Dare Me - By Megan Abbott Page 0,22

while Emily chirps and peeps, her little twigged legs trembling against the wall.

“Someone give her a fucking Kit Kat,” Beth growls.

I throw an energy bar at Emily because I can’t stand it anymore either.

We all watch as she eats it slowly, picking at it with shaking fingers, and then, turning greenish white, throws it all back up again in the wrapper.

Beth leans back on the long bench, extending one Aruba-tanned leg and examining it.

“Personally, I am sick of every one of you,” she continues, eyes on perpetual roll. “Sick of everything and everybody.”

Beth touches these things inside us sometimes. Inside me. It is one of her gifts, deeply misunderstood by others. It sounds like she’s being mean, but she’s not. Sick, sick, sick. It’s something you feel constantly, the thing you fight off all the time. The knot of hot boredom lodged behind your eyes, so thick and grievous you want to bang your head into the wall, knock it loose.

I wonder if that’s the thing Coach feels, at home, standing next to Matt French, loading the dishwasher, scrubbing her daughter’s face.

“Hanlon,” Beth says, jumping to her feet. “Let’s trawl.”

I look at her. “But if Coach shows…”

But I can tell where that will get me, Beth with her clenched jaw, about to unsnap. It reminds me of something I learned once in biology: a crocodile’s teeth are constantly replaced. Their whole life, they never stop growing new teeth.

I get up, I follow.

There’s something—always, even as late as junior year, us weary veterans now—about walking the echoing corridors after school. The whole cavernous place, a place we know so well that all our dreams take place here, feels different.

It’s more than the new stillness, more than the heavy bleach swabbed over every skidded, gum-streaked inch.

By day, we walk as if in a force field, surrounded only by one another—our great colored swirl of cheerness. It is not aloofness, superiority. It’s a protection. Who in this ravaged battlefield doesn’t want to gather close her comrades?

But after three o’clock, the school day’s gush of misery rushing into the streets, TV rooms, fluorescent-lit fast-food counters all over town. And the school-after-school becomes a foreign place, exotic.

There are kids here, and teachers in odd lurking pockets, you never know when or where, a huddle of physics grinds on the third-floor landing timing the velocity of falling super balls, the barking Forensics Clubbers snarking about capital punishment in the language lab, shaggy stoners slouching, their eyes bliss-glazed, outside the shop room—now called industrial design lab—the flash of nervous Mrs. Fowler flitting out of the ceramics studio, a foot-tall candleholder thick with shellac in her shaking hands.

We stalk the halls, looking, hunting, scavenging.

I want to find something for Beth. No captain glory, no stable to call her own, not even a glance from Sarge Will to distract her, she needs something. Something to knock the gloomy ire from her: an abandoned joint, a senior boy and freshman girl doing furtive nastiness in some far-flung corner, his arm jammed up her shirt, up over her baby-fat girl belly, her eyes wide with panic and excitement, already, in her head, practicing the telling of the moment even as the moment slips from her.

By the time we reach the fourth floor, there’s a desperation to it. Beth flashes her eyes at me, and it’s really a taunt. Get me something, get me anything.

But it’s always complicated with Beth and me, where her desire ends and mine begins. Because when we first hear the sound, I realize it’s me who wants it more. Wants something to happen.

And then it does.

A yard or two from the door to the teachers’ lounge, we hear something.

The rough rhythmic sound of a chair skidding, lurchingly, across the floor behind the teachers’ lounge door. It seems, suddenly, to be just for me.

Scrape, scrape, scrape.

Beth’s eyes nearly pop with pleasure.

We’re standing outside the door, listening.

I’m shaking my head back and forth and whispering soundlessly don’t, don’t, don’t as Beth, bouncing on her toes, leaning against the teachers’ lounge door, dancing her fingers along it and mouthing things to me. I’m opening it, I am, yes, yes, I sure am, Addy.

I put my hand on the door too, which vibrates with all that clamor inside, that squeaking and thudding. My ear against the humming door, I can hear the breathless pant. It sounds so pained, I think. It sounds like the worst hurt in the world ever.

Like after RiRi lost it to Dean Grady at that party on