Dare Me: A Novel

  It seems Will knows this older world and it binds us together and I realize we are meant to be close because, like she does, he opens deep pockets in the center of me I never knew were there.

  “Let’s go to Lanvers Peak,” says Coach, voice light and high, a girl’s voice. She’s looking back at me now, that mouth of hers red and glorious. The excitement, and Will grabbing her thigh so hard that I can feel it, I can feel his hand shaking my own thigh to gritty life.

  Lanvers Peak is not a place for cars, but it is a place for Will’s Jeep, because nothing will stop him.

  Driving up, Will is talking about the gorges and how they were gouged by glaciers hundreds of times over two thousand years like God’s own carving hand on the dark earth, or so his grandfather used to say.

  We’re higher than I’ve ever been and we’re drinking bourbon, which is the most grown-up thing I’ve ever had and I pretend I like it until I do.

  Up high, where the sky looks violet against the peak, Coach and I kick off our shoes, no matter how cold it is, the silvered grass crunching under our feet.

  “Show me,” Will is saying, and he is laughing. “Show me.”

  He doesn’t believe we can do the shoulder sit, just we two and dizzy on bourbon.

  “You say it’s so dangerous, but compare it to offensive tackle, which left me with these,” he says, lifting his pretty lip to show me his front teeth, snowy white. “Caps, like my gramps. That’s what real sports do to you.”

  Baiting us, he makes me want to turn my body into the lightest, most miraculous thing, makes me want to show him what I can do so that I will feel perfect and loved.

  So Coach and me, we show him, without a spotter and in spitting distance of the depthless purple gorge so beautiful I want to cry into it.

  I feel my phone buzzing and I don’t even look at it, dropping it to the ground.

  Coach and me, we’re laughing now, Coach’s hair tumbling against me as we scramble to the most solid patch of an unsolid turf.

  Lunging forward, she calls to me and I set my bare foot high atop her bended thigh, lifting myself, swinging my other leg over her shoulder, as she rises to her feet. Wrapping my thighs around her, twining my feet behind her, and we are one.

  We are one.

  I never did a stunt with Coach before.

  At first, we are a sorry case, weaving and laughing, and Will drill-sergeants us until we get focus, my thighs locking tight around her and Coach grinding her feet into the frosty grass.

  Then I unlock my feet and thrust my legs forward, Coach reaching under and between my thighs to grab my clammy hands in hers. Dipping down, she gives me a pop, pulling me over her head, my legs swinging from behind her, then together again, my feet landing hard on the ground.

  The sear up my leg is nothing at all. Nothing.

  We are stupendous and Will is cheering and yelling and hip-hollering and it echoes through the ravine in bewitching ways.

  Up above her shoulders, fixed tight upon her, it is something. My eyes wander down to the icy bottom of the gorge and we are higher than we ever thought we’d be.

  My house is farther, and Coach gets dropped off first, which is a mind-bending prospect.

  Will pulls over a half block from her house. Watching them kiss, watching the way he opens her mouth with his, her sneaky looks back at me, the pleasure on her, I feel myself go loose and wondrous inside. I want to be a part of their kiss, and maybe even they want it too.

  It’s only a five-minute drive to my house, but it feels like it lasts forever, all the misted lightness of Lanvers Peak gone.

  “Tonight was the first time I ever saw you without that other girl,” Will says. “The one with the freckles.”

  This seems the craziest way to describe Beth ever, but it makes everything go tight in my head and I remember, coming off the peak, flipping open my phone and seeing missed call, missed call, missed call. A text: you’d best pay attn to me.

  He looks at me and smiles.

  Suddenly, I want to hold the whole night close to my chest and I decide it is mine alone.

  “Seeing her tonight, I understand now,” he says. “She needs this.”

  For a second I think he means himself. And, thinking of her that night, so carefree, all the antic restlessness blown out of her, I think he is surely right.

  But then he gestures toward my Sutton Eagles duffel bag, and I see he means being coach.

  “She needs you girls,” he adds.

  I nod, meaningfully as I can.

