by Megan Abbott
Seeing the shiny brown leaf of Coach’s hair from behind, her yoga-taut posture, I’m almost afraid to look at her face. For our eyes to lock and for everything to come pitching forward until I can smell the smell, hear the gurgling aquarium.
What can it be like for her?
But when she turns around—shouldn’t I have known?
Her eyes breezing past me, as if we hadn’t shared anything at all, much less this.
Oh, the flinty grace, it’s stunning. I think it must be pharmaceutical, and I look for the slight drag to her foot, the tug in her speech. But I can’t be sure.
All I know is she’s got her stunt roster, her purple gel pen with the click-click-click as she ticks us off, roundoffs, walkovers, handstands, handsprings, front limbers.
Tumbling drills, two hours’ worth. Best distraction ever.
We do back tuck after back tuck, bounding from standing pike into flips, handsprings. Our bodies bucking, and when I spot RiRi and watch the row of girls, I get a kind of calmness that hums in my chest. The promise of order.
My body, for instance, it can dip and leap and spring and I am as if untouched, no fear flapping behind my eyes can touch my body, which is invincible and all mine.
It’s when I’m spotting RiRi on the last turn that I spy Beth, lingering tardily by the locker room door in practice shorts.
It unnerves me, but I brush it off, and instead my eyes catch the flash of hot-pink daisies that sprinkle before me every time RiRi’s skirt flips up.
How is it other girls’ panties are always so much more interesting than your own, I think.
“Okay, let’s see those Scorps,” Coach says.
Everyone groans, quietly. RiRi says she’s not nearly “stretchy” enough today, but she can’t do one, a decent one anyway, because you have to be small, small enough to fly. I am, or almost. I was. And I still can do it. The body remembers.
It was Beth who first taught me the Scorpion, her hands on my back leg, lifting it slowly behind me, easing it higher and higher until finally my left foot met my raised-up hand. Until my body became one long line.
She taught all of us, back when she was a real captain. She had us use a dog leash we’d tie to our ankle then try pulling it up. At the Centaurs game, when I first got that foot just shy of my forehead and made myself go straight, I knew a pain so stunning I saw stars.
After, Beth bought me a pink camo leash with my name on it in glitter.
Doing it now, I feel my body constrict, then loosen, warm, perfect.
Closing my eyes, I almost see the stars.
Opening them, I see Coach giving me a real smile, and Beth there, watching and nodding. And I forget about everything. I just do.
“It’ll be okay, Addy,” she says. “No one will ever know.”
It’s after, just after dusk, Coach driving, the two of us working things out.
“Jimmy—PFC Tibbs—told me. This afternoon, he drove out to the apartment and got the super to let him inside. He wanted me to hear it from him.”
I don’t say anything for a second, can feel her looking over at me. Then I ask, “What did he say exactly?”
She faces the road again. “He told me something happened to Sarge. Then he couldn’t talk anymore, for a long time. I kept waiting. It was like I almost forgot I already knew.” She pauses a second. “Which was good, I guess. Because I think I really seemed surprised when he told me.”
I find myself nodding because I don’t know what else to do.
“He had this stuff he’d printed off the internet. Wounded Warrior: Suicide in the Military. He said it looks like Sarge suicided. That’s how he put it. I never heard it put like that.”
Suicided.
It reminds me how we’d all tried cutting. I never could break real skin. Beth scraped a big heart on her stomach and then wore her bikini top to the Panthers game. But then she decided it was a hobby for the supremely boring and it no longer seemed so gangsta to any of us after that.
Coach stops at a light and reaches for a cigarette.
“Life was always hard for him,” she says, rolling the unlit cigarette up and down the steering wheel spokes.
She tilts her head a little, squinting like she’s figuring out a puzzle. “I don’t think he ever really got over losing his wife.”
I guess maybe it’s true.
“He came from a hard family,” she says. “Came up hard, like I did.”
