Dare Me: A Novel

  Jordy Brennan, who I never blinked at twice.

  After, I’m about to call Beth for our nightly postmortem, but then I decide not to.

  I think she’ll be mad at me for not waiting for her after school. Or for something else. She is mad at me a lot, especially since last summer at cheer camp, when things started to change with us. I grew tired of all my lieutenant duties, and her no-prisoners ways, and I started stunting with other girls at camp. It goes deep with Beth and me. Our history is long and lashes us tight.

  So I call Emily instead and talk with her for an hour or more about basket tosses and her shin splints and the special rainforest wax Brinnie Cox bought in Bermuda to tear off all her girl hair.

  Anything but boys and Coach. My head a hot, clicking thing. I want to quiet it. I want to hush, hush it and I hold my legs together, tense as pincer grips, and clutch my stomach upon itself. I listen endlessly to Emily’s squeaking voice, the way it sputters and pipes and dances lightfoot and never, ever says anything at all.

  5

  WEEK THREE

  We’re getting better all the time.

  We are all locking stunts, focusing. Emily nailed her standing back handspring, which we never thought she would, with those soft-rise breasts she once had. We are stronger and we are learning how to feel each other’s bodies, to know when we will not fall.

  Nights, in bed, I hear the thuds on the gym floor, feel that thud through my bones, through the center of me.

  Already I can feel my muscles thrusting under my skin. I even start eating because if I don’t, my head goes soft. The first week, I pass out twice in calc, the second time hitting my head SMACK on the edge of a desk.

  Can’t have that, Coach says.

  “You can’t slap the treadmill before school and then expect to make it to lunch on your a.m. diet coke,” Coach says, coming at me in the nurse’s office. Charging in with such purpose, making even lumberjack-chested Nurse Vance, twice her size, jump back.

  Her hands are riffling through my purse, thwacking the bag of sugar-free jolly ranchers at my chest.

  I’m meant to throw them away, which I do, fast.

  “Don’t worry,” Coach says. “No one gets fat on my watch.”

  So I start with the egg whites and almonds and the spinach, like wilting lily pads between my teeth. It’s so boring, not like eating at all because you don’t feel the sweet grit on your tongue all day and night, singing on the edge of your teeth.

  But my body is tight-tight-tightening. Hard and smooth, like hers, my waist pared down to nothing, like hers.

  The walk, her walk, feet planted out, like a ballerina. I wonder if Coach was a ballerina once, her hair pulled into a fierce dark bun, collarbones poking.

  We all do the walk.

  Not Beth, though, and not some of the girls, like Tacy Slaussen, who cotton more to Beth’s dusky glower, the way she hitches her cheer skirt low, the way she slinks over to the freshman squad, perched in the stands to watch us. The way she reaches up and yanks the pom off one of the girl’s socks and sinks it purposefully into the bottom of her plastic coke cup.

  This is what Beth does, while some of us make ourselves hard and beautiful.

  Jordy Brennan, fleet around the track, a soft tangle of cord skimming from his earbuds.

  I watch him four days in a row, under the bleachers, my wrist wrapped around one of the underhangs, fingers clenching and unclenching.

  “You got a thing for deviated septums, Addy-Faddy?” Beth asks.

  “I don’t know,” I say, scratching my palms.

  “What’s the story, anyway?” she says. “He’s dull as a plank of wood.” She pings the bleacher post, which is actually aluminum.

  “He looks like he’s thinking things,” I say, jumping a little on my toes, feeling like some dumb cheerleader. “Like maybe he actually thinks about things.”

  “Deep thoughts,” Beth says, pulling her ponytail tight, “about puma treads.”

  I didn’t tell her what Coach said, somehow didn’t want her to know Coach had even given me a ride home.

  Beth floats forward from the bleacher skeleton and lingers on the edge of the track.

  He’s pounding toward us, the huff-huff rattling in me, jolting between my hips.

  “Jordy Brennan,” Beth shouts, voice deep and clear. “Come here.”

  There’s a rollicking in my chest as he slows to stop just past us, then does an about-face and slows to a cool-man stride as he makes his way over.

