Dare Me - By Megan Abbott Page 0,74

kneeling, till there’s glitter on the ceiling…”

All our heads turn, and there is Beth, white-socked and whistle swinging.

“Bitches,” Beth hollahs, ringingly. “Front and center and show me your badass selves. I’m self-deputized.”

“What do you mean?” demands Tacy. “Where’s Coach?” Our now perpetual lament.

“Didn’t you hear?” Beth says, turning the music up louder, the rattle in it sending a few girls to their feet, bouncily. “She got hauled in by the po-po.”

“What are you talking about?” I say.

“She’s at the station house. The cops picked her up in the squad car. Her ball-and-chain went with her.”

I don’t let her catch my eye.

“How do you know?” RiRi says, cocking an eyebrow.

“I went over there to see if Coach needed a ride. Barbara-the-Babysitter told me. She looked scared pantless. She said the cops came in with trash bags. Started hauling off stuff.”

Everyone exchanges wide-eyed glances.

“But I’m not here for idle gossip,” she says. “Show me you got something other than chicken hearts behind those padded bras.”

Everyone starts forming their lines, I can’t even believe how quickly.

Clapping tight and shaking their legs out and faces tomato-bursting.

Like they’re eager for it.

Like anyone will do, if they’re hard enough.

“And no more tantric chants and bullshit,” Beth says. “I want to see blood on the floor. And remember what old Coach Temp used to say…”

She steps back as everyone but me assembles for their back tucks.

“Cheer, cheer, have no fear!” they all chant. Some of them are even smiling.

Grinning, Beth gives the response: “When you’re flying high, look to the sky, and scream Eagles, Eagles, Eagles!”

An hour later, we hit the two-two-one, Beth our Flyer.

Tossed up between RiRi and me, already six feet up, our legs braced by Mindy and Cori beneath us. Tossed up, our ponytailed apex.

My arms lifted above, I have her right side, her right wrist, her arm like a batten, hard and motionless, and RiRi her left.

She, spine so straight, the line of her neck, her body still, tight, perfect.

I have her, we have her, and Beth is higher than I’ve ever seen anyone.

After everyone has scattered to the locker room, I spot a lone figure watching practice from high up in the stands.

No tan for her, no nothing, but thinner than ever, a bobby pin, and she seems to be saying something to me.

That mammoth brace on her knee and her mouth open, a big O, straining to rise.

It’s Emily. And she’s saying something.

“What?” I call up. “What do you want, Royce?”

Slowly, she gimps her way down the stands, each step meaning a wide swing of her leg.

It never occurs to me to climb up and meet her.

“Addy,” she is saying, breathless. “I never saw it before.”

“Saw what?”

“I never saw the stunts. From back there,” she says. “I never saw us.”

“What do you mean?” I say, a slight ripple in my chest.

“Did you ever really think about it? About what we’re doing?” she says, holding tight to the railing.

She starts talking, breathless and high, about the way we are stacked, like toothpicks, like pixy stix, our bodies like feathers, light and tensile. Our minds focused, unnourished, possessed. The entire structure bounding to life by our elastic bodies vaulting into each other, sticking, and then…

A pyramid isn’t a stationary object. It’s a living thing.…The only moment it’s still is when you make it still, all your bodies one body, until…we blow it all apart.

“I had to cover my eyes,” she says. “I couldn’t look. I never knew what we were doing before. I never knew because I was doing it. Now I see.”

I am not listening at all, her voice getting more shrill, but I can’t hear. A month on the DL, a month stateside, this is what happens.

I just look hard into her baby blue eyes.

“Standing back,” she says, mouth hanging in horror, “it’s like you’re trying to kill each other and yourself.”

I look at her, folding my arms.

“You were never one of us,” I say.

28

SATURDAY EVENING

I drive by the police station and see Matt French’s car. An hour later, it’s still there.

Prine heard Coach there that night. Which means Coach lied, which means Coach was there when whatever happened to Will…

These words still hang, sentence unfinished. I just can’t finish the sentence.

I remind myself that, hard as she is, I have seen her grief blast apart her stony self. At least once I did, holding her by the waist in her bedroom hallway Wednesday night. Feeling the bed shake with it while we slept. How is that a killing soul?

But does