Dare Me: A Novel

by Megan Abbott

  And I land it and Beth is there and I am spotting, Mindy and Cori popping her into the air, tick-tocking one leg to the other, her feet in their hands, her arms V-ed.

  And Beth is shouting, and I am looking up at her, her chin trembling, her neck pulsing.

  She is crying, but only I can see that. I’m the only one who’s seen it before. Her face like something precious split in two. A diamond cracked, a web spreading.

  “It’s Coach,” comes Tacy’s squealing shout. “It’s Coach.”

  My head whipping to one side, I can’t believe it, but I see her there, soft hoodie and hemp yoga pants, and her hair knotted tight on her head.

  Coach.

  Oh, my Coach.

  And she is saying something, or she isn’t saying anything at all, but we know what to do and we do our back tucks in perfect unison, symmetric soldiers all in a line, then the whistle blows and the bounding boys come and we run to her.

  We run to her.

  And I see Beth, and her broken face, and I can’t help her at all.

  I can’t.

  It’s all a heady blur, the floorboard-pounding mayhem of the game, and Coach there, placing her hand gently on the backs of our heads, pulling, even, so un-Coach-like, on Mindy’s golden braids, and by the time the halftime horn thunders, I’ve lost Beth entirely.

  In the locker room, the air clear from the tall windows lifted open by Coach with that long iron stick.

  We are not actually on our knees, but it feels that way. It feels as if we’re on our knees, like prayerful Southern football players.

  We are all bowing inside, to her.

  Coach, you’ve not forsaken us.

  “I’m glad to be here right now,” she says, and she’s speaking so low but somehow even amid the bumptious din coming from the gym we can hear her, hear every beat.

  “I’m lucky to be in your company,” she says. “And I’m talking about all of you. You mighty women.”

  Something catches in my throat. Coach.

  I feel a hand twist around my arm, and it’s RiRi, her curls shaking, and beside her Emily, half leaning, still casted, against the lockers, and all of us standing, craning our necks, huddling toward Coach’s clear eyes, clear face, clear voice.

  How could the things we would laugh at out there, scoff at and eye roll and dismiss, move us so much in here? Because it is Coach.

  “For all kinds of reasons,” she says, her voice wobbling so slightly I feel sure only I can hear, “we’re all going to remember tonight.”

  All of us circling forward, wanting to warm our hands, our bodies to it.

  “It’s the last game of the season, after all these months of sweat and blood. And, after all this, I want you to be able to speak proudly, to strip your sleeves and show your scars, and talk about what you did tonight.”

  Her words are vibrating through me, touching my very center.

  “After the night’s over,” she says, her voice lifting higher, “after you graduate, and you’re off to college or wherever you girls go—ten years from now, your little girl’s going to pull your dusty Eagles yearbook off the shelf and ask what you were like in high school.

  “You won’t have to cough, look the other way, and say, ‘Well, sweetie, your mom was in the French Club and sang in the choir.’ You won’t even have to say, ‘Your mom waved pom-poms and shook her ass.’ Because you will know what you were, what you are forever.

  “Squad, take this moment, seal it over your heart.”

  The quiet among us, the devotional silence starts to break apart as we feel ourselves lifted, feelings and gasps and eager squeaks and throatier yeas and rustling and rumbling and most of all the sense of greatness rising from within us and hoisted high.

  “You’re going to look your girl straight in the eye and say, ‘Baby, your mom rode to the rafters. Your mom lifted three girls in her hands, grinning all the way,’” she says, our voices rising to a baying now, all together.

  “‘Your mom built pyramids and flew high in the sky, and back in Sutton Grove, they’re still talking about the wonders they saw that night, still talking about how they watched us all reach to the heavens.’

  “Don’t you want to be able to say that?”

  Our innermost selves, in some magnificent ascent, and a clattering as some girls leap onto the benches, crying out, overtaken.

  But not me—me who wants to bathe in the moment’s sacredness forever.

