Dare Me: A Novel

by Megan Abbott

  “Oh, Addy. You can’t even see it, you’re so love-blind. I’m sorry about that. And sorry to have to do this to you. Really, I am.”

  “I’m not…love-blind,” I stutter, the word throwing me. Which I guess it’s meant to, but—

  “But you’re bringing a knife to a gunfight,” she continues. “You can’t see the facts, even laid out plain. Even when the po-lice department, Addy, calls you in to the station to investigate her lover’s murder. What will it take?”

  I feel a sob creep into my chest, she’s just so damned good and I can’t breathe.

  “You keep saying these things,” I say, “but you’ve never given me any real reason to believe why you think she would ever…”

  Beth slants her head. “Why she would ever?” she repeats, singsongy. “Why wouldn’t she?”

  My head throbs, not knowing what to believe now, ever, except I believe them both—Beth and Coach, in different ways—when their words wormhole into my brain. They make everything seem real. Dark. Painful. True.

  “It kills me, I tell you,” Beth says, “the way you all fawn over her. The way you, Addy, the way you fawned over them both. She isn’t what you think, and neither was he. They were not star-crossed. He was just a guy, like all of them. They fucked each other and he got tired of her before she got tired of him. She gets everything she wants, and she couldn’t stand not getting him anymore.”

  The throbbing becoming something else, something worse and more insistent.

  I lift myself up to sitting position, my head light and everything lifting lightly in me. The edge of hysteria sliding into her voice, it can come to no good.

  “And none of us gets away with anything,” she says, climbing up onto her knees in front of me. “None of us.”

  “You don’t know anything,” I say. “Neither of us knows.”

  She looks at me, and for a second I almost see all the misery and rage, centuries of it, tumbling across her face.

  “She’s not a killer,” I say, trying to make my voice bore-thick.

  She looks down at me, her eyes depthful and ruinous.

  “Love is a kind of killing, Addy,” she says. “Don’t you know that?”

  There are three hours before practice, the Big Practice before the Big Game.

  I can’t live in Beth’s head a moment longer, so I spend a few hours at the mall, wandering, hands knotted around my jug of kombucha, its fermented threads swirling around the bottom of the bottle.

  Coach, my Coach. I think of that pearl-smooth face of hers and wonder if I can ever imagine it, try to picture her hard, ordered body doing the thing Beth says she’s done.

  It’s impossible and I keep trying but the image that comes instead is of her, legs hooked hard around Will in the teachers’ lounge, the elation, everything in her unpinned, untucked, unveiled. No one looking, no one watching, and everything hers.

  He is mine, he is mine, and I will do anything to feel this always.

  Anything.

  Feeling Will slipping from her, might she find herself doing something she never thought she’d do?

  Maybe it’s a feeling I know.

  It’s the feeling that sends me out to The Towers again, second time in as many days, some magnetic stroke tickling inside me, summoning me there.

  Pulling into the lot, I see no sign of police. There are even fewer cars than usual on this blustery day, the wind whistling under my windshield wipers and the sky raw and melancholy.

  I sit for a long time, punching radio presets, then turning my car off, putting my earbuds in, drowning in the plaintive songs of adolescent heartache, then quickly becoming disgusted by them and flinging my player to the floor of my car.

  Then, the flinging seems to be part of the same counterfeit world of those tinny teenbox songs, and I hate myself too.

  But that’s when I realize that I’ve been on a stakeout, without even knowing it.

  Because there, walking across the parking lot into Building A, is Corporal Gregory Prine.

  I’d know that bullet head anywhere.

  I watch him enter the building and then, without even thinking, I follow him, sneakers squeaking across the wet parking lot.

  Stopped short by the locked lobby doors, I can’t guess why he has a key and wonder if it’s Will’s key. I stand at the big buzzer board where I stood five days ago, and I try to be Beth-bold, my dayglo nails dancing over the silver buttons, pressing them all, waiting for any crackling voice, the ringing wail of entry.

