me feel better—Beth has finally dervished herself into exhausted slumber, her reign of terror over, for now—but it does not.
Instead, I have a sickly feeling I know will sit with me all night, that will join the larger sickness, the sense of nightmare and menace that feels like it will be mine forever.
I roll down all the windows and breathe.
Then I start the car and inch past Coach’s house, just to see if there are any lights on.
Suddenly, I see something moving, fast, like an arrow, down her driveway and to my car.
Almost before I can take a breath, Coach’s palms are slapping my windshield, my heart spurring to terrible life.
“I was just leaving, I was,” I nearly yelp, shutting off the ignition as she leans in through the passenger window. “No one saw—”
“You’re my friend,” she blurts, an ache in her voice. “The only friend I ever had.”
Before I can say anything, she’s whippeting back across her lawn, slipping soundlessly into the dark house.
I sit a long time, my hands resting in my lap, my face warm.
I don’t want to start the car, move, do anything.
I never gave anything to anyone before. Not like this.
I never was anything to anyone before.
Not like this.
I never was, before.
Now I am.
Finally in my rumpled bed, my eyes jitterbug through all of Beth’s texts.
2:03 a.m., 2:07 a.m., 2:10 a.m.
@ Statlers, Coach drinking ginger and jacks + on phone for hour kept saying why are you doing this to me why
Bartend said she used to come when she was young and drink w. badasses from the speedway and once broke both wrists falling in that same pking lot
…kind of trash she is. She shld b glad Matt sunk so low to grab scruff of her neck cuz…
Then, by 2:18:
WHERE THE FUCK R U? You better txt back or I’m coming over. U KNOW I WILL. DON’T MESS WITH—
…and on until 2:27, the last one.
here I am, Pinetop Ct, looking at yr open garage door, but where’s yr car? Hmmm…
She must be lying, I tell myself. But I know she’s not. I know she was out there in front of my house at 2:27, hunched over the steering wheel of her mother’s Miata. I know it.
I wonder how long she waited and what she thought.
I wonder what I’ll say and how I’ll ever make her believe it.
In this knot of fear, I forget everything but Beth’s canny slit eyes.
Those eyes on me, even now.
In the blackest of moments that night, when sleep finally sinks me, a dream of Beth and me, little kids, Beth raking the hard bars of that ancient merry-go-round they used to have in Buckingham Park, spinning us, spinning. And we lie flat on it, on its warty surface, our heads pressed close.
“It’s what you wanted,” she says, breathless. “You said faster.”
20
TUESDAY: SIX DAYS TO FINAL GAME
It’s early, an hour before first period, but I had given up on sleeping, all those half-awake nightmares of my feet sunk in blood-wet carpet and aquariums pumping violet-red bubbles.
You saw a dead man last night. That’s what I’m saying in my head. You saw a suicide right before your eyes.
You saw Will, dead.
So I’m slumped in front of my locker, curling the pages of my The Odyssey of Man textbook, fat green highlighter poked into my mouth.
Beth glides through the front doors of school.
I expect it to be immediate, her face a tanned snarl as she demands to know where I was last night, why I stopped texting her back.
But instead, hand out, she lifts me to my feet, her face vivid and mysterious, and arm-in-arms me to the cafeteria.
We get a fat-slicked chocolate chip muffin, which we heat up in the rotating toaster machine. Standing next to it, the heat radiating off its coils, I imagine myself suffering eternal damnation for sins not yet clear.
But then the muffin pops out, tumbling into my hands. Together, we eat it in long, sticky bites that we do not swallow. No one else is there, so we can do it, and Beth fills tall cups with warm water to make it easier, then spit it out after, into our napkins.
When we finish, I feel much better.
Until Beth starts telling me about her dream.
“It wasn’t just any dream,” she says, licking her fingers, under each slick fuchsia nail. “It was like before. Like with Sandy.”
As long as I’ve known her, Beth has had periodic dreams of dark portent, like the night before her aunt Lou fell from her