Dare Me - By Megan Abbott Page 0,17

I know how, everything wonderful is terrible too. I don’t know how I know it, but I do.

“You don’t know enough about wonderful yet,” Coach says, her voice smaller still, her face growing more somber, more meaningful. “Or terrible.”

We’re so close in that moment it feels like a humming wire between us, and no one wants to say a word for fear of snapping it, silencing it.

It’s very late when RiRi plucks the pint from her boiled wool pocket. Smirnoff vodka, the slummer’s choice.

RiRi’s move is bold, but without Beth here, somebody has to be.

“How about we all do one shot,” she says, rising, stretching her arms to either side, as if to insist on the importance of the moment, “to toast the squad, and most of all Coach, who’s made us…”

She pauses, then looks around, all of us watching nervously, eagerly. Watching her and watching Coach, who hasn’t moved from her luxuriant slouch, whose eyes lock with RiRi’s, as if deciding.

“To Coach,” RiRi says, then, her voice building, “who’s made us women.”

Who’s made us women.

This from RiRi, who’s never said anything significant, ever.

Suddenly, I’m on my feet, my toes even, raising my arm high too, as if I held a champagne flute, a whole frosty magnum in my grip.

Emily and Tacy follow fast and we’re all standing now, looking down at Coach, her chin lifting regally to receive us.

RiRi takes a gentle tug from that pint, then rocks her head back and forth from the kick of it. The rough, smutty smack of it. We all do. I feel it heating in me, firing up my whole body.

Then, I tender the pint to Coach, my hand trembling a little, wondering what she’ll do, if we’ve done something here, swept her up in something with us, something we all want.

Her arm lifts serenely, without pause, her hand slipping around the pint.

Tilting it, her fingers nuzzled tight, she drinks.

Hand to hand, our warming fingers, we pass the pint until it’s empty. My eyes tearing, my body blazing and strong.

Emily and Tacy go home, and RiRi is drunken-texting a new boy, who seems just like the last one and may even be the last one’s brother, so Coach and I drift into the house.

“Hanlon—Addy,” she says, and we pluck fruit from the big wooden bowl on her kitchen island as we walk by. “And you can call me Colette. These are Smirnoff rules.”

She snags a tangle of grapes and we slide them into our mouths one after another as she gives me the big tour.

Coach’s eyes are a little blurred, and it’s just a gentle buzz we have, and I drop a grape on the carpet, and it smears beneath my sock, and I apologize four times.

“Fuck it,” Coach—Colette—says. “You think I care about this carpet?”

And soon enough we’re both kneeling on the carpet, woven wool in the deepest forest green.

“It’s the face weight,” she says. “That’s what counts. Matt says you have to have forty ounces per square. And at least five twists per inch. He read it on the internet.”

“It’s beautiful,” I say, and I’ve never really looked at carpet before. But now I can’t seem to get enough of the feel of it on my knees, between my fingertips, dug deep.

“Addy,” she says, pulling me up to my feet, dragging me from room to room, “you should’ve seen the wedding. We had a picture pool filled with rose petals. A harpist. Pin spots on every table.”

She tells me they couldn’t afford any of it, but Matt worked harder, until they could.

Five, six days a week, he left for work at five, came home at ten. He wanted to give her things. He let her have whatever she wanted. She didn’t know what to want, but she cut out pictures from magazines. Assembled them in a book. My Wedding, it was called.

“I was barely twenty-one,” she says. “What did I know?”

I nod and nod and nod.

“He found the house,” she says, looking around, eyes blinking, like it’s all new to her. Like she hasn’t ever seen any of it before.

And so, age twenty-two, she had this house. And had to fill it.

He said, Whatever you want. So she cut out more pictures from magazines. She made a big bulletin board and called it My House. He saw what she wanted and he made it happen—as much of it as he could.

“He’s very hardworking,” she says. “He looks at numbers all day. And at home, that laptop is always open, those