Dare Me - By Megan Abbott Page 0,80

I felt sorry for Coach. And then when the Sarge died, I felt rotten. I thought maybe Beth used that picture in some evil way. And that Sarge killed himself on account of it. Is that what happened, Addy?”

“I don’t know what happened,” I say, finally.

She stares up at me, glassy-eyed.

“Tacy,” I say, “you better show me that picture.”

“I deleted it,” she says, too quickly.

“You did not,” I say.

Sighing again, she reaches into the pocket of her yoga pants and pulls out her tiny phone, a searing purple.

The image on the screen looks like it was shot through a fuzzed screen door.

You can see Will’s uniform, the green suit coat, the gold buttons shimmering, the braid on the lifted sleeve, and part of his face, the rest concealed by the back of a female head, a swamp of dark hair and bare shoulderblades.

For a second, I think it’s Coach. It looks so much like Coach.

But then I recognize Beth’s green hoodie, the one slipping down, his palm spread across her back.

The look on Will’s face, how could I really name it, everything so pixilated into blurred nothingnesss.

His face, though, seems to me the saddest I’ve ever seen.

Both stricken and despairing.

Like the pictures you see of people standing in front of their burning houses, like one I saw once of a dad holding his nightgowned little girl in his arms, trying to put on her shoe, watching his house burn to the ground.

And I know, just like that, if Tacy had been standing on the other side of the truck, if her camera lens captured Beth’s eyes instead, it would show the same thing.

The picture, I can’t stop looking at it. Because it seems to me suddenly filled with truth. Because it seems so beautiful.

“I never wanted to get anyone into trouble,” Tacy says. “But Beth, she scares me. I mean, she’s always been scary. But since all this, it’s been different. It’s like she’s gone up three levels of scary.”

I stop looking at the photo and look at Tacy instead.

Things begin to shimmer into view.

“So you just gave Beth the photo and that was it?”

“That’s what I said,” Tacy says, flipping over, lying back on the mat beneath her. “Isn’t it?”

Resting on elbows, she stretches her skinny little toothpick legs, observing them, admiring herself.

Looking down at her, all I can think of is the time she’s cost me, these collusions, her weakness. The fact that this little tinkerbell got to be Top Girl.

Something in that puffball face of hers and I can’t stop myself, my foot pressing against her face. Pushing into her blighted chin, still vein-mottled from her fall. I push it hard, harder than I meant to, its softness giving way.

“Addy,” Tacy moans, scratching at me with her fingers. “Addy, what are you—”

“You sent that picture to Mr. French, didn’t you?” I say, my voice husky and surprising.

Hands flinging up, she tries to shove my leg away, but she can’t.

“Yes, yes,” she whimpers, tears coming in long syrupy strands.

I drop my foot back to the floor. And she tells me the rest.

How Beth got Matt French’s number from Coach’s phone and made Tacy send it, claiming she didn’t have a new phone yet.

And that Beth wrote the text herself: Look at the kind of woman you’re married to. Look at the trash she opens her legs for.

Beth was always good with words. And knowing the times when simplest was best.

“But the picture didn’t mean anything,” Tacy insists. “A dumb prank. I guess Beth probably thought Mr. French would make her quit, or Coach would get fired. But wouldn’t it have made more sense to send it to Principal Sheehan?”

I shake my head at this stupid girl.

Heels of hands to her mascaraed eyes, she whispers, “Do you think that blurry little picture could have had something to do with all this? With Sarge and everything?”

I’m thinking of Matt French reading the text and looking at that picture. I’m guessing what he really thought:

Not, There’s some man with one of my wife’s cheerleaders.

No, instead, There’s some man with my wife.

“And now Beth won’t back off,” she says, her hand back on my ankle, holding on to it, but eyes fixed straight ahead, at the locker room doors. “She keeps saying I better not tell anyone what we did. At practice the other day, when I fell, it was like she was showing me what she could do to me.”

Her gaze locked on the doors, fiercely vibrating from the school furnace’s