Dare Me - By Megan Abbott Page 0,91

finger along her upper lip. “I never loved it,” she says, shaking her head. “It was just a thing. I never cared about it at all.”

I don’t believe her.

“What happens now?” I say.

She looks at me and laughs.

A few days later, I’m watching the news, my new habit, when I see the latest report.

“The break came when a witness identified Matthew French as the man he had spotted running from The Towers apartment building the night of the murder. Sources say the witness reported that, under the parking lot lights, it looked like French’s clothes were covered in blood.”

You can’t keep secrets long, and it’s RiRi who tells me who the witness was.

Jordy Brennan, crooked nose and high-tops.

One of his late-night runs, he made it nearly all the way to Wick Park. Spotting the bright lights of The Towers parking lot, he stopped to look for just the right song for the run home.

I wonder what it must have been like to see Matt French tearing through those front doors. If Jordy was really close enough to see any blood. If he was close enough to see the expression on Matt French’s face. Sometimes I feel like I can.

Jordy Brennan. I picture him up there, taking long, dragging breaths in the frosted air, during the moments before he saw Matt French. Just a few hundred yards from the spot where he once kissed me messily for a half hour or more, those vacant eyes of his shut tight. Believing something was beginning.

Those moments when he stood up there, catching his breath, looking for his song, I wonder if he thought about me.

I visit Beth in the hospital once. It’s very late and past visiting hours, but I don’t want to see her mom again or all the squad girls teeming there, at first as if on deathwatch and then as if on a healing prayer vigil. Oh, to see them and to watch their paroxysms, like Salem witches tearing their hair out, lolling their tongues.

Then, when the Reaper no longer lurked and there was no more talk of intracranial bleeding and cognitive impairment, they turned to epic poems on the We Miss You Beth! Facebook page, where everyone wishes their ♥♥ and get well soon, sistuhs! and to hourly deliveries, cookie bouquets, pluming gift baskets stuffed with smiley-face cupcakes, teddy bears donning nurse’s hats. Everything Beth would just love.

So I come late, the hospital blue and lonesome.

I stand at her bed, my hands on the side rails.

There’s a start in my chest when I see she’s awake, her eyes bright in the moonlight, as if waiting for me.

She tells me she didn’t think I’d come, that everyone has come but me.

“Even my dad,” she says, smiling faintly. “He wants to talk about a lawsuit. Can you figure?”

I tell her Coach has left town, has taken Caitlin to her mother’s, will only come back for the trial.

But she doesn’t say anything and it’s a while before she talks again.

When she does, she starts in the dreamy middle of something, her words caught in her lips.

“I’ll never forget seeing it. How she came in one day and I saw her wearing it,” she says, her voice wool-thick and plaintive. “I couldn’t believe it when I saw it. It was the worst part, worse than anything.”

I don’t know what she means, and wonder about the things happening in her brain.

“I couldn’t believe it,” she said. “You gave it to her, the very same one, the very same.”

She keeps looking at me, a barely banked fire there, hovering behind her eyes.

“How could you give her that bracelet, Addy?” she asks.

The bracelet. I can’t believe we’re back on the hamsa bracelet after everything that’s happened. The fluid pressing on Beth’s skull, that’s what it is, like when it happened, the black blood pooling in her ear.

I shake my head. “It was just a bracelet, Beth. I don’t even remember where I got it—”

“I mean, that was the worst part,” she says. “It really was.”

That’s when I remember.

A present for you, Beth had said when she gave it to me a year ago, or more. Wear it forever. Which I think is the same thing I’d hoped for Coach.

“I forgot,” I say. Which must be a lie, but it’s one of the pieces I don’t look at. Like Beth says, I choose what to look at. I choose what to remember. Beth is my memory, remembering for me.

“You’ve given me lots of bracelets. We all do