Dare Me Part 3

But then I remember it was Casey Jaye, this girl I tumbled with at cheer camp last summer, but Beth didn't like her and camp ended anyway. Funny how people you know at camp can seem so close and then the summer's over and you never see them again at all.

Coach has her eyes on me, and there's a shadow of a dimple in the corner of her mouth.

"Show me," she says, poking out her cigarette. "Show me how to love-knot."

I say I don't have any of the thread, but Emily does, at the bottom of her hobo bag.

We show her how to do it, then watch her twist the strands, to and fro. She picks it up so fast, her fingers flying. I wonder if there's anything she can't do.

"I remember," she says. "Watch this one."

She shows us how to make one called Cat's Tongue, which is like a Broken Ladder crossed with a simple braid, and another she calls the Big Bad that I can't follow at all.

When she finishes Big Bad, she twirls it on her finger and flings it at me. I see Emily's face flicker jealously.

"Is this all you guys do for fun?" she says.

And no, it's not.

"It was like she was really interested in our lives," Emily tells everyone after, her fingers whisking across my new bracelet.

"Pathetic," Beth says. "I'm not even interested in our lives." Her finger slips under the bracelet and tug-tug-tugs until it snaps from my wrist. not even interested in our lives." Her finger slips under the bracelet and tug-tug-tugs until it snaps from my wrist.

The next day, after school, the parking lot, I see Coach walking to her sprightly little silver crawler of a car.

I'm loitering, fingers hooked around my diet soda bottle, waiting on Beth, who is my ride and occasionally sees fit to make me wait while she talks up Mr. f.e.c.k, who gives her reams of pink fluttery hall pa.s.ses from his desk drawer.

I don't even realize Coach has seen me until she beckons, her head snapping toward her open door.

"Well c'mon then," she says. "Get in."

As if she knows I've been waiting for the invitation.

Driving, Coach is shaking one of those strange, muddy-looking juices she's always drinking, raw against your teeth. I don't think any of us have ever seen her eat.

"You girls have lots of bad habits," she says, eyeing my soda.

"It's diet," I say, but she just keeps shaking her head.

"We'll get you right. The days of funyuns for lunch and tanning beds-they're over, girl."

"Okay," I say, but I must not look convincing. First of all, I've never eaten a funyun in my life.

"You'll see," she says. Her neck and back so straight, her eyebrows tweezed to precise arches. The glint-gold tennis bracelet and shine-sleek hair. She is so perfect.

"So, which one of those footballers is your guy?" Coach asks, staring out the window.

"What?" I say. "None of them."

"No boyfriend?" She sits up a little. "Why not?"

"There's not a lot to interest me at Sutton Grove High," I say, like Beth might say. I'm eyeing the cigarette pack on the console between us, imagining myself plucking one and putting it in my mouth. Would she stop me?

"Tell me," she says. "Who's the guy with all the curls?" She taps her forehead. "And the crook in his nose?"

"On the team?" I ask.

"No," she says, leaning forward toward the steering wheel a little. "I see him run track in those high-tops with the skulls."

"Jordy Brennan?" I say.

There was a group: ten, twelve guys you might loiter with, might lap-shimmy, beer-breathed at parties, might letter-jacket him for a week, a month.

Jordy Brennan wasn't one of them. He was just there, barely. Scarcely a blip on the screen of my school.

"I never thought of him," I say.

"He's cute," she says. The way she breathes in, turning the wheel, you can feel her thinking all about Jordy Brennan, for just that second.

And then I think of him too.

My shirt sc.r.a.ping up my back, the nervy-hot hands of Jordy skittering there, and before I know it, my cheer skirt twisting 'round my waist, nudging up my belly, his hands there too, and mine coiled into little nerve-b.a.l.l.s, and am I going to do it?

This is in my head, these thoughts, as I rustle under my Sutton green coverlet in bed that night. I've never had it happen like that before, a sharp ache down there, right there, and a put-put-put pulse, so breathless.

Jordy Brennan, who I never blinked at twice.

After, I'm about to call Beth for our nightly postmortem, but then I decide not to.

I think she'll be mad at me for not waiting for her after school. Or for something else. She is mad at me a lot, especially since last summer at cheer camp, when things started to change with us. I grew tired of all my lieutenant duties, and her no-prisoners ways, and I started stunting with other girls at camp. It goes deep with Beth and me. Our history is long and lashes us tight.

So I call Emily instead and talk with her for an hour or more about basket tosses and her shin splints and the special rainforest wax Brinnie c.o.x bought in Bermuda to tear off all her girl hair.

Anything but boys and Coach. My head a hot, clicking thing. I want to quiet it. I want to hush, hush it and I hold my legs together, tense as pincer grips, and clutch my stomach upon itself. I listen endlessly to Emily's squeaking voice, the way it sputters and pipes and dances lightfoot and never, ever says anything at all.