  “I know what that’s like,” he says. “The way you can be saved without ever knowing you were in trouble.”

  These are the words he says, but they sound like something I’m overhearing, a conversation I’d never be a part of.

  “I guess it’s funny, me talking to you like this,” he says.

  I guess it is. Sometimes Coach doesn’t seem that much older than me, but Will, with his tragic dead wife and tours of duty, sure does.

  “I know we don’t really know each other,” he admits. “But we know each other in a strange way.”

  I nod again, though really we don’t know each other at all. It makes me think Will is one of those people who just tell everybody everything right away, and usually I don’t like those people, those girls at summer camp sharing tales of cutting and kissing their babysitters. But this feels different. Maybe because he’s right. Because we share a secret. And because I saw them together that day in the teachers’ lounge, which felt like seeing everything.

  “She has it hard,” he says. “Her husband, he’s not the guy you might think he is. She has it very hard.”

  Maybe it’s the bourbon, or the bourbon wearing off, but this doesn’t sound exactly right either, not really.

  “He gave her that house,” I point out.

  “It’s a cold house,” he says, looking out the window. “He gave her a cold house.”

  “It’s her house,” I say. “I mean, even if it’s cold, it’s hers.”

  He doesn’t say anything, and I feel him slipping from me.

  “And Caitlin,” I say, but this sounds even less convincing. “There’s Caitlin.”

  “Right,” he says, shaking his head. “Caitlin.”

  We both sit for a moment, and I feel suddenly like we both might know something we can’t name. About how, in some obscure way, Caitlin was another thing that wasn’t a gift so much as the thing that stands in place of the gift. My wedding, my house, my daughter, my cold, cold heart.

  12

  “Freaking rock star,” RiRi marvels, finger spotting me.

  I am doing perfect back tucks, one after another.

  I know suddenly I was born to do them. I am a propeller.

  “This is what a coach can do.” RiRi grins. “Beth would never have let you get this good.”

  As soon as she says it, she seems almost to take it back, laughing, like it’s a joke. Maybe it is.

  “Knees to nose, Hanlon,” Coach barks, a sneaky smile dancing there as she walks back into her office.

  “Pffht-pffht,” comes the sound from the bleachers, where Beth has slunk. “Watch that neck, Addy-Faddy, or it’s the ventilator for you. Pffht-pffht.”

  “Très J,” whistles Emily. But I know Beth isn’t jealous of my tuck. She can back handspring, back tuck me into the ground, her body like a twirling streamer.

  In the locker room after, Emily kicks her leg up, grabbing her toes as she stands on the center bench. Pea-shoot thin now, fifteen pounds lighter since the month before, she’s set to fly with Tacy at the Stallions game. All the hydroxy-hot and activ-8 and boom blasters and South African hoodia-with-green-coffee-extract and most of all her private exertions have made her airy and audacious.

  Eyeing her, Tacy is sullen, uneager to share Flyer glory.

  Lying on the far end of the bench, Beth stares abstractedly up at the drop ceiling.

  “Cox-sucka,” she calls out to Brinnie Cox, who is curling her hair into long sausages and singing to the locker mirro
r. “How’s your head?”

  “What do you mean?” Brinnie asks, her arm frozen. “My head is fine.”

  “That’s a relief,” Beth says. “I wondered if maybe you were still feeling the blood pushing against your brain. From that header you took a few weeks back.”

  “No,” she says, quietly.

  “Beth,” I say, a faint try at warning.

  “As long as you’re not a purger, you should be okay out there tonight. It’s the regurgitators who drop like dead weight.”

  At the other end of the long bench, our girl Emily releases her leg and looks at the reclining Beth, who is staring straight up at the fluorescent lights.

  “Chumming all the time,” Beth says, “they bust all those blood vessels in their eyes. Then one day, out on the mat, they hit their head and…ping.”

  Beth snaps her fingers beside her temple.

  “Once,” she continues, “I heard a ’mia girl fell during a dismount and an eye popped out.”

  Propping herself up on her elbows, she looks down the long bench straight at Emily.

