Dare Me - By Megan Abbott Page 0,63

is what Coach has done for her, I think. She helps us all.

Then, lurking in the open doorway of Coach’s office, she is there. The shadow she throws seems so large that her five feet swallow the office hall. Beth.

“Cap,” I say, wanting to help sate her, “you bled us today.”

Her back to me, I can’t see her face.

I walk closer.

I’m hoping, praying for elation.

I mean, isn’t she the Coach Itself now, for the moment at least?

“Beth,” I say again. “Return of the King.”

The sunfall flooding everything, her whole body lit darkly gold, I stop a few feet from her ambered back.

“Beth,” I say, “you got everything.”

Finally, slowly, a half turn of her head. A whisper of her profile, darkened by her shudder of black hair.

That’s when I see that nothing’s been had at all, nothing’s been saved. She thought this would be it, and it wasn’t.

“The sun’s down and the moon’s pretty,” she says, her voice hushed. “It’s time to ramble.”

And I say yes. Of course I say yes.

25

FRIDAY NIGHT

Sprawled on the hood of my car, we are high up on the south face of the ridge, right where it drops a thousand miles or more, into the deepest part of the earth.

We have been drinking cough-syrupy wine that clings to the tongue. Beth calls it hobo wine, and it feels like we are hobos now. Wanderers. Midnight ramblers.

I forget everything and think that, hidden up here behind the sparkly granite of a thousand gorges and knobs, I am safe from all hazard.

But there is Beth beside me, breathing wildly and talking in ragged lopes that seem to streak around my head, across the sky above us.

At some point I stop listening and instead focus on the loveliness of my own white hands, bending and canting them above me, against the black sky.

“Do you hear what I’m saying, Addy?” she asks.

“You were speaking of dark forces,” I tell her, guessing, because this is usually what Beth is speaking of.

“You know who I thought I saw yesterday,” she says, “driving her whorey Kia over by St. Reggie’s?”

“Who?”

“Casey Jaye. All last summer, cheer buddies in your camp bunk, giggling together in your matching sports bras, and that love knot she gave you.”

“It wasn’t anything,” I say, feeling an unaccountable blush. “It didn’t mean anything.”

“Opening her thighs to show you her tight quads. I knew her wormy heart. But I shot my wad too soon and you weren’t ready to believe me. You didn’t want to.”

She will never let it go. She will never forget it.

But then she jerks up suddenly and I nearly slide from the car hood, hands gripping her jacket.

“Look out there,” she says, pointing into the distance, the place where Sutton Grove would be if it weren’t just nightness out there.

I peer off into the black, but I can’t see anything, just a shimmer of some town somewhere that’s mostly, if not fully, asleep.

A lush wino haze upon me, I guess I’ve been hoping, with colossal naïveté, that Beth will determine she has won, that she is Captain, that Coach is barely even a coach these days, ceding more and more power, and now she will let it go…she will let it go and Coach will be free.

It’s all over, or nearly so.

The police will realize the truth, and it will all be over.

And Beth will be done.

Or nearly so.

I am drunk.

“With her private jokes and her yoga orgies and her backyard jamborees,” Beth is saying. “All of you curled at her feet. Cleopatra in a hoodie. I never fell for any of it.”

“You never fell for it once,” I agree, trying to fight off the feeling of menace piercing the haze.

“But when I look out there,” she says, sweeping her hand across the lightless horizon, “all I can think is that she’s getting away with it. Getting away with everything.”

“Beth,” I warn. My eyes on the velvety dark below. The expanse of nothingness that suddenly seems to be throbbing, nervous, alive.

What does lie down there?

In this state, the unruly despair of Will’s life, the battered end of it, comes to me freshly.

I want sparkled cheeks, high laughter, and good times, and I never asked for any of this. Except I did.

“Addy,” she says, kicking her feet in the air. “I’ve got that fever in my blood. I’m ready for some trouble. Are you?”

I am not. Oh, I am not. But who would leave Beth alone when she’s like this?

“Let’s go look the devil in the eye, girlfriend,”