5

WEEK THREE

We're getting better all the time. all the time.

We are all locking stunts, focusing. Emily nailed her standing back handspring, which we never thought she would, with those soft-rise b.r.e.a.s.t.s she once had. We are stronger and we are learning how to feel each other's bodies, to know when we will not fall.

Nights, in bed, I hear the thuds on the gym floor, feel that thud through my bones, through the center of me.

Already I can feel my muscles thrusting under my skin. I even start eating because if I don't, my head goes soft. The first week, I pa.s.s out twice in calc, the second time hitting my head SMACK on the edge of a desk.

Can't have that, Coach says.

"You can't slap the treadmill before school and then expect to make it to lunch on your a.m. diet c.o.ke," Coach says, coming at me in the nurse's office. Charging in with such purpose, making even lumberjack-chested Nurse Vance, twice her size, jump back.

Her hands are riffling through my purse, thwacking the bag of sugar-free jolly ranchers at my chest.

I'm meant to throw them away, which I do, fast.

"Don't worry," Coach says. "No one gets fat on my watch."

So I start with the egg whites and almonds and the spinach, like wilting lily pads between my teeth. It's so boring, not like eating at all because you don't feel the sweet grit on your tongue all day and night, singing on the edge of your teeth.

But my body is tight-tight-tightening. Hard and smooth, like hers, my waist pared down to nothing, like hers.

The walk, her walk, feet planted out, like a ballerina. I wonder if Coach was a ballerina once, her hair pulled into a fierce dark bun, collarbones poking.

We all do the walk.

Not Beth, though, and not some of the girls, like Tacy Slaussen, who cotton more to Beth's dusky glower, the way she hitches her cheer skirt low, the way she slinks over to the freshman squad, perched in the stands to watch us. The way she reaches up and yanks the pom off one of the girl's socks and sinks it purposefully into the bottom of her plastic c.o.ke cup.

This is what Beth does, while some of us make ourselves hard and beautiful.

Jordy Brennan, fleet around the track, a soft tangle of cord skimming from his earbuds.

I watch him four days in a row, under the bleachers, my wrist wrapped around one of the underhangs, fingers clenching and unclenching.

"You got a thing for deviated septums, Addy-Faddy?" Beth asks.

"I don't know," I say, scratching my palms.

"What's the story, anyway?" she says. "He's dull as a plank of wood." She pings the bleacher post, which is actually aluminum.

"He looks like he's thinking things," I say, jumping a little on my toes, feeling like some dumb cheerleader. "Like maybe he actually thinks about things."

"Deep thoughts," Beth says, pulling her ponytail tight, "about puma treads."

I didn't tell her what Coach said, somehow didn't want her to know Coach had even given me a ride home.

Beth floats forward from the bleacher skeleton and lingers on the edge of the track.

He's pounding toward us, the huff-huff rattling in me, jolting between my hips.

"Jordy Brennan," Beth shouts, voice deep and clear. "Come here."

There's a rollicking in my chest as he slows to stop just past us, then does an about-face and slows to a cool-man stride as he makes his way over.

"Yeah," he says, up close his eyes green and blank as poker felt.

"Jordy Brennan," Beth says, throwing her cigarette on the ground. "It's your lucky day."

Fifteen minutes later, the three of us drifting along in his pocked Malibu, Beth directs Jordy to the convenience store on Royston Road, the place where the football players all buy their beer from the grim-faced man behind the counter, extra five-dollar charge just for the plastic bag.

We take the 40s, which I never like, all warm and sour by the time you get halfway in, and the three of us drive up to Sutton Ridge, where that girl jumped last spring.

Seventeen and brokenhearted, she jumped.

RiRi saw the whole thing, from Blake Barnett's car.

Right before, RiRi saw a screech owl burst from behind the water tank.

Her eyes lifted, so did Blake's, to the top of the rutted ridge. A place haunted by ruined Indians, or so we heard as kids spooking on Halloween. Apache maidens swan-diving over lost love for white men who abandoned them.

Together, RiRi and Blake watched.

Blake recognized the girl from St. Reggie's, and nearly shouted out to her, but didn't.

Arms stretched wide, her hands strangely spinning, and walking backwards fast.

RiRi watched it, the whole thing.

She said it was terrible and kinda beautiful.

I bet it was, jumping from so high, so very high, into the dark plush of that grieving ravine.

All us girls might look down into that same gorge on nights steeped in the sorrows of womanhood. I never felt so much, but looking now, I thought I might yet.

Beth walks up extra high on the ridge, swinging her 40 with surprising grace, and Jordy ducks his big boy head against me and kisses me smearily for a half hour or more.

He tells me this is a special spot for him.

At nights sometimes he runs up here, playing his music and forgetting everything.