  “Yeah,” he says, up close his eyes green and blank as poker felt.

  “Jordy Brennan,” Beth says, throwing her cigarette on the ground. “It’s your lucky day.”

  Fifteen minutes later, the three of us drifting along in his pocked Malibu, Beth directs Jordy to the convenience store on Royston Road, the place where the football players all buy their beer from the grim-faced man behind the counter, extra five-dollar charge just for the plastic bag.

  We take the 40s, which I never like, all warm and sour by the time you get halfway in, and the three of us drive up to Sutton Ridge, where that girl jumped last spring.

  Seventeen and brokenhearted, she jumped.

  RiRi saw the whole thing, from Blake Barnett’s car.

  Right before, RiRi saw a screech owl burst from behind the water tank.

  Her eyes lifted, so did Blake’s, to the top of the rutted ridge. A place haunted by ruined Indians, or so we heard as kids spooking on Halloween. Apache maidens swan-diving over lost love for white men who abandoned them.

  Together, RiRi and Blake watched.

  Blake recognized the girl from St. Reggie’s, and nearly shouted out to her, but didn’t.

  Arms stretched wide, her hands strangely spinning, and walking backwards fast.

  RiRi watched it, the whole thing.

  She said it was terrible and kinda beautiful.

  I bet it was, jumping from so high, so very high, into the dark plush of that grieving ravine.

  All us girls might look down into that same gorge on nights steeped in the sorrows of womanhood. I never felt so much, but looking now, I thought I might yet.

  Beth walks up extra high on the ridge, swinging her 40 with surprising grace, and Jordy ducks his big boy head against me and kisses me smearily for a half hour or more.

  He tells me this is a special spot for him.

  At nights sometimes he runs up here, playing his music and forgetting everything.

  “Maybe,” he says, “that’s how cheerleading is for you.”

  Then, he ripples his hands up and down me, gentle and with those great empty eyes of his shut tight, lashes long like a girl’s. That funny way his nose bends slightly right, like a boxer’s.

  “Isn’t she pretty, Jordy?” I hear Beth’s rippling voice from somewhere, “when she looks into your eyes?”

  I rest my lips on his cheekbone, near the crook of his nose, and he shudders.

  The way his eyelashes tickle, and his hard heavy boy hands, grave and turbulent, I can feel all kinds of wonder and surprises charging through him.

  All of this moves me, powerfully, and the day feels rare, the dusk falling purple, and I must be drunk because I think I hear Beth’s voice far away, saying crazy things, asking me if I feel different, and loved.

  Jordy Brennan’s name buzzes on my phone that night, a spare text with “u”s and “r”s and cautious wonderings. But the thing that was there, the feeling huddling in me at the gorge, is already gone.

  His wanting, so easily won—well, it bores me. I know every flex and twist of it, because there are no flexes and twists to it.

  And instead I want to see Coach again, and tell her about it. I wonder what she’ll say.

  Beth calls after, and we have a long-winding talk, the 40-ouncers still heavy on us both.

  She is asking if I remember how we used to hang on the monkey bars, hooking our legs around each other, and how strong we got and how no one could ever beat us, and we could never beat each other, but we’d agree t
o each release our hands at the count of three, and that she always cheated, and I always let her, standing beneath, looking up at her and grinning my gap-toothed, pre-​orthodontic grin.

  Such reminiscence is unlike Beth, but she is drunk and I think she may still be drinking, her mother’s V.S.O.P., and she sounds affected by our time at the gorge, and possibly by other things.

  “I hate how everything changes, always,” she says. “But you don’t.”

  In the parking lot the next day, Coach tilts her head and gives me a whisper of a smile.

  Wanting to present this to her, I feel a funny kind of pride. Like she’d asked me to do a stunt for her, “Give me that pop cradle, Addy. Straight up, straight up—” and there I am, legs arrow-piked, and the feeling when my feet land on that hard floor, the fearsome quake through my ankles, legs, hips.

  So I tell her, my hand sweeping across my mouth, like I can barely say it. Just messed around a little. Jordy Brennan. Jordy Brennan. Just like you said.

