Dare Me - By Megan Abbott Page 0,64

she says, tilting that wine bottle to my lips, to my open mouth, and I drink, drink, drink.

Beth now at the wheel, we are looping endlessly, in curling figure eights, and the streetlamps overhead are popping over my eyes.

Then we’re climbing upward again and there’s a pause between songs and I hear a roar in my ears. Face to the window, I see the crashing interstate is newly below us.

We’re nearly there before I realize where she’s taken me.

“I don’t want to be here,” I whisper.

She stops the car in front of the lightboxed sign, The Towers.

We sit, the light greening our faces.

“This is not a place I want to be,” I say again, louder now.

“Can you feel the energy here?” she says, putting lip gloss on with her finger, like we are readying for our dates. “It’s some black mojo.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Our great captain’s captain, the she-wolf. The li-o-ness. I can feel her here,” she smiles spookily. “How it was for her that night.”

I don’t say anything.

“The night she done shot her lover dead,” Beth says, crooking her fingers into little guns.

Bang-bang, she whispers in my ear, bang-bang!

And there it is. She has said it.

“You have lost your mind,” I say, the words heavy in my mouth. “You have lost it.”

“Hey, Coach,” Beth sings, her grin wider and wider, “where you goin’ with that gun in your hand?”

“Shut up,” I say, my hand leaping out and shoving at her, a strange half laugh coming from me.

But then I’m shoving harder and I’m not laughing, and Beth grabs my hands and locks them together. When did she get so sober?

“He killed himself,” I say, so loud it hurts me to hear. “She didn’t do anything. She’d never do anything like that.”

My hands in hers, she leans toward me, very close, her wine-thick breath in my face, my hands knotted in hers so tight I feel a hot tear in my eye corner.

“She would never do anything like that,” she repeats back to me, nodding.

“She loved him,” I say, the words sounding small and ridiculous.

“Right,” Beth says, smiling, pressing my hands against her own hard ribcage, like clutching in the backseat with a boy, “because no one’s ever killed the person they love.”

“You’re drunk, you’re drunk and awful,” I say, and I’m trying to get my hands free, and we’re rocking, our faces so close. “An awful bitch, the worst I ever knew.”

She drops my hands at last, tilting her head and watching me.

Suddenly, the alcohol heaving in me, my hands palsied, I have to get out of the car.

Feet on the smooth, freshly poured asphalt of the lot, I breathe deep.

But this is what she wants because she gets out too.

I look at her, face shot through not with moonlight but with the wan blue of the bank of parking lot lights.

“Let’s go,” I say. “I don’t need this—”

“Do you smell something?” Beth asks, suddenly. “Like flowers or something. Honeysuckle.”

“I don’t smell anything,” I say.

I smell all kinds of things, most of all chlorine. Bleach. Blood.

“Did you know the government is studying the possibility that people might give off these scents when they’re lying?” Beth says, and I must be dreaming. “And each smell is very individual. Like a fingerprint.”

I’ve dreamed my way into one of Beth’s nightmares, the one where we’re standing above the gorge, like an open throat.

“I wonder if yours is honeysuckle,” she says.

“I’m not lying about anything,” I say.

“Honeysuckle so sweet I can taste it. You’re good enough to eat, Addy-Faddy,” she says, and I feel she’s monstrous now.

“He killed himself,” I say, my voice almost too low to hear. “It’s the truth, if you want to know.”

“You lie and lie, and I keep lapping it up,” she says, clucking her tongue. “Not anymore.”

“He did. He shot himself in the mouth on his carpet,” I say, and it’s not even my voice, not even my words, but they come so fast and so sure. “It’s the truth.”

Beth is watching me, and there’s no stopping me now.

“He shot himself,” I say. I wish I could stop, but I can’t stop until I convince her. “He fell on the carpet and his head was black. And he died there.”

With those security floodlights glaring, her face like marble, she says nothing.

And I keep going.

“You don’t know,” I say, the wind whipping my hair into my face, my mouth. “Because you didn’t see. But I know.”

“How do you know?” she darts back, and repeats her question from the