Dare Me - By Megan Abbott Page 0,39
all watch, keenly.
I’m the only one who sees through them.
“She’s a chicken,” Coach says to me later. “She talks a good game, but she’s just a baby chick.”
About this, I know she could not be more wrong.
“You all think she’s such a gamer,” Coach says, shaking her head. “She’s just marshmallow fluff. Like any of those JV tenderfoots. Just with bigger lungs and a better ass.”
The two of them. Like liar’s dice at summer camp. But Beth always won because she was good at math and understood odds, and because, when looking under the cup, she’d turn over the dice with her thumb.
“But that Prine guy. You said they call him the Mauler…”
Coach shrugs. “She told me she doesn’t remember him ever hurting her. He passed out. And she guesses she didn’t know what she was saying, really, she was so drunk.”
I look at Coach, and I wonder who’s lying, or if they both are.
“So she’s not going to do anything?”
“There’s nothing to do,” Coach says. “I asked her if she wanted me to take her to my doctor. She said absolutely not. What she does remember is that Prine’s a bantam rooster with nothing but squawk.”
“So, bitch,” Beth asks later that afternoon, chewing straws at the coffee place, “are you ever gonna give me my phone back?”
I picture Coach spiraling it down the toilet.
“Your phone?”
“Herr F told me you must’ve taken it Saturday night. Probably to stop me from drunk-dialing. You’re a scrub, you know that, Hanlon? You’re auxiliary.”
“I don’t have your phone, Beth,” I say.
“I guess she must be wrong,” Beth says, foam curled in the corner of her mouth. Her tongue unfurling, swiping. “Funny she would think it was you.”
“Beth,” I say, “you said you’d texted Will that night. You said you’d called or texted him a bunch of times.”
She doesn’t say anything, but her mouth twitches just slightly. Then she pulls it taut and I wonder if I ever saw it at all.
“Did I say that?” she says, her bright tan shoulders slipping into a shrug. “I don’t remember that at all.”
17
The next day, Beth is back on the squad.
And she is captain again. Honorifically.
She gets to skip chem on Wednesday for captain-coach mentor time, and study hall means she can go to Coach’s office by herself and smoke. I see her when I walk by and she waves at me, head tilted, smoke swirling in malevolent plumes around her face.
Thank you, Coach, I think. Thank you.
“Is she really Cap?” Tacy whispers, everybody whispers, but Tacy is shaking in her bright white air cheers.
Because it appears she is.
And Beth, is that contentment I see there on your tan face?
Fuck me, I think, which even sounds like Beth. Is this all she wanted?
It’s not, of course.
“It’s okay,” says Coach. “I don’t have time for her, Addy. And you don’t either. Let’s see that back handspring.”
And I am trying, but my legs won’t come together and my body feels funny and stiff.
“Push off,” she barks, temple sweat-dappled and her hair limp and slipping from its elastic.
“Lock out”—and with each shout her voice stronger, and my body tighter, harder—“stay tight, stay center, and, fuck it, Addy, smile. Smile. Smile.”
The next morning, I spy Matt French pulling into the parking lot in his gray Toyota, with Coach in it.
When she gets out of the car she doesn’t even glance behind her. It looks like he’s saying something to her, but maybe not.
But he’s watching her, waiting, I guess, to make sure she gets inside the building.
More and more, when I see his face I think maybe he is kind of handsome in his own tired way.
That’s the hardest part, she said once. There’s nothing bad I can say about him, nothing I can say at all.
Which somehow seems the cruelest thing to say, ever.
Which is maybe why I feel this, looking at him now. Matt French. I can’t account for it, but his weariness amid all the bluster and strut of us sparkle-slitted girls—it speaks to me. Like seeing him the other night, the way he looked at me.
He’s not the guy you might think he is. That’s what Will told me.
But I’m not sure what he thinks I might think.
Matt French watches Coach as she walks down the center aisle of the parking lot, watches her walk through the glass doors. He watches for a long time, one arm stretched across the passenger seat, head slightly dipped.
Watching her in the way that reminds me of the way a dad