Dare Me - By Megan Abbott Page 0,33

go to the bone. A six-pack is wedged under his arm. He sort of burrows against Coach for a minute and I pretend to look out the window.

While Coach hustles Caitlin off to the backyard, we sit on the sofa together, the cold beer bottles pressing against my legs.

There is a long, silent minute, my eyes following the milky rise and fall of his Adam’s apple, me so hypnotized, and thinking somehow of Coach’s fingers there.

“Addy,” he finally says, and I’m relieved someone is saying something. “I’m sorry I interrupted you two. You were probably doing things. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” I say.

When I was seven, my dad’s best friend died from a heart attack on the golf course and my dad locked himself in the garage for an hour and my stepmom wouldn’t let me knock on the door. Later, I think I crawled on his lap and I remember how he let me sit there for an hour and never once asked me to move so he could change the TV channel.

I don’t guess I should sit on Will’s lap but wish I could do something.

“Can I tell you something, Addy?” he says, and he’s not looking at me but at the furred white lamb on the coffee table, its head bent. “This awful thing happened to me on the way here.”

“What?” I say, rising up in my seat.

“I was coming out of the Beer Depot on Royston Road and there’s this bus stop out front. This old woman was coming off the bus, carrying her shopping bags. She had this hat with a big red flower, like a poppy, the ones you wear on Veterans’ Day. That’s what you’re supposed to wear on Veterans’ Day.

“When she saw me, she stopped in her tracks, right on the bottom step. She just stopped. It was like she knew me.

“And this thing happened. I just couldn’t move. I was just standing there, beer in my hand, and we just locked eyes. And something happened.”

His stare is glassy, and he has one finger tracing the tops of the beer bottles sitting between his legs.

“Did she know you from somewhere?” I ask, not sure I’m following.

“Yes. Except she didn’t. I never saw her before in my life. But, Addy, she knew me. She kept staring at me from under that poppy hat. And these black eyes, like lumps of coal. She would not let me go.” He shakes his head back and forth. “She would not let me go.”

I’m listening, but I don’t know what I’m hearing. I wonder how many beers Will has had, or if this is what mourning can look like, diffuse and mysterious.

“Addy, I think…” He has his eyes fixed again on the toy lamb on the coffee table, its head tilted, like a broken neck. “She knew things about me. It all became clear. She knew. The things I did as a kid, the Slip ’N Slide accident with my cousin and the sparkler bombs in the church parking lot and the time my dad showed up drunk at my job at the Hamburger Train and I shoved him and he fell on the wet floor and hit his head. And the first time in the Guard, and how now, after those bad drinking years, I only remember the MEDCAP missions, those little Allahaddin girls who slipped me love poems. I never remember any of the rest of it at all.”

He pauses, his beer bottle tilting in his hand.

“She knew things I never told anyone,” he says. “Like about my wife. Six years we were together, I never bought her a Valentine’s Day card.”

The empty bottle slips from his fingers, rolls across the sofa cushion.

“She knew all those things. And then I did.”

I don’t know what to say. I want to understand, to touch a bit of this shiny despair.

“What did you do?” I finally ask.

He laughs, the hard sound of it making me jump. “I ran,” he says. “Like a kid. Like seeing the bogey man. A witch.”

We are both quiet for a moment. I’m thinking of the old woman. I can see the poppy-blooming hat, and her face, her eyes inked black and all-knowing. I wonder if anything like that will ever happen to me.

Will leans down and picks up his bottle, setting it on the coffee table, its clammy bottom ringing the wood.

“Remember that night we all drove up the peak?” he says suddenly.

“Yes,” I say.

“I wish it could always be like that,” he says,