Dare Me - By Megan Abbott Page 0,81

blast, she doesn’t even see me click a button on her phone and text the picture to myself.

“She showed me all right,” Tacy says. “But I still told you, didn’t I? I told Addy Hanlon. I guess I’m not such a cottontail. I guess I’m not the little pussy she says I am.”

Her head dipping, as if from the weight of her ponytail slinging forward, she lets her body go lax.

“I was always afraid of you,” she says, touching her cheek lightly, the tread of my shoe dancing faintly there. “Even more than Beth. I heard what you did to her. That scar on her ear.”

This time, I don’t correct it. What I’d done to Beth. What I had done to Beth, the scariest badass we ever knew.

I fold my arms and glance down at Tacy. She looks so small.

“I just wanted to be Flyer,” she says. “I’m going to be again.”

“Sure you are,” I say, handing her phone back to her.

She looks up at me as she takes it, and something passes over her face.

Dropping her phone into her pocket, she flings her hand upward, as if I should help her to her feet.

“Sure I am,” she repeats, brightening. “I mean, you’re gonna bust Beth now, right?”

A smile wiggling there, she adds, “Then I’ll be Flyer again.”

I was there, but I didn’t do anything. That’s what Coach had said.

I was with him, but I found him too. It’s all true.

Matt French’s phone blips, he looks at the screen, he sees that picture, reads those words:

Look at the kind of woman you’re married to. Look at the trash she opens her legs for.

A mistake that also happens to be true.

So Matt French, he sees the military uniform and goes hunting. Finds out who the recruiter is. Or he just checks his wife’s phone, her e-mails, something. Anything.

He finds out where this recruiter lives, and he drives out there, to that empty steel tower on the edge of nothing, and he finds his wife and her lover.

And…and…

And he wants me to know.

And then there’s Coach, the alibi she built for me.

“So last Monday you were there with your coach and her husband?” the detective had asked.

“Yes,” I said.

Coach protecting Matt French, Matt French protecting Coach. The things between them, their webbed history and hidden hearts, and so instead of turning on each other, they are raising the ramparts high. The two of them locked in something blood-deep. Who knows what lies between them now? Wrists crossed, head to head, they are closing so tight, but they need me.

They do.

And Beth. There is Beth.

30

MONDAY: TWELVE HOURS TO FINAL GAME

Work hard and believe in yourself. That’s what they always tell you. But that’s not really it at all. It’s the things you can’t say aloud, the knowledge that what you’re doing, climbing high, jumping, hurling yourself into the air, hooking arms, legs around each other to create something that will collapse with the bobble of one knee, a twist of a wrist.

Standing back, Emily said, saying the thing you’re never supposed to say, it’s like you’re trying to kill each other and yourself.

The knowing that what you are all doing, together, is the most delicate thing, fragile as spun glass, and driven by magic and abandon, your body doing things your head knows it can’t, your bodies locking together to defy gravity, logic, death itself.

If they told you these things, you would never join cheer. Or maybe you would.

In the morning, it takes a long time under the showerhead to get my blood moving. To pinprick my skin to life. To get my head game.

I stand under the bracing gush for so long, looking at my body, counting every bruise. Touching every tender place. Watching the swirl at my feet.

I’m really just trying to jack up my heart.

I think, This is my body, and I can make it do things. I can make it move, flip, fly.

After the squall of a blow-dryer, I gather my hair, sliding in bobby pin after bobby pin, pulling it all into place.

I stand in front of the mirror, my face bare, flushed, taut.

Slowly, my hands lifting, the sticky nozzle, dusty brushes, oily wands waving in front of my face, fuchsia streaking up my cheeks, my lashes stiffened to brilliant black, my hair stiff, gleaming, pin-tucked.

The perfumed mist, thick in my throat, settling.

I look in the mirror.

And it’s finally me there, and I look like no one I’ve ever seen before.

“Game Day—Kill Celts!!” shrieks the banner across the