Dare Me - By Megan Abbott Page 0,20

at Casa French, the grill fired up, Coach flipping salmon on cedar planks. Nothing ever tasted so good, even though we all only pick at it, shred it to pink filings on our plates, our mouths focused eagerly on the tickly white wine served in fine stemware that tinggged when your nails clicked it.

It’s harder to enjoy it with Beth there, feeling her dismissive eyes on everything. But the wine helps.

We have a routine down, Emily and me lighting all the candles, the hurricane lanterns with the hand-painted ladybugs that Matt brought all the way from South Carolina, and the tall gas torch that Coach says is just like what they have on the beach in Bali, though she’s never been there, none of us have. Beth, dull-eyed and afflicted, says it’s the same ones she’s seen in Maui, or even San Diego, or the Rainforest Café out on Route 9.

Eventually, though, the wine whirls even through Beth and it’s so fun looking around the table at everyone’s blooming, candlelit faces.

Mostly, it’s all of us chicken-jabbering and Coach, her silent, half-smiling self. She listens and listens, and the stories, as before, get darker and more intimate. Oh, RiRi, maybe one day you’ll find a boy who loves you for more than your double-jointed jaw. And Emily, six weeks running on splenda and cabbage broth, as caved-in as your belly looks you’ll never get that round face of yours any thinner at all unless you take a hammer and chisel.

By the time Husband Matt comes home around eleven, we are all pretty drunk, Coach maybe even a little bit, that bloom to her face and her tongue slipping around words, and when RiRi takes off her top and runs around the yard, shouting into the bushes for boys, Coach just laughs and says it’s time we met some real men, and that’s when we see him standing at the kitchen island, and we all think that’s hysterical, except Matt French, who looks tired and flips open his laptop and asks us if we could be quiet, which we can’t possibly be.

Beth, who keeps saying she isn’t drunk at all, but she never admits to being drunk, starts talking to him and asking him questions about his job, and if he likes it, and what his commute is like. She squeezes her breasts together in her tank top and leans on the kitchen island, fingers grazing his computer mouse rhythmically.

He looks at her, his brow knitted high in a way that I do find sweet, and asks if her parents might wonder where she is.

Over Beth’s shoulder, he’s throwing these looks at Coach, who finally says she’ll drive us all home and Emily and Beth can pick up their cars tomorrow.

When we’re walking out, I look back at him, and his face looks troubled, like years ago, eighth grade, and my dad, who no longer bothers, watching me as I left the house with Beth, our bodies suddenly so ripe and comely and there was nothing he could do.

The next day, hung over on the L-shaped sofa in Beth’s living room, I wake up to Beth’s hair dangling over me. Leaning over the back of the cushion, she tells me she didn’t have any fun at all. And she’s talking big, which always feels ominous.

“Sitting there on the deck, like it’s her throne,” she says, cotton-mouthed and craggy. “I didn’t like it there. I don’t like the way she conducts herself.” There’s a hitch in her voice and I wonder if she’s still drunk, or I am.

“So high on her seat,” Beth says. “All of you mooning like schoolgirls.”

But we are schoolgirls, I think to myself.

“You have always been soft to these things, Addy,” she says. “Last summer you were.”

And I don’t want her to talk about last summer again, and all our bickerings at cheer camp when everyone thought we were busting up. Because this has nothing to do with that girly nonsense.

“I tell you, Adelaide, I know her kind.”

Climbing over the back of the sofa, Beth swings her bare legs, nestling into me, and I’m listening but not listening because I don’t like that hitch in her voice.

“She better enjoy it while she can,” she rumbles, burrowing her head into the pillow I’ve tucked under my arm, burrowing her head into me, like always. “Because in a few years she’ll probably pop out another kid and her hips’ll spread like rising dough and before she knows it, she’ll be coaching