by Megan Abbott
It’s like I’m seeing Will and I’m seeing something else too. The old woman from the bus, the one with the black eyes Will was sure could bore through to the center of him. That story never felt real to me, it felt like when someone tells you a dream and they can’t make you feel what they feel. It didn’t feel real to me except as something I wanted to understand but couldn’t. But now suddenly I can. The woman’s hat tilting up, eyes like shale.
“Stop crying,” Coach is saying, begging. “Addy, stop crying.”
“I didn’t touch him.” Coach says, and I cannot catch my breath, but she will not wait. “When I ran over, I slipped on those.”
She points to three small white things dotted across the floor. The something I’d felt wobbling under my foot, that I’d sent spinning across the parquet. A button or spool of thread.
“What are…” But then suddenly I know.
Turning again to Will’s poppy-struck face on the floor, the bottom half of it blown away, I know what they are.
I hear a moan come up from within me, my fingers clapping my own teeth, as if to remind myself they’re still there.
“Coach, why am I here?” someone says in a voice I recognize, obscurely, as my own. The words just tumble out, constricted and lost. “Why did you make me come?”
But she doesn’t answer me. I don’t even think she’s heard me.
ZZzzzzt! My phone, my phone. Like a paddle over my heart.
Beth. I’m sure I’ve pressed that button long enough to turn it off until the end of time, but I must’ve pressed it so long I turned it on again.
The way it keeps ringing, it’s like Beth is there in the room too. And I’m afraid to even touch the phone because it seems somehow Beth will know if I turn it off, like she knows everything. Like she’s here right now, claws out.
“Do you see it,” Coach says, still ten feet from me, she won’t come any closer.
“I see him,” I say, as calm as I can, my finger scratching at my phone, trying to hold the Off button just long enough to make it stop. As soon as I do it shudders ZZzzzt! again. “Of course I see him.”
“No,” she says, her voice going quieter still but more insistent. “On the floor.”
I don’t want to look again, but I do. At his hands, palms faced up, his legs, which have a queer violet cast.
That’s when I spot the gun peeking out from under his left leg.
I turn to face Coach, who’s standing in front of the dining room table, winding a dewy strand of hair behind her ear. She looks younger than me, I think.
“He did this to himself?” I whisper, not even wanting to say it out loud.
“Yes,” she says. “I found him.”
“Was there a note or something?”
“No,” she says.
“You didn’t call nine-one-one,” I say. Maybe it’s a question and maybe it isn’t.
“No,” she says. Before I can ask why, she adds, “I guess no one heard. He doesn’t have any neighbors yet.”
We both look at the walls to our left and to our right. The room feels impossibly small.
“I don’t know when it happened,” Coach says. “I don’t know anything.”
Thoughts come to me, of Will and his self-puzzled depths.
I feel a loss suddenly.
I can’t hold on to it long enough to figure out why, but suddenly, shamefully, I feel sorry for myself.
In that moment, though, she’s made a turn.
“Addy,” she says, voice faster now. “Where’s your car?”
“I don’t know,” I say. I can feel a bolting energy from her, her body inching toward the door.
It’s like she just showed me a triple toe touch back, three fast scissor kicks, landing, then springing back for the final back tuck. Her hands never touching the ground. Not once.
But something is niggling at me. Holding me back.
“Wait, Coach,” I say. “Where’s your car?”
“At the mechanic. Remember?” She is curt, like I’m her slowest student.
“So how did you get here?” I ask, walking over to her.
“Oh,” she says. “I took a cab. I snuck out of the house. Matt was asleep. He took two pills. I had to see Will. So I called a cab.” A pause between each sentence like reading flash cards. “But I couldn’t call a cab to take me back, could I?”
“No, Coach,” I say. “I guess you couldn’t.”
“And I can’t show up at home in a cab now,” she says, her voice speeding up again.
Zzzzt!
My phone.
Zzzzt!
