by Megan Abbott
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.”
13
“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.
14
Little Caitlin, her doughy face with that cherry-stem mouth, baby-soft hair sticking to her bulbed forehead.
Sitting on Coach’s sofa, I watch her amble around her strewn toys, the pink plastic and the yellow fluff of girlhood, everything glitter-silted. She steps with such care through the detritus of purple-maned ponies, gauzy-winged tutus, and all the big-eyed dolls—dolls nearly as empty-eyed as Caitlin, who reminds me of one of those stiff-limbed walking ones the richest girls always had, and we’d knock them over with the backs of our hands, or walk them into swimming pools or down basement stairs. Like stacking them up in pyramids just to watch them fall.
“I know, I know. Please, will you, will you…listen to me, baby. Listen close.”
In the dark dining room, Coach is on the phone, fingers hooked around the bottom of the low-hanging chandelier, turning it, twisting it in circles until I hear a sickly creak.
For hours she’s been hand-wringing, jabbing her thumb into the center of her palm, molding it there, her teeth nearly grinding, her eyes straying constantly to her cell phone. Ten times in ten minutes, a phantom vibration. Picking it up, nearly shaking it. Begging it to come to life. We can’t finish a conversation, sure can’t practice dive rolls in the yard. Any of the things she promised me.
Finally, her surrender, slipping into the other room and her voice high and rushed. Will? Will? But you…but Will…
Now, Caitlin’s play-doh feet stomp over mine, her gummy hands on my knees as she pushes by me, and I want out. It’s all so sticky and unfun and I feel the air clog in my throat. For the first time since Coach let me into her home, I wish I’d gone instead with RiRi to her new boyfriend’s place, where they were drinking ginger-and-Jack in the backyard and smashing croquet balls up and down the long slope of the lawn.
But then Coach, phone raised high in hand like a trophy, tears into the living room, her face suddenly shooting nervy energy.
She is transformed.
“Addy, can you do me a favor?” she says, fingering the hamsa bracelet, its amulet flaring at me. “Just this once?”
She kneels down before me, her arms resting on my knees. It’s like a proposal.
Her face so soft and eager, I feel like she must feel when she looks at me.
“Yes,” I say, smiling. “Sure, yes. Yes.” Always.
“It won’t be long,” Coach says. “Just a little while.”
She tells me Will’s having a hard time. Today, she says, is the third anniversary of his wife’s death.
My legs tingling, it’s like Lanvers Peak again, and I have a sense of my grand importance. Jump, jump, jump—how high, Coach? Just tell me, how high?
When he arrives, Will doesn’t quite look like himself, his face sheet-creased and he smells like beer and sweat, a dampness on him that seems to go to the bone. A six-pack is wedged under his arm. He sort of burrows against Coach for a minute and I pretend to look out the window.
While Coach hustles Caitlin off to the backyard, we sit on the sofa together, the cold beer bottles pressing against my legs.
There is a long, silent minute, my eyes following the milky rise and fall of his Adam’s apple, me so hypnotized, and thinking somehow of Coach’s fingers there.
“Addy,” he finally says, and I’m relieved someone is saying something. “I’m sorry I interrupted you two. You were probably doing things. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” I say.
When I was seven, my dad’s best friend died from a heart attack on the golf course and my dad locked himself in the garage for an hour and my stepmom wouldn’t let me knock on the door. Later, I think I crawled on his lap and I remember how he let me sit there for an hour and never once asked me to move so he could change the TV channel.
I don’t guess I should sit on Will’s lap but wish I could do something.
“Can I tell you something, Addy?” he says, and he’s not looking at me but at the furred white lamb on the coffee table, its head bent. “This awful thing happened to me on the way here.”
“What?” I say, rising up in my seat.
“I was coming out of the Beer Depot on Royston Road and there’s this bus stop
out front. This old woman was coming off the bus, carrying her shopping bags. She had this hat with a big red flower, like a poppy, the ones you wear on Veterans’ Day. That’s what you’re supposed to wear on Veterans’ Day.
“When she saw me, she stopped in her tracks, right on the bottom step. She just stopped. It was like she knew me.
“And this thing happened. I just couldn’t move. I was just standing there, beer in my hand, and we just locked eyes. And something happened.”
