Dare Me - By Megan Abbott Page 0,34

twisting off a new beer cap.

I look at him.

Then he says, “Look at you,” reaching out and flicking my blond braid. “You’re so easy to talk to, Addy.”

I try to smile.

“Let me ask you,” he says, pressing the bottle against his damp forehead. “Do people see you, so pretty and your hair like a doll, and do they know about those things you hold inside of you?”

How did he know I held such things? And what things?

“Can I trust you, Addy?” he asks.

I say he can. Does anyone ever answer that question with a no?

And I wait for him to say more. But he just looks at me, his eyes blood-webbed and so sorrowful.

None of it makes much sense and I think Will must be very drunk or something. Something.

For a second it all overwhelms me, and all I want is to listen to music, or do a bleacher sprint, or feel the featherweight of Tacy’s elfin foot in my flat palm, her counting on me to hold her up, and it being so easy.

“I’m sorry I ruined your afternoon,” he says.

I’m in the backyard, leaning on the enormous dutch door playhouse Caitlin occupies, jumbo chalk jammed in her chubby hands. Still half breathless from my talk with Sarge Will, I smoke three of Coach’s American Spirits and think about what’s going on inside.

Nearly an hour goes by, those two inside, and Caitlin falls asleep in the playhouse, her mouth sucked over the corner of the foam table inside.

Her hair scalloped into a ponytail, Coach runs barefoot across the lawn. I think she’s going to hug me, but she’s not a hugger, and kind of arm-hooks me, Coach-like, wringing my shoulder.

“Thank you, Addy,” she says, breathlessly. “Thanks, okay?”

And she smiles, with all her teeth, her face taffy pink.

It’s like I’ve just done the greatest thing I could ever do for her, like a single-based split catch, like a pike open basket at the State Championship, like a balm over her heart.

For a moment, my fingers touch her hard back, which shudders like a bird’s.

Touching it is like touching them, their beauty.

15

Party tonite, flashes Beth’s text.

Rebs, I type back. Away game.

After, she says. Comfort Inn Haber.

Nu uh.

Uh huh.

That prickle behind my ear. The Comfort Inn. Older brothers and sisters are always talking about how it used to be called the Maid Marian, with a second-floor walkway slung so low it looked like the hookers—real live hookers like in the movies, only with worse skin—would slide right off into the courtyard. You’d only drive by when you had to go downtown, like a class trip to the museum and the teachers so embarrassed that you’d be passing Maid Marian, with all those maids all in a row.

When it became the Comfort Inn, they tore out the walkway and you couldn’t see the hookers anymore, but the whole place still quivered with a sense of dirty deeds.

And Beth, and her dirty deeds. I want to say no, but I want to say yes. I want to say yes to keep my eyes on Beth and want to say yes because it’s a party at the Comfort Inn on Haber Road.

So I say yes.

“Whose party?” RiRi asks, reaching under her shirt, plucking first her right breast higher, then her left, so they crest out the top. “Your dealer’s?”

“My dealer could buy Haber Road tip to tail,” Beth says. Beth doesn’t have a dealer, but there is a guy over on Hillcrest who graduated Sutton Grove ten years ago and he sells her adderall, which she sometimes shares and which feels like oxygen blasting through my brain, blowing everything away and leaving only immense joy that shakes tic tac–like in my chest and then sinks away so fast it takes everything from me and my sad life.

“So whose party?” I ask.

She grins.

I didn’t believe her at first, but there it is. There’s five or six of them, all from the Guard.

All Will’s men.

They’re wearing regular clothes, but their haircuts and close shaves give them away, and the way they stand, feet planted apart, chests puffed out. One of them even has his at-ease hands behind his back, which makes it hard to hold his beer.

I recognize the PFC with the red brush cut who walks Sarge Will to his car every day and the other one, with the ham-hock hands and the bowlegs.

There’s a little bar set up on the long plywood dresser and they’re huddled around it, and no one’s on the drooping beds