Dare Me - By Megan Abbott Page 0,10

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