Dare Me - By Megan Abbott Page 0,31

wrist. I smile to see it’s my hamsa bracelet, its eye flashing in the porch light.

“Cassidy’ll be back,” she says. “Or not. But she won’t be our Flyer again.”

She looks down at her squiggled hieroglyphics.

“She’s not the straw that stirs the drink,” she says.

Eyeing the Flyer spot on the diagram, I watch her pen skim right and left, a big black X right in the center.

It’s not until very late that we’re jarred by Matt French’s car door slamming from the driveway and, the same instant, Coach’s deck chair shakes to life.

Dad’s home, that’s what it’s like, and everyone jumps. We all scurry to the kitchen, start stacking plates and shaking wine glasses empty over our mouths, and I’m helping RiRi hide the empties behind the evergreen shrubs. The bottles clanging loudly. Matt French must know. He must hear everything.

We’re swooping around the kitchen island, loading the dishwasher and chomping on our organic ginger gum, and Coach is talking to him in the other room, asking him, her speech so slow and careful, about his day.

Through the swinging café doors, he looks very tired and he’s talking but I can’t quite make out the words.

He reaches out to touch her arm just at the moment she turns to hand him the mail.

I think how exhausted he must be, how maybe if he were my husband, even though he’s not handsome at all, maybe I’d want to sit him down and rub his shoulders, and maybe get one of those lemony men’s lotions, and rub his shoulders and his hands. And maybe that’d be nice, even if he’s not good-looking and his forehead is way too high and he has little wiry hairs in his ears and I never think about him like that, really.

But he’s tired after his long day and he comes home and there we are, bansheeing all over his house, all cranked high and slipping-free braids and ponytails, and Coach talks to him and it’s like how she talks to the other teachers at school, holding their mottled coffee mugs and making the smallest talk ever.

His shoulders tucking in wearily, I see him flinching at all the clamorous girl energy radiating from the kitchen.

“Colette,” I think he says, “I was calling all day. I called all day.”

I’m not sure, but I think I hear him say something about Caitlin, about the day care center phoning him, asking where she was.

Coach’s hand is over her mouth and she is staring at her feet in a way I recognize from myself, the nights when my dad still waited up, demanded to know things.

Suddenly, there’s a loud crash from the back deck, like glasses falling.

“Coach!” someone hollers from outside. “We’re sorry. We’re really sorry.”

13

“Everybody give the chicken a warm welcome,” Coach says, giving a gentle shove to the latest recruit, a JV cheerleader getting her shot at the show. A hammer-headed girl with a body like a tuning fork. No one will mind her landing headfirst on the spring floor. She’ll just ting.

“She’s on me,” Mindy surmises, curling her neck side to side. “I turn her out.”

Mindy knows she can lift the shavetail rafters-high, a girl like that, not more than ninety pounds soaking wet, and she even looks wet, a dew on her that’s probably flop sweat.

“Not before she pays her dues,” RiRi says, arms folded. “We all fly her first.”

New girls get tossed hard first time out. Initiate-style. And we like to rock them side to side.

“Mat kill,” mutters Tacy, newly hard, suddenly a senior statesman of the squad.

No one asks about Beth. She’s barely been in school these past three days, and Coach seems very calm in her victory.

It’s after midnight when my phone hisses, rattling my bedside tabletop.

Can u pick me up? Cnr Hutch & 15.

Beth. The first text in five days. The longest stretch since she went to horse camp in the mountains after seventh grade, returning with a ringlet of hickeys from a counselor and fresh revelations about the world.

Creeping through the house, I unhitch the car keys from the kitchen door hook. Anyone could hear the car shaking to life in the garage, but if they do, they ignore it. My father nuzzled close to my stepmother, she muzzled by her nightly dose of sleep aids.

Beth is standing on the corner, and her face when the headlights hit is a surprise. It’s Beth bare-faced, which is scarier than her hooded eyes, her teengirl snarl.

Her face splayed open, like it almost never is, and