Dare Me

21



WEDNESDAY: FIVE DAYS TO FINAL GAME

Meet me @ 7 at coffee place.

Coach’s five a.m. text scissoring into my sleep.

I feel hung over, have felt hung over for two days straight, the early morning light laying dew and mystery on me as I walk the five blocks, wary of starting my car at 6:55 in the morning. Sometimes I see my dad then, lurking in the hallways, robe flapping, surprised to see me, like I’m his errant boarder.


Coach is leaning against the milk and sugar station, but when she sees me, her body seems to lift upward, her eyes jittering into focus.

She goes to the counter to get me a matcha green tea and when I reach for a pink packet, she smacks it from my hand, that familiar gesture of hers, and I almost smile but can’t seem to.

We take our drinks to her car and sit there, windows rolled tight.

She tells me the police called last night and said they had some questions for her, just routine, but they thought she might wish to handle it discreetly and come to the station house.

At first, all her words just flap at me. I listen and nod and slide my drinking straw behind my teeth, grate it along the roof of my mouth until it hurts.

“Luckily, Matt’s out of town,” she’s saying. “Did I tell you that?”

I shake my head.

“He flew to Atlanta yesterday for work,” she says, eyes lifting to the rearview mirror.

I hadn’t even been thinking of Matt French. Or how she was going about her life with him amid all this, hiding such a monumental secret. But maybe it wasn’t that different. Maybe it wasn’t different at all.

“So I got Barbara to stay with Caitlin and I went to the police station. And it wasn’t like I thought at all. The detective told me that…he told me what we knew. And he said that they were conducting a routine investigation and they had found my phone number in his call log.”

She pauses, her chest heaving a little. That’s when I realize her voice is faster than yesterday, with a new wariness to it.

“He asked me if I thought Will was depressed. And if I knew whether he kept any firearms in his home. And about how we knew each other.”

“Did you tell?” I ask, sinking my chin into the plastic lid of my drink. “What did you tell?”

“I was as honest as I could be,” she says. “It’s the police. And I have nothing to hide, not really.”

I lift my head and look her in the eye. I wonder if I’ve heard her right.

“I mean, I do. Have some things I’d rather…,” she says, shaking her head, like she’s just remembered. “I told him we were friends. And that Will probably did have firearms, which is all I really know.”

“If he saw the call log,” I say, trying to get her to look me in the eye, “wouldn’t he know you’re more than friends?”

“Will and I didn’t really talk on the phone that much,” she says, briskly. “Besides, all that has nothing to do with what happened.”

I don’t know what to say to this.

A voice spins from me, small and wild. “Will the police call me? Will they be calling all of us?”

It suddenly seems like it could happen, and I think: this is how your life can end.

“Listen, Addy,” she says, turning to me. “I know this is all really a lot for you to take. I know it all seems scary. But the police are just doing their job, and once they confirm that this is…what it is…then they’re not going to need to be bothered with me anymore. It’s going to be just fine. Matt will come home, and it’ll be like before. Before before. Believe me, they’re not interested in my little life.”


It’s not until a long time later, standing at my school locker, that I think, But I was asking about me. Will the police call me?

But, Coach, what about me?


When we walk into school, Coach loops her arm in mine for a second, which she has never done and doesn’t suit her. Still, I feel her strain and want to clinch her tighter, but I don’t. Now we share something. At last. Except it’s this.


I fall asleep in chem, my cheek on the tall tabletop of our lab station, a TV movie unreeling in my head: cheerleaders lined up at the police station in full uniform. On TV they always wear their uniforms all day long, and never stop smiling.

When I wake with a jolt to the sight of David Hemans flaring the Bunsen burner inches from my hair, I feel like I’ve just touched the tip of knowing, of realizing.

But then it goes away.

“You’re the worst lab partner ever,” he says, eyes on my Eagles letter jacket. “I hate all of you.”


Second period, two minutes before the bell, and Beth slips into the seat next to me.

“Miss Cassidy,” Mr. Feck says, hand on his hip like he does. “I don’t believe I see you until fourth period. And not always then.”

Full-on cheer-glamour mode, à la RiRi, Beth crinkles her nose with just a whiff of naughtiness and jiggles her index finger like a little inchworm, mouthing, One second, Mr. Feck, please!!!

Feck nearly bows his assent.

They are so weak. All of them.

Dragging my desk toward her, Beth whispers greedily in my ear.

“Did she tell you about it? Spill, soldier, spill.”

“Did who tell me what?” A routine that’s getting old, even to me.

“F*ck me, Hanlon,” she says, hand gripping my wrist until both our tan hands turn white.

