Dare Me: A Novel

by Megan Abbott

  When the questions turn, it’s a gentle turn, or she renders it gently.

  “So you and Coach French spend time together outside of school?”

  The question seems strange. I think I’ve misheard it.

  “She’s my coach,” I say.

  “And last Monday night, did you see your coach?”

  I don’t know what to say. I have no idea what she told them.

  “Last Monday?” I say. “I don’t know.”

  “Try to remember, okay? Were you at her house last Monday?”

  That second part, a gift. At her house. If Coach didn’t tell them that, who would have?

  “I guess I was,” I say. “Sometimes I help her with her little girl.”

  “Like a babysitter while she goes out?”

  “No, no,” I say, calm as I can. Besides, who is she to call me a babysitter? “I don’t babysit.”

  “So just pitching in?”

  I look at her, at her bare lips and badly plucked eyebrows.

  “I hang out there a lot,” I say. “She helps me through stuff. I like being over there.”

  “So last Monday you were there with your coach and her husband?”

  And her husband. “Yes,” I say, because doesn’t this have to be Coach’s story and don’t our stories have to be straight for both our sakes? “I was.”

  “And you knew the sergeant?”

  “I’d see him in school.”

  “Was your coach friends with him?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “She never said anything to me.”

  “You never saw them together?”

  “No.”

  I have no idea what I’ve done or undone.

  “And you like being at Coach’s house. You like spending time there.” She’s watching me closely, but I can’t get over the stitch of stray eyebrow hair to the side of her overgroomed right brow.

  How could she miss something like that? That detail, like spotting a slack move in another squad’s routine.

  It makes me feel strong.

  Deputy Hanlon, stone-cold lieutenant, my old guise—I’d forgotten how good they felt.

  “That’s what I said, yes, ma’am.”

  I lean back, stretch my legs long, and adjust my ponytail.

  “It was a comfortable place to be? They seemed to get along?”

  “Yeah,” I say.

  “Seem like a happy marriage?”

  I look at her with my head tilted, like a dog. Like I can’t guess what she might mean. Who thought about the happiness of marriages?

  “Yeah, sure,” I say, and my voice clicks into something else, the way I talk when I have to talk to people who could never understand anything at all but who think they get me, think they get everything about girls like me.

  “We like Coach,” I say. “She’s a nice lady.”

  And I say, “Sometimes she shows us yoga moves. It’s really fun. She’s awesome. The Big Game is Monday, you should come.”

  I lean close, like I’m telling her a secret.

  “We kick ass Monday, we’re going to Regionals next year.”

  “We may have some more questions,” the detective says, as she walks me out.

  “Okay,” I say. “Cool.” Which is a word I never use.

  Walking past all the cops, all the detectives, I raise my runner’s shirt a few inches, like I’m shaking it loose from my damp skin.

  I let them all see my stomach, its tautness.

  I let everyone see I’m not afraid, and that I’m not anything but a silly cheerleader, a feather-bodied sixteen-year-old with no more sense than a marshmallow peep.

  I let them see I’m not anything.

  Least of all what I am.

  27

  SATURDAY AFTERNOON

  At home, I drag my phone from under my mattress.

  There are seven voicemails from Coach, and sixteen texts. They all say some variation on this: Call me before anything. Call me NOW.

  But first, I decide to do some stretches, like Coach showed us.

  Cat tilt. Puppy dog. Triangle pose.

  She can wait.

  I turn the shower on and stand under it a long time.

  Then I blow-dry my hair, stretching each strand out languorously, my mind doing various twists and turns.

  Somewhere in the back of my head some old cheer motivational words sputter forth: Time comes, you have to listen to yourself.

  That seems like something old Coach Templeton—Fish—would’ve said, or printed out from the internet, or typed in scroll font at the bottom of our squad sheets.

  As if listening to yourself was just something you could do. As if there were something there to listen to. A self inside you with all kinds of smart things to say.

