You know what we throw around? Live girls. Do you know who flies? We do. You know what we hurl to the rafters? Each other.”
I hear Emily’s tender gasp behind me, her boot brace clacking, and the muffled squeal of the JV Flyer.
“Tonight, you’ve got to spill their blood,” she says, her raised arm, her temples, her neck pulsing, “or I promise you they will spill yours.”
There’s a dark roiling on Beth and it’s starting to sweep through us. We are letting it, all of us.
“Brace those arms. Bolt those knees. Look at that crowd like you’re about to give them the best piece of ass they ever had. Sell it.”
The feelings charging through the room, they’re complicated and incendiary and none of us, not even me, can name them all. Everything in Beth, in her swarthy energy, so repulsive and so captivating—
“Bases, eyes on your Flyer, she is yours. You lock her to your heart. You lose her, blood on the mat. She is yours. Make her.”
All the swirling ponytails nod in unison, as if they know, as if any of us know what Beth, veins tight on her upstretched arms, means or could ever mean.
“JV,” Beth says, pointing her witching finger at the yearling under my arm, and because none of us really know her name. “You fail, you fail all of us. So you will not fail.”
The JV shakes her head back and forth, looking like she might cry.
“Girlie, you’ve been a chick long enough. I need you to show me that egg tooth,” she says, slipping her fingers under JV’s tank top, heaving her up on the bench with her. “Tonight’s the night, you’re gonna pip through the shell.”
Beth tugs the girl under her own bronzed arm, stares her down and nearly laps her face. “So stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood. We’ve come to bury them. We’ve come to plow their bones by the final bell.”
She pounds her pumas until that bench rattles, our bodies shake.
“It’s harvest day, girlies,” she says, her voice like crackling lightning. “Get busy when the corn is ripe.”
I almost fall for it, for Beth’s hoodoo grandiosity.
Our captain, like Beth from before, our noble, proud, heart-strong Beth, and this Beth too, a warrior nearly vanquished but not quite, never quite.
We few, we happy few, she might say, we band of sistuhs, for she today that sheds her blood with me, shall be my sistuh always.
Couldn’t I just let that be enough for these two hours?
But then Tacy sputters in, late, her face still bruise-dappled and her eyes lightless, damned.
And I’m reminded of everything.
Including the feel of my foot pressed against her face, what she made me do.
This feeling, this high, it’s not real. It’s that Jesus-love flooding through me, by which I mean the adderall and the pro clinical hydroxy-hot with green tea extract and the eating-nothing-but-hoodia-lollipops-all-day.
And most of all the high that comes from Beth’s dark supply.
I don’t want it.
Ten minutes to game time, and no Coach to stop the squad, everyone’s breaking rules and whirring through the back bleachers, scout-spotting.
Back in the locker room, I sit, trying to get my game head on.
SCOUT! 3 row frm top, lft — lady w. cap + mirror shades! RiRi texts.
I hear a rustling one row over and there’s Beth, hands in her locker, tugging off her rows of friendship bracelets, tightening her pin-straight ponytail. Eyes on herself in her stick-on mirror, face blue and frightening.
Were it not for the angle of her locker door, the way the parking lot lights slant through the high windows, I might never have seen it.
But I did.
The hot glow of an evil eye, lurking between a pile of hair ties and toe socks.
A hamsa bracelet. Coach’s hamsa bracelet. My hamsa bracelet.
Hands to her slick shea-buttered arms, I catch her by surprise, flipping her around.
“What, did you think I wouldn’t show?” she says, and her blood all up in her cheeks and temples. “I’d never let the squad down.”
My chest lurching, I grab the bracelet with one hand and, with the other, shove her into the shower stalls.
“You did it. You took it. You lied about all of it,” I shout raggedly, my voice echoing to the slimy ceiling of the showers. “It was never in Will’s apartment, was it?”
“No,” she says, with an odd stuttering laugh, “of course not.”
“Why did you tell me the police found it?”
“I wanted you to see,” she says. “She was hiding everything from you. She never cared about you.”
“But you