Dare Me: A Novel

by Megan Abbott

  Thank you, Coach, I think. Thank you.

  “Is she really Cap?” Tacy whispers, everybody whispers, but Tacy is shaking in her bright white air cheers.

  Because it appears she is.

  And Beth, is that contentment I see there on your tan face?

  Fuck me, I think, which even sounds like Beth. Is this all she wanted?

  It’s not, of course.

  “It’s okay,” says Coach. “I don’t have time for her, Addy. And you don’t either. Let’s see that back handspring.”

  And I am trying, but my legs won’t come together and my body feels funny and stiff.

  “Push off,” she barks, temple sweat-dappled and her hair limp and slipping from its elastic.

  “Lock out”—and with each shout her voice stronger, and my body tighter, harder—“stay tight, stay center, and, fuck it, Addy, smile. Smile. Smile.”

  The next morning, I spy Matt French pulling into the parking lot in his gray Toyota, with Coach in it.

  When she gets out of the car she doesn’t even glance behind her. It looks like he’s saying something to her, but maybe not.

  But he’s watching her, waiting, I guess, to make sure she gets inside the building.

  More and more, when I see his face I think maybe he is kind of handsome in his own tired way.

  That’s the hardest part, she said once. There’s nothing bad I can say about him, nothing I can say at all.

  Which somehow seems the cruelest thing to say, ever.

  Which is maybe why I feel this, looking at him now. Matt French. I can’t account for it, but his weariness amid all the bluster and strut of us sparkle-slitted girls—it speaks to me. Like seeing him the other night, the way he looked at me.

  He’s not the guy you might think he is. That’s what Will told me.

  But I’m not sure what he thinks I might think.

  Matt French watches Coach as she walks down the center aisle of the parking lot, watches her walk through the glass doors. He watches for a long time, one arm stretched across the passenger seat, head slightly dipped.

  Watching her in the way that reminds me of the way a dad might watch his daughter on the jungle gym.

  She never looks back once.

  “Her car’s on blocks over at Schuyler’s garage,” Beth tells me later. “Davy saw it. There’s a big punch in the front fender.”

  I don’t know who Davy is, or how he knows what Coach’s car looks like. Beth has always known people—friends of her brother, sons of her mother’s exes, the nephew of the woman from Peru who used to clean her house—that no one else knows or even sees. Her reserves of information, objects, empty houses, designer handbags, driver’s licenses, and prescription pads seem limitless.

  I ask Coach about it later, what happened to her car anyway.

  She shows me a long cut skating up her arm.

  “From the seam in the steering wheel,” she says, cigarette hanging from her mouth, her voice throaty and tired, almost like Beth’s. “I hit a post in the lot over at the Buckingham Park playground.”

  I tell her I’m sorry.

  “I was pulling in and had to swerve really fast. A little girl ran in front of the car,” she says, her eyes losing focus. “She looked just like Caitlin.”

  “But you were both okay?” I ask, which seems like something you should ask.

  “That’s the funny part,” she says, shaking her head. “Caitlin wasn’t with me. I’d forgotten her. Left her at home, in her room, playing Chutes and Ladders. Or tipping over bleach, eating poison from the cabinet under the sink, starting fires in the backyard. Who knew?”

  She laughs a little, shaking her head. Shaking her head a long time, flipping her Bic in her hand.

  Then she stops.

  “I must be the worst mother in the world,” she says, eyes glassy and confused.

  I look at her, all the blurry fear on her.

  And I say, “Mos def.”

  Which always makes her laugh, and makes her laugh now, and it’s unguarded, beautiful.

  “She was trying to avoid hitting some kid at the playground,” I say. “She hit a post.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Beth says.

  “Why would she lie?”

  “Plenty of reasons,” she says. “I’ve been right before, other times. You believe people, just like cheer camp, with that St. Regina Flyer. That compulsive liar, Casey Jaye. And you licked it all up.”

