Dare Me

11



“It’s to thank you,” I say. “It’s like a thank-you.”

We’re in Coach’s driveway.

“For the back tuck,” I say.

She holds it up to the car light, examining it.

“It’s my hamsa bracelet,” I say. “You said you liked it.”

When she saw me wearing it, she’d said, “What, you some kind of wicca, Hanlon?”

I’d shown her its hand-shaped charm—mirror-plated, with two symmetrical thumbs, an ancient amulet for magical protection from the evil eye.

“Sounds like something I could use,” she’d said. And maybe she was kidding, but I wanted her to have it.

And now she’s holding it, its crimson cord laced across her three middle fingers, like she doesn’t know what to say.

Reaching out, I spin the hand charm with my index finger so she can see the big eye planted in the middle of its mirrored palm.

She holds up her wrist so I can put it on.

“It wraps around twice,” I say, showing her.

“Twice the protection,” she says, smiling. “That’s what I need.”


“You’re Addy, right? Colette’s favorite,” he says, when I get in the backseat. Upfront, Coach is putting lipstick on in the mirror, a deep garnet shade I’ve never seen on her before. It makes her mouth look wet, open. It’s distracting and I try not to look.

Addy, she’d said, looking at the hamsa bracelet tight on her wrist. I have an idea.

That’s how it comes to be that it’s late at night now and I’m in Sarge Will’s SUV, so big it’s like being in the center of a velvet-lined box, everything dark and buffered, soft sides and hard corners and the sense of nothing out there touching you.

I look at him, thinking how strange it all is. Sarge Will, but not in his uniform, and his shirt still finely pressed but some stubble on his jaw, and his eyes, most of all his eyes, not coolly watchful, as in school, as when he scours the teeming, sweaty masses of students for recruits, pinpointing all the lost souls that fill our halls, all the ones who live close to the freeway and the ones I never notice at all.

No, his eyes aren’t like that at all now. There’s a looseness, and an openness, and some other things I can’t name. All the remoteness gone and he’s this man, and he smells a little like laundry detergent and cigarettes, and he has a nick on one knuckle of his left hand, and when he turns the steering wheel I see faint sweat scalloping under his arm.

Will is drinking from a pint he’s holding nestled between his legs as he drives. When he hands it to me, the bottle is so warm.

Come with us tonight, she’d said. I want you to understand how it is.

And now I do.

We drive to Sutton Ridge, the fall air shivery and the smell of burning leaves drifting from somewhere.

“I thought there was no place left,” Will says, “where people still burned leaves.”

Because they do burn leaves here, the older folks do, and I remember now that I love it and always have. The way fall feels at night because of it, because of the crackling sound and walking around the sidewalks, like when you’re a kid, and kicking those soft piles, and seeing smoke from backyards and Mr. Kilstrap standing over the metal drum with the holes in the top, the sparking embers at his feet.

Where’d that world go, that world when you’re a kid, and now I can’t remember noticing anything, not the smell of the leaves or the sharp curl of a dried maple on your ankles, walking? I live in cars now, and my own bedroom, the windows sealed shut, my mouth to my phone, hand slick around its neon jelly case, face closed to the world, heart closed to everything.

It seems Will knows this older world and it binds us together and I realize we are meant to be close because, like she does, he opens deep pockets in the center of me I never knew were there.

“Let’s go to Lanvers Peak,” says Coach, voice light and high, a girl’s voice. She’s looking back at me now, that mouth of hers red and glorious. The excitement, and Will grabbing her thigh so hard that I can feel it, I can feel his hand shaking my own thigh to gritty life.

Lanvers Peak is not a place for cars, but it is a place for Will’s Jeep, because nothing will stop him.

Driving up, Will is talking about the gorges and how they were gouged by glaciers hundreds of times over two thousand years like God’s own carving hand on the dark earth, or so his grandfather used to say.

We’re higher than I’ve ever been and we’re drinking bourbon, which is the most grown-up thing I’ve ever had and I pretend I like it until I do.


Up high, where the sky looks violet against the peak, Coach and I kick off our shoes, no matter how cold it is, the silvered grass crunching under our feet.

“Show me,” Will is saying, and he is laughing. “Show me.”

He doesn’t believe we can do the shoulder sit, just we two and dizzy on bourbon.