  “But let’s not talk of ugly matters,” she says. “Our girl Em’s going to rock it out tonight. Going out a youngster and coming back a star.”

  “She’d really miss the Stallions game?”

  Ten minutes before kickoff, Beth is nowhere to be found.

  She’s never no-showed a game. Everyone wonders if something happened, like that time she followed her dad and his paralegal to that Hyatt downtown and keyed the words MAN WHORE into the hood of his car.

  Without her, we have to reconfigure the whole double-hitch pyramid. We count on Beth to be the Middle Flyer, holding onto Tacy’s and Emily’s inside legs as they swing out their other legs and stretch them sky high. She’s the only one light enough to be that high and strong enough to support both girls. It’s like juggling jigsaw pieces that don’t fit and I can see Coach’s face tighten.

  “Should we skip the stunt?” I ask Coach.

  “No,” Coach says, eyes on the field, breeze kicking up. “Cox can stand for her.”

  I look at flimsy Brinnie with her chicken bone legs. Now I see what Beth’s game was, putting the scare in Brinnie.

  RiRi looks at me, squintingly. But I shrug.

  “Coach knows what to do,” I say.

  Brinnie’s right arm starts shaking during the double hitch.

  I can see it from the back spot and I’m shouting at her, but fear hurtles across her eyes and there is no stopping it.

  On the half-twist Deadman fall, that pin-thin arm of hers gives entirely and Emily, now just an eyelash of a girl, her head dizzy with visions of blood burst, slips and crashes, knee-first, into the foam floor.

  Oh, to see her fall is to see how everything can fall.

  Her body popping like bubble wrap.

  In the back of my brain, I know that the clap we all hear from Emily’s knee, like a New Year’s champagne cork, is about that back tuck of mine.

  Is about Coach and me.

  I had epic cramps, Beth texts me that night.

  You had it last week, I say. We all had our periods at the same time, the witchiness of girls.

  Infection, she texts. Cranjuice all nite, and mom’s narvox.

  Come clean, I text. She has never missed a game, ever. Not even when her mother slipped on the living room carpet and dented her forehead on the coffee table, forty-seven stitches and three years’ worth of vicodin.

  Clean as a whistle, Merry Sunshine, she texts back. Cleaner than yr coach.

  U know what I mean, I text. Em might have a torn lig.

  There is a long moment and I can almost feel something black open inside Beth’s head.

  I have a torn life. Fuck all of you.

  “Two-game suspension,” RiRi tells us. “No Beth for two games. Em’s down. And with Miz Jimmy-Arm Brinnie Cox spotting us, it means our heads’ll be popping all over the mat.”

  “Tough break,” Tacy Slaussen says, trying not to grin. She has her eye on the prize. With Emily and Beth out, she’s the only bitty girl left to fly.

  “Beth blames it all on Coach,” RiRi says.

  “Coach?” I say, my eyebrow twitching.

  “She said Em fell because she’s been living on puffed air and hydroxy for six weeks to hit weight for Coach.”

  I look at her. “Is that what you think?” I say, surprised at the hardness in my voice, the old lieutenant steel. It doesn’t go away.

  RiRi’s eyes go wide. “No,” she says. “No.”

  I find Beth lying on the bleachers out back, sunglasses on.

  “I look at all of you, how you are with her. Your paper-heart parade,” she says.

  “You never like anyone,” I say. “Or anything.”

  “She never should’ve staked Brinnie Cox, she’s too short and too stupid,” she says. “And you know how I feel about her teeth.”

  “You should’ve showed up,” I say, trying to peer behind the black lenses, to see how deep this goes.

  “Coach can’t top-girl anyone else,” Beth says. “She’ll beg for me back.”

  “I don’t think so,” I say. “She’s a rule-keeper.”

  “Is that so?” Beth wriggles up and stares at me, eyes like silver-rimmed globes, an insect, or alien. “That hasn’t been my experience of her.”

  I look at her.

  “She may have the clipboard and the whistle,” Beth says, “but I have something too.”

  “We’re not saying anything,” I say, my voice going faster. “We said we wouldn’t.”

