Dare Me

19



MONDAY NIGHT

I’m deep into toes-curled sleep when I hear it.

My cell, squawking from the floor.

I feel it hum under my grappling fingers.

Please not Beth.

Incoming call: Coach, the screen reads, and my favorite snapshot, from the night after the Cougars’ defeat, Coach sitting on the hood of my car, sated and exultant.

“Addy,” the whisper comes. “Addy, I slipped on the floor. I saw him and I slipped on something and I didn’t know what it was.”

“Coach? What’s going on?” Words sticky in my sleeping mouth.

“I kept looking at my sneaker and wondered what was on it. What the dark stain was.”

I think I’m dreaming.

“Coach,” I say, rolling over, trying to blink myself awake. “Where are you? What’s going on?”

“Something happened, Addy. That’s what I think. But my head…”

Her voice so peculiar, thin and wasted.

“Coach—Colette. Colette, where are you?”

A pause, a creaking sound from her throat. “You better come, Addy. You better come here.”


I’m sure I’ll be heard, but if I am, no one does anything about it, not even when the garage door shimmies open, when the car leaps to life. Sometimes I don’t even try to be quiet. Sometimes I turn on all the lights, leave a trail blazing from my bedroom through the garage until my dawn return, and no one has ever said a word.

But tonight, I don’t.

I try not to look at my phone, which is spasming with texts that must have come in while I slept—all from vampiric Beth, who sometimes seems never to sleep at all and tonight seems especially wired with speculations and grim fancy.

I can’t stop to read them now.


Nearly to Wick Park, I see The Towers, a colossal apartment complex, the only one in Sutton Grove, though it doesn’t even feel like Sutton Grove but like the tenuous landing strip for a steel box dropped from high above.

I’ve been there once before, to pick up Coach and take her back to her car, which she’d left at school.

One of the new developments perched high on Sutton Ridge, it floats perilously over the edge, and still half empty because no one wants to live by the roaring interstate.

It’s so great, Addy, Coach said. Like a deserted castle. You can scream and shout and no one could—

I remember when I’d pulled up Will had waved from the lobby’s glass doors, his face and neck flushed, like hers. His hair wet and seal-slick. And Coach, still slipping on her left shoe as she ran to my car.

The sharp smell on her when she opened my car door, so thick it seemed to hover in the air around her.

Her face bright, her right leg still shaking.

I couldn’t take my eyes off it.

But that was weeks ago, in the middle of the day, and nothing looks familiar at all now. It takes me three circuits of the complex to find the right building, and then find Will’s name on the big lighted board out front.

All the while I’m thinking of Coach’s voice on the phone.

“Is he there now,” I’d asked, a sick feeling in my stomach. “Is Will with you?”

“Yes,” she said. “He’s here.”

“Is he okay?”

“I can’t look,” she said. “Don’t make me look.”


She doesn’t say anything on the intercom, just buzzes me in.

The drone in my ear, it’s like the tornado drill in elementary school, the hand-cranked siren that rang mercilessly, all of us hunched over on ourselves, facing the basement walls, heads tucked into our chests. Beth and me wedged tight, jeaned legs pressed against each other. The sounds of our own breathing. Before we all stopped believing a tornado, or anything, could touch us, ever.


In the elevator, the numbers glow and the funniest feeling starts up inside me. It’s like before a game. Chest vaulting, bounding on my toes, everything ricocheting in my head (lift arm higher, no fear, count it out, pull it tight, and make it sing), my body so tight and ready I feel like a coiled spring: Let me free, let me free, I will show you my ferocity, my rapture.


“Addy,” Coach says, opening the door, startled, like she’s almost forgotten she called me, as if I’ve shown up at her own home, unaccountably, in the middle of the night.

The apartment is dark, one floor lamp coning halogen up in the far corner. A hooded fish tank effervesces on a table by the wall, the clouded water seeming almost to smoke, a fluorescent cauldron with no fish I can see.

She looks tiny, her iron-rod back sinking into itself. Bare-footed, a nylon windbreaker zipped up so high it covers her neck and the tip of her chin. Her hair dankly tucked behind her ears.

“Coach,” I start.

