not a whore, Addy. Are you a whore?”
I don’t say anything.
“Are you a whore?” she says, walking toward me, “and is Coach your sweet-lipped Mack Daddy whispering promises in your ear?”
“I was practicing,” I say. “She’s the coach.”
Beth folds her arms and stares me down.
I don’t say a word.
“Haven’t you learned anything, Addy?” she says. I’m not sure what she means, but I know I have to settle her.
We are both quiet, my hands getting cold and Beth in her puffy jacket unzippered.
I see something in her eyes I know from back when, from some girl-recesses of time spent hiding in playground tunnels together, nursing schoolyard wounds.
Nobody might understand about Beth because her seeming power overwhelms. But I can see behind things.
And so I find myself reaching my pinkie out to twine hers, and she shakes it off and gripes some more, about Coach’s treachery and false friend ways, but I do see her rest the smallest bit inside, her shoulders unhunching from a toadlike curl.
We end up back at her house, down in the basement. No one ever goes down there except Beth’s brother when he used to robotrip with his friends.
We lie on the sofa and the moonlight tumbles through the high window and I start it this time, our favorite thing. Or what used to be our favorite thing, but we haven’t done it in so long.
Taking the vitamin E oil from my backpack, I do a soft massage on Beth’s right knee, where she tore ligaments landing on the marble floor of the school hallway, which is the kind of thing Beth sometimes does.
I do these light-as-a-feather tap-taps with my fingertips, which she likes.
After, hands pearled with her sweet almond salve, she does her hard magic on me.
We started this at age ten at PeeDee Tumbling Camp and it was our thing and it was the way, always, to soothe us. Sometimes it was like a visitation, a trance.
She once said, breathless after, that it was a coolness that stilled her like nothing ever did.
We stopped when we hit fourteen or so, I guess, which is when everything changes or you realize it has. I wonder why we stopped? But time gets away from us, doesn’t it? That’s a thing I know.
In the basement now, there is a powerful nostalgia. This is a Beth I haven’t seen for a while, the Beth of subterranean nights, our self-whipped adolescent fears and JV yearnings: I will never what if we never will we ever.
I’d forgotten we were like that, before we were everything.
Her hands move quietly to my calves, of which I am newly proud, the muscle there, tight as a closed bud.
Her thumb slides up the diamond shaped middle of the calf, and notches there, working slowly, achingly, pressing down to the hardest place then sliding her thumb up, the two muscle heads forking. It’s like her thumb is a hot wand, that’s how I always used to think of it.
I can feel Beth unloose it the way the last back tuck unloosed it. It feels warm and wet under my skin, and everything is lovely.
“You were burning this tonight,” she says, so dark I can see nothing but the whites of her eyes, the silver eyeliner.
“I was,” I murmur. “Back tucks.”
And there’s this sense that somehow she knows.
“How did it feel?” she whispers. “To nail it.”
“Like this,” I say, curling under the hard pressure from her hand. “But better.”
11
“It’s to thank you,” I say. “It’s like a thank-you.”
We’re in Coach’s driveway.
“For the back tuck,” I say.
She holds it up to the car light, examining it.
“It’s my hamsa bracelet,” I say. “You said you liked it.”
When she saw me wearing it, she’d said, “What, you some kind of wicca, Hanlon?”
I’d shown her its hand-shaped charm—mirror-plated, with two symmetrical thumbs, an ancient amulet for magical protection from the evil eye.
“Sounds like something I could use,” she’d said. And maybe she was kidding, but I wanted her to have it.
And now she’s holding it, its crimson cord laced across her three middle fingers, like she doesn’t know what to say.
Reaching out, I spin the hand charm with my index finger so she can see the big eye planted in the middle of its mirrored palm.
She holds up her wrist so I can put it on.
“It wraps around twice,” I say, showing her.
“Twice the protection,” she says, smiling. “That’s what I need.”
“You’re Addy, right? Colette’s favorite,” he says, when I get in the backseat. Upfront, Coach is putting lipstick on