But this time she is right next to me, and she is back to being Coach, her arm whipping out, her fingers hooking over my pocketed hand.
“What is that? Who’s calling?”
“No one’s calling,” I say, her hot fingers clamping at me, like when she pushes your body to make that jump, support that weight, the weight of five girls, effortlessly.
In an instant, it’s like I’m not in Will’s apartment but at practice, and in trouble.
“A text,” I say. “I get texts all the time.”
“In the middle of the night?” She jerks my wrist from my pocket and the phone rattles to the floor.
Mercifully, the battery flies out.
“Pick it up,” she says. “Goddammit, Addy.”
I start to bend down.
“Don’t touch anything,” she snaps, and I see one of my hands is almost resting on the shiny black lacquer of the table.
Rising, I look down at the tabletop and see my smudgy face reflected in it, black depthless eyes.
There’s nothing there, really.
“Addy, we have to go, we have to go,” Coach says, her voice grinding into me. “Get me out of here.”
Moments later, we dart across the parking lot, my sapphire Acura like a beacon.
We’re driving, the night vacant and starless, and the whole world is softly asleep, with furnaces purring and windows shut tight and the safety of people tucked inside with the warming knowledge of a tomorrow and a tomorrow after that of just such humming sameness.
The car windows down, the crystally cool on me, I imagine myself in that world, the one I know. I imagine myself curled in just such comforts, comforts so tight they could choke you. So tight they choke me always.
Oh, was there no happiness to be had the world over? There or here?
Here in this bleach-fogged car, she beside me, still holding her sneakers between her legs. Her fingers keep running around the tongue, her eyes thoughtfully, almost dreamily on the road.
I can’t fathom what she’s thinking.
Finally, as we’re turning down her street, Coach asks me to pull over two doors from her house.
“Roll the windows up,” she says. I do.
“Addy, it’s going to be fine,” she says. “Just forget about all this.”
I nod, my chin shaking from the cold, from the wretched loneliness of that drive, fifteen, twenty minutes in the car. She never said a word, seemed lost in some kind of moody reverie.
“You just need to go home and pretend it never happened,” she says. “Okay?”
When she gets out of the car, the waft of bleach from her shoes smacks me.
Unable to turn the ignition, I sit there.
Were I thinking straight, were I feeling the world made any sense at all, I might be driving to the police station, calling 911. Were I that kind of person.
Instead, I look at my cell. I need to text Beth back.
Fell asleep, be-yotch, I type. Some of us sleep.
Still sitting, I wait a minute for her reply. But my phone just lies there.
No Beth.
It should make me feel better—Beth has finally dervished herself into exhausted slumber, her reign of terror over, for now—but it does not.
Instead, I have a sickly feeling I know will sit with me all night, that will join the larger sickness, the sense of nightmare and menace that feels like it will be mine forever.
I r
oll down all the windows and breathe.
Then I start the car and inch past Coach’s house, just to see if there are any lights on.
Suddenly, I see something moving, fast, like an arrow, down her driveway and to my car.
Almost before I can take a breath, Coach’s palms are slapping my windshield, my heart spurring to terrible life.
“I was just leaving, I was,” I nearly yelp, shutting off the ignition as she leans in through the passenger window. “No one saw—”
“You’re my friend,” she blurts, an ache in her voice. “The only friend I ever had.”
Before I can say anything, she’s whippeting back across her lawn, slipping soundlessly into the dark house.
I sit a long time, my hands resting in my lap, my face warm.
I don’t want to start the car, move, do anything.
I never gave anything to anyone before. Not like this.
I never was anything to anyone before.
Not like this.
I never was, before.
Now I am.
Finally in my rumpled bed, my eyes jitterbug through all of Beth’s texts.
2:03 a.m., 2:07 a.m., 2:10 a.m.