  Beth, always sifting ancient history, scattering ashes at me. Always going back to last summer. It was our only fight and it wasn’t a fight really. Just stupid girl stuff.

  I never thought you’d be friends again after that, RiRi said afterward. But we were. No one understands. They never have.

  “Beth, can’t you leave all this alone?” I say now, surprised at the strain in my voice. “You got what you wanted. You’re captain again and you can do whatever you want. So stop.”

  “It’s not my choice,” she says. “Something gets started, you have to see it through.”

  “See what through? What, Beth? What, Captain-My-Captain?”

  She pauses, clicking her teeth, an old habit from the days we both slid retainers around in our hanging-jaw girl mouths.

  “You don’t understand it, do you? All that’s happened. It’s all her.”

  She leans back, spreading her long ponytail across her face, her mouth.

  Then she says something and I think it’s, “She has your heart.”

  “What?” I say, feeling something ping in my stomach, my hand fisting over it.

  “She has her part,” she says, brushing her ponytail from her face, “in all this.”

  But I can’t believe I misheard her. Did I?

  “It’s not just me,” she says again, teeth latching and unlatching. “She has her part.”

  I misheard.

  18

  MONDAY: ONE WEEK TO FINAL GAME

  Coach spends most of practice in her office, on the phone, her face hidden behind her hand.

  When she comes out, the phone rings again, and she is gone.

  In her place, Beth brandishes the scepter, or pretends to. We have a sloppy practice and Mindy wearies me, complaining about the red grooves and pocks studding her shoulder, the imprint of Tacy’s kaepa toss shoe. Chicken-boned Brinnie Cox only wants to talk about her lemon detox tea.

  My head bobbing helplessly, I look up into the stands and spot Emily, a white pipe cleaner propped lonely there.

  I keep forgetting about Emily. Ground-bound, it’s like she dropped into the black hole of the rest of the school.

  God, it must be terrible not to be on cheer. How would you know what to do?

  Her head darting left and right, she’s watching us from the cave of her letter jacket, her ponderous orthopedic moon boot nearly tipping her to one side.

  Emily, who I’ve known for three years, borrowed tampons from, held her hair back over every toilet bowl in school.

  “Skinny be-yotch,” Beth calls out to her, as if reading my mind. “How we rate to your bony ass?”

  Emily shudders to life. “Tight,” she calls out, eagerly.

  “Tight as JV pussy?” Beth shouts.

  “Tighter!” Emily laughs, and I remember this Beth, Captain Beth when Beth was feeling most captainy, most interested in wielding her formidable powers, me at her side.

  Thank you, Beth, for reminding me. Thank you.

  Teddy saw Coach @ Statlers last week, Beth’s text reads. Drinking, talking on cell all nite, crying @ jukebox.

  So? I text back, nearing one a.m.

  I want to turn off the phone. I want to be done with Beth for the night, done with her chatter about Coach, and her car, or even the things she used to talk about: Tacy’s runty legs and the antidepressants she eyed in Mindy’s book bag, and the sex toy she found under her mother’s pillow and how it looks like a pink boomerang made by Mattel, and maybe that’s what happened to her Barbie surfboard, mysteriously lost a decade ago.

  Like some pol
luted Little Red Riding Hood, Beth always creeping through everyone’s lives.

  So? I text again.

  There’s a long pause, and I can picture Beth pecking away her reply.

  Sometimes, though, I think that how long she takes, these epic multipart texts, is all on purpose, making the dread mount each time: What is Beth up to? What is she doing now?

  ZZzt, the phone screen flashes at me at last:

  Said she ran outside + hit post in parking lot, peeled off

  So…? I text back.

  So why lie to us, to u? she texts. Plus, crying abt what?

  I roll over in bed, let the phone slip to the carpet, its screen winking at me.

  In the half dream that comes, the screen is a mouth, teeth gnashing.

  19

  MONDAY NIGHT

  I’m deep into toes-curled sleep when I hear it.

  My cell, squawking from the floor.

  I feel it hum under my grappling fingers.

