Dare Me - By Megan Abbott Page 0,89

to me, until he sees my uniform, the sequins matted to my leg.

Later, Beth’s mom comes back from talking to the doctor and smoking twelve cigarettes in the parking lot.

She says it’s a skull fracture in three places.

“I was waiting for her.” That’s what Beth kept saying, lying on the gym floor, her eyes black. “Where did she go?”

All the way out, like on some continuous loop. “When will she come back? I was waiting for her.”

There seems no point in sitting, so I drive to the police station at two a.m. and sit.

It’s an hour before I see Coach, holed up in the back lot with a pack of Kools—these are not times for clove cigarettes—her breath making dragony swirls.

“Hey,” she says, when she spots me.

We sit in my car, her eyes darting over and over to the back door, like she’s waiting for the cops to realize she shouldn’t be out here alone.

I don’t tell her about Beth, don’t ask if she knows.

It’s her time to talk, and she does.

That night, like any other night, she tells me, Matt was working late and she still had no car.

Will wants to see her, needs to, really.

Says he’ll drive her back and forth if she’ll come. He never wants to be alone.

No one ever needed her half as much, not even her daughter. She is sure of it.

At his apartment, everything feels different. It’s been that way lately. The feeling that it’s all too much, and even scary, the way he holds her hard enough to hurt, talking the whole time about how she is all that keeps him from the way he feels, which is like his heart is pumping water and drowning him to death.

These are the ways he talks lately, and the only thing to do is to hold on to him. Some nights she’s held him so hard, she has bruises on the heels of her hands.

They are in the bedroom a long time, and nothing is made better for more than one tight minute. The look on his face after frightens her.

She takes a long shower to give him time to pull himself together, to shake off the night horrors of his dark room.

But when she turns off the faucet she hears a man talking loudly. Saying something over and over. At first she thinks it’s Will, but it isn’t Will.

Over and over, the same rhythm and the same feeling of panicky anger, like her dad after things started to go wrong for him, at work, with her mom, with the world, and sometimes it was like he would tear the whole house down with him, raze it, incinerate it.

She guesses she is hearing it through the ceiling, the floor. Doesn’t that happen in apartments, where nothing is private or secret?

For a few seconds she doesn’t even call out to Will, figures she is being silly, all the noises that rattle through these big buildings, the way sound carries in the gorges.

But then the sound flies up fast and is now familiar to her, feels close enough to touch. That’s when she pulls on her T-shirt, her body still so wet it fuses to her in an instant, and starts walking out of the bathroom.

“Will,” she says. “Will.”

And she is shaking the water from her hair. Her head is down and so she doesn’t see how it started.

“Listen, please, calm down and—”

Will, towel wrapped around him, is talking to someone in the tone she sometimes uses with Caitlin when Caitlin scares herself at night, seeing ghosts slipping under her closet door.

And another voice, one she knows:

“—think you can do whatever you want. Another man’s wife—”

And it is Matt, and how can Matt be here? She wonders if she is still asleep and this is like a soap opera when you walk out of the shower and learn everything has been a dream.

Matt.

At first she thinks it’s his phone in his hand, that black curve always like a dark beetle in his palm.

She remembers hearing Will say, “How did you get my gun—”

Will had shown her the gun the week before. He’d taken it from his top bureau drawer and said, Is this what life is supposed to be about?

He’d held it in his lap as he told her he hated the Guard, hated everything except her.

Because that was how he talked lately, which wasn’t a way she wanted anyone to talk, not after Dad.

In bed with him, it was all she could think about.

When he