Dare Me: A Novel

by Megan Abbott

  My heart still hammering from the practice, I’m thinking of how hardcore Beth was out there today, like I haven’t seen her since sophomore year, when it still beat in her so hard. When she hadn’t gotten distracted by petty grievances and her own miseries of life, her own creeping boredom.

  Maybe she has never been this good, cared so much.

  This is what Coach has done for her, I think. She helps us all.

  Then, lurking in the open doorway of Coach’s office, she is there. The shadow she throws seems so large that her five feet swallow the office hall. Beth.

  “Cap,” I say, wanting to help sate her, “you bled us today.”

  Her back to me, I can’t see her face.

  I walk closer.

  I’m hoping, praying for elation.

  I mean, isn’t she the Coach Itself now, for the moment at least?

  “Beth,” I say again. “Return of the King.”

  The sunfall flooding everything, her whole body lit darkly gold, I stop a few feet from her ambered back.

  “Beth,” I say, “you got everything.”

  Finally, slowly, a half turn of her head. A whisper of her profile, darkened by her shudder of black hair.

  That’s when I see that nothing’s been had at all, nothing’s been saved. She thought this would be it, and it wasn’t.

  “The sun’s down and the moon’s pretty,” she says, her voice hushed. “It’s time to ramble.”

  And I say yes. Of course I say yes.

  25

  FRIDAY NIGHT

  Sprawled on the hood of my car, we are high up on the south face of the ridge, right where it drops a thousand miles or more, into the deepest part of the earth.

  We have been drinking cough-syrupy wine that clings to the tongue. Beth calls it hobo wine, and it feels like we are hobos now. Wanderers. Midnight ramblers.

  I forget everything and think that, hidden up here behind the sparkly granite of a thousand gorges and knobs, I am safe from all hazard.

  But there is Beth beside me, breathing wildly and talking in ragged lopes that seem to streak around my head, across the sky above us.

  At some point I stop listening and instead focus on the loveliness of my own white hands, bending and canting them above me, against the black sky.

  “Do you hear what I’m saying, Addy?” she asks.

  “You were speaking of dark forces,” I tell her, guessing, because this is usually what Beth is speaking of.

  “You know who I thought I saw yesterday,” she says, “driving her whorey Kia over by St. Reggie’s?”

  “Who?”

  “Casey Jaye. All last summer, cheer buddies in your camp bunk, giggling together in your matching sports bras, and that love knot she gave you.”

  “It wasn’t anything,” I say, feeling an unaccountable blush. “It didn’t mean anything.”

  “Opening her thighs to show you her tight quads. I knew her wormy heart. But I shot my wad too soon and you weren’t ready to believe me. You didn’t want to.”

  She will never let it go. She will never forget it.

  But then she jerks up suddenly and I nearly slide from the car hood, hands gripping her jacket.

  “Look out there,” she says, pointing into the distance, the place where Sutton Grove would be if it weren’t just nightness out there.

  I peer off into the black, but I can’t see anything, just a shimmer of some town somewhere that’s mostly, if not fully, asleep.

  A lush wino haze upon me, I guess I’ve been hoping, with colossal naïveté, that Beth will determine she has won, that she is Captain, that Coach is barely even a coach these days, ceding more and more power, and now she will let it go…she will let it go and Coach will be free.

  It’s all over, or nearly so.

  The police will realize the truth, and it will all be over.

  And Beth will be done.

  Or nearly so.

  I am drunk.

  “With her private jokes and her yoga orgies and her backyard jamborees,” Beth is saying. “All of you curled at her feet. Cleopatra in a hoodie. I never fell for any of it.”

  “You never fell for it once,” I agree, trying to fight off the feeling of menace piercing the haze.

  “But when I look out there,” she says, sweeping her hand across the lightless horizon, “all I can think is that she’s getting away with it. Getting away with everything.”

  “Beth,” I warn. My eyes on the velvety dark below. The expanse of nothingness that suddenly seems to be throbbing, nervous, alive.