  “You may have the bodies of young girls,” she says, her voice deep and holy, “but you have the hearts of warriors. Tonight, show me your warrior hearts.

  “That’s all.”

  And she turns and pushes through the locker room doors into the brightly lit hallway.

  But instead of turning in to the clanging gym, its frenzy pitched to madness, she walks straight out the loading dock doors, into the starred night.

  It’s like when a fever breaks, and you don’t know what’s happened, or what all those voices in your head meant, but the Celts squad does their halftime routine and all I see are flying bodies and cries and the greater and greater sense of a battlefield of fallen enemies on which we will march.

  And I realize, Beth gone again, I don’t even know who Top Girl is.

  “It’s gotta be the JV, right?” whispers RiRi. “We’re tossing her up, right?”

  But there is no time, and there we are, running out on that gym floor, and I feel my body flipping into my handspring, and Brinnie Cox’s legs spiraling next to me, and suddenly we’re twenty seconds in and I can hear myself shouting:

  …said shah shah shah shah booty

  Got that rhythm feelin’ tight

  Let your body rock SNAP-SNAP

  Let your hips show some might STOMP-STOMP-STOMP

  shah shah shah shah booty

  I’m looking for the JV Flyer, but I don’t see her.

  We don’t need no music

  We don’t need no bands.

  All we need are Eagles fans jammin in the stands!

  Oh wait, stop a minute, WAIT

  shah shah shah shah booty

  I feel her before I see her.

  Dark hair shimmering, the thunderbolt seared to her face.

  Beth, in the JV’s place. Lining up in the top Flyer spot for the two-two-one.

  And if you could understand how time can stop, it did for me.

  Mindy has her hands on my waist, my hands gripping soft shoulders, my toe slipping into the pocket of her bent knee, pushing off with my right foot and lifting my other knee as high as I can, planting it on her shoulder, front-spotting Paige below, propelling up my other foot.

  RiRi and I face each other, feet fixed on Mindy’s and Cori’s shoulders, their hands tight on our ankles.

  “Who’s counting?” I shout.

  shah shah shah shah booty

  Emily, swinging her boot brace across the front row, her eyes avid, her fear gone.

  “I’ll do it,” she cries. “I’ll count. No one knows better than me. No one knows—”

  We are now ten and a half feet high, my eyes fixed on RiRi’s wild green ones, her face cobalt-brushed, ecstatic, mouthing, “B-E-T-H!”

  shah shah shah shah booty

  “One-two, three-four,” Emily’s fierce counting like a pulse in my brain, like a hammer over my heart.

  The whole pyramid sponging, rubber-banding as it should, the living thing, the beating heart.

  Below I see Beth’s black hair, and she flings her head back, her eyes squeezed shut.

  I will die only for you above all.

  That’s what she’d said, and I remembered it now, from long ago. Age nine or ten, poring over a Time-Life book in my dad’s library, an old picture of a Japanese pilot tying his headband, eyes determined, jaw set.

  And the caption: “I will die only for you above all.”

  Beth loved that picture and tore the page out and pasted it in her locker with rubber cement, and at year’s end, we tried to claw it free, but it came off in shreds and there was no
thing she could do.

  I will die only for you above all.

  Six hands on her and she’s propelled up between RiRi and me. Lying flat, her arms outstretched, and we pop her up so she is standing.

  Blocking out Emily’s dire warnings of what it’s like from out there, from the stands, as they see all of us spring-loaded into the air, defying gravity, logic, the laws of physics itself, I know all I must think of is Beth’s wrist in my tight-clawed—

  One

  shah shah shah shah booty

  and loading her forward, slingshotting her back to life, pitching her higher, locking her in place, holding her widespread arms like points on a star,

  Two

  shah shah shah shah booty

  I can feel, fingers to Beth’s wrist, the veins pulsing, the beat slower than it should be, and I think—

  Three

  you ain’t got

  —her pumas balancing on the gathered hands below, a pinched tightrope and she is cheering, oh, is she cheering.