  “Are we a ‘we’ again?” she says, sinking back down onto the bench. “And I didn’t promise anything.”

  “If you were going to say something,” I say, “you would’ve.”

  “You know that’s not how to play. That’s not how to win.”

  “You don’t understand,” I say. “The two of them. It’s not like you think.”

  “Yeah,” she says, looking at me, nail-hard. “You know better? You’ve seen into her knotted soul?”

  “There’s things you don’t know,” I say. “About him, about them.”

  “Things I don’t know, huh?” she says, something less than a taunt, more urgent. “Illuminate. Like what? Like what, Addy?”

  But I don’t tell. I don’t want to give her anything. I see something now. She’s building a war chest.

  The next night, Coach has everyone over for a party for Emily, whose fall has put her on the DL for six weeks, maybe more.

  No one can even imagine six weeks. It’s a lifetime.

  It’s too cold to be outside, but after the wine swells in all of us, we’re even taking off our jackets, lounging lovely across the deck, watching the sky grow dark. Emily gets prime seat, high-kicking her boot brace for all to see, her eyes stoned on percocet. The happiest girl in the world, for tonight.

  I decide to banish Beth’s hex from my head. She fell because she’s been living on puffed air and hydroxy.…

  Coach maps out our Saturday stunts on napkins spread across the glass-top patio table. We huddle around eagerly, following Coach’s sharpie as it plots our fates.

  “We have three weeks until the final game against the Celts,” Coach says. “We shine there, we have a qualifying tape to submit, we go to Regionals next year.”

  We are all beaming.

  No one asks about Beth until Tacy, Beth’s former flunky, our little stone-drunk Benedict Arnold, bleats, “And who needs Cassidy? We don’t need the haters. We’re going to Regionals with or without the haters.”

  We’re all a little nervous, but Coach smiles lightly, looping her bracelet around her wrist. I smile to see it’s my hamsa bracelet, its eye flashing in the porch light.

  “Cassidy’ll be back,” she says. “Or not. But she won’t be our Flyer again.”

  She looks down at her squiggled hieroglyphics.

  “She’s not the straw that stirs the drink,” she says.

  Eyeing the Flyer spot on the diagram, I watch her pen skim right and left, a
big black X right in the center.

  It’s not until very late that we’re jarred by Matt French’s car door slamming from the driveway and, the same instant, Coach’s deck chair shakes to life.

  Dad’s home, that’s what it’s like, and everyone jumps. We all scurry to the kitchen, start stacking plates and shaking wine glasses empty over our mouths, and I’m helping RiRi hide the empties behind the evergreen shrubs. The bottles clanging loudly. Matt French must know. He must hear everything.

  We’re swooping around the kitchen island, loading the dishwasher and chomping on our organic ginger gum, and Coach is talking to him in the other room, asking him, her speech so slow and careful, about his day.

  Through the swinging café doors, he looks very tired and he’s talking but I can’t quite make out the words.

  He reaches out to touch her arm just at the moment she turns to hand him the mail.

  I think how exhausted he must be, how maybe if he were my husband, even though he’s not handsome at all, maybe I’d want to sit him down and rub his shoulders, and maybe get one of those lemony men’s lotions, and rub his shoulders and his hands. And maybe that’d be nice, even if he’s not good-looking and his forehead is way too high and he has little wiry hairs in his ears and I never think about him like that, really.

  But he’s tired after his long day and he comes home and there we are, bansheeing all over his house, all cranked high and slipping-free braids and ponytails, and Coach talks to him and it’s like how she talks to the other teachers at school, holding their mottled coffee mugs and making the smallest talk ever.

  His shoulders tucking in wearily, I see him flinching at all the clamorous girl energy radiating from the kitchen.

  “Colette,” I think he says, “I was calling all day. I called all day.”

  I’m not sure, but I think I hear him say something about Caitlin, about the day care center phoning him, asking where she was.

  Coach’s hand is over her mouth and she is staring at her feet in a way I recognize from myself, the nights when my dad still waited up, demanded to know things.