  What does lie down there?

  In this state, the unruly despair of Will’s life, the battered end of it, comes to me freshly.

  I want sparkled cheeks, high laughter, and good times, and I never asked for any of this. Except I did.

  “Addy,” she says, kicking her feet in the air. “I’ve got that fever in my blood. I’m ready for some trouble. Are you?”

  I am not. Oh, I am not. But who would leave Beth alone when she’s like this?

  “Let’s go look the devil in the eye, girlfriend,” she says, tilting that wine bottle to my lips, to my open mouth, and I drink, drink, drink.

  Beth now at the wheel, we are looping endlessly, in curling figure eights, and the streetlamps overhead are popping over my eyes.

  Then we’re climbing upward again and there’s a pause between songs and I hear a roar in my ears. Face to the window, I see the crashing interstate is newly below us.

  We’re nearly there before I realize where she’s taken me.

  “I don’t want to be here,” I whisper.

  She stops the car in front of the lightboxed sign, The Towers.

  We sit, the light greening our faces.

  “This is not a place I want to be,” I say again, louder now.

  “Can you feel the energy here?” she says, putting lip gloss on with her finger, like we are readying for our dates. “It’s some black mojo.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Our great captain’s captain, the she-wolf. The li-o-ness. I can feel her here,” she smiles spookily. “How it was for her that night.”

  I don’t say anything.

  “The night she done shot her lover dead,” Beth says, crooking her fingers into little guns.

  Bang-bang, she whispers in my ear, bang-bang!

  And there it is. She has said it.

  “You have lost your mind,” I say, the words heavy in my mouth. “You have lost it.”

  “Hey, Coach,” Beth sings, her grin wider and wider, “where you goin’ with that gun in your hand?”

  “Shut up,” I say, my hand leaping out and shoving at her, a strange half laugh coming from me.

  But then I’m shoving harder and I’m not laughing, and Beth grabs my hands and locks them together. When did she get so sober?

  “He killed himself,” I say, so loud it hurts me to hear. “She didn’t do anything. She’d never do anything like that.”

  My hands in hers, she leans toward me, very close, her wine-thick breath in my face, my hands knotted in hers so tight I feel a hot tear in my eye corner.

  “She would never do anything like that,” she repeats back to me, nodding.

  “She loved him,” I say, the words sounding small and ridiculous.

  “Right,” Beth says, smiling, pressing my hands against her own hard ribcage, like clutching in the backseat with a boy, “because no one’s ever killed the person they love.”

  “You’re drunk, you’re drunk and awful,” I say, and I’m trying to get my hands free, and we’re rocking, our faces so close. “An awful bitch, the worst I ever knew.”

  She drops my hands at last, tilting her head and watching me.

  Suddenly, the alcohol heaving in me, my hands palsied, I have to get out of the car.

  Feet on the smooth, freshly poured asphalt of the lot, I breathe deep.

  But this is what she wants because she gets out too.

  I look at her, face shot through not with moonlig
ht but with the wan blue of the bank of parking lot lights.

  “Let’s go,” I say. “I don’t need this—”

  “Do you smell something?” Beth asks, suddenly. “Like flowers or something. Honeysuckle.”

  “I don’t smell anything,” I say.

  I smell all kinds of things, most of all chlorine. Bleach. Blood.

  “Did you know the government is studying the possibility that people might give off these scents when they’re lying?” Beth says, and I must be dreaming. “And each smell is very individual. Like a fingerprint.”

  I’ve dreamed my way into one of Beth’s nightmares, the one where we’re standing above the gorge, like an open throat.

  “I wonder if yours is honeysuckle,” she says.

  “I’m not lying about anything,” I say.

  “Honeysuckle so sweet I can taste it. You’re good enough to eat, Addy-Faddy,” she says, and I feel she’s monstrous now.

  “He killed himself,” I say, my voice almost too low to hear. “It’s the truth, if you want to know.”