“Yes,” I say, clipping my voice. “She can’t believe it. It’s terrible.”

“Suicide is no solution,” she says, and she says it lightly, cruelly.

Then she seems to catch herself, and something tangles messily in her face. For a second.

Seeing that, I feel my chin wobble and heat rising to my eyes. Therein, somewhere, beats the heart of Beth.

“But, Addy,” she says, looking at me low-eyed, like c’mon, give it up, girlie, “did she have any more information? How did she find out? Who told her?”

“I don’t know,” I say.

“Miss Cassidy…,” singsongs Mr. Feck, eager to reengage.

“Yes, m’lord,” Beth says, and she curtsies. She really does.

Turning around at the door, her waist swiveling, she pokes two fingers out at me.

Later, be-yotch.

Later.


My finger poised over my phone, the text message screen blank and taunting.

UR nt gona tel abt Coach n Will…I start to type.

But then I don’t.

And I start thinking of all the text messages Beth must have about everything.

One by one, text by text, e-mail by e-mail, I delete everything on my phone, my breath loud in my own ear. But I know it doesn’t matter.

You can’t erase it all, not even half of it. Half my life surrendered to gray screens the size of my thumbnail, each flare carelessly shot from my phone to another now rocketing back, landing in my lap like a cartoon bomb, its wick lit.

The thing is, when this happens, you just have to give Beth the thing she wants.

But what does Beth want?


Yet Coach goes on, and I marvel at it.

At practice, she hustles us while Beth sits on the top bleacher deck.

Perched up near the rafters, black wings tucked tight, she’s staring at her phone, her face lit by it.

Counting off our beats, Coach is focused, intense. She rides us hard.

“I’ve got to move things fast,” she shouts. “I have to pick up my daughter. Don’t drag on me, dollies.”

At first, the hurting is not the good kind, and I can’t pound my way to it. And when Mindy fishhooks me during a tumbling pass, knocking me to the mat, I’m embarrassed to feel hot tears popping from me. For the first time ever on the mat.

“God, Hanlon,” Mindy says, surprised. “You are Lieutenant Hanlon, aren’t you?”

But there’s no time to feel the shame, and I make sure to hold nothing back when I jam my shoe into Mindy’s hidebound shoulder next time around.

Soon enough, as we leap and tuck and jump, I start feeling better and my body starts doing astonishing things, tight and rock-hard, nailing it.

But then Beth starts talking loudly on her phone. I see Coach looking up at her, again and again, and everything starts galloping back, hoofs up.

“Cap’n,” Coach calls out to her, and I feel myself tense. “Can you run some tumbling?”

Beth looks up, a strand of hair slipping from her mouth.

We all look up.

She does not remove the phone from her face.

I feel like if I were closer, I’d see her baring her teeth.

“I’d like to, ma’am,” Beth shouts, in her whiniest teen girl voice, “but I only have one tampon left and I’ve had it in all day, so I think if I do mat work, it’ll come loose.”

We all look at Coach now, and no one says anything.

Coach, oh, Coach, why did you ask?

“Then we’ll see your blood on the mat,” Coach says, planting a foot on the bottom bleacher.

Oh, Coach…these two, toe-to-toe, puffing their chests out, practically thumping them.

“I’d like to, Coach,” she says. “Really, I would. But haven’t we all seen enough blood lately? Shouldn’t we really be thinking of our loss?”

Coach’s face motionless, but I can see something in there, something caving in deep.

Look at her, Coach, I want to say. Look at it. See how she is fearless now. See how long she has been waiting for her chance and now she has it.

I have to make Coach see.

And I have to keep my eyes on Beth, ceaselessly.


We drive side by side down Curling Way, Beth play-gunning the gas. We’re driving out to Sutton Ridge, where the red-scalped PFC, Jimmy Tibbs, agreed to meet with Beth.

She’s pumping him or someone’s pumping someone, and suddenly they are like comrades, passing briefcases and taping Xs on telephone poles.

The spooky rustlings of the ridge are spookier than ever now that the air’s gone cold and everything’s glass-bright. Or maybe it’s the cryptic pause I feel in Beth. Like a thing arrested between coming and going. Like the second before a crouch becomes a bound.

We’re to meet the PFC in a clearing up by the easternmost edge, and we walk in a hush, sneakers tramping, ankles twisting on strange clumps and roots and other things of nature. Why can’t the world be as flat and smooth as a spring-loaded floor, as hard and certain as a gym’s merciless wood?

We hear him before we see him because someone is whistling tinnily somewhere. It seems to put a little scare even in Beth, who doesn’t suffer the red-tinted terrors behind my eyes.

