Dare Me - By Megan Abbott Page 0,60

Coach, with me?

Coach, Coach, like my very own sergeant, who took me straight into the fog of war…

I wanted to be a part of your world, but I didn’t know your world was this.

That night, I dream about that time with Beth, the first drunk I ever had, both of us climbing up Black Ash Ridge. She kept saying, Are you sure you’re ready, Addy. Are you? And I promised I was, our heads schnapps-fuzzed and our bodies ecstatic. She said, But you’re not afraid, Addy, are you? Show me that lion heart.

Later, I remember falling back, great big Xs for eyes and half delirious, and Beth crawling over to me, her shirt off and flaming red bra. She says she will stop me from log-rolling to my death. She promises she will save me, us.

Just don’t look down, Addy, just never look down.

…and her voice, like it was coming from a deep gorge inside me, vibrating through my chest, my throat, my head, my heart.

When you gaze into the Abyss, Addy, she says, her eyes glowing above me like two blazing stars, laughing or even crying, the Abyss gazes into you.

24

FRIDAY: THREE DAYS TO FINAL GAME

“Guess what I’m doing?” Beth asks, calling me crack-o-dawn, while I’m standing at the mirror, trying to make my face over candy-clean. Streaming petal pink across my cheeks, my eyelids, slashing it across my trembling lips.

I don’t say anything. I don’t like the way her voice sounds. Cat-and-canary-like.

“I’m reading the newspaper. I thought the old lady would faint. She said, ‘Do you even know what that is, darling daughter?’ Oh, the morning wit in the Cassidy household.”

“Mmm.”

“‘A National Guard source indicated increasing doubt that the Sergeant’s death was suicide,’” she reads. “‘Results from a gunshot residue test on the victim’s hands showed only trace amounts.’”

I don’t say anything.

“Oh, and turns out you were right,” she says, pausing as if taking a bite. I have a sudden image of raw meat shearing between her teeth. “It was a gunshot to the mouth, not the temple. You said you were confused, but it turns out you weren’t confused at all, Addy.”

The dying fluorescent lights buzz above me mercilessly.

I’m in the first-floor girls’ room, second stall, having just thrown up, my right cheekbone resting on the porcelain. I’d forgotten what that kind of throwing up could be like, the kind where you’re not, Emily-style, nuzzling your finger down your fishtailing throat, begging for release from the dreaded sluice of cupcakes or from the acidic sludge of too many Stoli Citronas—cheer beer, they call it, we call it. No, this is throwing up like coming off the tilt-a-whirl at age seven, like discovering that dead rat under the porch, like finding out someone you loved never loved you at all.

Now I’m sitting on the floor of the stall, damp newspaper still folded in my hands, the smeary sentences:

“…While police would not comment on reports of conflicting evidence at the scene, a source close to the investigation questioned the position of the weapon near the body. Recoil will usually cause a handgun to land behind the body, the source noted, not next to his head where it was found.”

I feel my stomach turn again.

Suddenly, Beth is there, standing above me, handing me a long sheaf of paper towels, still billowing, untorn, from the dispenser.

At first, I think I’m hallucinating.

“You wait your whole life for something to happen,” she’s saying, her face virtuous, princess-like, under the rimy fluorescents. “Then, suddenly, it’s all the terrors of the earth all at once. Is that how it feels to you, Addy?”

She winds the trail of paper towel around me, leans down, dangling one edge into my sick-moist mouth.

“I’m just sick,” I say. “It’s nothing.”

She smiles, tapping the newspaper in my blackened hands.

“I keep waiting for them to write about that hamsa bracelet,” she says. “Put a picture of it to see if anyone recognizes it.”

“They don’t write about it because it’s not important,” I say. “They know it could’ve been left there anytime.”

“It could’ve been. Except it wasn’t,” she says.

“How do you know?” I say, a fresh round of dread rising in me.

“Because of where they found it,” she says. “Or didn’t our fearless leader tell you?”

“Where they found it…?” I say, fighting the moan in my voice.

“Under Sarge’s body,” she says. “PFC told me. Riddle me that.”

Her smile is so faint and yet so piercing, I feel I may go blind.

And the picture in my head, that nubbed carpet, Will’s spent body,