  “Sorry, I live in Fourteen-B and forgot my keys. My mom’s not home, can you buzz me in?”

  Someone does, and before I know it, I’m in the elevator, a slick sweat on me now, and the fluorescent light hissing, and then I’m in the empty hallway on Will’s empty floor.

  I’m not scared at all but seem to be fueled by the same kind of chemical rush like at a game, like when there’s just been too much slim-FX and nothing to eat but sugar-free jell-o so you can get back the space between your upper thighs, it’s a feeling most spectacular.

  I have it now and it’s so strong in me I can’t stop myself from charging forward, my foot accidentally punting a piece of crime-scene tape, catching it on the tip of my puma.

  And there I am, standing in front of number 27-G, a lone strip of tape still curled around its handle.

  But before I can decide what I plan to do—ring the bell, burst in like some gangbanger—I stop myself, tripping backwards against the stairwell door, inhaling deeply three times.

  Prine, what if he…

  That’s when I notice that the door to the neighboring apartment is just slightly ajar, and a whoosh from the heating unit has nudged it farther open.

  I walk slowly toward it, peeking in.

  Inside, it’s the mirror image of Will’s apartment but spartan-bare.

  The same parquet entry, the same sandy carpet.

  The only difference seems to be the plastic lazy susan perched on the table in the entryway. Stuffed with brochures: Luxury Living on Nature’s Edge.

  Were I to step closer, to step inside, I’m sure I’d see the same leather sofa slashed across the center of the room.

  But I don’t step closer. Somehow, I feel if it were an inch closer, this sofa will become that sofa, and there on the carpet, I will see it. Him.

  But mostly, the place just feels empty.

  Except it’s not.

  A door thumps, then the sound of feet skimming across the carpet, and heading toward me is the bullet head himself, a plastic grocery store bag clutched in that ham-hock hand.

  It all happens so fast. Spotting me, he stops short in front of the open door.

  Gorilla-puffed chest, sunglasses perched on his crew-cut head, he blinks spasmodically, red rushing up his thick neck and face.

  It’s as if he can’t believe his eyes, and I nearly can’t either.

  “Oh,” he says, “it’s one of you.”

  Back in the near-empty parking lot, we sit together in my car.

  “Listen,” he says, the plastic grocery bag hooked daintily around his wrist. “I haven’t said anything. So don’t worry.”

  “What do you mean?” I say, marveling still at the idea of Prine in my car, us both here. Everything.

  “I have some priors. I had a substance problem,” he says, fingers crackling noisily at the bag. “So I’m not saying a goddamn thing to those cops. You can tell her not to worry. And you can tell her to leave me the hell out of this.”

  I don’t know who “she” is, but I don’t ask.

  There is a palpable sense of revelation coming and I want to tread carefully. Finally someone not smart enough to lie to me, or even to know why he should.

  Though, as I’m sitting there with him, his left foot ensnared by the cheetah-print sports bra on my car floor, it strikes me he might be thinking the same thing.

  “So you live here or something?” I ask, fingering my gearshift.

  “No,” he says, watching my hand. He takes a breath. “Sarge let me cras
h in that apartment. He knew no one was living there. The realtors are always just leaving it open. He gave me the building key. For when things get tough at home.”

  He looks over at me, sheepish.

  “My old man and me don’t always see eye to eye,” he explains. “Sarge understood…Sarge, he was such a good guy.”

  Suddenly, Prine’s eyes fill. I try to hide my surprise. He turns away and looks out the window, flipping his sunglasses down.

  “So why are you here now?” I ask.

  “I had to see what I left behind,” he says. Looking down, he opens his plastic bag, showing me a travel-size mouthwash, a single-blade razor, a dusty bar of soap.

  He lowers his voice to a whisper, even though there’s no sign of life anywhere. Luxury Living on Nature’s Edge.

  “Listen, the cops don’t know I was here that night,” he says.

  I try not to let him see my flinch.

  “Okay,” I say.