@ Statlers, Coach drinking ginger and jacks + on phone for hour kept saying why are you doing this to me why
Bartend said she used to come when she was young and drink w. badasses from the speedway and once broke both wrists falling in that same pking lot
…kind of trash she is. She shld b glad Matt sunk so low to grab scruff of her neck cuz…
Then, by 2:18:
WHERE THE FUCK R U? You better txt back or I’m coming over. U KNOW I WILL. DON’T MESS WITH—
…and on until 2:27, the last one.
here I am, Pinetop Ct, looking at yr open garage door, but where’s yr car? Hmmm…
She must be lying, I tell myself. But I know she’s not. I know she was out there in front of my house at 2:27, hunched over the steering wheel of her mother’s Miata. I know it.
I wonder how long she waited and what she thought.
I wonder what I’ll say and how I’ll ever make her believe it.
In this knot of fear, I forget everything but Beth’s canny slit eyes.
Those eyes on me, even now.
In the blackest of moments that night, when sleep finally sinks me, a dream of Beth and me, little kids, Beth raking the hard bars of that ancient merry-go-round they used to have in Buckingham Park, spinning us, spinning. And we lie flat on it, on its warty surface, our heads pressed close.
“It’s what you wanted,” she says, breathless. “You said faster.”
20
TUESDAY: SIX DAYS TO FINAL GAME
It’s early, an hour before first period, but I had given up on sleeping, all those half-awake nightmares of my feet sunk in blood-wet carpet and aquariums pumping violet-red bubbles.
You saw a dead man last night. That’s what I’m saying in my head. You saw a suicide right before your eyes.
You saw Will, dead.
So I’m slumped in front of my locker, curling the pages of my The Odyssey of Man textbook, fat green highlighter poked into my mouth.
Beth glides through the front doors of school.
I expect it to be immediate, her face a tanned snarl as she demands to know where I was last night, why I stopped texting her back.
But instead, hand out, she lifts me to my feet, her face vivid and mysterious, and arm-in-arms me to the cafeteria.
We get a fat-slicked chocolate chip muffin, which we heat up in the rotating toaster machine. Standing next to it, the heat radiating off its coils, I imagine myself suffering eternal damnation for sins not yet clear.
But then the muffin pops out, tumbling into my hands. Together, we eat it in long, sticky bites that we do not swallow. No one else is there, so we can do it, and Beth fills tall cups with warm water to make it easier, then spit it out after, into our napkins.
When we finish, I feel much better.
Until Beth starts telling me about her dream.
“It wasn’t just any dream,” she says, licking her fingers, under each slick fuchsia nail. “It was like before. Like with Sandy.”
As long as I’ve known her, Beth has had periodic dreams of dark portent, like the night before her aunt Lou fell from her second-floor landing and broke her neck. In the dream, her aunt came to breakfast and announced she had a new talent. Then, taking one forearm to her neck, she showed them how she could turn her head 360 degrees.
Or, when we were ten and Beth came to school one day and said she dreamt she found Sandy Hayles from soccer camp behind the equipment shed, a sheet pulled tight across her face. That Saturday, our soccer coach told us Sandy had a blood disease and wasn’t coming back to camp, ever.
“What was the dream?” I ask, fighting off the nerves spiking up my neck, tickling my temples.
“We were doing toe touch jumps high on one of the overlooks, like that one time, remember?” she says. “But then we heard a noise, like something falling a long, long way. I walked over to the edge of the gorge to look down, but I couldn’t see anything at all. I could feel it, though, because it was vibrating, like your throat when you scream.”
And I’m thinking, yes, like when all of us scream at the game, with our throats vibrating and our feet pounding, and the bleachers shaking, everything. I can hear it all in my head now.
“Then I looked back up at you. It was so dark up there and you were so white, but your eyes were black, like one of those ash rocks in geology class.”
Shoulders clustered, a preying black bird, she leans closer.
Suddenly it feels like I’m the one who’s dreaming, who’s still stuck in that nightmare of sinking carpets and bloody footprints and an aquarium pump glub-glubbing, opening and closing like the valves of a heart.