  “Which one is that?” she says.

  I feel something slither a little loose in me. Which one?

  “You see him on the track,” I insist. “You were talking about him. You talked to me about him and his high-tops. The crick in his nose.”

  She looks at me, quiet like.

  “So was he a good kisser?” she asks, and I still don’t know if she remembers him.

  I don’t say anything.

  “Did he open his mouth right away?” she asks.

  At first, I think I misheard her.

  “Or did you make him work for it?” she continues, grinning slyly.

  “It wasn’t like that,” I say, and is she making fun of me?

  “So,” she asks, her voice softer, straighter, “what was it like?”

  “I don’t know,” I say, not meeting her eyes, my face burning. Somehow it feels like I’m talking to a boy, a guy, an older one, or from another school. “I don’t think I want it to go anywhere.”

  She looks at me and then nods, like I’ve said something wise.

  “You’re a smart girl, Addy,” she says. She pauses, then adds, “You can make a lot of mistakes, just wondering about boys.”

  I nod back, thinking about the word she uses, about the word “boys.” Because that’s what Jordy Brennan is, a boy. A boy. Not even a guy.

  Coach, after all, is married to a man. Coach, after all, has known the world of men. Who even knows how many or what kinds.

  She jangles her car keys into her fingers, sliding into her car.

  She looks at me through the window, a winking look, but it’s between us. We’ve shared something.

  And it brings her closer to me.

  6

  WEEK FOUR

  “Where is she?” RiRi whispers, her honey curls whipping side to side.

  Beth is late for practice, and I wonder if she’s going to show at all.

  Something’s been shifting in her and I think it’s sort of like she’s still captaining with nothing to captain, scratching some phantom limb.

  Twice last week she didn’t call for our late-night recap, our laying forth of the maneuvers of the day, who humiliated herself, whose bra is tatty, and whose fat ass is fatting up the whole squad. We’ve done these calls nightly since forever. But Tuesday I forgot to call and Thursday she didn’t pick up. Still, I could feel her breathing somehow, could feel her watching her phone screen blinking Addy, Addy.

  Coach rolls the media cart into the gym, fingers wrapped tight around the remote.

  “Progress has been,” she says, “not bad.”

  We watch ourselves. That bouncing yellow frill on the screen. Malibu-tanned and jerking ponytails, as ever. But we are no longer hip-shaking, pop and locking. We are bounding in perfect time, marching into a three-rowed V, jumping into our toe touches with matching precision. When we do our transition, I can’t even believe it, not quite, the way we seem like one long centipede snapping and unsnapping.

  We are in sync. We are tight. We are martial and precise.

  “Where’s Cassidy?” Coach asks, and all our heads turn from the screen.

  If you’re even ten seconds late—seconds she counts out with toe taps, like our third-grade gym teacher—you don’t get to practice. Emily once skidded in at the five-count, blood pouring from her forehead, hurrying so fast her face had caught in her own slamming locker door.

  “I think she—” I start, trying to generate an excuse.

  As if on cue, I see Tacy Slaussen’s hoodie pocket, red blinking from the top seam. A bass kicks up, the chorus of that song about the club, the way the heat presses tight and you know you’re getting some, at da club.

  She forgot her phone was on, and now she’s trapped.

  And I know that ring is Beth’s.

  Every year there are ones like Tacy, with big ole girl crushes on Beth, the kind who will skip fourth period to go on monster energy runs for her, or do dares, like running through the Sutton Grove Mall, hitching jeans low and flashing thongs at security guards. Beth likes to make these girls run.

  I glare quick at her, try to get her to steady herself, but her face is panic-stitched.

  A flash, and Coach is right there, her hand in Tacy’s pocket.

  The phone skitters across the floor, spinning madly all the way to the stretched accordion doors behind which the junior squad shouts buoyantly, We do it like stomp-stomp-clap-clap, we do it like stomp-stomp-clap-clap.

  Tacy’s jaw shakes.

  Since we’ve never actually seen Coach have to lay it down, I don’t know why we all feel it like a hammer on our chest. But we do.

