Dare Me - By Megan Abbott Page 0,27

in the mirror, a deep garnet shade I’ve never seen on her before. It makes her mouth look wet, open. It’s distracting and I try not to look.

Addy, she’d said, looking at the hamsa bracelet tight on her wrist. I have an idea.

That’s how it comes to be that it’s late at night now and I’m in Sarge Will’s SUV, so big it’s like being in the center of a velvet-lined box, everything dark and buffered, soft sides and hard corners and the sense of nothing out there touching you.

I look at him, thinking how strange it all is. Sarge Will, but not in his uniform, and his shirt still finely pressed but some stubble on his jaw, and his eyes, most of all his eyes, not coolly watchful, as in school, as when he scours the teeming, sweaty masses of students for recruits, pinpointing all the lost souls that fill our halls, all the ones who live close to the freeway and the ones I never notice at all.

No, his eyes aren’t like that at all now. There’s a looseness, and an openness, and some other things I can’t name. All the remoteness gone and he’s this man, and he smells a little like laundry detergent and cigarettes, and he has a nick on one knuckle of his left hand, and when he turns the steering wheel I see faint sweat scalloping under his arm.

Will is drinking from a pint he’s holding nestled between his legs as he drives. When he hands it to me, the bottle is so warm.

Come with us tonight, she’d said. I want you to understand how it is.

And now I do.

We drive to Sutton Ridge, the fall air shivery and the smell of burning leaves drifting from somewhere.

“I thought there was no place left,” Will says, “where people still burned leaves.”

Because they do burn leaves here, the older folks do, and I remember now that I love it and always have. The way fall feels at night because of it, because of the crackling sound and walking around the sidewalks, like when you’re a kid, and kicking those soft piles, and seeing smoke from backyards and Mr. Kilstrap standing over the metal drum with the holes in the top, the sparking embers at his feet.

Where’d that world go, that world when you’re a kid, and now I can’t remember noticing anything, not the smell of the leaves or the sharp curl of a dried maple on your ankles, walking? I live in cars now, and my own bedroom, the windows sealed shut, my mouth to my phone, hand slick around its neon jelly case, face closed to the world, heart closed to everything.

It seems Will knows this older world and it binds us together and I realize we are meant to be close because, like she does, he opens deep pockets in the center of me I never knew were there.

“Let’s go to Lanvers Peak,” says Coach, voice light and high, a girl’s voice. She’s looking back at me now, that mouth of hers red and glorious. The excitement, and Will grabbing her thigh so hard that I can feel it, I can feel his hand shaking my own thigh to gritty life.

Lanvers Peak is not a place for cars, but it is a place for Will’s Jeep, because nothing will stop him.

Driving up, Will is talking about the gorges and how they were gouged by glaciers hundreds of times over two thousand years like God’s own carving hand on the dark earth, or so his grandfather used to say.

We’re higher than I’ve ever been and we’re drinking bourbon, which is the most grown-up thing I’ve ever had and I pretend I like it until I do.

Up high, where the sky looks violet against the peak, Coach and I kick off our shoes, no matter how cold it is, the silvered grass crunching under our feet.

“Show me,” Will is saying, and he is laughing. “Show me.”

He doesn’t believe we can do the shoulder sit, just we two and dizzy on bourbon.

“You say it’s so dangerous, but compare it to offensive tackle, which left me with these,” he says, lifting his pretty lip to show me his front teeth, snowy white. “Caps, like my gramps. That’s what real sports do to you.”

Baiting us, he makes me want to turn my body into the lightest, most miraculous thing, makes me want to show him what I can do so that I will feel perfect and loved.

So