Dare Me Part 26

I nod.

Something creaks open in her, a place she does not want to go.

"We saw him, Addy," she says, her fingertips to her mouth, her face sheeting white. "We saw what he did."

I want to hold tight to her hand and say soft things.

"Addy," she says feverishly, her fingers fisting. "You have to understand. People will always try to scare you into things. Scare you away from things. Scare you into not wanting things you can't help wanting. You can't be afraid."

"Three days left!" shouts Mindy. "I hear scouts always always sit high left in the bleachers. We gotta work toward that corner." sit high left in the bleachers. We gotta work toward that corner."

My chest lifts. Our weird little universe where a word from Mindy Coughlin, her face red and brutish, can suddenly make me care again about the Big Game. Our qualifying shot.

But Coach is nowhere to be found.

"Why does she keep going away?" Tacy asks, mouth m.u.f.fled with bandages. She's standing next to Cori, who's rotating her left wrist anxiously, taped tight where wavering Tacy's foot lodged.

And Emily. Gimpy Emily, still boot-braced, near forgotten.

This array of casualties, and I wonder how I'm still standing.

We happy few, we band of b.i.t.c.hes, Beth used to say. Don't you forget it.

As if on cue, Beth strolls in front of us, hip-slinging gangsta.

"Let's get started, kitties," Beth says. "The Celts wait for no sad-a.s.s chicken hearts."

This, I think, is good for her. I think, Yes. Yes, Beth. Take it and let it feed you. Feed off this for a while, please. Yes. Yes, Beth. Take it and let it feed you. Feed off this for a while, please.

"The way to win is to sell it," Beth shouts, her voice rising high and thrumming in all our ears.

"Whip your heads," she says, and we do.

"Make your claps sharp," she says, and we do.

"Make your faces like you're wired for pleasure," she says, and we gleam ecstatic.

"Give 'em the best blow-job smiles you got," she says, and if she had a bullwhip, she'd be slapping it against our thighs. "Turn it on, on, on."

We ride rough and work hard for her. We have three days until the final game and we have to call up another JV whippoorwill and we will work hard for Beth because we want to show our hot stuff, our epic impudence, our unholy awesomeness in front of the sneering Celts ma.s.ses on Monday night.

But most of all, we work hard because it raises a din, a rabid, high-pitched din that can nearly drown out the sound of the current and coming chaos. The sense that everything is changing in ways we can't guess and that nothing can stop it.

Or maybe that's not it at all. Maybe all we're trying to drown out is the terrifying quiet, the sense that all there is to hear is our own thin echoes. Our sense that Coach is slipping from our clasping hands, that maybe she is already gone. That there is no center anymore and maybe there never was.

All we have is Beth. But that is something, her thunder filling up all the silence.

In the locker room, the din dissolving, girls scattered and then gone, I find myself alone, or nearly so.

With no Coach, everyone leaves a mess. This is how it was under Beth before. Flair strewn about, rolling empties of zero-carb rockstar and sugar-free monster, tampon wrappers and crushed goji berries. Even one cobwebby thong.

Bobby pins crunching under my feet, I walk through, surveying the damaged girlness.

My heart still hammering from the practice, I'm thinking of how hardcore Beth was out there today, like I haven't seen her since soph.o.m.ore year, when it still beat in her so hard. When she hadn't gotten distracted by petty grievances and her own miseries of life, her own creeping boredom.

Maybe she has never been this good, cared so much.

This is what Coach has done for her, I think. I think. She helps us all. She helps us all.

Then, lurking in the open doorway of Coach's office, she is there. The shadow she throws seems so large that her five feet swallow the office hall. Beth.

"Cap," I say, wanting to help sate her, "you bled us today."

Her back to me, I can't see her face.

I walk closer.

I'm hoping, praying for elation.

I mean, isn't she the Coach Itself now, for the moment at least?

"Beth," I say again. "Return of the King."

The sunfall flooding everything, her whole body lit darkly gold, I stop a few feet from her ambered back.

"Beth," I say, "you got everything."

Finally, slowly, a half turn of her head. A whisper of her profile, darkened by her shudder of black hair.

That's when I see that nothing's been had at all, nothing's been saved. She thought this would be it, and it wasn't.

"The sun's down and the moon's pretty," she says, her voice hushed. "It's time to ramble."