“Take off your shoes,” she says, her mouth pinched. I think it’s because of the parquet floors, though they don’t look that nice, and I slip off my flip-flops and rest them by the door.

We’re standing in the vestibule, which gives way to a small dining area with a thick black-lacquered table. Just past it is the living room, braced by the hard angles of a leather sectional.

Turning back to her, I see something’s in her hands, her tennis shoes bundled there, soaking wet.

“I washed them in the sink,” she says, answering my unasked question. Suddenly, she hoists them into my hands.

“Hold them, okay? Because I need to think. I need to get my head in order.”

I nod, but my eyes keep darting to the back of the large sectional sofa sprawling across the room like a spreading stain.

Maybe it’s the gloomy dark, the phosphoresce from the glubbing aquarium.

But mostly it’s the way Coach’s eyes seem to vibrate when she looks at me, pupils like nail heads.

“What’s over there?” I say, angling my head toward the sofa. “Coach, what’s over there?”

She looks at me for a second, running a hand through her hair, which looks so dark.

Then she lets her eyes drift over to the sofa, and I let mine too.

I’m holding the shoes tight and inching toward the sofa.

I can hear her breathing behind me, in rasping gulps. Watching.

The parquet floors squeak and the sofa looms before me, crooking around the center of the room.

Walking slowly, the surging bleach from the sneakers nearly making me choke, I feel something skitter under my bare foot and spin across the floor. Something small, like a button or a spool of thread.

As I creep closer, ten-then-five-feet away from the living room area, the sofa back seems larger, taller than the football goalpost, than the Eagles emblem on the field, wings spread.

My right foot dangles over the circular rug in the center of the room. To step on it feels like stepping into black water.

Zzzt! My phone like Mexican jumping beans in my pocket. Zzzt!

I’m sure Coach heard the vibration, but if she did, she doesn’t show it, so fixed is she on the sofa, what lies behind it.

Turning my body, I finger for, and press, the Off button so hard I nearly knock the phone from my pocket.

Deep breath.

Deep breath.

Me, now only a few steps from the back of the snaking sofa, peeking around the sofa’s sharp corner, around its scaly leather arm. I see something on the floor.

“I let myself in with the key he gave me,” Coach is saying, answering more unasked questions. “I rang the doorbell first, but he didn’t answer. I walked in and there he was. Ohhh, there he was.”

First, I see the glint of dark blond hair twining in the weave of the rug.

Then, stepping forward, I see more.

Coach’s sneakers slip from my hands, shoe string tickling my leg as they drop to the carpet with a soft clunk.

There he is.

There he is.

There’s Sarge. There’s Will.

“Addy,” Coach whispers, far behind me. “I don’t think you want to…I don’t think you need to…Addy…is it like I thought?”


His chest bare, wearing only a towel, his arms stretched out, he’s like one of those laminated saint pictures the Catholic girls always brought from catechism. Saint Sebastian, his head always thrown back, body both luminous and tortured.

“Addy,” says Coach, almost a whimper. Like little Caitlin, just waking up and scared.

I just keep looking. At Will. On the floor.

In those saint pictures, their bodies are always torn, split, lacerated. But their faces so lovely, so tranquil.

But Will’s face does not look righteous and exalted.

My eyes fix on the thing that was Will’s mouth, but is now a red flower, its tendrils sprawling to all corners and, like a poppy, an inky whorl at the center.

In those saint pictures, their eyes, lovingly lashed, are always looking up.

And, for all the ruin of Will’s handsome face, his eyes, they are gazing up too.

But it seems to me not to the Kingdom of God but to the tottering ceiling fan.

Looking up so he doesn’t have to see the ruin of his face.

Behind his head, the rug is dark and wet.


I can’t stop looking at him, at the bright streak of his face.

It’s like I’m seeing Will and I’m seeing something else too. The old woman from the bus, the one with the black eyes Will was sure could bore through to the center of him. That story never felt real to me, it felt like when someone tells you a dream and they can’t make you feel what they feel. It didn’t feel real to me except as something I wanted to understand but couldn’t. But now suddenly I can. The woman’s hat tilting up, eyes like shale.

“Stop crying,” Coach is saying, begging. “Addy, stop crying.”


