Dare Me - By Megan Abbott Page 0,73

does arrive, if I will let my face betray anything.

I slide two Tylenol with codeine, leftovers from last year’s thumb jam, under my tongue and wait.

But Coach doesn’t show.

And Beth, well, she’s not there either.

“I don’t understand how Coach could do this to us,” Tacy yowls, her battered lip now a frosted lavender. “Two days before the big game.”

“It must be some kind of test,” Paige Shepherd says, chin-nodding with unsure surety. “To show us we can do it on our own.”

RiRi is doing a straddle stretch against the wall, which usually calms her down.

“No,” she says. “Something’s wrong. Really wrong. I’ve been hearing things. What if this is all about Sarge Stud?”

Oh, this causes quite a conflagration.

“My brother—listen to this!” Brinnie Cox gasps through those big chiclet teeth of hers. “My brother works at the sub shop next to the police station where the cops come in for lunch and he heard them mention Coach. And I don’t know what they said, but…”

There’s scurrying and speculations spun like long sticky gum strands, but I am out of it.

Instead, I work it. I pound that mat. I’m doing my tucks, over and over, curling my body sharklike upon itself.

“You are so fucking tight,” RiRi murmurs, strolling by.

I slap her thigh hard and grin.

“You’re better than you ever were with Beth,” she says.

“I’m working harder,” I say.

“You were kicking it with Casey Jaye last summer,” RiRi says. “You were so good.”

“Why are you bringing that up?” I say. “Why does everyone always want to talk about that?”

It’s the thing no one can let go of. But I can. I’d like to never think of any of it again.

“I was glad when you two got together,” she says. “That’s all I’m saying.”

I think suddenly of Casey, the ease of her light hands on me, flipping my hips up, laughing.

“You know,” RiRi says, “Casey told me she thought you were the bravest, best cheerleader she ever knew and she’s cheered her whole life.”

“She meant Beth,” I say. “She must have meant Beth.”

Addy, Casey whispered one night, hanging from the bunk above me. She’s never going to let it be you. Fuck your four inches. You’re light as air. You could be Top Girl. You’re a badass and beautiful. You should be captain.

“And that fight between you and Beth, we all knew it was coming,” RiRi says, shaking her head. “Four of us to pull you two off each other.”

“It was an accident,” I say, but no one ever believed me. “My hand got caught.”

One day, tumbling class by the lake, I was spotting Beth’s handspring. When my arm flung up, my fingers caught her hoop earring, pulling it clean through.

I was trying to catch you, I’d told her, the hoop still hooked through my fingers. You were bending.

But she’d just stood there, holding the side of her head, a brick red trickle between tan fingers.

Everyone whispered that it was about Casey, but it wasn’t. It was an accident. Beth and her big door-knocker earrings. It just happened.

Sometimes now, when she’s not looking, I stare at her earlobe and want to touch it, to understand something.

I never thought you’d be friends again after that, RiRi said later. But we were. No one understands. They never have.

“I stood with her when they stitched up her ear,” RiRi says now. “I never saw her cry before. I never knew she had tear ducts. Hell, I never knew she had blood in her.”

“It was just a fight,” I say, remembering the two of us tangled up, someone screaming.

“I thought,” RiRi says, “‘Addy’s finally manning up to Beth.’ None of us ever had the guts.”

“A stupid fight, like girls do,” I say.

“And, for what it’s worth, Beth talked all kinds of trash about Casey,” RiRi says, “but I never believed it.”

I had, though. And I stripped my bunk of sheets and walked down to the end of the cabin, to the bunk Beth had already vacated for me. And I never talked to Casey again.

“Addy, you could still do it,” RiRi says now. “You could be captain, anything.”

“Shut the fuck up,” I say.

RiRi brushes back, like I’ve hit her.

“That was a long time ago,” I add, setting my arms up for another tuck. “That was last summer.”

A half hour passes, everyone doing lazy tuck jumps and stretches, before we hear the sound.

Coach Templeton’s ancient boom box sliding across the gym floor, blasting bratty girl rap: “Take me low, where my girlies go, where we hit it till they’re