And I say yes. Of course I say yes.

25

FRIDAY NIGHT

Sprawled on the hood of my car, we are high up on the south face of the ridge, right where it drops a thousand miles or more, into the deepest part of the earth. hood of my car, we are high up on the south face of the ridge, right where it drops a thousand miles or more, into the deepest part of the earth.

We have been drinking cough-syrupy wine that clings to the tongue. Beth calls it hobo wine, and it feels like we are hobos now. Wanderers. Midnight ramblers.

I forget everything and think that, hidden up here behind the sparkly granite of a thousand gorges and k.n.o.bs, I am safe from all hazard.

But there is Beth beside me, breathing wildly and talking in ragged lopes that seem to streak around my head, across the sky above us.

At some point I stop listening and instead focus on the loveliness of my own white hands, bending and canting them above me, against the black sky.

"Do you hear what I'm saying, Addy?" she asks.

"You were speaking of dark forces," I tell her, guessing, because this is usually what Beth is speaking of.

"You know who I thought I saw yesterday," she says, "driving her wh.o.r.ey Kia over by St. Reggie's?"

"Who?"

"Casey Jaye. All last summer, cheer buddies in your camp bunk, giggling together in your matching sports bras, and that love knot she gave you."

"It wasn't anything," I say, feeling an unaccountable blush. "It didn't mean anything."

"Opening her thighs to show you her tight quads. I knew her wormy heart. But I shot my wad too soon and you weren't ready to believe me. You didn't want to."

She will never let it go. She will never forget it.

But then she jerks up suddenly and I nearly slide from the car hood, hands gripping her jacket.

"Look out there," she says, pointing into the distance, the place where Sutton Grove would be if it weren't just nightness out there.

I peer off into the black, but I can't see anything, just a shimmer of some town somewhere that's mostly, if not fully, asleep.

A lush wino haze upon me, I guess I've been hoping, with colossal navete, that Beth will determine she has won, that she is Captain, that Coach is barely even a coach these days, ceding more and more power, and now she will let it go...she will let it go and Coach will be free.

It's all over, or nearly so.

The police will realize the truth, and it will all be over.

And Beth will be done.

Or nearly so.

I am drunk.

"With her private jokes and her yoga orgies and her backyard jamborees," Beth is saying. "All of you curled at her feet. Cleopatra in a hoodie. I never fell for any of it."

"You never fell for it once," I agree, trying to fight off the feeling of menace piercing the haze.

"But when I look out there," she says, sweeping her hand across the lightless horizon, "all I can think is that she's getting away with it. getting away with it. Getting away with everything." Getting away with everything."

"Beth," I warn. My eyes on the velvety dark below. The expanse of nothingness that suddenly seems to be throbbing, nervous, alive.

What does lie down there?

In this state, the unruly despair of Will's life, the battered end of it, comes to me freshly.

I want sparkled cheeks, high laughter, and good times, and I never asked for any of this. Except I did.

"Addy," she says, kicking her feet in the air. "I've got that fever in my blood. I'm ready for some trouble. Are you?"

I am not. Oh, I am not. But who would leave Beth alone when she's like this?

"Let's go look the devil in the eye, girlfriend," she says, tilting that wine bottle to my lips, to my open mouth, and I drink, drink, drink.

Beth now at the wheel, we are looping endlessly, in curling figure eights, and the streetlamps overhead are popping over my eyes.

Then we're climbing upward again and there's a pause between songs and I hear a roar in my ears. Face to the window, I see the crashing interstate is newly below us.

We're nearly there before I realize where she's taken me.

"I don't want to be here," I whisper.

She stops the car in front of the lightboxed sign, The Towers.

We sit, the light greening our faces.

"This is not a place I want to be," I say again, louder now.

"Can you feel the energy here?" she says, putting lip gloss on with her finger, like we are readying for our dates. "It's some black mojo."

"What are you talking about?"

"Our great captain's captain, the she-wolf. The li-o-ness. I can feel her here," she smiles spookily. "How it was for her that night."

I don't say anything.

"The night she done shot her lover dead," Beth says, crooking her fingers into little guns.

Bang-bang, she whispers in my ear, she whispers in my ear, bang-bang! bang-bang!

And there it is. She has said it.