  Please not Beth.

  Incoming call: Coach, the screen reads, and my favorite snapshot, from the night after the Cougars’ defeat, Coach sitting on the hood of my car, sated and exultant.

  “Addy,” the whisper comes. “Addy, I slipped on the floor. I saw him and I slipped on something and I didn’t know what it was.”

  “Coach? What’s going on?” Words sticky in my sleeping mouth.

  “I kept looking at my sneaker and wondered what was on it. What the dark stain was.”

  I think I’m dreaming.

  “Coach,” I say, rolling over, trying to blink myself awake. “Where are you? What’s going on?”

  “Something happened, Addy. That’s what I think. But my head…”

  Her voice so peculiar, thin and wasted.

  “Coach—Colette. Colette, where are you?”

  A pause, a creaking sound from her throat. “You better come, Addy. You better come here.”

  I’m sure I’ll be heard, but if I am, no one does anything about it, not even when the garage door shimmies open, when the car leaps to life. Sometimes I don’t even try to be quiet. Sometimes I turn on all the lights, leave a trail blazing from my bedroom through the garage until my dawn return, and no one has ever said a word.

  But tonight, I don’t.

  I try not to look at my phone, which is spasming with texts that must have come in while I slept—all from vampiric Beth, who sometimes seems never to sleep at all and tonight seems especially wired with speculations and grim fancy.

  I can’t stop to read them now.

  Nearly to Wick Park, I see The Towers, a colossal apartment complex, the only one in Sutton Grove, though it doesn’t even feel like Sutton Grove but like the tenuous landing strip for a steel box dropped from high above.

  I’ve been there once before, to pick up Coach and take her back to her car, which she’d left at school.

  One of the new developments perched high on Sutton Ridge, it floats perilously over the edge, and still half empty because no one wants to live by the roaring interstate.

  It’s so great, Addy, Coach said. Like a deserted castle. You can scream and shout and no one could—

  I remember when I’d pulled up Will had waved from the lobby’s glass doors, his face and neck flushed, like hers. His hair wet and seal-slick. And Coach, still slipping on her left shoe as she ran to my car.

  The sharp smell on her when she opened my car door, so thick it seemed to hover in the air around her.

  Her face bright, her right leg still shaking.

  I couldn’t take my eyes off it.

  But that was weeks ago, in the middle of the day, and nothing looks familiar at all now. It takes me three circuits of the complex to find the right building, and then find Will’s name on the big lighted board out front.

  All the while I’m thinking of Coach’s voice on the phone.

  “Is he there now,” I’d asked, a sick feeling in my stomach. “Is Will with you?”

  “Yes,” she said. “He’s here.”

  “Is he okay?”

  “I can’t look,” she said. “Don’t make me look.”

  She doesn’t say anything on the intercom, just buzzes me in.

  The drone in my ear, it’s like the tornado drill in elementary school, the hand-cranked siren that rang mercilessly, all of us hunched over on ourselves, facing the basement walls, heads tucked into our chests. Beth and me wedged tight, jeaned legs pressed against each other. The sounds of our own breathing. Before we all stopped believing a tornado, or anything, could touch us, ever.

  In the elevator, the numbers glow and the funniest feeling starts up inside me. It’s like before a game. Chest vaulting, bounding on my toes, everything ricocheting in my head (lift arm higher, no fear, count it out, pull it tight, and make it sing), my body so tight and ready I feel like a coiled spring: Let me free, let me free, I will show you my ferocity, my rapture.

  “Addy,” Coach says, opening the door, startled, like she’s almost forgotten she called me, as if I’ve shown up at her own home, unaccountably, in the middle of the night.

  The apartment is dark, one floor lamp coning halogen up in the far corner. A hooded fish tank effervesces on a table by the wall, the clouded water seeming almost to smoke, a fluorescent cauldron with no fish I can see.

  She looks tiny, her iron-rod back sinking into itself. Bare-footed, a nylon windbreaker zipped up so high it covers her neck and the tip of her chin. Her hair dankly tucked behind her ears.