  Waiting for Emily to count EIGHT, then DEADMAN, we drop Beth’s wrists, she falls backwards, limbs outspread, into the waiting arms below…that is what she is to—

  Four

  you ain’t got it, you ain’t got it, ain’t got it

  She is so high, fifteen feet, sixteen, seventeen, a thousand—and the whole gym shaking victorious, her body still like a fierce arrow—when I feel her suddenly yank her wrist from my clasp.

  My body pitches forward, but terror-eyed Mindy has hold of me, and RiRi bobbles to keep hold of Beth’s other wrist.

  I have my eyes on Beth, I think I am calling out to her, her name choked in my chest, but she won’t turn, she couldn’t or she’d—

  Five

  …and I know and I’m not going to stop her, there is no stopping her.

  This is what she wants, after all.

  Six-and—and two beats too soon, she propels herself backwards with such force.

  The gasp from the bleachers lashes through the air.

  The power with which she thrusts her body backwards.

  The force with which she twists her body, spinning it, and then kicking backwards

  RiRi and I teetering on our Bases, nearly falling forward toward each other—

  —and all our hands grabbing for her, and the will with which Beth pitches her body, legs kicking so far back, so far back.

  All the way back.

  The air sucked from me, the sounds gone from the world.

  The way, for a second, her body seems to lift, dance to the rafters, then the way everything shifts, all our bodies tilting in space as I feel myself falling, as I feel Beth falling.

  It’s like she doesn’t weigh anything at all, and she might never hit the floor, until she does.

  Then the sickening crack and seeing her head click backwards, like a doll’s.

  But you must see:

  She never really wanted anything but this.

  The Abyss, Addy, it gazes back into you.

  32

  MONDAY NIGHT

  I’m sitting in the hospital’s east corridor, a waiting room behind a wall of glass bricks.

  Beth’s mom appears in the doorway just past nine, flinging her camel Coach bag onto the sofa and bursting into inky tears that seem to come in gaping spurts for hours.

  She talks mournfully of her failures, her weaknesses, and most of all the harshness of life for pretty girls who never know how good they have it.

  Finally, she cries herself to sleep, sinking into her coat like a slumbering bat.

  I move three seats away.

  The TV, pitched high in a corner, scrolls footage of Beth being wheeled out on the gurney, one arm dangling limply.

  Then the on-camera interviews, and there’s Tacy Slaussen’s rabbit face.

  “I just want everyone to know that our stunts usually hit,” she says, tightening her ponytail and showing all her teeth. “But let’s face it. Cheer can be dangerous. I got injured just the other day. It was supposed to be me out there.”

  Behind her, Emily sobbing in the background. “I didn’t mess up the count, I didn’t.”

  I reach up and switch the channel, but Tacy’s on that one too.

  “But Beth always told us, life is about taking risks, and you can die at any moment,” she says, with those pointy teeth of hers, forehead shining.

  “It’s what we sign up for.”

  And then Brinnie Cox, crying just as she cried a few hours before when she flunked a chemistry quiz, and a few hours before that, when Greg Lurie called her Bitty Titty.

  “She is such a talented girl,” she wails, raccoon-eyed, “and we all feed off her positiveness.”

  Not long after, I see the news of the arrest.

  The closed caption reads: Cheerleading coach husband to be charged in slaying.

  Which is such a simple way to say what is anything but simple.

  The snapshot they show on the news seems to be from some other world I don’t know, Coach and Matt French, faces giddy, a great custardy wedding veil whipping around her.

  I think of him out there in the backyard the other day, his stillness. But wasn’t he always so still, a shadow drifting past all our antic energy? So strange to think how much was roiling in him. The thing we mistook for blankness, for boringness, for a Big Nothing, turned out to be everything. A battered heart, a raging one.

