Dare Me - By Megan Abbott Page 0,65

girls’ restroom. “Were you there?”

“Of course I was,” I say, almost a howl, my breath sliding from me.

“Of course you were,” she says, fingers reaching out, lacing through my blowing hair.

“So that’s how I know,” I say, tightening my voice. “That’s how I know more than you. I saw his body. I saw it lying there.”

She is quiet for a moment.

“You saw him kill himself.”

“No, after.”

“Ah, so you saw him after he was already dead. After Coach shot him dead.”

“No,” I say, my voice loud. “We found him together. We got to his apartment and there he was.”

There is a pause.

“I see,” she says, an unspeakably lewd leer rising. “So what exactly was going on that Coach would bring you to the Sarge’s apartment, at all hours of the night. Were you some virgin prize—”

“No,” I nearly shout, feeling stomach-sick. “She found him and she called me. I went and got her.”

She smiles faintly. “Huh,” she says.

My stomach turning, I lean against the open car door, breathing in.

“Wait,” I say, heeling back, dropping into the front seat. “You saw us that night. You saw me come home after.”

“I didn’t need to see you,” she says, toe-kicking at my ankles. It’s not really an answer, though. “I know all your beats, Addy.”

“You know everything,” I mutter.

“I know you, Addy,” she says. “Better than you ever could. You’ve never been able to look at anything about yourself. You count on me to do it for you.”

I press my face into the car headrest.

“And what you’ve just told me,” she continues, “I’m glad you finally fessed up, but it doesn’t change anything.”

Turning my head slowly toward her, my mouth drifting open…

“What?”

“All it proves, Addy, is that you lied to me. But I knew that already.”

Later, in bed, the alcohol leaching from me, I cannot make my head stop.

Drunk and weak, I gave her everything.

I feel outmaneuvered, outflanked.

Because I was.

Don’t you believe me now? I’d said, whining like a little JV, all the way home.

Don’t you get it? she’d said, shaking her head. He was done with her. And now she’s done with him. And now she’s sunk you down in it with her. And soon she’ll be done with you too.

She made you her accomplice.

She made you her bitch—but then again, weren’t you already?

I think I will never sleep and then, finally, I do.

26

SATURDAY MORNING: TWO DAYS TO FINAL GAME

I wake up with a start, and a picture flashes there.

Last Monday night, Coach opening Will’s apartment door to me. The alarm in her eyes like she’d forgotten she’d called me. The shimmery dampness clinging to her thick hair.

The picture so vivid, it aches. My heart rocketing in my chest, I feel my T-shirt sticking to me, my hung-over body blazing.

Grasping for the warm water bottle by my bed, I know something suddenly. Something I’d forgotten.

The dew on her.

Faint. Like someone who’d showered maybe a half hour before.

And Will, lying on the floor in his towel.

I can’t quite piece it together, but it reminds me of something.

It reminds me of another time.

It reminds me of this:

Will, waving through the lobby doors, his hair wet and seal-slick.

Coach, slipping from behind him, walking toward me, her hair hanging in damp loops to her shoulders, darkening her T-shirt.

The first time I drove to The Towers, the time I came and picked her up. And I knew what they’d been doing before I arrived, because it was all over them.

Their clothes on but they seemed so naked, all their pleasure in each other streaked across their faces.

Fresh from their shower, their shared shower I’d imagined.

I imagine now.

Monday night, Coach and Will, both shower damp, but Will is dead.

She didn’t find his body, Beth said. She was there when it happened. She was already there.

The phone rings and rings and rings. I turn it off and stuff it under my mattress.

The thoughts that come are rough and relentless.

The days leading up to Will’s death, the way Coach had been acting, missing practices, the car accident, and now I wonder if she’d lied about all of it. If she had felt Will slipping away and had been calling, had been begging him to come over, like that day at her house, when she finally lured him there. When she had me wait in the backyard with Caitlin.

And that night. The faintly damp hair. The bleachy tennis shoes. What had that been about, really?

And how did she get to Will’s?

I took a cab, she’d said. I snuck out of the house.