Dare Me: A Novel

by Megan Abbott

  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 im
portance 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.

  But the way Coach—Colette—walks through it, her voice hushed, her feet treading so softly, it starts to seem like the whole place is glowing, like the spinning lantern in little Caitlin’s room, casting enchantment everywhere.

  “Beautiful,” I say again, my fingers slipping around a curtain pull. “Beautiful.” That’s the word that keeps sliding from my mouth.

  “Beautiful, beautiful,” she says, singsongy, as we walk past it all, as I lace my fingers through everything.

  “And this is the last of it,” she says, and my feet are nestling in the bedroom carpet, which is deep, rich. It’s a quiet, caramely space, like a nice hotel room where everything feels soothing and featureless.

  But then I think of how she chose it all, Coach—Colette—with fabric swatches, tile samples, paging endlessly through those thick magazines you see fanned on tables at the white-walled boutiques on Honeycutt Drive. From the wrought-iron chandelier, its arms looping up, nearly stroking the ceiling, to the sheer curtains dangling, twisting around the drooping spider plant. Everything touching everything else.

  She made it up inside her head, and he made it real for her.

  It starts to seem like so much more, swelling before my eyes. Like everything is throbbing lightly, and if you rested your forehead against it, you could feel its heart beating.

  “This is my favorite room,” I say.

  She looks at me, then looks around, like she’s already forgotten all of it. Like she hasn’t noticed any of it in years, since she tacked it together on her bulletin board. My House.

  Our eyes float to the creampuff of a bed, its linen whipped up high. The princess and the pea.

  Wearily, she sinks down into it, and everything seems to puff up, tiny cream-colored pillows scattering to the corners, the carpet.

  “All these pillows,” she says. “Every morning I put them all back. He’s already at the office by six and I’m here, putting all these little pillows, these hundreds of pillows, back on the bed.”

  I feel my foot sink into one of them as I stumble toward her. I’ve never seen so many pillows, every shade of brown, from pale honey to something the color of chicory, like the French teacher drinks every day at lunch.

  She takes my hand and sets it on the duvet, soft as spun air. Her touch, a coach’s touch, Feel this. Now.

  “Lie down,” she says. “Get under it.”

  My bare legs cocooned under the filmy duvet, I want to kick them in circles. The bed is a tremendous cream-filled pillow, no, air-filled cream, and the tickling in my belly, unbearable.

  “Pretend you’re me,” she says. I can barely see her over the frothy mound.

  And it happens just like that.

  A feeling of sinking, a falling deep inside.

  And I’m her.

  And this is my house, and Matt French is my husband, tallying columns all day, working late into the night for me, for me.

  And here I am, my tight, perfect body, my pretty, perfect face, and nothing could ever be wrong with me, or my life, not even the sorrow that is plainly right there in the center of it. Oh, Colette, it’s right there in the center of you, and some kind of despair too. Colette—

  —that silk sucking into my mouth, the weight of it now, and I can’t catch my breath, my breath, my breath.

  Everything’s changing in me.

  I guess I’d been waiting forever, my palm raised. Waiting for someone to take my girl body and turn it out, steel me from the inside, make things matter for me, like never before.

  Like love can.

  8

  Noonish, at the Guard recruitment table, we’re watching the bet unfold.

  All w
eek, Beth has kept Sarge Will in her sights, determined to take RiRi down. They both agreed: whoever can get him to do a below-the-waist touch.

  Beth works those school corridors like a gunslinger, spurred boots click-clacking. They lip over her knees, tall and shiny, and you’re not supposed to wear boots with your cheer skirt, you’re not supposed to wear boots like that at all.

  As for RiRi, her cheer skirt tugged heavenward, waistband high enough to show what her mama gave her. The two of them, they’re dangerous.

  Sarge, though, is above all this. All the girls are hurling themselves at him, but he never blinks, not once. He smiles, but his smile doesn’t really seem like a smile but the kind of thing you do with your mouth when you know everyone is watching.

  Sometimes it’s like each hip swivel is a burden he strains under. So, he just smoothly shifts such attentions over to the corporal, the private, whoever the hard-jawed thug next to him is, the one we never look at, that brush of acne on his chin, that angry look on him, like the boys who get into fights after one beer, who shove their girlfriends at parties and knock their shoulder blades loose, who pop their collarbones like buttons. We never look at them. Or I don’t.

  The worst is Corporal Prine, the one with the barrelhouse shoulders and the broad head like an eraser stub. A few weeks ago, I spotted him standing in front of the door of my English class. He seemed to be staring right at me, his razor-burned cheeks studded red. I tried not to pay attention, but then he did something with his tongue and hand that could not be ignored.

  But Sarge, he can do anything. Yet the more we try, the less interested he seems. Most days, he seems to be some other place entirely, some place in which girls like us have no place at all.

  Even Beth at her tartiest can’t provoke him.

  I don’t see it, but I hear about it—the flash of her skirt, the star-spangled panties—and I don’t believe it. I didn’t flash anything, she tells me later. Just crooked her index finger, made him lean close, and asked him if she could feel his weapon.