  “It doesn’t matter anyway,” he says. “I left before any gunshot. I don’t know what the hell happened. But I did hear the two of them headboard banging for a good fifteen minutes before midnight and I couldn’t get any sleep.”

  Coach, there, that night. When Will was still alive.

  I take this fact, this staggering and harrowing fact, and put it in a far corner in my head. For now. I can’t look at it. It is there for safekeeping.

  “That’s how it always was with them,” he says. “I don’t like hearing other people’s private business. And, to be honest, the two of them, it made me sad.”

  He looks at me, fingers plucking at the bag loop.

  “I mean, that was a messed-up situation, right?” he looks at me, raising his eyebrows. “You could see something bad was going to happen. Something was going to go down.”

  I know he’s waiting for some kind of confirmation, but I don’t say anything.

  “The point is,” he goes on, “like I promised her, I’m not saying a goddamned word.”

  “Her?” I ask, measuring my voice. Hiding everything.

  “Your friend,” he says, a little impatiently now. “The brunette.”

  “Beth?”

  “Beth,” he says. “The one with the tits. I mean, you seem nice, but so did she at first. Girl like that, she could make trouble for me.”

  Craning his neck, he looks up at the apartment building, ominously.

  “All of you, you’re a whole lot of trouble,” he says, softly. “I don’t need that kind of trouble.”

  A whole lot of trouble, I think.

  “Guess Sarge found out, didn’t he?” he looks at me, grimly. “Queen of the hive. Don’t mess with the queen.”

  I look at him and wonder which queen he means.

  Driving away, I can’t begin to unravel it all. Why would Beth want Prine to keep quiet about hearing Coach in Will’s apartment that night? And why didn’t she tell me, at least, if her aim is to convince me of Coach’s guilt?

  But the pulsing center is this: Coach was there with Will that night, Will alive. She and Will in bed.

  The picture in my head now, Coach standing before me, bleached sneakers in hand.

  Coach.

  Tilting pyramid-top, reaching for me, bucking for my arm, knowing what it will mean. Where it would take both of us.

  “Two days, four hours,” RiRi says, fingers tapping on her thighs anxiously. “Fifty-two hours till the game, hollaback girls. Where is she?”

  We are all standing in the gym, waiting for Coach.

  I haven’t figured out what I will do when she does arrive, if I will let my face betray anything.

  I slide two Tylenol with codeine, leftovers from last year’s thumb jam, under my tongue and wait.

  But Coach doesn’t show.

  And Beth, well, she’s not there either.

  “I don’t understand how Coach could do this to us,” Tacy yowls, her battered lip now a frosted lavender. “Two days before the big game.”

  “It must be some kind of test,” Paige Shepherd says, chin-​nodding with unsure surety. “To show us we can do it on our own.”

  RiRi is doing a straddle stretch against the wall, which usually calms her down.

  “No,” she says. “Something’s wrong. Really wrong. I’ve been hearing things. What if this is all about Sarge Stud?”

  Oh, this causes quite a conflagration.

  “My brother—listen to this!” Brinnie Cox gasps through those big chiclet teeth of hers. “My brother works at the sub shop next to the police station where the cops come in for lunch and he heard them mention Coach. And I don’t know what they said, but…”

  There’s scurrying and speculations spun like long sticky gum strands, but I am out of it.

  Instead, I work it. I pound that mat. I’m doing my tucks, over and over, curling my body sharklike upon itself.

  “You are so fucking tight,” RiRi murmurs, strolling by.

  I slap her thigh hard and grin.

  “You’re better than you ever were with Beth,” she says.

  “I’m working harder,” I say.

  “You were kicking it with Casey Jaye last summer,” RiRi says. “You were so good.”

  “Why are you bringing that up?” I say. “Why does everyone always want to talk about that?”

  It’s the thing no one can let go of. But I can. I’d like to never think of any of it again.

  “I was glad when you two got together,” she says. “That’s all I’m saying.”

  I think suddenly of Casey, the ease of her light hands on me, flipping my hips up, laughing.