  Coach, though, doesn’t say anything. Not for ten, twenty seconds.

  She doesn’t look angry exactly.

  Instead, she looks bored.

  It’s a dismissal.

  “You girls, with your phones and your sad little texts,” she says, shaking her head. “Ten, twelve years ago, it was still folding notes, passing them in class. Just as fucking sad. No, this is sadder.”

  In an instant, it feels like all our hard work, still frozen on the TV screen, has been wiped away.

  And I feel so stupid with my own stupid fucking phone, with the little skins I have for it—hot pink, butterflied, leopard skin—and how it never leaves my crimped palm, a live thing that, it seems now, beats instead of my heart.

  And we all know whose fault it is.

  Tacy’s head is shaking back and forth, worse, much worse than the time Beth kicked her out of the car on Black Ash Ridge for spilling peach brandy all over Beth’s new leather boots, licorice-shiny and magnificent and ever since creased with ruin.

  “I’m sorry, Coach,” Tacy blurts. “I’m sorry.”

  Coach just looks at her, and the look makes me think of the needle valve on that Bunsen burner, turning tight. Shutting off.

  Later, Coach smoking in front of the propped-open window of her office, ponders poor Tacy and her lank, switch-straight hair and startled eyebrows.

  “She’s a sheep,” sighs Coach.

  I feel relieved I am not one of the fucking sad girls with their sad fucking phones.

  “Squad needs sheep,” she says. “So fine.”

  I nod, pressing my temple to the cold windowpane, legs still shaking from practice.

  “But I don’t spend my time on sheep,” she says. “There’s no payoff.”

  I nod, slower now, my forehead squeaking on the windowpane.

  “But you, Hanlon. You’re figuring out what you want,” she says, staring at her cigarette, like it’s telling her something. “Which is what you should be doing.”

  I keep nodding, lifting myself straight, straightening myself for her.

  Still staring at her cigarette, her face slowly loosening, turning soft with youngness and fear and wonder.

  I’ve not seen this on her, and it’s like the years shuttling backwards and it’s two girls inside the bathroom stall, hiding from the horrors of the world together, burning their throats, their lungs, for rude courage to
face those same horrors with big smiles and white shoes.

  Beth shows up at next-day practice, a note from See-Yu at the Living Heart Medical Spa assuring Coach that Beth had been suffering from severe menstrual cramps the previous day and needed an emergency acutonic session.

  “Coach, no lie, they ding these big forks, like the kind you use to flip steaks on a grill,” Beth says, and none of us can watch her, “and the sound just zings through you and straightens your ovaries all out.”

  Beth, she runs her hand over her hips, like she’s showing us how quiet and subdued her ovaries now are. How she has vanquished them.

  “It’s hard being a girl,” Beth adds, shaking her head with elaborate weariness.

  Coach looks at her, hands curved lightly around her clipboard. Face blank.

  She will not play.

  Instead, she looks right through Beth.

  “The timing is way off on the tuck jumps,” she says, turning away from Beth.

  That’s it?

  “And I know why,” Coach says. “I can see sugar glazed all over you girls. You’re all shiny with bad living.”

  Suddenly, I’ve forgotten all about Beth and I can only feel all the grease on me. As hard as I try, there are slips, and I feel like Coach is looking just at me, seeing the cinnamoned snack puffs I’d snuck that morning. My teeth ache with it. My stomach is swollen with it. I feel weak and desecrated.

  “We’re going to hit it extra hard today,” Coach says. “Hit you in places no tuning forks can. Line up.”

  That’s when we know: we’re paying for Beth’s sins.

  The jump drill comes, and then the high kicks and then floor crunches and then running the gym track until RiRi throws up in the corner, a sloshing mix of slim-fast and sugar-free powdered donuts.

  Beth, though, she sacks up. I’ll give her that. At least she doesn’t make it any worse for any of us. Sweat glittering on her, dappling her eyelashes, she kills it.

  She will not sit down after, when we all collapse on the mats, our sweaty limbs crisscrossing. She will not sit down, will not let the steel slip from between her shoulders.