Dare Me - By Megan Abbott Page 0,88

arms like points on a star,

Two

shah shah shah shah booty

I can feel, fingers to Beth’s wrist, the veins pulsing, the beat slower than it should be, and I think—

Three

you ain’t got

—her pumas balancing on the gathered hands below, a pinched tightrope and she is cheering, oh, is she cheering.

Waiting for Emily to count EIGHT, then DEADMAN, we drop Beth’s wrists, she falls backwards, limbs outspread, into the waiting arms below…that is what she is to—

Four

you ain’t got it, you ain’t got it, ain’t got it

She is so high, fifteen feet, sixteen, seventeen, a thousand—and the whole gym shaking victorious, her body still like a fierce arrow—when I feel her suddenly yank her wrist from my clasp.

My body pitches forward, but terror-eyed Mindy has hold of me, and RiRi bobbles to keep hold of Beth’s other wrist.

I have my eyes on Beth, I think I am calling out to her, her name choked in my chest, but she won’t turn, she couldn’t or she’d—

Five

…and I know and I’m not going to stop her, there is no stopping her.

This is what she wants, after all.

Six-and—and two beats too soon, she propels herself backwards with such force.

The gasp from the bleachers lashes through the air.

The power with which she thrusts her body backwards.

The force with which she twists her body, spinning it, and then kicking backwards

RiRi and I teetering on our Bases, nearly falling forward toward each other—

—and all our hands grabbing for her, and the will with which Beth pitches her body, legs kicking so far back, so far back.

All the way back.

The air sucked from me, the sounds gone from the world.

The way, for a second, her body seems to lift, dance to the rafters, then the way everything shifts, all our bodies tilting in space as I feel myself falling, as I feel Beth falling.

It’s like she doesn’t weigh anything at all, and she might never hit the floor, until she does.

Then the sickening crack and seeing her head click backwards, like a doll’s.

But you must see:

She never really wanted anything but this.

The Abyss, Addy, it gazes back into you.

32

MONDAY NIGHT

I’m sitting in the hospital’s east corridor, a waiting room behind a wall of glass bricks.

Beth’s mom appears in the doorway just past nine, flinging her camel Coach bag onto the sofa and bursting into inky tears that seem to come in gaping spurts for hours.

She talks mournfully of her failures, her weaknesses, and most of all the harshness of life for pretty girls who never know how good they have it.

Finally, she cries herself to sleep, sinking into her coat like a slumbering bat.

I move three seats away.

The TV, pitched high in a corner, scrolls footage of Beth being wheeled out on the gurney, one arm dangling limply.

Then the on-camera interviews, and there’s Tacy Slaussen’s rabbit face.

“I just want everyone to know that our stunts usually hit,” she says, tightening her ponytail and showing all her teeth. “But let’s face it. Cheer can be dangerous. I got injured just the other day. It was supposed to be me out there.”

Behind her, Emily sobbing in the background. “I didn’t mess up the count, I didn’t.”

I reach up and switch the channel, but Tacy’s on that one too.

“But Beth always told us, life is about taking risks, and you can die at any moment,” she says, with those pointy teeth of hers, forehead shining.

“It’s what we sign up for.”

And then Brinnie Cox, crying just as she cried a few hours before when she flunked a chemistry quiz, and a few hours before that, when Greg Lurie called her Bitty Titty.

“She is such a talented girl,” she wails, raccoon-eyed, “and we all feed off her positiveness.”

Not long after, I see the news of the arrest.

The closed caption reads: Cheerleading coach husband to be charged in slaying.

Which is such a simple way to say what is anything but simple.

The snapshot they show on the news seems to be from some other world I don’t know, Coach and Matt French, faces giddy, a great custardy wedding veil whipping around her.

I think of him out there in the backyard the other day, his stillness. But wasn’t he always so still, a shadow drifting past all our antic energy? So strange to think how much was roiling in him. The thing we mistook for blankness, for boringness, for a Big Nothing, turned out to be everything. A battered heart, a raging one.

“What is this, the all-cheerleading network?” brays a tired expectant father in the chair next