I didn’t know he came up hard, or that Coach did. I’m not even sure what that means. Suddenly I feel like I never knew the person who died, or the person right next to me.
“She helped him,” she says, “and then she was gone.”
She’s not crying, doesn’t even look sad precisely. But I feel like she is waiting for something from me.
“But he had you,” I say. “Maybe you reminded him of her. How good she was. Maybe he found that in you.”
The look on her face is grim, knowing.
“That’s not what he found in me,” she says, softly.
I don’t say anything. It feels like some kind of furtive confession.
“I guess I knew it’d turn out this way,” she says, and her voice speeds up a little, and she faces straight ahead, her foot churning the brake pedal, inching us forward with tiny bursts.
“Not just like this, but near it,” she says.
She nods, as if agreeing with herself, then nods again. It’s as if she’s saying, That’s it, that’s it, isn’t it? And there was nothing we could do.
She looks at the road, we both do, and I think about it all. About how Coach is always so efficient, so precise, her moves sharp and tight, so it makes sense she could turn this all so quickly, doesn’t it?
It makes sense she could, less than twenty-four hours after finding Will’s body, come to understand that it was really as it was meant to be, there’d been no stopping it, and everyone was lucky they’d had some pleasures while they could.
When I get home, no one is there, they never are, so I pluck my secret bottle of silver raz from the corner of my closet and take long gulps, then collapse on my bed.
But all I hear is Coach’s voice, soft and nearly affectless: Life was always hard for him, Addy. There was nothing we could do.
Forcing myself to sit at my computer, eyes blurred, I make myself look.
I search for news reports on Sarge but can’t find any.
I even find the police scanner website, but I can’t understand it, and I keep getting distracted—42 are we leaving the football game? didn’t know you were there you told us to go here 841 Willard her back is broken that’s what she said—and my eyes all loose and stinging.
It’s nearly midnight when Beth calls. I pull the covers over me and press my lips to the phone.
“Hold on, little grit,” she says. “Hold on and grip hard.”
“I’m holding,” I say, whorling myself into the wall, my head pressing into its solidness.
“Sarge Stud killed himself.”
I feel my breath go tight. I don’t say anything.
“I don’t know the details yet, but I’m working on it. I dispatched my remaining minions. You used to be so much more help with that, Addy. Now I have to tend to everything. But the meat of the matter is he’s dead. I heard he took his head off with a shotgun.”
“I don’t believe it,” I say, which feels like the truest thing I’ve said in twenty-four hours.
“Well, Addy, truth is an ugly mother, especially for you. But it’s the truth. The PFC told me. That boy thinks he’s my Knight in Shining. On account of the other night.”
It takes me a long minute even to remember the once-world-shattering quality of that night of Beth and Corporal Prine, barely ten days past. That feels like Holly Hobbie time now.
“I told you something was going to happen,” she says.
“No,” I say. “You said you were going to make something happen.”
“Well,” she replies, “turns out I didn’t have to.”
; “Why would Will do that?” I ask.
“Why wouldn’t he?” she answers, her voice animated, gossipy—like we have finally hit upon the thing itself, something she’s been waiting for.
“Maybe, Addy-Faddy, just maybe he saw the pointlessness of all matters of the heart and said I won’t just sink in, I won’t let her grab me by the ankles. Fuck me, I’ll look her in the eye. I’ll jump.”
There is a pause, and I hear Beth’s fast breaths, her tongue clicking in her mouth.
I have the sudden feeling that she might say something that will alarm and hurt me. Something I don’t want to hear. About the way we are linked, my cheer shoe lodged in her steely palm. About last summer, when I said I was tired of being her lieutenant, tired of being her friend, and it seemed like the two of us were over forever, but we never could be.
“Beth,” I say, my arms over my head. “I can’t talk to you anymore.”
“Addy,” she says, somberly, intimately. “You have to.”
