Dare Me - By Megan Abbott Page 0,24

it. With these magic words.

“Wait until it’s you.”

Don’t tell anyone.

That night, fingers plucking the buttons on my duvet cover, thumbs on my phone, Beth’s texts blipping under my fingers. Agreed. This is just us. We keep quiet 4 now.

I shut off my phone.

Wriggling there, thinking it all through, I start to see, for the first time, how it might be for Coach, young and pretty and strong. Why should she be stuck all day rousting chickens like us, or at least like some of us, on the shellacked floors of the Sutton Grove High School gym, our hapless ponytails flying, smarting off, being lazy, spitting gum on the floor, whining about periods and boys? She spends all her days like this and then home to her kid, pucker-mouthed and red-faced, a day of sugar and agitation in preschool, and her husband at work until the nightly news sometimes.

I start to think of it differently, as a home filled not with ease and liberty but with irritation and woe. Who wouldn’t need the ministrations of the likes of Sergeant Will, and what he might give her? I wonder what he gives her and why we aren’t enough.

10

“I knew,” Beth says, before practice the next day, lifting her leg into a heel stretch. “I knew there was something wrong with her. What a fake, what a liar.”

“Beth,” I say. But the warning flare in her eyes says I better tread lightly.

“Beth,” I say, “can you show me how you get your foot behind your head like that? Can you help?”

We are in Coach’s backyard after practice, just the two of us. She has invited me. Just me.

We haven’t spoken about Sarge Will, not yet.

Coach is trying to help me with my standing back tuck, which is weak at best. It’s really just a tight backflip from a standing position and is one of those stunts all real cheerleaders can do in their sleep. RiRi says college cheerleaders do them at parties—“Tuck check!”—to test each other’s drunkenness.

One of her hands on my waist, Coach uses the other to pull my knees up, flipping me hard as soon as I’m off the ground, her arms like a propeller.

She is in that focus mode where she doesn’t even look me in the eye but treats my body like a new machine with parts not yet broken in. Which is what it is.

“If you can’t back tuck,” she says, “you can’t land most tumbling stunts.” What she doesn’t say: since I don’t fly or do Bottom Base, I need to be able to tumble.

I need to nail it.

“The pull is just as important as the set,” she is saying, her breath fogging in near dusk. I can feel it on my face as she knocks her hip against mine. “You can have the best set in the world but if you don’t pull your legs around after it, you’re still going to land short.”

Over and over, I start strong, arms up brace-tight, only to land on my hands, my knees, the tips of my toes.

It’s a head thing. I feel certain I will fall. And then I do, my foot twisting beneath me.

“You think too much,” Beth used to tell me.

She’s right. Because if you think about it, you realize you can’t possibly jump into the air and rotate yourself 360 degrees. No one can do that.

Beth, of course, does a flawless standing back tuck, and it’s something to see.

It is incredibly high and perfect.

But Beth grabs from behind the thighs, not the shins like Coach likes.

“I don’t want that sloppy stuff from you,” Coach says. “Don’t waste my time with that.”

Again and again, my shins grass-streaked and the sky heavy with dusk.

“Chest up,” she shouts, every time I land, to keep me from falling forward.

Finally, I’m getting cleaner and she stops flipping me. And I start falling. She lets me fall every time.

“It’s a blind landing, Hanlon,” she says. “You’re trying to find the ground. You gotta know it’s not there.”

I try to pretend I’m her. Try to feel tight like she does, so tight nothing can touch her. I think of squeezing my whole body into a tight ball.

“Ride that jump longer,” her voice out there somewhere, vibrating in my ear, her hands there but not.

And then releasing.

“Open your body,” she keeps saying, and it’s shuddering through my whole head. “Open it.”

And I feel myself doing just that, an explosion from the center of me to my toes, my fingertips.

It is just after dark,