Dare Me - By Megan Abbott Page 0,30

how everything can fall.

Her body popping like bubble wrap.

In the back of my brain, I know that the clap we all hear from Emily’s knee, like a New Year’s champagne cork, is about that back tuck of mine.

Is about Coach and me.

I had epic cramps, Beth texts me that night.

You had it last week, I say. We all had our periods at the same time, the witchiness of girls.

Infection, she texts. Cranjuice all nite, and mom’s narvox.

Come clean, I text. She has never missed a game, ever. Not even when her mother slipped on the living room carpet and dented her forehead on the coffee table, forty-seven stitches and three years’ worth of vicodin.

Clean as a whistle, Merry Sunshine, she texts back. Cleaner than yr coach.

U know what I mean, I text. Em might have a torn lig.

There is a long moment and I can almost feel something black open inside Beth’s head.

I have a torn life. Fuck all of you.

“Two-game suspension,” RiRi tells us. “No Beth for two games. Em’s down. And with Miz Jimmy-Arm Brinnie Cox spotting us, it means our heads’ll be popping all over the mat.”

“Tough break,” Tacy Slaussen says, trying not to grin. She has her eye on the prize. With Emily and Beth out, she’s the only bitty girl left to fly.

“Beth blames it all on Coach,” RiRi says.

“Coach?” I say, my eyebrow twitching.

“She said Em fell because she’s been living on puffed air and hydroxy for six weeks to hit weight for Coach.”

I look at her. “Is that what you think?” I say, surprised at the hardness in my voice, the old lieutenant steel. It doesn’t go away.

RiRi’s eyes go wide. “No,” she says. “No.”

I find Beth lying on the bleachers out back, sunglasses on.

“I look at all of you, how you are with her. Your paper-heart parade,” she says.

“You never like anyone,” I say. “Or anything.”

“She never should’ve staked Brinnie Cox, she’s too short and too stupid,” she says. “And you know how I feel about her teeth.”

“You should’ve showed up,” I say, trying to peer behind the black lenses, to see how deep this goes.

“Coach can’t top-girl anyone else,” Beth says. “She’ll beg for me back.”

“I don’t think so,” I say. “She’s a rule-keeper.”

“Is that so?” Beth wriggles up and stares at me, eyes like silver-rimmed globes, an insect, or alien. “That hasn’t been my experience of her.”

I look at her.

“She may have the clipboard and the whistle,” Beth says, “but I have something too.”

“We’re not saying anything,” I say, my voice going faster. “We said we wouldn’t.”

“Are we a ‘we’ again?” she says, sinking back down onto the bench. “And I didn’t promise anything.”

“If you were going to say something,” I say, “you would’ve.”

“You know that’s not how to play. That’s not how to win.”

“You don’t understand,” I say. “The two of them. It’s not like you think.”

“Yeah,” she says, looking at me, nail-hard. “You know better? You’ve seen into her knotted soul?”

“There’s things you don’t know,” I say. “About him, about them.”

“Things I don’t know, huh?” she says, something less than a taunt, more urgent. “Illuminate. Like what? Like what, Addy?”

But I don’t tell. I don’t want to give her anything. I see something now. She’s building a war chest.

The next night, Coach has everyone over for a party for Emily, whose fall has put her on the DL for six weeks, maybe more.

No one can even imagine six weeks. It’s a lifetime.

It’s too cold to be outside, but after the wine swells in all of us, we’re even taking off our jackets, lounging lovely across the deck, watching the sky grow dark. Emily gets prime seat, high-kicking her boot brace for all to see, her eyes stoned on percocet. The happiest girl in the world, for tonight.

I decide to banish Beth’s hex from my head. She fell because she’s been living on puffed air and hydroxy.…

Coach maps out our Saturday stunts on napkins spread across the glass-top patio table. We huddle around eagerly, following Coach’s sharpie as it plots our fates.

“We have three weeks until the final game against the Celts,” Coach says. “We shine there, we have a qualifying tape to submit, we go to Regionals next year.”

We are all beaming.

No one asks about Beth until Tacy, Beth’s former flunky, our little stone-drunk Benedict Arnold, bleats, “And who needs Cassidy? We don’t need the haters. We’re going to Regionals with or without the haters.”

We’re all a little nervous, but Coach smiles lightly, looping her bracelet around her