  “You know,” RiRi says, “Casey told me she thought you were the bravest, best cheerleader she ever knew and she’s cheered her whole life.”

  “She meant Beth,” I say. “She must have meant Beth.”

  Addy, Casey whispered one night, hanging from the bunk above me. She’s never going to let it be you. Fuck your four inches. You’re light as air. You could be Top Girl. You’re a badass and beautiful. You should be captain.

  “And that fight between you and Beth, we all knew it was coming,” RiRi says, shaking her head. “Four of us to pull you two off each other.”

  “It was an accident,” I say, but no one ever believed me. “My hand got caught.”

  One day, tumbling class by the lake, I was spotting Beth’s handspring. When my arm flung up, my fingers caught her hoop earring, pulling it clean through.

  I was trying to catch you, I’d told her, the hoop still hooked through my fingers. You were bending.

  But she’d just stood there, holding the side of her head, a brick red trickle between tan fingers.

  Everyone whispered that it was about Casey, but it wasn’t. It was an accident. Beth and her big door-knocker earrings. It just happened.

  Sometimes now, when she’s not looking, I stare at her earlobe and want to touch it, to understand something.

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

  “I stood with her when they stitched up her ear,” RiRi says now. “I never saw her cry before. I never knew she had tear ducts. Hell, I never knew she had blood in her.”

  “It was just a fight,” I say, remembering the two of us tangled up, someone screaming.

  “I thought,” RiRi says, “‘Addy’s finally manning up to Beth.’ None of us ever had the guts.”

  “A stupid fight, like girls do,” I say.

  “And, for what it’s worth, Beth talked all kinds of trash about Casey,” RiRi says, “but I never believed it.”

  I had, though. And I stripped my bunk of sheets and walked down to the end of the cabin, to the bunk Beth had already vacated for me. And I never talked to Casey again.

  “Addy, you could still do it,” RiRi says now. “You could be captain, anything.”

  “Shut the fuck up,” I say.

  RiRi brushes back, like I’ve hit her.

  “That was a long time ago,” I add, setting my arms up for
another tuck. “That was last summer.”

  A half hour passes, everyone doing lazy tuck jumps and stretches, before we hear the sound.

  Coach Templeton’s ancient boom box sliding across the gym floor, blasting bratty girl rap: “Take me low, where my girlies go, where we hit it till they’re kneeling, till there’s glitter on the ceiling…”

  All our heads turn, and there is Beth, white-socked and whistle swinging.

  “Bitches,” Beth hollahs, ringingly. “Front and center and show me your badass selves. I’m self-deputized.”

  “What do you mean?” demands Tacy. “Where’s Coach?” Our now perpetual lament.

  “Didn’t you hear?” Beth says, turning the music up louder, the rattle in it sending a few girls to their feet, bouncily. “She got hauled in by the po-po.”

  “What are you talking about?” I say.

  “She’s at the station house. The cops picked her up in the squad car. Her ball-and-chain went with her.”

  I don’t let her catch my eye.

  “How do you know?” RiRi says, cocking an eyebrow.

  “I went over there to see if Coach needed a ride. Barbara-the-Babysitter told me. She looked scared pantless. She said the cops came in with trash bags. Started hauling off stuff.”

  Everyone exchanges wide-eyed glances.

  “But I’m not here for idle gossip,” she says. “Show me you got something other than chicken hearts behind those padded bras.”

  Everyone starts forming their lines, I can’t even believe how quickly.

  Clapping tight and shaking their legs out and faces tomato-bursting.

  Like they’re eager for it.

  Like anyone will do, if they’re hard enough.

  “And no more tantric chants and bullshit,” Beth says. “I want to see blood on the floor. And remember what old Coach Temp used to say…”

  She steps back as everyone but me assembles for their back tucks.

  “Cheer, cheer, have no fear!” they all chant. Some of them are even smiling.

  Grinning, Beth gives the response: “When you’re flying high, look to the sky, and scream Eagles, Eagles, Eagles!”

  An hour later, we hit the two-two-one, Beth our Flyer.