Dare Me - By Megan Abbott Page 0,51

Coach is focused, intense. She rides us hard.

“I’ve got to move things fast,” she shouts. “I have to pick up my daughter. Don’t drag on me, dollies.”

At first, the hurting is not the good kind, and I can’t pound my way to it. And when Mindy fishhooks me during a tumbling pass, knocking me to the mat, I’m embarrassed to feel hot tears popping from me. For the first time ever on the mat.

“God, Hanlon,” Mindy says, surprised. “You are Lieutenant Hanlon, aren’t you?”

But there’s no time to feel the shame, and I make sure to hold nothing back when I jam my shoe into Mindy’s hidebound shoulder next time around.

Soon enough, as we leap and tuck and jump, I start feeling better and my body starts doing astonishing things, tight and rock-hard, nailing it.

But then Beth starts talking loudly on her phone. I see Coach looking up at her, again and again, and everything starts galloping back, hoofs up.

“Cap’n,” Coach calls out to her, and I feel myself tense. “Can you run some tumbling?”

Beth looks up, a strand of hair slipping from her mouth.

We all look up.

She does not remove the phone from her face.

I feel like if I were closer, I’d see her baring her teeth.

“I’d like to, ma’am,” Beth shouts, in her whiniest teen girl voice, “but I only have one tampon left and I’ve had it in all day, so I think if I do mat work, it’ll come loose.”

We all look at Coach now, and no one says anything.

Coach, oh, Coach, why did you ask?

“Then we’ll see your blood on the mat,” Coach says, planting a foot on the bottom bleacher.

Oh, Coach…these two, toe-to-toe, puffing their chests out, practically thumping them.

“I’d like to, Coach,” she says. “Really, I would. But haven’t we all seen enough blood lately? Shouldn’t we really be thinking of our loss?”

Coach’s face motionless, but I can see something in there, something caving in deep.

Look at her, Coach, I want to say. Look at it. See how she is fearless now. See how long she has been waiting for her chance and now she has it.

I have to make Coach see.

And I have to keep my eyes on Beth, ceaselessly.

We drive side by side down Curling Way, Beth play-gunning the gas. We’re driving out to Sutton Ridge, where the red-scalped PFC, Jimmy Tibbs, agreed to meet with Beth.

She’s pumping him or someone’s pumping someone, and suddenly they are like comrades, passing briefcases and taping Xs on telephone poles.

The spooky rustlings of the ridge are spookier than ever now that the air’s gone cold and everything’s glass-bright. Or maybe it’s the cryptic pause I feel in Beth. Like a thing arrested between coming and going. Like the second before a crouch becomes a bound.

We’re to meet the PFC in a clearing up by the easternmost edge, and we walk in a hush, sneakers tramping, ankles twisting on strange clumps and roots and other things of nature. Why can’t the world be as flat and smooth as a spring-loaded floor, as hard and certain as a gym’s merciless wood?

We hear him before we see him because someone is whistling tinnily somewhere. It seems to put a little scare even in Beth, who doesn’t suffer the red-tinted terrors behind my eyes.

But we get closer and the whistle sounds more like a young boy’s. A whistle to ward off demons and night terrors.

He’s whistling what I finally recognize as some quavering version of “Feliz Navidad.”

Waving from the clearing, he heads toward us, jogging soldierlike and extending his hand as we nudge down the crest of our twining pathway, shoes skidding.

Beth gives him her golden hand and a look of great charm, the powerful illusion of delicate girlhood.

I see how this is with them.

Beth knows her mark.

“Listen, girls, I don’t want to get anyone in trouble.”

His freckle-rubbed face looking rubbed twice over, the PFC paces as he talks, scratching the back of his neck until it turns red.

“He was our Sarge,” he says. “And he’s still Sarge to me. And I got his back.”

“Of course you do,” I say. “None of us want any trouble.”

“But the thing is, now our superiors are involved. The Army’s doing their own investigation,” he says. “And we have to cooperate fully.”

He looks at us and it’s then I realize he knows we know about Sarge and Coach, and I am guessing Beth told him.

“We understand,” Beth says, all big-eyed sympathy. “It’s your duty. What choice do you have?”

“We just want what’s