“I didn’t touch him.” Coach says, and I cannot catch my breath, but she will not wait. “When I ran over, I slipped on those.”

She points to three small white things dotted across the floor. The something I’d felt wobbling under my foot, that I’d sent spinning across the parquet. A button or spool of thread.

“What are…” But then suddenly I know.

Turning again to Will’s poppy-struck face on the floor, the bottom half of it blown away, I know what they are.

I hear a moan come up from within me, my fingers clapping my own teeth, as if to remind myself they’re still there.

“Coach, why am I here?” someone says in a voice I recognize, obscurely, as my own. The words just tumble out, constricted and lost. “Why did you make me come?”

But she doesn’t answer me. I don’t even think she’s heard me.

ZZzzzzt! My phone, my phone. Like a paddle over my heart.

Beth. I’m sure I’ve pressed that button long enough to turn it off until the end of time, but I must’ve pressed it so long I turned it on again.

The way it keeps ringing, it’s like Beth is there in the room too. And I’m afraid to even touch the phone because it seems somehow Beth will know if I turn it off, like she knows everything. Like she’s here right now, claws out.

“Do you see it,” Coach says, still ten feet from me, she won’t come any closer.

“I see him,” I say, as calm as I can, my finger scratching at my phone, trying to hold the Off button just long enough to make it stop. As soon as I do it shudders ZZzzzt! again. “Of course I see him.”

“No,” she says, her voice going quieter still but more insistent. “On the floor.”

I don’t want to look again, but I do. At his hands, palms faced up, his legs, which have a queer violet cast.

That’s when I spot the gun peeking out from under his left leg.

I turn to face Coach, who’s standing in front of the dining room table, winding a dewy strand of hair behind her ear. She looks younger than me, I think.

“He did this to himself?” I whisper, not even wanting to say it out loud.

“Yes,” she says. “I found him.”

“Was there a note or something?”

“No,” she says.

“You didn’t call nine-one-one,” I say. Maybe it’s a question and maybe it isn’t.

“No,” she says. Before I can ask why, she adds, “I guess no one heard. He doesn’t have any neighbors yet.”

We both look at the walls to our left and to our right. The room feels impossibly small.

“I don’t know when it happened,” Coach says. “I don’t know anything.”

Thoughts come to me, of Will and his self-puzzled depths.

I feel a loss suddenly.

I can’t hold on to it long enough to figure out why, but suddenly, shamefully, I feel sorry for myself.

In that moment, though, she’s made a turn.

“Addy,” she says, voice faster now. “Where’s your car?”

“I don’t know,” I say. I can feel a bolting energy from her, her body inching toward the door.

It’s like she just showed me a triple toe touch back, three fast scissor kicks, landing, then springing back for the final back tuck. Her hands never touching the ground. Not once.

But something is niggling at me. Holding me back.

“Wait, Coach,” I say. “Where’s your car?”

“At the mechanic. Remember?” She is curt, like I’m her slowest student.

“So how did you get here?” I ask, walking over to her.

“Oh,” she says. “I took a cab. I snuck out of the house. Matt was asleep. He took two pills. I had to see Will. So I called a cab.” A pause between each sentence like reading flash cards. “But I couldn’t call a cab to take me back, could I?”

“No, Coach,” I say. “I guess you couldn’t.”

“And I can’t show up at home in a cab now,” she says, her voice speeding up again.

Zzzzt!

My phone.

Zzzzt!

But this time she is right next to me, and she is back to being Coach, her arm whipping out, her fingers hooking over my pocketed hand.

“What is that? Who’s calling?”

“No one’s calling,” I say, her hot fingers clamping at me, like when she pushes your body to make that jump, support that weight, the weight of five girls, effortlessly.

In an instant, it’s like I’m not in Will’s apartment but at practice, and in trouble.

“A text,” I say. “I get texts all the time.”

“In the middle of the night?” She jerks my wrist from my pocket and the phone rattles to the floor.

Mercifully, the battery flies out.

“Pick it up,” she says. “Goddammit, Addy.”

I start to bend down.

“Don’t touch anything,” she snaps, and I see one of my hands is almost resting on the shiny black lacquer of the table.

Rising, I look down at the tabletop and see my smudgy face reflected in it, black depthless eyes.

There’s nothing there, really.

