Dare Me - By Megan Abbott Page 0,29

him slipping from me.

“And Caitlin,” I say, but this sounds even less convincing. “There’s Caitlin.”

“Right,” he says, shaking his head. “Caitlin.”

We both sit for a moment, and I feel suddenly like we both might know something we can’t name. About how, in some obscure way, Caitlin was another thing that wasn’t a gift so much as the thing that stands in place of the gift. My wedding, my house, my daughter, my cold, cold heart.

12

“Freaking rock star,” RiRi marvels, finger spotting me.

I am doing perfect back tucks, one after another.

I know suddenly I was born to do them. I am a propeller.

“This is what a coach can do.” RiRi grins. “Beth would never have let you get this good.”

As soon as she says it, she seems almost to take it back, laughing, like it’s a joke. Maybe it is.

“Knees to nose, Hanlon,” Coach barks, a sneaky smile dancing there as she walks back into her office.

“Pffht-pffht,” comes the sound from the bleachers, where Beth has slunk. “Watch that neck, Addy-Faddy, or it’s the ventilator for you. Pffht-pffht.”

“Très J,” whistles Emily. But I know Beth isn’t jealous of my tuck. She can back handspring, back tuck me into the ground, her body like a twirling streamer.

In the locker room after, Emily kicks her leg up, grabbing her toes as she stands on the center bench. Pea-shoot thin now, fifteen pounds lighter since the month before, she’s set to fly with Tacy at the Stallions game. All the hydroxy-hot and activ-8 and boom blasters and South African hoodia-with-green-coffee-extract and most of all her private exertions have made her airy and audacious.

Eyeing her, Tacy is sullen, uneager to share Flyer glory.

Lying on the far end of the bench, Beth stares abstractedly up at the drop ceiling.

“Cox-sucka,” she calls out to Brinnie Cox, who is curling her hair into long sausages and singing to the locker mirror. “How’s your head?”

“What do you mean?” Brinnie asks, her arm frozen. “My head is fine.”

“That’s a relief,” Beth says. “I wondered if maybe you were still feeling the blood pushing against your brain. From that header you took a few weeks back.”

“No,” she says, quietly.

“Beth,” I say, a faint try at warning.

“As long as you’re not a purger, you should be okay out there tonight. It’s the regurgitators who drop like dead weight.”

At the other end of the long bench, our girl Emily releases her leg and looks at the reclining Beth, who is staring straight up at the fluorescent lights.

“Chumming all the time,” Beth says, “they bust all those blood vessels in their eyes. Then one day, out on the mat, they hit their head and…ping.”

Beth snaps her fingers beside her temple.

“Once,” she continues, “I heard a ’mia girl fell during a dismount and an eye popped out.”

Propping herself up on her elbows, she looks down the long bench straight at Emily.

“But let’s not talk of ugly matters,” she says. “Our girl Em’s going to rock it out tonight. Going out a youngster and coming back a star.”

“She’d really miss the Stallions game?”

Ten minutes before kickoff, Beth is nowhere to be found.

She’s never no-showed a game. Everyone wonders if something happened, like that time she followed her dad and his paralegal to that Hyatt downtown and keyed the words MAN WHORE into the hood of his car.

Without her, we have to reconfigure the whole double-hitch pyramid. We count on Beth to be the Middle Flyer, holding onto Tacy’s and Emily’s inside legs as they swing out their other legs and stretch them sky high. She’s the only one light enough to be that high and strong enough to support both girls. It’s like juggling jigsaw pieces that don’t fit and I can see Coach’s face tighten.

“Should we skip the stunt?” I ask Coach.

“No,” Coach says, eyes on the field, breeze kicking up. “Cox can stand for her.”

I look at flimsy Brinnie with her chicken bone legs. Now I see what Beth’s game was, putting the scare in Brinnie.

RiRi looks at me, squintingly. But I shrug.

“Coach knows what to do,” I say.

Brinnie’s right arm starts shaking during the double hitch.

I can see it from the back spot and I’m shouting at her, but fear hurtles across her eyes and there is no stopping it.

On the half-twist Deadman fall, that pin-thin arm of hers gives entirely and Emily, now just an eyelash of a girl, her head dizzy with visions of blood burst, slips and crashes, knee-first, into the foam floor.

Oh, to see her fall is to see