Dare Me - By Megan Abbott Page 0,72

one of you.”

Back in the near-empty parking lot, we sit together in my car.

“Listen,” he says, the plastic grocery bag hooked daintily around his wrist. “I haven’t said anything. So don’t worry.”

“What do you mean?” I say, marveling still at the idea of Prine in my car, us both here. Everything.

“I have some priors. I had a substance problem,” he says, fingers crackling noisily at the bag. “So I’m not saying a goddamn thing to those cops. You can tell her not to worry. And you can tell her to leave me the hell out of this.”

I don’t know who “she” is, but I don’t ask.

There is a palpable sense of revelation coming and I want to tread carefully. Finally someone not smart enough to lie to me, or even to know why he should.

Though, as I’m sitting there with him, his left foot ensnared by the cheetah-print sports bra on my car floor, it strikes me he might be thinking the same thing.

“So you live here or something?” I ask, fingering my gearshift.

“No,” he says, watching my hand. He takes a breath. “Sarge let me crash in that apartment. He knew no one was living there. The realtors are always just leaving it open. He gave me the building key. For when things get tough at home.”

He looks over at me, sheepish.

“My old man and me don’t always see eye to eye,” he explains. “Sarge understood…Sarge, he was such a good guy.”

Suddenly, Prine’s eyes fill. I try to hide my surprise. He turns away and looks out the window, flipping his sunglasses down.

“So why are you here now?” I ask.

“I had to see what I left behind,” he says. Looking down, he opens his plastic bag, showing me a travel-size mouthwash, a single-blade razor, a dusty bar of soap.

He lowers his voice to a whisper, even though there’s no sign of life anywhere. Luxury Living on Nature’s Edge.

“Listen, the cops don’t know I was here that night,” he says.

I try not to let him see my flinch.

“Okay,” I say.

“It doesn’t matter anyway,” he says. “I left before any gunshot. I don’t know what the hell happened. But I did hear the two of them headboard banging for a good fifteen minutes before midnight and I couldn’t get any sleep.”

Coach, there, that night. When Will was still alive.

I take this fact, this staggering and harrowing fact, and put it in a far corner in my head. For now. I can’t look at it. It is there for safekeeping.

“That’s how it always was with them,” he says. “I don’t like hearing other people’s private business. And, to be honest, the two of them, it made me sad.”

He looks at me, fingers plucking at the bag loop.

“I mean, that was a messed-up situation, right?” he looks at me, raising his eyebrows. “You could see something bad was going to happen. Something was going to go down.”

I know he’s waiting for some kind of confirmation, but I don’t say anything.

“The point is,” he goes on, “like I promised her, I’m not saying a goddamned word.”

“Her?” I ask, measuring my voice. Hiding everything.

“Your friend,” he says, a little impatiently now. “The brunette.”

“Beth?”

“Beth,” he says. “The one with the tits. I mean, you seem nice, but so did she at first. Girl like that, she could make trouble for me.”

Craning his neck, he looks up at the apartment building, ominously.

“All of you, you’re a whole lot of trouble,” he says, softly. “I don’t need that kind of trouble.”

A whole lot of trouble, I think.

“Guess Sarge found out, didn’t he?” he looks at me, grimly. “Queen of the hive. Don’t mess with the queen.”

I look at him and wonder which queen he means.

Driving away, I can’t begin to unravel it all. Why would Beth want Prine to keep quiet about hearing Coach in Will’s apartment that night? And why didn’t she tell me, at least, if her aim is to convince me of Coach’s guilt?

But the pulsing center is this: Coach was there with Will that night, Will alive. She and Will in bed.

The picture in my head now, Coach standing before me, bleached sneakers in hand.

Coach.

Tilting pyramid-top, reaching for me, bucking for my arm, knowing what it will mean. Where it would take both of us.

“Two days, four hours,” RiRi says, fingers tapping on her thighs anxiously. “Fifty-two hours till the game, hollaback girls. Where is she?”

We are all standing in the gym, waiting for Coach.

I haven’t figured out what I will do when she