Dare Me - By Megan Abbott Page 0,3
breasts and hip-cascades are the joy of all the boys, their ga-ga throats stretched to follow her gait, to stretch around corridor corners just to see that cheer skirt dance.
All those posters and PSAs and health class presentations on body image and the way you can burst blood vessels in your face and rupture your esophagus if you can’t stop ramming those sno balls down your throat every night, knowing they’ll have to come back up again, you sad weak girl.
Because of all this, Coach surely can’t tell a girl, a sensitive, body-conscious teenage girl, to get rid of the tender little tuck around her waist, can she?
She can.
Coach can say anything.
And there’s Emily, keening over the toilet bowl after practice, begging me to kick her in the gut so she can expel the rest, all that cookie dough and cool ranch, the smell making me roil. Emily, a girl made entirely of donut sticks, cheese powder, and haribo.
I kick, I do.
She would do the same for me.
Wednesday, Brinnie Cox says she might quit.
“I can’t do it,” she pules to Beth and me. “Did you hear my head hit the mat on the dismount? I think Mindy did it on purpose. It’s easy for a Base. Her body’s like a big chunk of rubber. We’re not trained for stunts.”
“That’s why we’re training for stunts,” I say. I know Brinnie would rather be pom-shaking, grinding, and ass-slapping during halftime, or all the time.
Brinnie’s the one Beth and I have always ridden the hardest, out of irritation. “I don’t like her big teeth or her chicken bone legs,” Beth would say. “Get her out of here.”
Once, practicing double hook jumps, Beth and I made loud comments across the gym about how Brinnie’s slutty sister got caught making out with the assistant custodian until Brinnie ran off to the far showers to cry.
“All I know is,” Brinnie lisps now, through those big teeth, “my head is killing me.”
“If you ruptured a blood vessel,” Beth replies, “you could be slowly bleeding inside your head.”
“You probably already have brain damage,” I add, eyeing her closely. “I’m sorry, but it’s true.”
“The blood may be squeezing your brain against the side of your skull,” Beth says, “which eventually will kill you.”
Brinnie’s eyes wide and wet and brimming, I know we have achieved our goal.
On the last day of that first week, Coach calls a special meeting.
There are anxious texts and phone calls. Talk of cuts to the squad and who might it be?
But her announcement is simple.
“There isn’t going to be a squad captain anymore,” she says, standing before us.
Everyone looks at Beth.
I’ve known Beth since second grade, since we braided our bodies together in sleeping bags at girl camp, since we first blood-brothered ourselves to each other. I know Beth and can read her every raised eyebrow, every toe pivot. She holds certain things—calculus, hall passes, her mother, stop signs—in a steely contempt that drives her hard.
Once, she dunked her mother’s toothbrush in the toilet, and she calls her father “the Mole,” though none of us can remember why, and there was that time she called our phys ed teacher a cunt, though no one could prove it.
But there are other things about her that not everyone knows.
She rides horses, has a secret library of erotic literature, is barely five feet tall and yet has the strongest legs I’ve ever seen.
I might also tell this: In eighth grade, no, summer after, at a beer party, Beth put her scornful little-girl mouth on Ben Trammel, you know where. I remember the sight. He was grinning, holding her head down, gripping her hair like he’d caught a trout with his bare hand, and everyone found out. I didn’t tell. People still talk about it. I don’t.
I never knew why she did it, or the other things she’s done since. I never asked, that’s not how we are.
We don’t judge.
The main thing about Beth, though, is this: she has always been our captain, my captain, even back in peewee, in junior high, then JV, and now the Big Leagues.
Beth has always been captain, and me her badass lieutenant, since the day she and I, after three weeks of flipping roundoffs together in her backyard, first made squad together.
She was born to it, and we never thought of cheer any other way.
Sometimes I think captain is the only reason Beth even comes to school, bothers with any of us, anything at all.
“I just don’t see any need for a captain.