Something has passed between us, a secret knowledge about us, and what she needs from me. But I blink and I miss it.
21
WEDNESDAY: FIVE DAYS TO FINAL GAME
Meet me @ 7 at coffee place.
Coach’s five a.m. text scissoring into my sleep.
I feel hung over, have felt hung over for two days straight, the early morning light laying dew and mystery on me as I walk the five blocks, wary of starting my car at 6:55 in the morning. Sometimes I see my dad then, lurking in the hallways, robe flapping, surprised to see me, like I’m his errant boarder.
Coach is leaning against the milk and sugar station, but when she sees me, her body seems to lift upward, her eyes jittering into focus.
She goes to the counter to get me a matcha green tea and when I reach for a pink packet, she smacks it from my hand, that familiar gesture of hers, and I almost smile but can’t seem to.
We take our drinks to her car and sit there, windows rolled tight.
She tells me the police called last night and said they had some questions for her, just routine, but they thought she might wish to handle it discreetly and come to the station house.
At first, all her words just flap at me. I listen and nod and slide my drinking straw behind my teeth, grate it along the roof of my mouth until it hurts.
“Luckily, Matt’s out of town,” she’s saying. “Did I tell you that?”
I shake my head.
“He flew to Atlanta yesterday for work,” she says, eyes lifting to the rearview mirror.
I hadn’t even been thinking of Matt French. Or how she was going about her life with him amid all this, hiding such a monumental secret. But maybe it wasn’t that different. Maybe it wasn’t different at all.
“So I got Barbara to stay with Caitlin and I went to the police station. And it wasn’t like I thought at all. The detective told me that…he told me what we knew. And he said that they were conducting a routine investigation and they had found my phone number in his call log.”
She pauses, her chest heaving a little. That’s when I realize her voice is faster than yesterday, with a new wariness to it.
“He asked me if I thought Will was depressed. And if I knew whether he kept any firearms in his home. And about how we knew each other.”
“Did you tell?” I ask, sinking my chin into the plastic lid of my drink. “What did you tell?”
“I was as honest as I could be,” she says. “It’s the police. And I have nothing to hide, not really.”
I lift my head and look her in the eye. I wonder if I’ve heard her right.
“I mean, I do. Have some things I’d rather…,” she says, shaking her head, like she’s just remembered. “I told him we were friends. And that Will probably did have firearms, which is all I really know.”
“If he saw the call log,” I say, trying to get her to look me in the eye, “wouldn’t he know you’re more than friends?”
“Will and I didn’t really talk on the phone that much,” she says, briskly. “Besides, all that has nothing to do with what happened.”
I don’t know what to say to this.
A voice spins from me, small and wild. “Will the police call me? Will they be calling all of us?”
It suddenly seems like it could happen, and I think: this is how your life can end.
“Listen, Addy,” she says, turning to me. “I know this is all really a lot for you to take. I know it all seems scary. But the police are just doing their job, and once they confirm that this is…what it is…then they’re not going to need to be bothered with me anymore. It’s going to be just fine. Matt will come home, and it’ll be like before. Before before. Believe me, they’re not interested in my little life.”
It’s not until a long time later, standing at my school locker, that I think, But I was asking about me. Will the police call me?
But, Coach, what about me?
When we walk into school, Coach loops her arm in mine for a second, which she has never done and doesn’t suit her. Still, I feel her strain and want to clinch her tighter, but I don’t. Now we share something. At last. Except it’s this.
I fall asleep in chem, my cheek on the tall tabletop of our lab station, a TV movie unreeling in my head: cheerleaders lined up at the police station in full uniform. On TV they always wear their uniforms all day long, and never stop smiling.
When I wake with a jolt to the sight of David Hemans flaring the Bunsen burner inches from my hair, I feel like I’ve just touched the tip of knowing, of realizing.
But then it goes away.
“You’re the worst lab partner ever,” he says, eyes on my Eagles letter jacket. “I hate all of you.”