His stare is glassy, and he has one finger tracing the tops of the beer bottles sitting between his legs.
“Did she know you from somewhere?” I ask, not sure I’m following.
“Yes. Except she didn’t. I never saw her before in my life. But, Addy, she knew me. She kept staring at me from under that poppy hat. And these black eyes, like lumps of coal. She would not let me go.” He shakes his head back and forth. “She would not let me go.”
I’m listening, but I don’t know what I’m hearing. I wonder how many beers Will has had, or if this is what mourning can look like, diffuse and mysterious.
“Addy, I think…” He has his eyes fixed again on the toy lamb on the coffee table, its head tilted, like a broken neck. “She knew things about me. It all became clear. She knew. The things I did as a kid, the Slip ’N Slide accident with my cousin and the sparkler bombs in the church parking lot and the time my dad showed up drunk at my job at the Hamburger Train and I shoved him and he fell on the wet floor and hit his head. And the first time in the Guard, and how now, after those bad drinking years, I only remember the MEDCAP missions, those little Allahaddin girls who slipped me love poems. I never remember any of the rest of it at all.”
He pauses, his beer bottle tilting in his hand.
“She knew things I never told anyone,” he says. “Like about my wife. Six years we were together, I never bought her a Valentine’s Day card.”
The empty bottle slips from his fingers, rolls across the sofa cushion.
“She knew all those things. And then I did.”
I don’t know what to say. I want to understand, to touch a bit of this shiny despair.
“What did you do?” I finally ask.
He laughs, the hard sound of it making me jump. “I ran,” he says. “Like a kid. Like seeing the bogey man. A witch.”
We are both quiet for a moment. I’m thinking of the old woman. I can see the poppy-blooming hat, and her face, her eyes inked black and all-knowing. I wonder if anything like that will ever happen to me.
Will leans down and picks up his bottle, setting it on the coffee table, its clammy bottom ringing the wood.
“Remember that night we all drove up the peak?” he says suddenly.
“Yes,” I say.
“I wish it could always be like that,” he says, twisting off a new beer cap.
I look at him.
Then he says, “Look at you,” reaching out and flicking my blond braid. “You’re so easy to talk to, Addy.”
I try to smile.
“Let me ask you,” he says, pressing the bottle against his damp forehead. “Do people see you, so pretty and your hair like a doll, and do they know about those things you hold inside of you?”
How did he know I held such things? And what things?
“Can I trust you, Addy?” he asks.
I say he can. Does anyone ever answer that question with a no?
And I wait for him to say more. But he just looks at me, his eyes blood-webbed and so sorrowful.
None of it makes much sense and I think Will must be very drunk or something. Something.
For a second it all overwhelms me, and all I want is to listen to music, or do a bleacher sprint, or feel the featherweight of Tacy’s elfin foot in my flat palm, her counting on me to hold her up, and it being so easy.
“I’m sorry I ruined your afternoon,” he says.
I’m in the backyard, leaning on the enormous dutch door playhouse Caitlin occupies, jumbo chalk jammed in her chubby hands. Still half breathless from my talk with Sarge Will, I smoke three of Coach’s American Spirits and think about what’s going on inside.
Nearly an hour goes by, those two inside, and Caitlin falls asleep in the playhouse, her mouth sucked over the corner of the foam table inside.
Her hair scalloped into a ponytail, Coach runs barefoot across the lawn. I think she’s going to hug me, but she’s not a hugger, and kind of arm-hooks me, Coach-like, wringing my shoulder.
“Thank you, Addy,” she says, breathlessly. “Thanks, okay?”
And she smiles, with all her teeth, her face taffy pink.
It’s like I’ve just done the greatest thing I could ever do for her, like a single-based split catch, like a pike open basket at the State Championship, like a balm over her heart.
For a moment, my fingers touch her hard back, which shudders like a bird’s.
Touching it is like touching them, their beauty.
15
Party tonite, flashes Beth’s text.
Rebs, I type back. Away game.
After, she says. Comfort Inn Haber.
Nu uh.
Uh huh.