“But, Addy, the bottom part of your face was gone,” she whispers, her fingers wandering to her chin, her lips. “And your mouth was just this white smear.”
My breath catches.
“I started to slip,” she continues. “You grabbed my wrist and were trying to pull me up, but it hurt and I looked down and something was cutting into me, something on your hand.”
“And you lifted your other hand, and there was a mouth there, right in the center of your palm—and you were talking through it, and you were saying something very important.”
I look down at my palm.
“What was I saying?” I ask, staring at the whiteness of my open hand.
“I don’t know.” Beth sighs, leaning back, shaking her head. “But then you did it.”
“Did what?”
“You let go,” she says. “Just like before you learned how to spot.”
Grab for the body, not the limb.
“You had my wrist, and then you didn’t anymore. You let go. Like always.”
My head hot, my stomach bucking, I press my napkin to my face. I can’t remember the last time I ate anything and I almost wish I’d really eaten that muffin. Almost.
“That’s not a special dream,” I say. “Nothing even happened.”
“Everything happened,” she says again, plucking lip gloss from her jeans pocket. “You know how it works. All will be revealed.”
I try to roll my eyes, and that’s when my stomach turns hard, and I have to reach for the napkin. The gagging is embarrassing, but nothing really comes up other than chocolate residue, a muddy slick dripping down my wrist.
“Lovergirl,” Beth says. “We gotta get you your gunstones back. You’re going feather soft. Now that I’m captain again, I’ll get you tight. I’ll get you good and tight.”
“Yeah,” I say, watching Beth swizzling that gloss wand like a magician. “How come I’m always the one doing bad things in your dreams?” I say.
She hands me the wand.
“Guilty conscience.”
After world civ, I see Beth again. She’s waiting for me outside the door.
“Splitsville,” she says. “I knew it. I knew somethin
g was gonna blow. Coach and Will, c’est fini.”
“Huh?”
“He’s not at the recruiting table today,” she says. “It’s just that redhead PFC.”
So fast, I think. So fast.
“That doesn’t mean anything,” I say, turning. But she grabs me by the belt loop. Part of me is glad her morning spookiness is gone, and she’s just regular badass Beth, but another part of me doesn’t like all the jump and spark on her.
“I’ve done recon,” she whispers, so close I can see the dent in her tongue where her stud used to be before she decided tongue rings were JV. “Bitty PFC says they don’t know where the Sarge is. And he’s not answering his phone.”
I don’t say anything, just spin-dial my locker combination.
“So get this: PFC says sometimes Sarge just AWOLs. And they don’t bother him about it, don’t report it. ‘It’s his way,’ that’s what the scrub tells me. They let it go because he’s had some trouble in his life. Something about his wife and a plate glass window,” Beth says, not quite rolling her eyes.
“So why’s that mean he broke up with Coach?” I ask, pretending to look for something in my locker.
“I’m telling you, Papa’s got a brand new hag,” she says, whistling a little. “Who d’ya think? I speculate Mrs. Fowler, Ceramics, always rolling those clay pots with her legs spread so the boys can see.”
“I don’t think so,” I say.
“Well, if it was RiRi she’d’ve posted pictures of it on Facebook by now. I don’t think he goes for young trim anyway. And we know it isn’t you.”
“Who cares, really,” I try, my head blurred.
She pauses a beat, taking the measure of me, and smiles. “Addy-Faddy, I wonder if that’s what you were doing last night.”
“What?” I whisper.
“Comforting our jilted Coach, of course,” she says.
“No,” I say, tapping my locker door shut.
“I have better things to do,” I add, trying to match her crocodile smile, and maybe beat it.
I don’t see Coach all day, until practice.
I text her four times, but she never replies.
Six hours of wondering about her, about how she’s moving through her day. If she feels the same swampy misery inside of me.