“You say it’s so dangerous, but compare it to offensive tackle, which left me with these,” he says, lifting his pretty lip to show me his front teeth, snowy white. “Caps, like my gramps. That’s what real sports do to you.”

Baiting us, he makes me want to turn my body into the lightest, most miraculous thing, makes me want to show him what I can do so that I will feel perfect and loved.

So Coach and me, we show him, without a spotter and in spitting distance of the depthless purple gorge so beautiful I want to cry into it.

I feel my phone buzzing and I don’t even look at it, dropping it to the ground.

Coach and me, we’re laughing now, Coach’s hair tumbling against me as we scramble to the most solid patch of an unsolid turf.

Lunging forward, she calls to me and I set my bare foot high atop her bended thigh, lifting myself, swinging my other leg over her shoulder, as she rises to her feet. Wrapping my thighs around her, twining my feet behind her, and we are one.

We are one.

I never did a stunt with Coach before.

At first, we are a sorry case, weaving and laughing, and Will drill-sergeants us until we get focus, my thighs locking tight around her and Coach grinding her feet into the frosty grass.

Then I unlock my feet and thrust my legs forward, Coach reaching under and between my thighs to grab my clammy hands in hers. Dipping down, she gives me a pop, pulling me over her head, my legs swinging from behind her, then together again, my feet landing hard on the ground.

The sear up my leg is nothing at all. Nothing.

We are stupendous and Will is cheering and yelling and hip-hollering and it echoes through the ravine in bewitching ways.

Up above her shoulders, fixed tight upon her, it is something. My eyes wander down to the icy bottom of the gorge and we are higher than we ever thought we’d be.


My house is farther, and Coach gets dropped off first, which is a mind-bending prospect.

Will pulls over a half block from her house. Watching them kiss, watching the way he opens her mouth with his, her sneaky looks back at me, the pleasure on her, I feel myself go loose and wondrous inside. I want to be a part of their kiss, and maybe even they want it too.


It’s only a five-minute drive to my house, but it feels like it lasts forever, all the misted lightness of Lanvers Peak gone.

“Tonight was the first time I ever saw you without that other girl,” Will says. “The one with the freckles.”

This seems the craziest way to describe Beth ever, but it makes everything go tight in my head and I remember, coming off the peak, flipping open my phone and seeing missed call, missed call, missed call. A text: you’d best pay attn to me.

He looks at me and smiles.

Suddenly, I want to hold the whole night close to my chest and I decide it is mine alone.

“Seeing her tonight, I understand now,” he says. “She needs this.”

For a second I think he means himself. And, thinking of her that night, so carefree, all the antic restlessness blown out of her, I think he is surely right.

But then he gestures toward my Sutton Eagles duffel bag, and I see he means being coach.

“She needs you girls,” he adds.

I nod, meaningfully as I can.

“I know what that’s like,” he says. “The way you can be saved without ever knowing you were in trouble.”

These are the words he says, but they sound like something I’m overhearing, a conversation I’d never be a part of.

“I guess it’s funny, me talking to you like this,” he says.

I guess it is. Sometimes Coach doesn’t seem that much older than me, but Will, with his tragic dead wife and tours of duty, sure does.

“I know we don’t really know each other,” he admits. “But we know each other in a strange way.”

I nod again, though really we don’t know each other at all. It makes me think Will is one of those people who just tell everybody everything right away, and usually I don’t like those people, those girls at summer camp sharing tales of cutting and kissing their babysitters. But this feels different. Maybe because he’s right. Because we share a secret. And because I saw them together that day in the teachers’ lounge, which felt like seeing everything.

“She has it hard,” he says. “Her husband, he’s not the guy you might think he is. She has it very hard.”

Maybe it’s the bourbon, or the bourbon wearing off, but this doesn’t sound exactly right either, not really.

“He gave her that house,” I point out.

“It’s a cold house,” he says, looking out the window. “He gave her a cold house.”

“It’s her house,” I say. “I mean, even if it’s cold, it’s hers.”

He doesn’t say anything, and I feel him slipping from me.

“And Caitlin,” I say, but this sounds even less convincing. “There’s Caitlin.”

“Right,” he says, shaking his head. “Caitlin.”

We both sit for a moment, and I feel suddenly like we both might know something we can’t name. About how, in some obscure way, Caitlin was another thing that wasn’t a gift so much as the thing that stands in place of the gift. My wedding, my house, my daughter, my cold, cold heart.