That prickle behind my ear. The Comfort Inn. Older brothers and sisters are always talking about how it used to be called the Maid Marian, with a second-floor walkway slung so low it looked like the hookers—real live hookers like in the movies, only with worse skin—would slide right off into the courtyard. You’d only drive by when you had to go downtown, like a class trip to the museum and the teachers so embarrassed that you’d be passing Maid Marian, with all those maids all in a row.
When it became the Comfort Inn, they tore out the walkway and you couldn’t see the hookers anymore, but the whole place still quivered with a sense of dirty deeds.
And Beth, and her dirty deeds. I want to say no, but I want to say yes. I want to say yes to keep my eyes on Beth and want to say yes because it’s a party at the Comfort Inn on Haber Road.
So I say yes.
“Whose party?” RiRi asks, reaching under her shirt, plucking first her right breast higher, then her left, so they crest out the top. “Your dealer’s?”
“My dealer could buy Haber Road tip to tail,” Beth says. Beth doesn’t have a dealer, but there is a guy over on Hillcrest who graduated Sutton Grove ten years ago and he sells her adderall, which she sometimes shares and which feels like oxygen blasting through my brain, blowing everything away and leaving only immense joy that shakes tic tac–like in my chest and then sinks away so fast it takes everything from me and my sad life.
“So whose party?” I ask.
She grins.
I didn’t believe her at first, but there it is. There’s five or six of them, all from the Guard.
All Will’s men.
They’re wearing regular clothes, but their haircuts and close shaves give them away, and the way they stand, feet planted apart, chests puffed out. One of them even has his at-ease hands behind his back, which makes it hard to hold his beer.
I recognize the PFC with the red brush cut who walks Sarge Will to his car every day and the other one, with the ham-hock hands and the bowlegs.
There’s a little bar set up on the long plywood dresser and they’re huddled around it, and no one’s on the drooping beds with the nubby spreads, and the lights are pitched low and soft and there’s almost a peacefulness about it.
It’s just a place to have a party, that’s all. A little party, two adjoining rooms, the clock radio jangling softly and one PFC reaching above his hand, absentmindedly twirling the overhanging lamp, sending glades of light across the room like a mirror ball, like Caitlin’s magic lantern.
Then, bullet-headed Corporal Prine steps out of the bathroom, his thumb dug in the neck of his beer bottle.
RiRi, looking at me, shaking her head, mouthing, Hell-no.
The other ones are all decked out in ironed polo shirts and pressed everything, but Prine is wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with skulls and bones and a big knife wedged in one of the s
kulls. The words LOVE KILLS are scrolled across it.
Nodding that big thick eraser-tip head of his, Prine beckons toward us.
Shrugging off her letter jacket, Beth, resplendent in a gold halter top, walks toward him, smiling slantily in that Beth way that feels like new trouble.
But RiRi is hip-shaking and she dips her hand in mine, and RiRi’s ease with boys is such solace and soon we are dancing, pop-pop-popping our hips and RiRi doing the robot arm.
There’s rum and diet cokes mixed special for us and all the alcopops we can drink, and the PFCs are gentlemanly and suggest we play a game called beer blow. I never do figure out what the point is except it involves a lot of us bending over the table and blowing playing cards off an empty bottle, and then drinking, and then drinking again.
I don’t care about anything, not the stain on the bedspread or the ceiling, or the way the bathroom sink drags away from the wall when you hold onto it, when you try to stay upright, not the crusted carpet under my feet, my shoes flung off as I climb up on the bed with RiRi, when we dance together, our hips knocking, and the Guardsmen all watch and cheer. I don’t care about anything at all.
I don’t care because it’s like this: the rum, and the hard lemonade, and the shot of tequila zoom and zag through me, and the spell cast so deeply.
The whole high school world of gum-stuck, locker-slamming, shoe-skidding tedium slips away and it’s all just warm and gushing perfection.
“Tell Coach to come,” RiRi is burbling. “Tell her we’re with the Guard.” She’s fumbling with my phone, trying to send a text.
Because it’s all okay because these are Will’s men and nothing bad could ever happen, one of them is pressing our heads together, wanting us to kiss.
“Always ready,” he says. “Always there.”
“We could never be girlfriends like this before,” RiRi says, hugging me close. “Until this year. You were always Beth’s girl. She never wanted to share you. Girl has such a hard-on for you. I was even scared of you. I was always scared of both of you.”