  “You lie and lie, and I keep lapping it up,” she says, clucking her tongue. “Not anymore.”

  “He did. He shot himself in the mouth on his carpet,” I say, and it’s not even my voice, not even my words, but they come so fast and so sure. “It’s the truth.”

  Beth is watching me, and there’s no stopping me now.

  “He shot himself,” I say. I wish I could stop, but I can’t stop until I convince her. “He fell on the carpet and his head was black. And he died there.”

  With those security floodlights glaring, her face like marble, she says nothing.

  And I keep going.

  “You don’t know,” I say, the wind whipping my hair into my face, my mouth. “Because you didn’t see. But I know.”

  “How do you know?” she darts back, and repeats her question from the girls’ restroom. “Were you there?”

  “Of course I was,” I say, almost a howl, my breath sliding from me.

  “Of course you were,” she says, fingers reaching out, lacing through my blowing hair.

  “So that’s how I know,” I say, tightening my voice. “That’s how I know more than you. I saw his body. I saw it lying there.”

  She is quiet for a moment.

  “You saw him kill himself.”

  “No, after.”

  “Ah, so you saw him after he was already dead. After Coach shot him dead.”

  “No,” I say, my voice loud. “We found him together. We got to his apartment and there he was.”

  There is a pause.

  “I see,” she says, an unspeakably lewd leer rising. “So what exactly was going on that Coach would bring you to the Sarge’s apartment, at all hours of the night. Were you some virgin prize—”

  “No,” I nearly shout, feeling stomach-sick. “She found him and she called me. I went and got her.”

  She smiles faintly. “Huh,” she says.

  My stomach turning, I lean against the open car door, breathing in.

  “Wait,” I say, heeling back, dropping into the front seat. “You saw us that night. You saw me come home after.”

  “I didn’t need to see you,” she says, toe-kicking at my ankles. It’s not really an answer, though. “I know all your beats, Addy.”

  “You know everything,” I mutter.

  “I know you, Addy,” she says. “Better than you ever could. You’ve never been able to look at anything about yourself. You count on me to do it for you.”

  I press my face into the car headrest.

  “And what you’ve just told me,” she continues, “I’m glad you finally fessed up, but it doesn’t change anything.”

  Turning my head slowly toward her, my mouth drifting open…

  “What?”

  “All it proves, Addy, is that you lied to me. But I knew that already.”

  Later, in bed, the alcohol leaching from me, I cannot make my head stop.

  Drunk and weak, I gave her everything.

  I feel outmaneuvered, outflanked.

  Because I was.

  Don’t you believe me now? I’d said, whining like a little JV, all the way home.

  Don’t you get it? she’d said, shaking her head. He was done with her. And now she’s done with him. And now she’s sunk you down in it with her. And soon she’ll be done with you too.

  She made you her accomplice.

  She made you her bitch—but then again, weren’t you already?

  I think I will never sleep and then, finally, I do.

  26

  SATURDAY MORNING: TWO DAYS TO FINAL GAME

  I wake up with a start, and a picture flashes there.

  Last Monday night, Coach opening Will’s apartment door to me. The alarm in her eyes like she’d forgotten she’d called me. The shimmery dampness clinging to her thick hair.

  The picture so vivid, it aches. My heart rocketing in my chest, I feel my T-shirt sticking to me, my hung-over body blazing.

  Grasping for the warm water bottle by my bed, I know something suddenly. Something I’d forgotten.

  The dew on her.

  Faint. Like someone who’d showered maybe a half hour before.

  And Will, lying on the floor in his towel.

  I can’t quite piece it together, but it reminds me of something.

  It reminds me of another time.

  It reminds me of this:

  Will, waving through the lobby doors, his hair wet and seal-slick.

  Coach, slipping from behind him, walking toward me, her hair hanging in damp loops to her shoulders, darkening her T-shirt.

