold-flecked, and no one could touch us.
But there was a sloth in it, I see now. A wayward itch, and sometimes even I would look at the other kids who filled the classrooms, the debaters and yearbook snappers and thick-legged girl-letes and the band girls swinging their battered violin cases, and wonder what it felt like to care so much.
Everything is different now.
Beth is tugging at her straw, the squeaking grating on me.
I should be home, drawing parabolas, and instead I’m in Beth’s car, Beth needing to get out of the house, to stop hearing her mother’s silky robe shushing down the hallway.
Beth and her mother, a pair of impalas, horns locked since Beth first started speaking, offered up her first cool retort.
“My daughter,” Mrs. Cassidy once slurred to me, slathering her neck with crème de la mer, “has been a delinquent since the day she was born.”
So I get in Beth’s car, thinking a drive might do some kind of soothing magic, like with a colicky baby.
“The test’s tomorrow,” I say, fingering my calc book.
“She lives on Fairhurst,” she says, ignoring me.
“Who?”
“French. The coach.”
“How do you know?”
Beth doesn’t even give me a shrug, has never, ever answered a question she didn’t feel like answering.
“You wanna see it? It’s pretty lame.”
“I don’t want to see it,” I say, but I do. Of course I do.
“This isn’t about the captain thing?” I say, very quiet, like not quite sure I want to say it aloud.
“What captain thing?” Beth says, not even looking at me.
The house on Fairhurst is not small. A ranch house, split level. It’s a house, what can I say? But there is something to it, okay. Knowing Coach is in there, behind the big picture window, the light tawny and soft, it seems like more.
There’s a tricycle in the driveway with streamers, pink and narrow, flittering in the night air.
“A little girl,” Beth says, cool-like. “She has a little girl.”
“Don’t think of a pyramid as a stationary object,” Coach tells us. “Don’t think of it as a structure at all. It’s a living thing.”
With Coach Fish, when we would do pyramids, we used to think of it as stacking ourselves. Building it layer by layer.
Now we are learning that the pyramid isn’t about girls climbing on top of each other and staying still. It’s about breathing something to life. Together. Each of us a singular organ feeding the other organs, creating something larger.
We are learning that our bodies are our own and they are the squad’s and that is all.
We are learning that we are the only people in the world when we are on the floor. We will wear our smiles, tight and meaningless, but inside, all we care for is Stunt. Stunt is all.
At the bottom, our hardcore Base girls, Mindy and Cori, my feet on Mindy’s shoulders, her body vibrating through mine, mine vibrating through Emily above me.
The Mid
dle Bases in place, the Flyer rises not by climbing, not by being lifted, it’s not a staircase, a series of tedious steps. No, we bounce and swing to bring everyone up, and the momentum makes you realize you are part of something. Something real.
“A pyramid is a body, it needs blood and beats and heat. ONE, TWO, THREE. What keeps it up, what keeps it alive is the bounding of your bodies, the rhythm you build together. With each count, you are becoming one, you are creating life. FOUR, FIVE, SIX.”
And I feel Mindy beneath me, the sinew of her, we are moving as one person, we are bringing Beth up and she is part of us too, and her blood shooting through me, her heart pounding with mine. The same heart.
“The only moment the pyramid is still is when you make it still,” Coach says. “All your bodies one body, and you DO NOT MOVE. You are marble. You are stone.
“And you won’t move because you won’t be able to, because you’re not that hot chick bouncing down the hallway, that ponytail-swinging girl, mouth filled with nothings. You’re not pretty, you’re not cute young things, you’re not a girl at all, not even a person. You’re the most vital part of one thing, the perfect thing. Until, SEVEN, EIGHT, and…
“We blow it all apart.”
After, our bodies spent, our limbs slick, we query her.
Sweatless and erect, she looks down at our wasted loins, water bottles rolling over our chests and foreheads.
“Coach, where’d you go to high school?” one of us asks.
“Coach, what’s your husband like?”
“Coach, is that your car in the faculty lot, or your husband’s?”
We try every day, most of us. The information comes slow, wriggling out. She’d gone to school over in Stony Creek, her husband works in a mirrored office tower downtown, and he bought her the car. Barely information at all. As little as she can share and still share something.
So focused, so intent, she’ll only answer questions when we’ve done our sprints, our bridge bends, our hundreds of searing crunches, backs sliding, squeaking on the floor.
That prettiness, that bright-beaming prettiness she wears almost like a shameful thing, a flounce she keeps pulling tight, a tinkling charm she stills under her hand.
It’s when she’s walking away from us, it’s when she’s dismissed us that RiRi calls out, “Hey Coach, hey, Co-o-ach. What’s that on your ankle?”
The tattoo creeps above her running anklet, a violet blur.
She doesn’t even turn her head, you wouldn’t even know she heard.
“Coach, what is it?”
“A mistake,” she says. That hard little voice of hers. A mistake.
Ah, steel-strung coach with a reckless past, a bawdy past.
“Bet we find her in an old episode of Girls Gone Wild: The Prehistoric Years.” That’s Beth, of course. On Emily’s laptop. Beth typing Coach’s name into YouTube, bottom-trawling.
She doesn’t find anything. Somehow I knew she wouldn’t. Someone that steely-strung, there’s nothing you could find.
After practice, dwindling Emily, back flat on the locker room linoleum, curls her stomach upon herself over and over, fighting to get tighter, to whittle herself down to Coach specs. I stay with her, hold her feet down, keep her pudged ankles from swiveling.
And it turns out Coach hasn’t left either. She’s in her office, talking on the phone. We see her through the glass, opening and closing the blinds, hand coiled around the plastic wand. Staring out the window to the parking lot. Open, shut, open, shut.
