Dare Me - By Megan Abbott Page 0,90
was sleeping, she opened the bureau drawer again, took the gun, and put it in her purse.
She hid it in her file cabinet at home, far in the back behind the hundreds and hundreds of Xeroxed cheer routines. She tried not to think about it. But it was there and, trying to sleep at night, she could think of nothing else.
But now her husband has the gun, holding it funny, like it’s this thing in his hand he doesn’t recognize.
It happens so fast, Will saying to Matt, “Do you think I care? Do you think I’d stop you?”
And Will grabbing for the gun, and Matt’s eyes seizing on her at last, spotting her standing there, and abruptly gaining focus, gaining balance.
Matt, suddenly realizing, but not fast enough to stop it.
The two men pressed together, almost like they are embracing. It is as though they are embracing.
And then suddenly the gun is shoved up between their faces, and Will tipping back, the gun tilting—like the way you’d feed a bottle to a baby.
“This is it,” he says. Will says.
She’ll always remember that.
And the pop.
The flash from Will’s mouth.
Like a cherry bomb.
Like Will’s face lit from within.
Candescent.
And Will sliding to the floor.
It is so graceful, like a dance.
If it hadn’t been what it was, it would’ve been beautiful.
After that, she loses time.
Mostly, she remembers the high, sharp whistling sound that she finally realizes is coming from her.
And Matt crying. She’d never ever seen him cry, except when Caitlin was born and he’d sat in the chair next to her hospital bed and told her that he had never been so happy and nothing could ever be bad again, he wouldn’t let it be.
After that, everything is a red blur, Matt smearing the gun on the sofa cushions, smearing his fingerprints away.
She remembers thinking, How does he know to do that? And then thinking, Everyone in the world would know to do that.
She remembers him holding her in his arms and telling her things, and the red-wrung way of his face, and how she felt sorry for him, she just did.
She remembers how she looked down and his shirt cuffs were misted red.
He tried to get her to leave with him, but she refused. Maybe he tried. That part she doesn’t really remember.
She remembers sitting on the leather sofa for a minute, staring out the big windows, night-blackened.
She couldn’t have, but she thinks she heard Matt driving away, twenty-seven floors down.
She doesn’t remember calling me.
She never looked down at the floor.
When she finishes telling me, we’re sitting on a back curb and it’s so cold but neither of us wants to go inside.
“After, I remember shouting, ‘How could you do this to me?’” she says with almost a wry laugh. “But which one of them was I saying it to?”
How could you do this to me? I wonder if she knows she’s still saying it in her sleep.
“When I came home that night, all the drawers were open, the file cabinet dumped on the floor. He’d gone through everything,” Coach says. “But I don’t know what started it.”
I don’t say anything.
“I don’t think he ever meant to use that gun at all,” she says. “That’s not how he is.”
“But if Matt explains how it was, if you both do,” I say, my voice rising up, “maybe they’ll let him go.”
She looks at me wearily, as if to say, And then what, Addy? Then what?
“I saw his face right before,” she says. “Will’s face. I saw the way he was looking at Matt.”
She turns to me.
“He never looked at me at all.”
Picturing Will, I think I finally see what it was. I could never name it before, the way his eyes were always drifting, never connecting. There was the feeling with him always of a room everybody had left.
“Tonight, just before they came to arrest him,” she says, “Matt said, ‘What they’ll never believe is that he wanted to die.’ He said, ‘Colette, it doesn’t seem fair that I get to know that. That I get that. But it’s true.’”
She looks at me, smiling sadly. “But you know what? He’s right. It really isn’t fair that he gets to know that.”
Her smile turning grim. “Because that doesn’t help me.”
We sit quietly for a long time.
“Coach,” I say, my voice surprising me. Then I ask something because I have the feeling it’s my last chance to ever ask it. “I never knew why you love it. Cheer. How you came to love it.”
She runs a