by Megan Abbott
But Sarge didn’t bat a downy eyelash.
Oh, the daily frustration on RiRi’s candy-mouthed face, and worse still Beth’s glower, which she wears like a black veil all day.
Between Coach and Sarge, she has much to be unhappy about.
But instead of wrath and plots, she is quiet, brooding.
There’s a witchiness to it, and it worries me.
It’s during those weeks that I see Coach’s husband for the first time, through the half-open study door. He’s reading a sheaf of paper while slowly pulling off his necktie. I can’t even tell you what he looks like except there’s nothing to notice at all.
The next time, and the time after, it’s always like this presence. Matt’s here. Oh, that’s just Matt, finally home. That’s the pizza guy for Matt. And sometimes just “he.” There he is, oh, we can’t turn on the stereo, he’s here. Oh, you know him, he’s working. He never, ever stops.
He is always on his cell phone and he always looks tired. Once or twice we see him in the backyard, talking into his bluetooth, pacing around. We see him sitting on a stool at the kitchen island, spreadsheets spread across the table, his laptop swiveling, screen glowing green on him.
He works very hard, and he’s not interesting at all.
Or maybe he is, but Coach never seems interested. And when he’s there, it feels weirdly like Dad’s home. A nice enough Dad, and not a buzzkill Dad except, I guess, for Coach, who seems to sink inside a little. Once he tried to ask about how we planned our pyramids because he studied real pyramids in college engineering and wondered if it was similar. But no one knew what to say and there was a long pause until Coach, her eyes shifting away, said that we were just tired because we’d been working on sequences all night.
“Man fears time,” he said, as he walked off into his study, smiling at us all and kind of saluting good night, “yet time fears the pyramids.”
Once, I’m passing the door to his study and I see him there, and the computer screen flickering, reflected on the window behind him. And I see he’s playing Scrabble online. And something about it makes me crashingly sad.
“Beth, just come, will you? Just once, come with us.”
We have been trying for the last three weeks. But when Beth does concede, I don’t like how easy it is.
“Let’s see what all of you have going on over there,” she says, eyes flashing. “I’d like to see for myself.”
Three Saturdays in a row, we’ve lounged, grown-up like, at Casa French, the grill fired up, Coach flipping salmon on cedar planks. Nothing ever tasted so good, even though we all only pick at it, shred it to pink filings on our plates, our mouths focused eagerly on the tickly white wine served in fine stemware that tinggged when your nails clicked it.
It’s harder to enjoy it with Beth there, feeling her dismissive eyes on everything. But the wine helps.
We have a routine down, Emily and me lighting all the candles, the hurricane lanterns with the hand-painted ladybugs that Matt brought all the way from South Carolina, and the tall gas torch that Coach says is just like what they have on the beach in Bali, though she’s never been there, none of us have. Beth, dull-eyed and afflicted, says it’s the same ones she’s seen in Maui, or even San Diego, or the Rainforest Café out on Route 9.
Eventually, though, the wine whirls even through Beth and it’s so fun looking around the table at everyone’s blooming, candlelit faces.
Mostly, it’s all of us chicken-jabbering and Coach, her silent, half-smiling self. She listens and listens, and the stories, as before, get darker and more intimate. Oh, RiRi, maybe one day you’ll find a boy who loves you for more than your double-jointed jaw. And Emily, six weeks running on splenda and cabbage broth, as caved-in as your belly looks you’ll never get that round face of yours any thinner at all unless you take a hammer and chisel.
By the time Husband Matt comes home around eleven, we are all pretty drunk, Coach maybe even a little bit, that bloom to her face and her tongue slipping around words, and when RiRi takes off her top and runs around the yard, shouting into the bushes for boys, Coach just laughs and says it’s time we met some real men, and that’s when we see him standing at the kitchen island, and we all think that’s hysterical, except Matt French, who looks tired and flips open his laptop and asks us if we could be quiet, which we can’t possibly be.