“Addy, we have to go, we have to go,” Coach says, her voice grinding into me. “Get me out of here.”


Moments later, we dart across the parking lot, my sapphire Acura like a beacon.


We’re driving, the night vacant and starless, and the whole world is softly asleep, with furnaces purring and windows shut tight and the safety of people tucked inside with the warming knowledge of a tomorrow and a tomorrow after that of just such humming sameness.

The car windows down, the crystally cool on me, I imagine myself in that world, the one I know. I imagine myself curled in just such comforts, comforts so tight they could choke you. So tight they choke me always.

Oh, was there no happiness to be had the world over? There or here?

Here in this bleach-fogged car, she beside me, still holding her sneakers between her legs. Her fingers keep running around the tongue, her eyes thoughtfully, almost dreamily on the road.

I can’t fathom what she’s thinking.


Finally, as we’re turning down her street, Coach asks me to pull over two doors from her house.

“Roll the windows up,” she says. I do.

“Addy, it’s going to be fine,” she says. “Just forget about all this.”

I nod, my chin shaking from the cold, from the wretched loneliness of that drive, fifteen, twenty minutes in the car. She never said a word, seemed lost in some kind of moody reverie.

“You just need to go home and pretend it never happened,” she says. “Okay?”

When she gets out of the car, the waft of bleach from her shoes smacks me.


Unable to turn the ignition, I sit there.

Were I thinking straight, were I feeling the world made any sense at all, I might be driving to the police station, calling 911. Were I that kind of person.

Instead, I look at my cell. I need to text Beth back.

Fell asleep, be-yotch, I type. Some of us sleep.

Still sitting, I wait a minute for her reply. But my phone just lies there.

No Beth.

It should make me feel better—Beth has finally dervished herself into exhausted slumber, her reign of terror over, for now—but it does not.

Instead, I have a sickly feeling I know will sit with me all night, that will join the larger sickness, the sense of nightmare and menace that feels like it will be mine forever.

I roll down all the windows and breathe.

Then I start the car and inch past Coach’s house, just to see if there are any lights on.

Suddenly, I see something moving, fast, like an arrow, down her driveway and to my car.

Almost before I can take a breath, Coach’s palms are slapping my windshield, my heart spurring to terrible life.

“I was just leaving, I was,” I nearly yelp, shutting off the ignition as she leans in through the passenger window. “No one saw—”

“You’re my friend,” she blurts, an ache in her voice. “The only friend I ever had.”

Before I can say anything, she’s whippeting back across her lawn, slipping soundlessly into the dark house.


I sit a long time, my hands resting in my lap, my face warm.

I don’t want to start the car, move, do anything.

I never gave anything to anyone before. Not like this.

I never was anything to anyone before.

Not like this.

I never was, before.

Now I am.


Finally in my rumpled bed, my eyes jitterbug through all of Beth’s texts.

2:03 a.m., 2:07 a.m., 2:10 a.m.

@ Statlers, Coach drinking ginger and jacks + on phone for hour kept saying why are you doing this to me why

Bartend said she used to come when she was young and drink w. badasses from the speedway and once broke both wrists falling in that same pking lot

…kind of trash she is. She shld b glad Matt sunk so low to grab scruff of her neck cuz…

Then, by 2:18:

WHERE THE F*ck R U? You better txt back or I’m coming over. U KNOW I WILL. DON’T MESS WITH—

…and on until 2:27, the last one.

here I am, Pinetop Ct, looking at yr open garage door, but where’s yr car? Hmmm…

She must be lying, I tell myself. But I know she’s not. I know she was out there in front of my house at 2:27, hunched over the steering wheel of her mother’s Miata. I know it.

I wonder how long she waited and what she thought.

I wonder what I’ll say and how I’ll ever make her believe it.

In this knot of fear, I forget everything but Beth’s canny slit eyes.

Those eyes on me, even now.


In the blackest of moments that night, when sleep finally sinks me, a dream of Beth and me, little kids, Beth raking the hard bars of that ancient merry-go-round they used to have in Buckingham Park, spinning us, spinning. And we lie flat on it, on its warty surface, our heads pressed close.

“It’s what you wanted,” she says, breathless. “You said faster.”