Dare Me - By Megan Abbott Page 0,49

is an ugly mother, especially for you. But it’s the truth. The PFC told me. That boy thinks he’s my Knight in Shining. On account of the other night.”

It takes me a long minute even to remember the once-world-shattering quality of that night of Beth and Corporal Prine, barely ten days past. That feels like Holly Hobbie time now.

“I told you something was going to happen,” she says.

“No,” I say. “You said you were going to make something happen.”

“Well,” she replies, “turns out I didn’t have to.”

“Why would Will do that?” I ask.

“Why wouldn’t he?” she answers, her voice animated, gossipy—like we have finally hit upon the thing itself, something she’s been waiting for.

“Maybe, Addy-Faddy, just maybe he saw the pointlessness of all matters of the heart and said I won’t just sink in, I won’t let her grab me by the ankles. Fuck me, I’ll look her in the eye. I’ll jump.”

There is a pause, and I hear Beth’s fast breaths, her tongue clicking in her mouth.

I have the sudden feeling that she might say something that will alarm and hurt me. Something I don’t want to hear. About the way we are linked, my cheer shoe lodged in her steely palm. About last summer, when I said I was tired of being her lieutenant, tired of being her friend, and it seemed like the two of us were over forever, but we never could be.

“Beth,” I say, my arms over my head. “I can’t talk to you anymore.”

“Addy,” she says, somberly, intimately. “You have to.”

Something has passed between us, a secret knowledge about us, and what she needs from me. But I blink and I miss it.

21

WEDNESDAY: FIVE DAYS TO FINAL GAME

Meet me @ 7 at coffee place.

Coach’s five a.m. text scissoring into my sleep.

I feel hung over, have felt hung over for two days straight, the early morning light laying dew and mystery on me as I walk the five blocks, wary of starting my car at 6:55 in the morning. Sometimes I see my dad then, lurking in the hallways, robe flapping, surprised to see me, like I’m his errant boarder.

Coach is leaning against the milk and sugar station, but when she sees me, her body seems to lift upward, her eyes jittering into focus.

She goes to the counter to get me a matcha green tea and when I reach for a pink packet, she smacks it from my hand, that familiar gesture of hers, and I almost smile but can’t seem to.

We take our drinks to her car and sit there, windows rolled tight.

She tells me the police called last night and said they had some questions for her, just routine, but they thought she might wish to handle it discreetly and come to the station house.

At first, all her words just flap at me. I listen and nod and slide my drinking straw behind my teeth, grate it along the roof of my mouth until it hurts.

“Luckily, Matt’s out of town,” she’s saying. “Did I tell you that?”

I shake my head.

“He flew to Atlanta yesterday for work,” she says, eyes lifting to the rearview mirror.

I hadn’t even been thinking of Matt French. Or how she was going about her life with him amid all this, hiding such a monumental secret. But maybe it wasn’t that different. Maybe it wasn’t different at all.

“So I got Barbara to stay with Caitlin and I went to the police station. And it wasn’t like I thought at all. The detective told me that…he told me what we knew. And he said that they were conducting a routine investigation and they had found my phone number in his call log.”

She pauses, her chest heaving a little. That’s when I realize her voice is faster than yesterday, with a new wariness to it.

“He asked me if I thought Will was depressed. And if I knew whether he kept any firearms in his home. And about how we knew each other.”

“Did you tell?” I ask, sinking my chin into the plastic lid of my drink. “What did you tell?”

“I was as honest as I could be,” she says. “It’s the police. And I have nothing to hide, not really.”

I lift my head and look her in the eye. I wonder if I’ve heard her right.

“I mean, I do. Have some things I’d rather…,” she says, shaking her head, like she’s just remembered. “I told him we were friends. And that Will probably did have firearms, which is all I really know.”

“If