  My fingers touch my open computer screen, our squad Facebook page, all the cheer photos from three years of death defiance and bright ribbons.

  Cheerlebrities!!!

  There’s one shot of Beth and me in the foreground, our faces glitter-crusted, our mouths open, tongues out, our fingers curled into the devil hand sign.

  We look terrifying.

  The picture was from last year. At first, I don’t recognize myself. With all the paint, we are impossible to tell apart. Not just Beth and me, but all of us.

  The front windows of Coach’s house are still rimy from last night’s frost, and Caitlin’s paper snowflakes scatter across. A lamp glows inside.

  It has the feel of a fairy-tale cottage, like one of those paintings at the mall.

  Caitlin stands inside the front door, two fingers punched in her mouth. Usually so tidily groomed, her hair looking oddly knotted, like an uncared-for doll. Breadcrumbs scatter up her cheek.

  She doesn’t say anything, but then she never does, and I twist past her, my legs brushing against the barbs of her ruffled jumper, which seems more suited for July.

  She likes to look pretty, Coach always says, like that is the only thing she really knows about her.

  “I didn’t think they’d get to you so fast,” Coach says. She’s washing the windows in the den, wielding a long pole with a squeegee at the end, and a soft duster beneath it. “I was calling and calling. I thought for sure I’d get to you before they did.”

  There’s a sheen of sweat on her face.

  I don’t say anything because I want that sweat there, at least for now. She’s made me sweat enough.

  “It just seemed easiest to tell them you were here that night,” she says. “If you were at my house, then I couldn’t possibly have been at Will’s.”

  She looks at me, from under her extended arm, elegant muscles spun tight.

  “And you couldn’t have been there either,” she adds. “So we’re both covered.”

  “What about Matt?” I say, dropping my voice.

  “Oh, he’s back,” she says, gesturing out the window. “He’s outside.”

  In the far corner of the lawn, I spot him sitting on the brick edging of an empty flowerbed.

  I can’t figure out what he’s doing, but he’s very still.

  I’ve never seen him like that, or outside at all. I wonder if he feels peaceful.

  “No,” I say, regaining my focus. “I mean he told the cops you were home asleep, right? Which is what he thought anyway?”

  Why did you need me as your alibi, I want to say, when you had him.

  “This is better, Addy,” she says, the words just tripping from her tongue. “They never believe the spouse. And he was asleep, that’s not much corroboration…”

  She stops for a second, eyes fixed on something on the windowpane. A smudge I can’t see.

  “I used to use newspapers,” she says. “Then Matt bought me this thing.” She touches her fingers to the duster at the end of the pole. “It’s lamb’s wool.”

  I keep waiting for her to say sorry, sorry I didn’t warn you, sorry I didn’t prepare you, sorry I didn’t protect you from all of this. But she’s never been a sorry kind of person.

  “Coach,” I say. “Don�
��t you want to know what I said to the cops?”

  She looks at me.

  “But I know what you said,” she says.

  “How do you know?” I say, kneeling on the sofa where she stands, barefoot. “I might have blown it without even realizing it.”

  “I know because you’re smart. I know because I trust you,” she says, and lifts the pole again, telescoping it higher. “I wouldn’t have gotten you into this otherwise.”

  “Gotten me into what?” I say, my voice scraping up my throat. “Coach, what am I in?”

  She will not look at me. She’s looking out the window.

  “My mess,” she says, her voice smaller. “Don’t think I don’t know that.”

  I follow her gaze.

  Far back on the lawn, Matt French has turned and seems to be looking toward us. Toward me.

  I can’t make out his face, but it’s as though I can.

  “Coach,” I say, “why was your hair wet?”

  “What,” she says, swooping the squeegee back up the window.

  “When I got to Will’s apartment that night,” I say, my eyes still on Matt French in the backyard, his rounded-over shoulders. “Why was your hair wet?”

