Dare Me - By Megan Abbott Page 0,70

looking down at me. “And as for you and Coach…”

She lays her hand on my head, like a benediction.

“We are never deceived,” she says, her voice deep and ringing. “We deceive ourselves.”

We are lying on Beth’s deep blue bedroom carpet, as we’ve done a hundred, a thousand times, collapsing from our labors, the wages of war, one kind or another. Adrift on that speckless ultramarine, Beth would lay out all her martial machinations for me, her attaché, her envoy. Sometimes her mouthpiece. Whatever was required.

In some ways, Beth was almost never wrong in her judgments.

Paper-thin, master cleansed Emily was not, in fact, strong enough to do the stunt.

Tacy didn’t have the head game or the strong legs of a true Flyer.

With Beth, so full of lies, you have to push past the lie to see the deeper truth that drives it. Because Beth is almost always lying about something, but the lying is her way of rendering something else, something tucked away or confounded, manifest.

And you have to keep playing, and maybe the truth will reveal itself, maybe Beth will get tired and finally show her hand. Or maybe it’ll stop being fun for her, and she’ll just hurl that truth in your face, and make you cry.

I never liked you anyway.

You’re just so goddamned fat it depresses me.

I saw your dad at the mall buying lingerie with a strange woman.

Casey Jaye said you can’t throw a back handspring for shit, and she told RiRi there’s something weird about you, but she wouldn’t say what.

Oh, and I only pretended to care.

“It can’t be easy,” she says, surveying her lotioned legs, “knowing you were an accessory to a crime, even if it’s after the fact. It’s not really a position a red-blooded All-American teenage girl expects to be put in, especially given everything you’ve done for your Coach.”

“Like the things I’ve done for you?” I say. “Did you think I was going to be your lieutenant forever?”

“What have you ever done for me,” she replies, her eyes snake-slitted, “that you didn’t want to do?”

Flipping over on her stomach, she props her tanned chin on one palm and reaches out to me with her other.

“Oh, Addy. You can’t even see it, you’re so love-blind. I’m sorry about that. And sorry to have to do this to you. Really, I am.”

“I’m not…love-blind,” I stutter, the word throwing me. Which I guess it’s meant to, but—

“But you’re bringing a knife to a gunfight,” she continues. “You can’t see the facts, even laid out plain. Even when the po-lice department, Addy, calls you in to the station to investigate her lover’s murder. What will it take?”

I feel a sob creep into my chest, she’s just so damned good and I can’t breathe.

“You keep saying these things,” I say, “but you’ve never given me any real reason to believe why you think she would ever…”

Beth slants her head. “Why she would ever?” she repeats, singsongy. “Why wouldn’t she?”

My head throbs, not knowing what to believe now, ever, except I believe them both—Beth and Coach, in different ways—when their words wormhole into my brain. They make everything seem real. Dark. Painful. True.

“It kills me, I tell you,” Beth says, “the way you all fawn over her. The way you, Addy, the way you fawned over them both. She isn’t what you think, and neither was he. They were not star-crossed. He was just a guy, like all of them. They fucked each other and he got tired of her before she got tired of him. She gets everything she wants, and she couldn’t stand not getting him anymore.”

The throbbing becoming something else, something worse and more insistent.

I lift myself up to sitting position, my head light and everything lifting lightly in me. The edge of hysteria sliding into her voice, it can come to no good.

“And none of us gets away with anything,” she says, climbing up onto her knees in front of me. “None of us.”

“You don’t know anything,” I say. “Neither of us knows.”

She looks at me, and for a second I almost see all the misery and rage, centuries of it, tumbling across her face.

“She’s not a killer,” I say, trying to make my voice bore-thick.

She looks down at me, her eyes depthful and ruinous.

“Love is a kind of killing, Addy,” she says. “Don’t you know that?”

There are three hours before practice, the Big Practice before the Big Game.

I can’t live in Beth’s head a moment longer, so I spend a few hours at