Dare Me - By Megan Abbott Page 0,48

anything for a second, can feel her looking over at me. Then I ask, “What did he say exactly?”

She faces the road again. “He told me something happened to Sarge. Then he couldn’t talk anymore, for a long time. I kept waiting. It was like I almost forgot I already knew.” She pauses a second. “Which was good, I guess. Because I think I really seemed surprised when he told me.”

I find myself nodding because I don’t know what else to do.

“He had this stuff he’d printed off the internet. Wounded Warrior: Suicide in the Military. He said it looks like Sarge suicided. That’s how he put it. I never heard it put like that.”

Suicided.

It reminds me how we’d all tried cutting. I never could break real skin. Beth scraped a big heart on her stomach and then wore her bikini top to the Panthers game. But then she decided it was a hobby for the supremely boring and it no longer seemed so gangsta to any of us after that.

Coach stops at a light and reaches for a cigarette.

“Life was always hard for him,” she says, rolling the unlit cigarette up and down the steering wheel spokes.

She tilts her head a little, squinting like she’s figuring out a puzzle. “I don’t think he ever really got over losing his wife.”

I guess maybe it’s true.

“He came from a hard family,” she says. “Came up hard, like I did.”

I didn’t know he came up hard, or that Coach did. I’m not even sure what that means. Suddenly I feel like I never knew the person who died, or the person right next to me.

“She helped him,” she says, “and then she was gone.”

She’s not crying, doesn’t even look sad precisely. But I feel like she is waiting for something from me.

“But he had you,” I say. “Maybe you reminded him of her. How good she was. Maybe he found that in you.”

The look on her face is grim, knowing.

“That’s not what he found in me,” she says, softly.

I don’t say anything. It feels like some kind of furtive confession.

“I guess I knew it’d turn out this way,” she says, and her voice speeds up a little, and she faces straight ahead, her foot churning the brake pedal, inching us forward with tiny bursts.

“Not just like this, but near it,” she says.

She nods, as if agreeing with herself, then nods again. It’s as if she’s saying, That’s it, that’s it, isn’t it? And there was nothing we could do.

She looks at the road, we both do, and I think about it all. About how Coach is always so efficient, so precise, her moves sharp and tight, so it makes sense she could turn this all so quickly, doesn’t it?

It makes sense she could, less than twenty-four hours after finding Will’s body, come to understand that it was really as it was meant to be, there’d been no stopping it, and everyone was lucky they’d had some pleasures while they could.

When I get home, no one is there, they never are, so I pluck my secret bottle of silver raz from the corner of my closet and take long gulps, then collapse on my bed.

But all I hear is Coach’s voice, soft and nearly affectless: Life was always hard for him, Addy. There was nothing we could do.

Forcing myself to sit at my computer, eyes blurred, I make myself look.

I search for news reports on Sarge but can’t find any.

I even find the police scanner website, but I can’t understand it, and I keep getting distracted—42 are we leaving the football game? didn’t know you were there you told us to go here 841 Willard her back is broken that’s what she said—and my eyes all loose and stinging.

It’s nearly midnight when Beth calls. I pull the covers over me and press my lips to the phone.

“Hold on, little grit,” she says. “Hold on and grip hard.”

“I’m holding,” I say, whorling myself into the wall, my head pressing into its solidness.

“Sarge Stud killed himself.”

I feel my breath go tight. I don’t say anything.

“I don’t know the details yet, but I’m working on it. I dispatched my remaining minions. You used to be so much more help with that, Addy. Now I have to tend to everything. But the meat of the matter is he’s dead. I heard he took his head off with a shotgun.”

“I don’t believe it,” I say, which feels like the truest thing I’ve said in twenty-four hours.

“Well, Addy, truth