When she hangs up, she opens the office door. The shush of the door swinging open, and it’s beginning.
She opens the door and sees us, and the nod of her head, permitting entry.
The office smells like smoke, like the sofa in the teachers’ lounge with that hard stain in the sunken center. Everybody has a story about that stain.
There’s a picture on her desk of her little girl. Coach says her name is Caitlin and she’s four years old with a bleary mouth and flushed skin and eyes that glaze so dumbly I wonder how does anyone have kids.
“She’s so cute,” spurts Emily. “Like a doll or something.”
Like a doll, or something.
Coach looks at the photo, like she’s never seen it before. She squints.
“They get mad at me, at day care,” she says, like she’s thinking about it. “I’m always the last one to pick up. The last mom, at least.”
She puts down the photo and looks at us.
“I remember those,” she says, nodding at the flossy bracelets banding up and down our forearms.
She tells us she made them when she was a kid and she can’t believe they’re popular again. Friendship bracelets, she calls them. But we would never call them that.
“They’re just bracelets,” I say.
She looks at me, lighting a cigarette with a twiggy old match, like the man who sells us jugs of wine out of the back of his store on Shelter Road.
“We called this ‘Snake around the Pole,’” she says, lifting the one on Emily’s wrist with a crooking finger, her cigarette flaring.
“That’s a Chinese Staircase,” I say. I don’t know why I keep correcting her.
“What’s that one?” she says, poking at my wrist, the cigarette tip flush on my skin.
I stare at it, and at Coach’s cool tanned finger.
“A Love-Me-Knot.” Emily grins. “That’s the easy one. I know who made you that.”
I don’t say anything.
Coach looks at me. “Guys don’t make these.”
“They sure don’t,” Emily says, and you can almost see her tongue flicking.
“I don’t even know who gave it to me,” I say.
But then I remember it was Casey Jaye, this girl I tumbled with at cheer camp last summer, but Beth didn’t like her and camp ended anyway. Funny how people you know at camp can seem so close and then the summer’s over and you never see them again at all.
Coach has her eyes on me, and there’s a shadow of a dimple in the corner of her mouth.
“Show me,” she says, poking out her cigarette. “Show me how to love-knot.”
I say I don’t have any of the thread, but Emily does, at the bottom of her hobo bag.
We show her how to do it, then watch her twist the strands, to and fro. She picks it up so fast, her fingers flying. I wonder if there’s anything she can’t do.
“I remember,” she says. “Watch this one.”
She shows us how to make one called Cat’s Tongue, which is like a Broken Ladder crossed with a simple braid, and another she calls the Big Bad that I can’t follow at all.
When she finishes Big Bad, she twirls it on her finger and flings it at me. I see Emily’s face flicker jealously.
“Is this all you guys do for fun?” she says.
And no, it’s not.
“It was like she was really interested in our lives,” Emily tells everyone after, her fingers whisking across my new bracelet.
“Pathetic,” Beth says. “I’m not even interested in our lives.” Her finger slips under the bracelet and tug-tug-tugs until it snaps from my wrist.
The next day, after school, the parking lot, I see Coach walking to her sprightly little silver crawler of a car.
I’m loitering, fingers hooked around my diet soda bottle, waiting on Beth, who is my ride and occasionally sees fit to make me wait while she talks up Mr. Feck, who gives her reams of pink fluttery hall passes from his desk drawer.
I don’t even realize Coach has seen me until she beckons, her head snapping toward her open door.
“Well c’mon then,” she says. “Get in.”
As if she knows I’ve been waiting for the invitation.
Driving, Coach is shaking one of those strange, muddy-looking juices she’s always drinking, raw against your teeth. I don’t think any of us have ever seen her eat.
“You girls have lots of bad habits,” she says, eyeing my soda.
“It’s diet,” I say, but she just keeps shaking her head.
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br /> “We’ll get you right. The days of funyuns for lunch and tanning beds—they’re over, girl.”
“Okay,” I say, but I must not look convincing. First of all, I’ve never eaten a funyun in my life.
“You’ll see,” she says. Her neck and back so straight, her eyebrows tweezed to precise arches. The glint-gold tennis bracelet and shine-sleek hair. She is so perfect.
“So, which one of those footballers is your guy?” Coach asks, staring out the window.
“What?” I say. “None of them.”
“No boyfriend?” She sits up a little. “Why not?”
“There’s not a lot to interest me at Sutton Grove High,” I say, like Beth might say. I’m eyeing the cigarette pack on the console between us, imagining myself plucking one and putting it in my mouth. Would she stop me?
“Tell me,” she says. “Who’s the guy with all the curls?” She taps her forehead. “And the crook in his nose?”
“On the team?” I ask.
“No,” she says, leaning forward toward the steering wheel a little. “I see him run track in those high-tops with the skulls.”
“Jordy Brennan?” I say.
There was a group: ten, twelve guys you might loiter with, might lap-shimmy, beer-breathed at parties, might letter-jacket him for a week, a month.
Jordy Brennan wasn’t one of them. He was just there, barely. Scarcely a blip on the screen of my school.
“I never thought of him,” I say.
“He’s cute,” she says. The way she breathes in, turning the wheel, you can feel her thinking all about Jordy Brennan, for just that second.
And then I think of him too.
My shirt scraping up my back, the nervy-hot hands of Jordy skittering there, and before I know it, my cheer skirt twisting ’round my waist, nudging up my belly, his hands there too, and mine coiled into little nerve-balls, and am I going to do it?
This is in my head, these thoughts, as I rustle under my Sutton green coverlet in bed that night. I’ve never had it happen like that before, a sharp ache down there, right there, and a put-put-put pulse, so breathless.