But we get closer and the whistle sounds more like a young boy’s. A whistle to ward off demons and night terrors.

He’s whistling what I finally recognize as some quavering version of “Feliz Navidad.”

Waving from the clearing, he heads toward us, jogging soldierlike and extending his hand as we nudge down the crest of our twining pathway, shoes skidding.

Beth gives him her golden hand and a look of great charm, the powerful illusion of delicate girlhood.

I see how this is with them.

Beth knows her mark.


“Listen, girls, I don’t want to get anyone in trouble.”

His freckle-rubbed face looking rubbed twice over, the PFC paces as he talks, scratching the back of his neck until it turns red.

“He was our Sarge,” he says. “And he’s still Sarge to me. And I got his back.”

“Of course you do,” I say. “None of us want any trouble.”

“But the thing is, now our superiors are involved. The Army’s doing their own investigation,” he says. “And we have to cooperate fully.”

He looks at us and it’s then I realize he knows we know about Sarge and Coach, and I am guessing Beth told him.

“We understand,” Beth says, all big-eyed sympathy. “It’s your duty. What choice do you have?”

“We just want what’s best for Sarge,” he says, nobly. “And I want to protect your…sarge too.”

Beth nods, slowly, her slowness a hint to him that maybe she has no “sarge” other than the truth.

“So they can’t rule out anything yet?” she asks, fishing. I marvel at her big-eyed frail routine. It’s like she can make her body smaller somehow just standing there. She can make her rough-skinned voice go soft and helpless.

“Well, the detective said that a lot of times the autopsy only tells you so much,” he says, talking slowly so we can understand. “You have to look at the behavior the weeks, days, hours leading up to the death. That’s how you figure out what was going on in a guy’s mind. To figure out if it’s a suicide or homicide.”

“Homicide?” I blurt, almost a laugh. Then it is a laugh.

He’s not laughing, though.

There is a long second when both of them look at me.

“What are you two talking about?” I ask, trying to keep the laugh going.

“A young guy, prime of his life,” the PFC says, swapping a grave look with faux-grave Beth, the two of them admonishing me. “There wasn’t any note. They have to look at all possibilities.”

“But his wife…he…”

He bows his head, sighs, then looks at me intently. “The point is, they’re trying to figure out what was going on with him, they’re going to ask questions, and I’ve got to answer them.”

I look at him, at Beth squirming delightedly beside him. These two. Who do they think they are, citizen soldier and good Samaritan?

“Just say it. You’re going to tell them about how it was,” I say. “With Coach.”

“I have to.”

I look at him, a bristling rising up in me.

“Sorry,” I say, after a pause. “I was just thinking of the last time I saw you. Watching me knot this one’s legs together in the parking lot of the Comfort Inn.”

He looks at me, stricken.

“But back to your point,” I say. “Yes, I guess you’re going to tell him everything then. Like about all the booze you fed us, even fourteen-year-olds. You do know that JV is fourteen. And about Prine.”

The PFC’s face bursts redder than ever, a blaring siren.

Beth harrumphs like she’s both annoyed and impressed. My lieutenant, my lieutenant.

“Girl looks out for her Coach, like she’s a mama tit,” Beth says to PFC, shrugging. “Point is, scrub, we all wanna protect our top dogs.”

The PFC grates the back of his scarlet neck till it blazes, then nods, white at the mouth. White at the mouth like he’s a little scared of both of us. Like he might need to start whistling again.


That word homicide snakes through my brain, its tail snapping back and forth.

Walking side by side back to the car, Beth twirls a finger through the bottom of my braid.

“Foul play,” I say, eyes rolling.

“He’s no JV runt, Hanlon,” she says. “You get more honey from that hive if you buzz softly in his ear. You with your f*cking chainsaw. Bringing up the Comfort Inn.”

“I studied at the feet of the master lumberjack,” I say, sounding like no one if not Beth.

“But our goal isn’t to intimidate into silence,” she says. “It’s to find out what happened.” She looks at me. “Isn’t that right?”

Of course this is neither of our goals.

“And I’m sure Coach above all wants to know what happened to her man,” she says, dipping her head closer to mine, so enjoying all this. “I’m sure she’ll be grateful to know. I’m surprised you’re not more eager to help her.”

“I don’t want him getting any of us in trouble,” I say. “I’m looking out for the squad.”

“Spoken like a born captain,” she says, grinning. “I always knew you wanted to be captain.”

“I never did,” I say, turning from her to continue down the trail. It’s so dark now, and I can hear her behind me.