Beth, who keeps saying she isn’t drunk at all, but she never admits to being drunk, starts talking to him and asking him questions about his job, and if he likes it, and what his commute is like. She squeezes her breasts together in her tank top and leans on the kitchen island, fingers grazing his computer mouse rhythmically.
He looks at her, his brow knitted high in a way that I do find sweet, and asks if her parents might wonder where she is.
Over Beth’s shoulder, he’s throwing these looks at Coach, who finally says she’ll drive us all home and Emily and Beth can pick up their cars tomorrow.
When we’re walking out, I look back at him, and his face looks troubled, like years ago, eighth grade, and my dad, who no longer bothers, watching me as I left the house with Beth, our bodies suddenly so ripe and comely and there was nothing he could do.
The next day, hung over on the L-shaped sofa in Beth’s living room, I wake up to Beth’s hair dangling over me. Leaning over the back of the cushion, she tells me she didn’t have any fun at all. And she’s talking big, which always feels ominous.
“Sitting there on the deck, like it’s her throne,” she says, cotton-mouthed and craggy. “I didn’t like it there. I don’t like the way she conducts herself.” There’s a hitch in her voice and I wonder if she’s still drunk, or I am.
“So high on her seat,” Beth says. “All of you mooning like schoolgirls.”
But we are schoolgirls, I think to myself.
“You have always been soft to these things, Addy,” she says. “Last summer you were.”
And I don’t want her to talk about last summer again, and all our bickerings at cheer camp when everyone thought we were busting up. Because this has nothing to do with that girly nonsense.
“I tell you, Adelaide, I know her kind.”
Climbing over the back of the sofa, Beth swings her bare legs, nestling into me, and I’m listening but not listening because I don’t like that hitch in her voice.
“She better enjoy it while she can,” she rumbles, burrowing her head into the pillow I’ve tucked under my arm, burrowing her head into me, like always. “Because in a few years she’ll probably pop out another kid and her hips’ll spread like rising dough and before she knows it, she’ll be coaching field hockey instead.”
Twisting her fingers in my hair, she tunnels into me and the pillow behind me, hiding herself.
“Who will want her then?” she asks.
Then answers.
“None of us.”
9
There is a golden period, a week, two, when Beth seems to have settled herself, when all our days are brimful with cheer, when everything seems, for a moment, like it will be golden-grooved forever.
Homecoming Week is starry and sublime.
For much of the school year, the rest of the student body views us as something like lacquered lollipops, tiara-ed princesses, spirit whores, chiclet-toothed bronze bitches. Aloof goddesses unwilling to mingle with the masses.
But we never care because we know what we are.
And at Homecoming, we are given full rein.
At the pep rally, they see our swagger, our balls, our badassery. They get to see what we can do, how our bodies are not paper dolls and how our tans are armor.
How we defy everything, including the remorseless sugar maple floor planks nailed a half century ago, ten feet below, our bodies tilting, curving, arcing, whipping through the air, fearless.
Homecoming Week, even those who dislike us the most—the painted Goths, the skater rats, the third-sex drama freaks—gaze with embarrassed wonder as we spring into our hanging pyramid on the open quad at lunch, our bodies
like great iron spokes on a massive wonder wheel.
And at the game, as we catapult Tacy to the heavens—the woozy screech from the stands as they seem to believe that we have flung her to her death—it inspires shock and awe.
I’m the one, strutted high on Mindy’s and Cori’s shoulders, who kicks off the pep rally, waving a long pole looped with streamers, Tacy running alongside with Custodial Services’ pilfered leaf blower, blowing against the streamers, which unfurl like so many roman candles.
The bonfire is the highest we’ve ever had, our torches whirling, all the circles of light, a foam-toothed Rattlers’ mascot going up in flames, swinging high above the cindery tips and all of us screaming to voicelessness, our faces hot and exploding.
Dropping our torches, we run across the dark field, Coach’s voice calling out, Toe Touch, Lock Arms, Spread Eagle…
And there she is, ringside, watching us, eyes darting and everything about her glowing.