Second period, two minutes before the bell, and Beth slips into the seat next to me.
“Miss Cassidy,” Mr. Feck says, hand on his hip like he does. “I don’t believe I see you until fourth period. And not always then.”
Full-on cheer-glamour mode, à la RiRi, Beth crinkles her nose with just a whiff of naughtiness and jiggles her index finger like a little inchworm, mouthing, One second, Mr. Feck, please!!!
Feck nearly bows his assent.
They are so weak. All of them.
Dragging my desk toward her, Beth whispers greedily in my ear.
“Did she tell you about it? Spill, soldier, spill.”
“Did who tell me what?” A routine that’s getting old, even to me.
“Fuck me, Hanlon,” she says, hand gripping my wrist until both our tan hands turn white.
“Yes,” I say, clipping my voice. “She can’t believe it. It’s terrible.”
“Suicide is no solution,” she says, and she says it lightly, cruelly.
Then she seems to catch herself, and something tangles messily in her face. For a second.
Seeing that, I feel my chin wobble and heat rising to my eyes. Therein, somewhere, beats the heart of Beth.
“But, Addy,” she says, looking at me low-eyed, like c’mon, give it up, girlie, “did she have any more information? How did she find out? Who told her?”
“I don’t know,” I say.
“Miss Cassidy…,” singsongs Mr. Feck, eager to reengage.
“Yes, m’lord,” Beth says, and she curtsies. She really does.
Turning around at the door, her waist swiveling, she pokes two fingers out at me.
Later, be-yotch.
Later.
My finger poised over my phone, the text message screen blank and taunting.
UR nt gona tel abt Coach n Will…I start to type.
But then I don’t.
And I start thinking of all the text messages Beth must have about everything.
One by one, text by text, e-mail by e-mail, I delete everything on my phone, my breath loud in my own ear. But I know it doesn’t matter.
You can’t erase it all, not even half of it. Half my life surrendered to gray screens the size of my thumbnail, each flare carelessly shot from my phone to another now rocketing back, landing in my lap like a cartoon b
omb, its wick lit.
The thing is, when this happens, you just have to give Beth the thing she wants.
But what does Beth want?
Yet Coach goes on, and I marvel at it.
At practice, she hustles us while Beth sits on the top bleacher deck.
Perched up near the rafters, black wings tucked tight, she’s staring at her phone, her face lit by it.
Counting off our beats, Coach is focused, intense. She rides us hard.
“I’ve got to move things fast,” she shouts. “I have to pick up my daughter. Don’t drag on me, dollies.”
At first, the hurting is not the good kind, and I can’t pound my way to it. And when Mindy fishhooks me during a tumbling pass, knocking me to the mat, I’m embarrassed to feel hot tears popping from me. For the first time ever on the mat.
“God, Hanlon,” Mindy says, surprised. “You are Lieutenant Hanlon, aren’t you?”
But there’s no time to feel the shame, and I make sure to hold nothing back when I jam my shoe into Mindy’s hidebound shoulder next time around.
Soon enough, as we leap and tuck and jump, I start feeling better and my body starts doing astonishing things, tight and rock-hard, nailing it.
But then Beth starts talking loudly on her phone. I see Coach looking up at her, again and again, and everything starts galloping back, hoofs up.
“Cap’n,” Coach calls out to her, and I feel myself tense. “Can you run some tumbling?”
Beth looks up, a strand of hair slipping from her mouth.
We all look up.
She does not remove the phone from her face.
I feel like if I were closer, I’d see her baring her teeth.
“I’d like to, ma’am,” Beth shouts, in her whiniest teen girl voice, “but I only have one tampon left and I’ve had it in all day, so I think if I do mat work, it’ll come loose.”
We all look at Coach now, and no one says anything.
Coach, oh, Coach, why did you ask?
“Then we’ll see your blood on the mat,” Coach says, planting a foot on the bottom bleacher.