“Of course not,” she is saying, and I can hear a grin on her.

She’s wrong, I never did. Not once. It was hard enough being lieutenant.

“Besides,” she says, sidling next to me, “it does seem weird, now that I think of it. A man in the prime of his life. And bang, bang, puts a gun to his temple?”

“His mouth,” I correct her.

As the words come out I feel myself go ice cold.

“His mouth?” Beth asks, lightning quick.

My whole life with Beth, under the hot lights. Standing beside her as she hotlights someone else.

“That’s what I read, I think,” I stumble. “Wasn’t it his mouth?”

With her or against her, you better be on. Game on. Like when you’re out there, grandstands thrumming, sneakers squeaking on polished floor, and you gotta fake-smile till it hurts. Till you want to die from it.

Ramrod that back, hoist those tits, be ready, always. Because she always is.

“I don’t know, Addy,” she says, her eyes on me. “Was it Sarge’s mouth?”

“No,” I say. “I’ve got it all wrong. I’m blood-sugar bottomed-out.” I begin tugging my braid loose, bobby pins flying, scattering to the ground.

I can almost feel her disappointment at how poorly I’ve kept up with her, stayed in the game.

For hours after, I’m cursing myself for ever thinking I could run with Beth, for thinking I could keep up.


If you could have seen him, I want to say to Beth, you would know it was suicide. You would see. If you saw that dark smudge where his face was…you would feel his desperation and surrender.

Wouldn’t you?

Is that what I felt?

I’m not so sure.

I think briefly, darkly, of that apartment, legions deep now in my head. A glugging, boggy cove in the center of the earth.

Still, to me, it had felt like stepping in the marsh swirl of a man underwater, a man drowning.

Hadn’t it?

It had felt bad. That’s what I knew. It had felt like the worst place I’d ever been—and now that place, it was inside of me.


That night, at last, Coach calls.

“Addy, why don’t you come over?” The warmth in her voice, and the desperation. “Stay at my place tonight. Matt’s out of town, remember? It’s so lonely.”

I can’t guess at the haunted feeling in her, given how it is with me. I’m glad to know she’s feeling these things, because you’d never know it to look at her.

“I’ll make us avocado shakes and we’ll sing Caitlin to sleep and drag the velvet blankets out on the deck and wrap ourselves in them and look at the stars. Or something,” she says, trying so hard.

I’d’ve dreamed of such courtship a month ago, and something about it does speak to me even amid all this, maybe even especially. It’s a singular and troubling stake we share, but it binds us always, doesn’t it? A stake that gives me new panics by the hour, yes, but now, for the first time, it warms me too.

So I go, but Caitlin’s already asleep and Coach doesn’t have any avocados, and it’s raining slimily on the deck.

As I dangle on a kitchen island stool, without purpose, she makes a grocery list. She pays an electricity bill. She wrings out kitchen towels, twisting them across her hands and staring vaguely out the window over the sink.

It’s almost like Coach doesn’t want me there at all now that I’m here.

It’s as if I remind her of bad things.

Once, I come back from the bathroom and see her looking at my phone, resting on the kitchen island.

“Can you just turn it off?” she says. “You didn’t tell anyone you were here, right?”

I say no.

She pauses, fingertips still grazing the phone. Watching as I turn it all the way off, waiting for the screen to go blank.


“Oh, Addy,” she finally says, “let’s do something, anything.”

And this is how we end up in the backyard close to midnight, doing backbends in the rain. Extended triangles. Dolphin plank poses.

There’s a holiness to it, the wind chimes on the deck carrying us off to the deepest Himalayan climes, or wherever the world is peaceful and clear.

We sweat even in the cold, and I catch, amid a streak of light from some passing car out front, Coach’s face looking untroubled and free.

The crying starts just after, when we’re back in the house. Walking down the hallway, she bends over at the waist and sobs come hard and hurtful. I hold onto her shoulders, their tensile thew rocking in my hands.

She stops in the middle of the hall and I try to hold on and she cries for a very long time.

I sleep next to her that night, under that big dolloping duvet.

We face opposite directions and I think, this is where Matt French sleeps, and I think how big the bed is and how far away Coach is, the duvet snowbanking in the middle, and if she’s still crying, I wouldn’t know.

It makes me feel lonely for both of them.


Sometime in the night, I hear her talking, her voice hard and strangled.

“How could you do this to me?” she snarls. “How?”

I glance over at her, and her eyes almost look open, her fists wrenching the covers.

I don’t know who she’s talking to.

People say all kinds of things when they’re dreaming.

“I’m not doing anything,” I whisper, as if she were talking to me.