I remember, age twelve, watching this. From up high in the bleachers, watching the high school squad in front of the wild inferno, flames vaulting, their silhouettes doing mad jumps, leaps, death defiance. One girl picking up her fallen baton rolling across sparking grass and knowing now, knowing having held that baton, that it is searing but she smiles and dances and leaps higher than anyone else.
And twelve-year-old Beth beside me, saying:
“Look at that, look at that,” her voice when it was still filled with wonder.
But, after Homecoming, returning from our glory paths, something has shifted.
In Coach’s eyes there is something burning moodily. We all notice, and speculate. We try to chalk it up to post-Homecoming comedown, but we do nothing with it.
But two days that week, Coach cancels practice. We think it must be an adult thing in which we have no interest. Mortgage payments, a broken dishwasher, a flood in the basement.
Still, everyone wonders: What could go wrong in Coach’s lovely life, with her nice home and her smooth hair and all those adoring girls wreathed at her feet?
But of course, I know better. I know things, even though I’m not sure what, exactly.
The way she never meets Matt French’s eyes. Watching him help her unload the dishwasher one evening, late, and she would not turn her head.
And the thing I saw, felt, under that creamy duvet of hers, that silk sucking into my mouth, the feeling of something weighing on me, on her, and I couldn’t catch my breath.
Friday, Coach doesn’t cancel. She just doesn’t show up for practice at all.
“Maybe it’s feminine medical problems,” RiRi says. “That happens to my Aunt Kaylie a lot. Sometimes she has to take off all her clothes. She sits on the sun porch in her bra, rubbing ice cubes all across herself.”
“That’s for old ladies,” Beth says. “Maybe she’s just sick of your face. Can you blame her?”
Emily, dizzy from Coach’s x-treme juice fast, sucking on ginger peel all day, has to lean against the padded gym wall.
“She was going to bring me the potassium broth recipe,” she whispers, her face feverish.
She starts to tell everyone about the broth, counting off the ingredients on her gum-sticky fingers: raw garlic, beet tops, turnip tops, parsley, red pepper seeds, it alkalizes and then you…
I nod and nod while Emily chirps and peeps, her little twigged legs trembling against the wall.
“Someone give her a fucking Kit Kat,” Beth growls.
I throw an energy bar at Emily because I can’t stand it anymore either.
We all watch as she eats it slowly, picking at it with shaking fingers, and then, turning greenish white, throws it all back up again in the wrapper.
Beth leans back on the long bench, extending one Aruba-tanned leg and examining it.
“Personally, I am sick of every one of you,” she continues, eyes on perpetual roll. “Sick of everything and everybody.”
Beth touches these things inside us sometimes. Inside me. It is one of her gifts, deeply misunderstood by others. It sounds like she’s being mean, but she’s not. Sick, sick, sick. It’s something you feel constantly, the thing you fight off all the time. The knot of hot boredom lodged behind your eyes, so thick and grievous you want to bang your head into the wall, knock it loose.
I wonder if that’s the thing Coach feels, at home, standing next to Matt French, loading the dishwasher, scrubbing her daughter’s face.
“Hanlon,” Beth says, jumping to her feet. “Let’s trawl.”
I look at her. “But if Coach shows…”
But I can tell where that will get me, Beth with her clenched jaw, about to unsnap. It reminds me of something I learned once in biology: a crocodile’s teeth are constantly replaced. Their whole life, they never stop growing new teeth.
I get up, I follow.
There’s something—always, even as late as junior year, us weary veterans now—about walking the echoing corridors after school. The whole cavernous place, a place we know so well that all our dreams take place here, feels different.
It’s more than the new stillness, more than the heavy bleach swabbed over every skidded, gum-streaked inch.
By day, we walk as if in a force field, surrounded only by one another—our great colored swirl of cheerness. It is not aloofness, superiority. It’s a protection. Who in this ravaged battlefield doesn’t want to gather close her comrades?