  “My hair wet? What kind of…it wasn’t wet.”

  “Yes it was,” I say. “It was damp.”

  She sets the pole down.

  “Oh,” she says, looking at me at last. “So it’s you who doesn’t trust me.”

  “No, I…”

  “Did the police…did they…?”

  “No,” I say. “I just remembered it. I’d forgotten it and I remembered it. I’m just trying…Coach, he was wearing a towel, and your hair…”

  Something is happening, that vacant, efficient expression slipping away, revealing something raw, bruised. It’s like I’ve done something powerfully cruel. “I took a bath before I went over there,” she replies. “I always did.”

  “But, Coach…”

  “Addy,” she says, looking down at me, the pole piercing the cushion, like a staff, or sword, “you need to stop talking to Beth.”

  A burr rises up under my skin.

  “Because she just wants her pretty doll back,” Coach says quietly, lifting the pole again, pressing the squeegee against the window, making it squeak.

  I feel something tighten in me and have a picture suddenly of Beth’s fingers circling my wrist.

  Then at last, I say it. “You never told me about the bracelet.”

  “The bracelet?” she says, finally releasing the pole and descending from her perch.

  “My hamsa bracelet.”

  “Your what?”

  “To ward off the evil eye. The one I gave you.”

  She pauses a second. “Oh, that, right. What about it?”

  “Why didn’t you tell me the police found it?” I say, then wait a beat before adding, “under Will’s body.”

  She looks at me. “Addy, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You mean they didn’t ask you about it? They found the bracelet under Will’s body.”

  “They told you that?” her voice bounds.

  “No,” I say. “Beth did.”

  I start to feel like my feet are going to slip out from under me, even though I’m sitting down.

  We’re standing in front of Coach’s bureau, her smooth mahogany jewelry box before us.

  She sets her hands on either side and lifts the top with a shushing sound.

  We look at the tidily arranged bracelets woven into the soft ridges. Her tennis bracelet, a few neon sports bracelets, a delicate silver-linked one.

  “It’s got to be in here,” she says, fingertip stroking the velvet. “I haven’t worn it in weeks.”

  But it’s not.

  I look at the box, and at her, at the way her face looks both tight and loose at the same time, veins wriggling at her temples, but her mouth slack, wounded.

  “It’s here,” she says, sliding the box off her bureau, everything tumbling radiantly to the carpet.

  “It’s not,” I say.

  She looks at me, so helpless.

  For a long time, maybe, we are both kneeling on the floor, fingers nuzzling into the carpet weave, shaking loose those filmy bracelets, tugging them from the caramel-colored loops.

  That beautiful carpet with its dense pile. At least five twists per inch.

  “Addy, you’ve listened to Beth, now you need to listen to me. If they found that bracelet, a girl’s bracelet like that, like one of yours,” she says, pointing to my arms, ringed with friendship flosses, neon jellies, a leather braid, “don’t you think they’d have asked you too?”

  There’s nothing I can say. I watch her as she walks into the bathroom and shuts the door.

  Neither of us wants to reckon openly with how deep Beth’s trickery may go and neither of us wants to reckon with why I have believed her.

  I hear the shower start and know I’m meant to leave.

  Being part of a pyramid, you never see the pyramid at all.

  Later, watching ourselves, it never feels real. Flickering YouTube images of bumblebees swarming, assembling themselves into tall hives.

  It’s nothing like it is on the floor. There, you have to bolt your gaze to the bodies in your care, the ones right above you.

  Your only focus should be your girl, the one you’re responsible for, the one whose leg, hip, arm you’re bracing. The one who is counting on you.

  Left spot, keep your focus on the left flank. Don’t look right.

  Right spot, keep your focus on the right flank. Don’t look left.

  Eyes on the Flyer’s eyes, shoulders, hips, vigilant for any sign of misalignment, instability, doubt.

  This is how you stop falls.