  The first time I drove to The Towers, the time I came and picked her up. And I knew what they’d been doing before I arrived, because it was all over them.

  Their clothes on but they seemed so naked, all their pleasure in each other streaked across their faces.

  Fresh from their shower, their shared shower I’d imagined.

  I imagine now.

  Monday night, Coach and Will, both shower damp, but Will is dead.

  She didn’t find his body, Beth said. She was there when it happened. She was already there.

  The phone rings and rings and rings. I turn it off and stuff it under my mattress.

  The thoughts that come are rough and relentless.

  The days leading up to Will’s death, the way Coach had been acting, missing practices, the car accident, and now I wonder if she’d lied about all of it. If she had felt Will slipping away and had been calling, had been begging him to come over, like that day at her house, when she finally lured him there. When she had me wait in the backyard with Caitlin.

  And that night. The faintly damp hair. The bleachy tennis shoes. What had that been about, really?

  And how did she get to Will’s?

  I took a cab, she’d said. I snuck out of the house. Matt was asleep. He took two pills. I had to see Will, Addy. That strangely robotic voice. So I called a cab. But I couldn’t call a cab to take me back, could I?

  Snuck out at two in the morning, and Matt French didn’t hear her? It made so much more sense that she’d gone over earlier, made some excuse to Matt, or gone because Matt wasn’t home yet.

  Could Will have been done with her, and she…

  Suddenly, I think of last week, that sleeping snarl in the night as I lay beside Coach:

  How could you do this to me? How?

  Pow-pow, I can hear Beth say. Pow-pow.

  A Post-it left for me on the kitchen island:

  “A, Debbie says someone from PD called for you. Someone steal mascot again? Love, D.”

  Yes, Dad, I think, holding the edge of the counter. That’s exactly it.

  I’m running on Royston Road when the car pulls up.

  I never run. Beth says runners are uncreative masturbators. I didn’t know what that meant, but it made me never want to run.

  But this morning, my stepmother’s klonopin still sticky on my tongue, running seems right.

  Like at practice
, like at games, I can forget everything but the special talents of my special girl body, which does everything I ask it to, which is unravaged and pure, baby-oil soft and fluttered only with the bruises of girl sport.

  The feel of the concrete pulsing up my shins is near-exquisite and when the release comes, it’s like hitting a stunt but better because it’s just me and no one can even see, but I’m doing it, doing it anyway and without peering out waiting for anyone to tell me I hit it, because I know I did. I know it.

  So I keep running. Until all I feel is nothing.

  And no one can touch me. My phone shut off, far from me, and no one even knows where I am, if I’m anywhere at all.

  Except the detectives.

  It’s just like on TV. They pull up to the curb, and one of them is leaning on the doorframe.

  “Adelaide Hanlon?”

  I stop, earbuds slipping from my ears.

  “Can we ask you a few questions?”

  The man gives me a bottle of water. It gives me something to do with my hands, my mouth.

  We sit in an office, and when the woman sees my sweated legs puckering a little on the seat, she offers me the desk chair, and she doesn’t seem to care that I sweat on it.

  “If you’d feel more comfortable with your parents present,” the man says, “we can call them.”

  “No,” I say, shaking my head. “That’s okay.”

  They both look at me and nod, as if I am being very wise.

  Then they exchange a quick look. He leaves, and the woman stays.

  In my head, I start doing my cheer counts. One-two, three-four. I count them until my heart finally slows down. Until I can empty my face, teen-girl bored.

  “We’re just trying to confirm a few details about last Monday night,” she says.

  She has a tight ponytail that reminds me of Coach’s, and a dimple on one side of her mouth. She doesn’t really smile, but she speaks softly.

  Somehow I start to feel okay, like having to talk to the assistant principal about something you know about but had nothing to do with. If you just say as little as possible, they really can’t do anything.

  The questions start generally, more like a conversation. What do I like about school? How long have I been a cheerleader? Aren’t some of the stunts dangerous?