  “What is this, the all-cheerleading network?” brays a tired expectant father in the chair next to me, until he sees my uniform, the sequins matted to my leg.

  Later, Beth’s mom comes back from talking to the doctor and smoking twelve cigarettes in the parking lot.

  She says it’s a skull fracture in three places.

  “I was waiting for her.” That’s what Beth kept saying, lying on the gym floor, her eyes black. “Where did she go?”

  All the way out, like on some continuous loop. “When will she come back? I was waiting for her.”

  There seems no point in sitting, so I drive to the police station at two a.m. and sit.

  It’s an hour before I see Coach, holed up in the back lot with a pack of Kools—these are not times for clove cigarettes—her breath making dragony swirls.

  “Hey,” she says, when she spots me.

  We sit in my car, her eyes darting over and over to the back door, like she’s waiting for the cops to realize she shouldn’t be out here alone.

  I don’t tell her about Beth, don’t ask if she knows.

  It’s her time to talk, and she does.

  That night, like any other night, she tells me, Matt was working late and she still had no car.

  Will wants to see her, needs to, really.

  Says he’ll drive her back and forth if she’ll come. He never wants to be alone.

  No one ever needed her half as much, not even her daughter. She is sure of it.

  At his apartment, everything feels different. It’s been that way lately. The feeling that it’s all too much, and even scary, the way he holds her hard enough to hurt, talking the whole time about how she is all that keeps him from the way he feels, which is like his heart is pumping water and drowning him to death.

  These are the ways he talks lately, and the only thing to do is to hold on to him. Some nights she’s held him so hard, she has bruises on the heels of her hands.

  They are in the bedroom a long time, and nothing is made better for more than one tight minute. The look on his face after frightens her.

  She takes a long shower to give him time to pull himself together, to shake off the night horrors of his dark room.

  But when she turns off the faucet she hears a man talking loudly. Saying something over and over. At first she thinks it’s Will, but it isn’t Will.

  Over and over, the same rhythm and the same feeling of panicky anger, like her dad after things started to go wrong for him, at work, with her mom, with the world, and sometimes it was like he would tear the whole house down with him, raze it, incinerate it.

  She guess
es she is hearing it through the ceiling, the floor. Doesn’t that happen in apartments, where nothing is private or secret?

  For a few seconds she doesn’t even call out to Will, figures she is being silly, all the noises that rattle through these big buildings, the way sound carries in the gorges.

  But then the sound flies up fast and is now familiar to her, feels close enough to touch. That’s when she pulls on her T-shirt, her body still so wet it fuses to her in an instant, and starts walking out of the bathroom.

  “Will,” she says. “Will.”

  And she is shaking the water from her hair. Her head is down and so she doesn’t see how it started.

  “Listen, please, calm down and—”

  Will, towel wrapped around him, is talking to someone in the tone she sometimes uses with Caitlin when Caitlin scares herself at night, seeing ghosts slipping under her closet door.

  And another voice, one she knows:

  “—think you can do whatever you want. Another man’s wife—”

  And it is Matt, and how can Matt be here? She wonders if she is still asleep and this is like a soap opera when you walk out of the shower and learn everything has been a dream.

  Matt.

  At first she thinks it’s his phone in his hand, that black curve always like a dark beetle in his palm.

  She remembers hearing Will say, “How did you get my gun—”

  Will had shown her the gun the week before. He’d taken it from his top bureau drawer and said, Is this what life is supposed to be about?

  He’d held it in his lap as he told her he hated the Guard, hated everything except her.

  Because that was how he talked lately, which wasn’t a way she wanted anyone to talk, not after Dad.

  In bed with him, it was all she could think about.

  When he was sleeping, she opened the bureau drawer again, took the gun, and put it in her purse.

  She hid it in her file cabinet at home, far in the back behind the hundreds and hundreds of Xeroxed cheer routines. She tried not to think about it. But it was there and, trying to sleep at night, she could think of nothing else.