  “Coach,” I start.

  “Take off your shoes,” she says, her mouth pinched. I think it’s because of the parquet floors, though they don’t look that nice, and I slip off my flip-flops and rest them by the door.

  We’re standing in the vestibule, which gives way to a small dining area with a thick black-lacquered table. Just past it is the living room, braced by the hard angles of a leather sectional.

  Turning back to her, I see something’s in her hands, her tennis shoes bundled there, soaking wet.

  “I washed them in the sink,” she says, answering my unasked question. Suddenly, she hoists them into my hands.

  “Hold them, okay? Because I need to think. I need to get my head in order.”

  I nod, but my eyes keep darting to the back of the large sectional sofa sprawling across the room like a spreading stain.

  Maybe it’s the gloomy dark, the phosphoresce from the glubbing aquarium.

  But mostly it’s the way Coach’s eyes seem to vibrate when she looks at me, pupils like nail heads.

  “What’s over there?” I say, angling my head toward the sofa. “Coach, what’s over there?”

  She looks at me for a second, running a hand through her hair, which looks so dark.

  Then she lets her eyes drift over to the sofa, and I let mine too.

  I’m holding the shoes tight and inching toward the sofa.

  I can hear her breathing behind me, in rasping gulps. Watching.

  The parquet floors squeak and the sofa looms before me, crooking around the center of the room.

  Walking slowly, the surging bleach from the sneakers nearly making me choke, I feel something skitter under my bare foot and spin across the floor. Something small, like a button or a spool of thread.

  As I creep closer, ten-then-five-feet away from the living room area, the sofa back seems larger, taller than the football goalpost, than the Eagles emblem on the field, wings spread.

  My right foot dangles over the circular rug in the center of the room. To step on it feels like stepping into black water.

  Zzzt! My phone like Mexican jumping beans in my pocket. Zzzt!

  I’m sure Coach heard the vibration, but if she did, she doesn’t show it, so fixed is she on the sofa, what lies behind it.

  Turning my body, I finger for, and press, the Off button so hard I nearly knock the phone from my pocket.

  Deep breath.

  Deep breath.

  Me, now only a few steps from the back of the snaking sofa, peeking around the sofa’s sharp cor
ner, around its scaly leather arm. I see something on the floor.

  “I let myself in with the key he gave me,” Coach is saying, answering more unasked questions. “I rang the doorbell first, but he didn’t answer. I walked in and there he was. Ohhh, there he was.”

  First, I see the glint of dark blond hair twining in the weave of the rug.

  Then, stepping forward, I see more.

  Coach’s sneakers slip from my hands, shoe string tickling my leg as they drop to the carpet with a soft clunk.

  There he is.

  There he is.

  There’s Sarge. There’s Will.

  “Addy,” Coach whispers, far behind me. “I don’t think you want to…I don’t think you need to…Addy…is it like I thought?”

  His chest bare, wearing only a towel, his arms stretched out, he’s like one of those laminated saint pictures the Catholic girls always brought from catechism. Saint Sebastian, his head always thrown back, body both luminous and tortured.

  “Addy,” says Coach, almost a whimper. Like little Caitlin, just waking up and scared.

  I just keep looking. At Will. On the floor.

  In those saint pictures, their bodies are always torn, split, lacerated. But their faces so lovely, so tranquil.

  But Will’s face does not look righteous and exalted.

  My eyes fix on the thing that was Will’s mouth, but is now a red flower, its tendrils sprawling to all corners and, like a poppy, an inky whorl at the center.

  In those saint pictures, their eyes, lovingly lashed, are always looking up.

  And, for all the ruin of Will’s handsome face, his eyes, they are gazing up too.

  But it seems to me not to the Kingdom of God but to the tottering ceiling fan.

  Looking up so he doesn’t have to see the ruin of his face.

  Behind his head, the rug is dark and wet.

  I can’t stop looking at him, at the bright streak of his face.