Dare Me

17



The next day, Beth is back on the squad.

And she is captain again. Honorifically.

She gets to skip chem on Wednesday for captain-coach mentor time, and study hall means she can go to Coach’s office by herself and smoke. I see her when I walk by and she waves at me, head tilted, smoke swirling in malevolent plumes around her face.

Thank you, Coach, I think. Thank you.

“Is she really Cap?” Tacy whispers, everybody whispers, but Tacy is shaking in her bright white air cheers.

Because it appears she is.

And Beth, is that contentment I see there on your tan face?

F*ck me, I think, which even sounds like Beth. Is this all she wanted?

It’s not, of course.


“It’s okay,” says Coach. “I don’t have time for her, Addy. And you don’t either. Let’s see that back handspring.”

And I am trying, but my legs won’t come together and my body feels funny and stiff.

“Push off,” she barks, temple sweat-dappled and her hair limp and slipping from its elastic.

“Lock out”—and with each shout her voice stronger, and my body tighter, harder—“stay tight, stay center, and, f*ck it, Addy, smile. Smile. Smile.”


The next morning, I spy Matt French pulling into the parking lot in his gray Toyota, with Coach in it.

When she gets out of the car she doesn’t even glance behind her. It looks like he’s saying something to her, but maybe not.

But he’s watching her, waiting, I guess, to make sure she gets inside the building.

More and more, when I see his face I think maybe he is kind of handsome in his own tired way.

That’s the hardest part, she said once. There’s nothing bad I can say about him, nothing I can say at all.

Which somehow seems the cruelest thing to say, ever.

Which is maybe why I feel this, looking at him now. Matt French. I can’t account for it, but his weariness amid all the bluster and strut of us sparkle-slitted girls—it speaks to me. Like seeing him the other night, the way he looked at me.

He’s not the guy you might think he is. That’s what Will told me.

But I’m not sure what he thinks I might think.

Matt French watches Coach as she walks down the center aisle of the parking lot, watches her walk through the glass doors. He watches for a long time, one arm stretched across the passenger seat, head slightly dipped.

Watching her in the way that reminds me of the way a dad might watch his daughter on the jungle gym.

She never looks back once.


“Her car’s on blocks over at Schuyler’s garage,” Beth tells me later. “Davy saw it. There’s a big punch in the front fender.”

I don’t know who Davy is, or how he knows what Coach’s car looks like. Beth has always known people—friends of her brother, sons of her mother’s exes, the nephew of the woman from Peru who used to clean her house—that no one else knows or even sees. Her reserves of information, objects, empty houses, designer handbags, driver’s licenses, and prescription pads seem limitless.

I ask Coach about it later, what happened to her car anyway.

She shows me a long cut skating up her arm.

“From the seam in the steering wheel,” she says, cigarette hanging from her mouth, her voice throaty and tired, almost like Beth’s. “I hit a post in the lot over at the Buckingham Park playground.”

I tell her I’m sorry.

“I was pulling in and had to swerve really fast. A little girl ran in front of the car,” she says, her eyes losing focus. “She looked just like Caitlin.”

“But you were both okay?” I ask, which seems like something you should ask.

“That’s the funny part,” she says, shaking her head. “Caitlin wasn’t with me. I’d forgotten her. Left her at home, in her room, playing Chutes and Ladders. Or tipping over bleach, eating poison from the cabinet under the sink, starting fires in the backyard. Who knew?”

She laughs a little, shaking her head. Shaking her head a long time, flipping her Bic in her hand.

Then she stops.

“I must be the worst mother in the world,” she says, eyes glassy and confused.

I look at her, all the blurry fear on her.

And I say, “Mos def.”

Which always makes her laugh, and makes her laugh now, and it’s unguarded, beautiful.


“She was trying to avoid hitting some kid at the playground,” I say. “She hit a post.”

“I don’t believe it,” Beth says.

“Why would she lie?”

“Plenty of reasons,” she says. “I’ve been right before, other times. You believe people, just like cheer camp, with that St. Regina Flyer. That compulsive liar, Casey Jaye. And you licked it all up.”

Beth, always sifting ancient history, scattering ashes at me. Always going back to last summer. It was our only fight and it wasn’t a fight really. Just stupid girl stuff.

I never thought you’d be friends again after that, RiRi said afterward. But we were. No one understands. They never have.

“Beth, can’t you leave all this alone?” I say now, surprised at the strain in my voice. “You got what you wanted. You’re captain again and you can do whatever you want. So stop.”

“It’s not my choice,” she says. “Something gets started, you have to see it through.”

“See what through? What, Beth? What, Captain-My-Captain?”

She pauses, clicking her teeth, an old habit from the days we both slid retainers around in our hanging-jaw girl mouths.

“You don’t understand it, do you? All that’s happened. It’s all her.”

She leans back, spreading her long ponytail across her face, her mouth.

Then she says something and I think it’s, “She has your heart.”

“What?” I say, feeling something ping in my stomach, my hand fisting over it.

“She has her part,” she says, brushing her ponytail from her face, “in all this.”

But I can’t believe I misheard her. Did I?

“It’s not just me,” she says again, teeth latching and unlatching. “She has her part.”

I misheard.