But after three o’clock, the school day’s gush of misery rushing into the streets, TV rooms, fluorescent-lit fast-food counters all over town. And the school-after-school becomes a foreign place, exotic.
There are kids here, and teachers in odd lurking pockets, you never know when or where, a huddle of physics grinds on the third-floor landing timing the velocity of falling super balls, the barking Forensics Clubbers snarking about capital punishment in the language lab, shaggy stoners slouching, their eyes bliss-glazed, outside the shop room—now called industrial design lab—the flash of nervous Mrs. Fowler flitting out of the ceramics studio, a foot-tall candleholder thick with shellac in her shaking hands.
We stalk the halls, looking, hunting, scavenging.
I want to find something for Beth. No captain glory, no stable to call her own, not even a glance from Sarge Will to distract her, she needs something. Something to knock the gloomy ire from her: an abandoned joint, a senior boy and freshman girl doing furtive nastiness in some far-flung corner, his arm jammed up her shirt, up over her baby-fat girl belly, her eyes wide with panic and excitement, already, in her head, practicing the telling of the moment even as the moment slips from her.
By the time we reach the fourth floor, there’s a desperation to it. Beth flashes her eyes at me, and it’s really a taunt. Get me something, get me anything.
But it’s always complicated with Beth and me, where her desire ends and mine begins. Because when we first hear the sound, I realize it’s me who wants it more. Wants something to happen.
And then it does.
A yard or two from the door to the teachers’ lounge, we hear something.
The rough rhythmic sound of a chair skidding, lurchingly, across the floor behind the teachers’ lounge door. It seems, suddenly, to be just for me.
Scrape, scrape, scrape.
Beth’s eyes nearly pop with pleasure.
We’re standing outside the door, listening.
I’m shaking my head back and forth and whispering soundlessly don’t, don’t, don’t as Beth, bouncing on her toes, leaning against the teachers’ lounge door, dancing her fingers along it and mouthing things to me. I’m opening it, I am, yes, yes, I sure am, Addy.
I put my hand on the door too, which vibrates with all that clamor inside, that squeaking and thudding. My ear against the humming door, I can hear the breathless pant. It sounds so pained, I think. It sounds like the worst hurt in the world ever.
Like after RiRi lost it to Dean Grady at that party on Windmere and bled for hours in the bathroom and we kept pulling toilet paper from the roll in long, sloping
drifts, like she was gonna die. Like she was gonna—
Just like that, Beth pushes her hip against the teachers’ lounge door, and it swings open, and we see it all.
Every bit of it.
There, seated on one of the old swivel chairs, is Sarge Will, National Guardsman Will, and Coach spanning his lap, her legs bare and looped around him like a pale ribbon, feet dangling high, and his dress blue blazer asunder, wrapped around her snowy nakedness, his hands pressed against her breasts, his face red and helpless. Her thighs are shuddering whitely and his hand curves around the back of her head, buried in her dark hair, sweat-stuck and triumphant.
Her face, though, that’s what you can’t take your eyes off of.
The dreamy look, her pinkening cheeks, all elation and mischief and wonder, like I never saw in her, like she’s never been with us, so strict and exacting and distant, like a cool machine.
It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
I feel myself jostled backwards into Beth the instant Coach’s eyes meet mine, alarm and dread there. I feel myself hurling both Beth and me out the door, Beth’s laughter clanging through the corridor, my hand dragging the door shut, closing my eyes to it. Wondering if I even saw what I saw.
But looking at Beth’s gleeful, mocking face, I know I have. I’ve seen it.
Later, I think about it. It wasn’t like in the movies, soft-lit bodies writhing creamily under satin sheets.
It lasted only a second, so how could it pierce me with such thorny beauty—but it does.
Coach’s face that long, hectic second before she saw me.
Like someone climbing her way out of the darkest tunnel, her mouth wide and gasping for air.
And his eyes shut so tight, face locking itself into place, as if to let go would destroy everything, would bury her again, and he only wants to save her, to breathe that hot life into her.
And she, gasping for air.