Dare Me - By Megan Abbott Page 0,47

don’t report it. ‘It’s his way,’ that’s what the scrub tells me. They let it go because he’s had some trouble in his life. Something about his wife and a plate glass window,” Beth says, not quite rolling her eyes.

“So why’s that mean he broke up with Coach?” I ask, pretending to look for something in my locker.

“I’m telling you, Papa’s got a brand new hag,” she says, whistling a little. “Who d’ya think? I speculate Mrs. Fowler, Ceramics, always rolling those clay pots with her legs spread so the boys can see.”

“I don’t think so,” I say.

“Well, if it was RiRi she’d’ve posted pictures of it on Facebook by now. I don’t think he goes for young trim anyway. And we know it isn’t you.”

“Who cares, really,” I try, my head blurred.

She pauses a beat, taking the measure of me, and smiles. “Addy-Faddy, I wonder if that’s what you were doing last night.”

“What?” I whisper.

“Comforting our jilted Coach, of course,” she says.

“No,” I say, tapping my locker door shut.

“I have better things to do,” I add, trying to match her crocodile smile, and maybe beat it.

I don’t see Coach all day, until practice.

I text her four times, but she never replies.

Six hours of wondering about her, about how she’s moving through her day. If she feels the same swampy misery inside of me.

Seeing the shiny brown leaf of Coach’s hair from behind, her yoga-taut posture, I’m almost afraid to look at her face. For our eyes to lock and for everything to come pitching forward until I can smell the smell, hear the gurgling aquarium.

What can it be like for her?

But when she turns around—shouldn’t I have known?

Her eyes breezing past me, as if we hadn’t shared anything at all, much less this.

Oh, the flinty grace, it’s stunning. I think it must be pharmaceutical, and I look for the slight drag to her foot, the tug in her speech. But I can’t be sure.

All I know is she’s got her stunt roster, her purple gel pen with the click-click-click as she ticks us off, roundoffs, walkovers, handstands, handsprings, front limbers.

Tumbling drills, two hours’ worth. Best distraction ever.

We do back tuck after back tuck, bounding from standing pike into flips, handsprings. Our bodies bucking, and when I spot RiRi and watch the row of girls, I get a kind of calmness that hums in my chest. The promise of order.

My body, for instance, it can dip and leap and spring and I am as if untouched, no fear flapping behind my eyes can touch my body, which is invincible and all mine.

It’s when I’m spotting RiRi on the last turn that I spy Beth, lingering tardily by the locker room door in practice shorts.

It unnerves me, but I brush it off, and instead my eyes catch the flash of hot-pink daisies that sprinkle before me every time RiRi’s skirt flips up.

How is it other girls’ panties are always so much more interesting than your own, I think.

“Okay, let’s see those Scorps,” Coach says.

Everyone groans, quietly. RiRi says she’s not nearly “stretchy” enough today, but she can’t do one, a decent one anyway, because you have to be small, small enough to fly. I am, or almost. I was. And I still can do it. The body remembers.

It was Beth who first taught me the Scorpion, her hands on my back leg, lifting it slowly behind me, easing it higher and higher until finally my left foot met my raised-up hand. Until my body became one long line.

She taught all of us, back when she was a real captain. She had us use a dog leash we’d tie to our ankle then try pulling it up. At the Centaurs game, when I first got that foot just shy of my forehead and made myself go straight, I knew a pain so stunning I saw stars.

After, Beth bought me a pink camo leash with my name on it in glitter.

Doing it now, I feel my body constrict, then loosen, warm, perfect.

Closing my eyes, I almost see the stars.

Opening them, I see Coach giving me a real smile, and Beth there, watching and nodding. And I forget about everything. I just do.

“It’ll be okay, Addy,” she says. “No one will ever know.”

It’s after, just after dusk, Coach driving, the two of us working things out.

“Jimmy—PFC Tibbs—told me. This afternoon, he drove out to the apartment and got the super to let him inside. He wanted me to hear it from him.”

I don’t say