  This is how you keep everything from collapsing.

  You never get to see the stunt at all.

  Eyes on your girl.

  And it’s only ever a partial vision, because that’s the only way to keep everyone up in the air.

  On my way out, I see Matt French still roaming around the backyard. It strikes me how few times I’ve seen him without his laptop in front of him, or his headset on. He looks lost.

  I stop at the kitchen window, wondering what Coach has told him. What he believes.

  Matt French reaches out to a branch spoking from a tall hawthorn bush, the one Caitlin is always cutting herself on, its hooks curling under her feet.

  He looks no sadder than usual, which is sad enough.

  Suddenly, he looks up and it’s like he sees me, but I think I must be too far, too small behind the paned window.

  But I think he sees me.

  “You made it up,” I say.

  I’m at Beth’s house, in her bathroom. She has her leg propped up on the toilet seat, where she’s examining it with care.

  “The Asian girl did the sugar wax on me, and she is comprehensive in her approach,” she says, shaking a flame-colored bottle of Our Desire, her mother’s perfume. “Except now I reek of pop-tart. Frosted. With sprinkles.”

  “You made it up,” I repeat, smacking her leg off the toilet seat. “The cops never asked her about any bracelet. You made all that up.”

  “The hot fuzz called you in, eh?” she says, standing up straight, still shaking the perfume bottle, shaking it side to side like some dirty boy gesture. “They called me in too. I go right after practice today.”

  “They never found any bracelet at all, did they?”

  “You’d best stay right, girl,” she says, lifting her leg back up, sending a fine mist of bitter orange and ylang-ylang over it.

  This I don’t like. She can’t batter at me like I’m Tacy, like I’m some JV.

  “What made you finally ask her?” she says.

  I knock her foot off the toilet seat again and sit down on its furred lid.

  “You made it up,” I say. “If the detectives found a bracelet, they would’ve asked me about it.”

  “Addy, I can’t make you believe me,” she says, looking down at me.
“And as for you and Coach…”

  She lays her hand on my head, like a benediction.

  “We are never deceived,” she says, her voice deep and ringing. “We deceive ourselves.”

  We are lying on Beth’s deep blue bedroom carpet, as we’ve done a hundred, a thousand times, collapsing from our labors, the wages of war, one kind or another. Adrift on that speckless ultramarine, Beth would lay out all her martial machinations for me, her attaché, her envoy. Sometimes her mouthpiece. Whatever was required.

  In some ways, Beth was almost never wrong in her judgments.

  Paper-thin, master cleansed Emily was not, in fact, strong enough to do the stunt.

  Tacy didn’t have the head game or the strong legs of a true Flyer.

  With Beth, so full of lies, you have to push past the lie to see the deeper truth that drives it. Because Beth is almost always lying about something, but the lying is her way of rendering something else, something tucked away or confounded, manifest.

  And you have to keep playing, and maybe the truth will reveal itself, maybe Beth will get tired and finally show her hand. Or maybe it’ll stop being fun for her, and she’ll just hurl that truth in your face, and make you cry.

  I never liked you anyway.

  You’re just so goddamned fat it depresses me.

  I saw your dad at the mall buying lingerie with a strange woman.

  Casey Jaye said you can’t throw a back handspring for shit, and she told RiRi there’s something weird about you, but she wouldn’t say what.

  Oh, and I only pretended to care.

  “It can’t be easy,” she says, surveying her lotioned legs, “knowing you were an accessory to a crime, even if it’s after the fact. It’s not really a position a red-blooded All-American teenage girl expects to be put in, especially given everything you’ve done for your Coach.”

  “Like the things I’ve done for you?” I say. “Did you think I was going to be your lieutenant forever?”

  “What have you ever done for me,” she replies, her eyes snake-slitted, “that you didn’t want to do?”

  Flipping over on her stomach, she props her tanned chin on one palm and reaches out to me with her other.