Dare Me - By Megan Abbott Page 0,53

against her, you better be on. Game on. Like when you’re out there, grandstands thrumming, sneakers squeaking on polished floor, and you gotta fake-smile till it hurts. Till you want to die from it.

Ramrod that back, hoist those tits, be ready, always. Because she always is.

“I don’t know, Addy,” she says, her eyes on me. “Was it Sarge’s mouth?”

“No,” I say. “I’ve got it all wrong. I’m blood-sugar bottomed-out.” I begin tugging my braid loose, bobby pins flying, scattering to the ground.

I can almost feel her disappointment at how poorly I’ve kept up with her, stayed in the game.

For hours after, I’m cursing myself for ever thinking I could run with Beth, for thinking I could keep up.

If you could have seen him, I want to say to Beth, you would know it was suicide. You would see. If you saw that dark smudge where his face was…you would feel his desperation and surrender.

Wouldn’t you?

Is that what I felt?

I’m not so sure.

I think briefly, darkly, of that apartment, legions deep now in my head. A glugging, boggy cove in the center of the earth.

Still, to me, it had felt like stepping in the marsh swirl of a man underwater, a man drowning.

Hadn’t it?

It had felt bad. That’s what I knew. It had felt like the worst place I’d ever been—and now that place, it was inside of me.

That night, at last, Coach calls.

“Addy, why don’t you come over?” The warmth in her voice, and the desperation. “Stay at my place tonight. Matt’s out of town, remember? It’s so lonely.”

I can’t guess at the haunted feeling in her, given how it is with me. I’m glad to know she’s feeling these things, because you’d never know it to look at her.

“I’ll make us avocado shakes and we’ll sing Caitlin to sleep and drag the velvet blankets out on the deck and wrap ourselves in them and look at the stars. Or something,” she says, trying so hard.

I’d’ve dreamed of such courtship a month ago, and something about it does speak to me even amid all this, maybe even especially. It’s a singular and troubling stake we share, but it binds us always, doesn’t it? A stake that gives me new panics by the hour, yes, but now, for the first time, it warms me too.

So I go, but Caitlin’s already asleep and Coach doesn’t have any avocados, and it’s raining slimily on the deck.

As I dangle on a kitchen island stool, without purpose, she makes a grocery list. She pays an electricity bill. She wrings out kitchen towels, twisting them across her hands and staring vaguely out the window over the sink.

It’s almost like Coach doesn’t want me there at all now that I’m here.

It’s as if I remind her of bad things.

Once, I come back from the bathroom and see her looking at my phone, resting on the kitchen island.

“Can you just turn it off?” she says. “You didn’t tell anyone you were here, right?”

I say no.

She pauses, fingertips still grazing the phone. Watching as I turn it all the way off, waiting for the screen to go blank.

“Oh, Addy,” she finally says, “let’s do something, anything.”

And this is how we end up in the backyard close to midnight, doing backbends in the rain. Extended triangles. Dolphin plank poses.

There’s a holiness to it, the wind chimes on the deck carrying us off to the deepest Himalayan climes, or wherever the world is peaceful and clear.

We sweat even in the cold, and I catch, amid a streak of light from some passing car out front, Coach’s face looking untroubled and free.

The crying starts just after, when we’re back in the house. Walking down the hallway, she bends over at the waist and sobs come hard and hurtful. I hold onto her shoulders, their tensile thew rocking in my hands.

She stops in the middle of the hall and I try to hold on and she cries for a very long time.

I sleep next to her that night, under that big dolloping duvet.

We face opposite directions and I think, this is where Matt French sleeps, and I think how big the bed is and how far away Coach is, the duvet snowbanking in the middle, and if she’s still crying, I wouldn’t know.

It makes me feel lonely for both of them.

Sometime in the night, I hear her talking, her voice hard and strangled.

“How could you do this to me?” she snarls. “How?”

I glance over at her, and her eyes almost look open, her