Dare Me

22



THURSDAY: FOUR DAYS TO FINAL GAME

Turning my phone on, seven a.m., I see our squad Facebook page studded with new wall posts, from Brinnie, Mindy, RiRi:

Monday=FINAL GAME!

Go Eagles!

Slaussen, you better KICK ass! Our ticket to the tourney is on YOU!

I long to be a part of it. I long for it.


I find Coach in the kitchen, making toaster oven waffles for Caitlin, who chews on the bottom of her pigtail and watches the oven’s orange glow, hypnotized.

“Did the phone wake you?” she asks, spoon in hand, slicing a banana over Caitlin’s pearly lavender plate.

It’s then that I realize it did.

“I have to go talk to them at the station again,” she says, her eyes graying. “In a half hour.”

“They’re talking to the Guardsmen,” I say quietly, as if Caitlin might understand if I spoke more loudly. “The redhead PFC. Tibbs.”

The spoon, banana-slicked, slips from her grasp.

She pauses a beat, her hand still outstretched.

I go to reach for the spoon, but her hand shoots out to stop me.

“They have to talk to his men,” she says. “I figured on that.”

“But, Coach,” I say, with as much knowingness as I can impart. “No one wants to get anyone in trouble. No one does.”

She looks at me, searchingly, and I’m not sure why I’m being so mysterious—something about Beth, eyes on the back of her ponytail, something about Caitlin’s blinking stare.

“There’s plenty of trouble to go around,” she says, holding my gaze.

“Right,” I say. “I’m sure that’s what everyone realizes.”

“Is that what PFC Tibbs realizes?” she says.

“I think so,” I say.

But Coach must see something on me, some dread gathering under my skin.

“So what might make the PFC share such details with you?” she asks, her sticky hands still lifted in front of her, her body frozen.

“He shares them with Beth,” I say, after the quickest of pauses. It still feels queasy to tell her, but it would feel queasy not to.

It takes her a second for this new bit of knowledge to descend.

“It’s Beth,” I repeat.

“Got it,” she says, those slippery hands still raised up, like a doctor ready for surgery. Ready to lay his hands upon your heart.


In the first-floor corridor, after second period, after her visit to the police station:

“It’s fine,” Coach says, brisking by me. Her French braid is very tight, temple vein pulsing. “No problems. It’s all good.”


After lunch, Beth finds me in the school library, where I never go and where no one should ever have thought to look. But she looks.

“Back in my day, libraries had books,” she says, as we internet surf side by side at tall terminals, “and we walked five miles in the snow to school.”

“So that’s how you got such thick ankles,” I say, clicking aimlessly through sundry nothingness. Celebrity crotch shots, Thinspiration: Secrets to Fasting Only Anas Know.

“The PFC went in this morning,” she says. “He told me his sad, sad song over malteds.”

“And?” I say, twirling my finger in ballerina circles over the touch pad.

“He said they’d called Coach in.”

“Yeah, she told me. It went fine.” I don’t look at her. I don’t like the feeling that’s coming, that prickling in my forehead.

“Ah…,” she says, and though I’m not looking, I know she’s smiling, can hear the gum clicking to the corner of her grinning mouth.

It reminds me of the time Beth’s mother swore to me over her morning coffee that Beth was born with sharp teeth.

Better to drink the blood of JVs, Beth had said.

“So,” Beth says now, “what has Coach told you about the hamsa bracelet?”

“What hamsa bracelet?” I say, fingers to my forehead.

“The one they found in Will’s apartment.”

I click on the ad for Wu Long Vanishing Tea.

“Wait a minute,” she says, smacking her head. “Didn’t you have one of those bracelets? The one you gave to Coach. Back in your puppy dog phase. To ward off the evil eyes of wronged husbands, I suppose.”

I look at her. I hadn’t even realized Beth knew about the bracelet.

“What about it?”

“Well, I guess she must have left it at Will’s, at some point,” Beth says. “During some…encounter.”

“Lots of people have those bracelets,” I say.

She looks at me, and something pinches in my chest, a memory of something, a connection. But I can’t hold on to it. She’s watching me so closely, but I can’t grab it.

“Do they think it’s hers?” I say.

“Is it hers, Addy?” Beth asks, her left eyebrow lifting. “She must have told you they asked her about it. You two thick as thieves.”

“We haven’t really had a chance to talk,” I say, holding tight to the edge of the terminal.

“Well, she’s pretty busy,” Beth says, with a slow nod. “Four days to the Big Game and all.”

Turning away from the terminal, she flings one golden leg onto the nearest library tabletop.

“Look how tight I am,” she says, surveying herself. “I’ll grant Coach that. But you think Li’l Tacy Cottontail’s up for Top Girl? The balance is all. One of her calves is bigger than the other. Did you ever notice that?”

“No.”

“I bet you have. Your balance is impeccable. Four inches shorter, you would’ve been a perfect Top Girl.”

I pause a second.

“The PFC doesn’t know she has one, does he?” I ask.

“Has what?” Beth asks, maddeningly, surveying my legs now with her cold captain-appraisal gaze.

“A hamsa bracelet,” I say, fighting a panicky tilt in my voice.

“Not now, Adelaide,” she says. “Not yet.”

I grab my books and start to walk away.

“You’re going to have to forget how pretty and interested she is in you, Addy,” she calls after me.

Walking out, I hear her all the way.

“Tighten that gut, Addy. Lock those legs. Smile, smile, smile!”

Everyone is looking at me, but I only look straight ahead.

“Remember what old Coach Templeton used to say, Addy!”

I push open the shuddering glass exit doors.

“A good cheerleader,” she is calling out, “is not measured by the height of her jumps but by the span of her spirit.”


23



THURSDAY: AFTER SCHOOL

“Four days, bitches!!” shouts Mindy.

RiRi is doing waist bends, flashing her panties, this time lined with sparkles.

The JV is clicking through YouTube on her laptop for the Celts squad’s stunts.

Paige Shepherd is twanging—“Ima go for the gold, heart is in control, I’m a go, I’m a go I’m a go getta”—lifting one long leg into a Bow ’n’ Arrow.

Cori Brisky shushes her hair up into her trademark extra-long white-blond pony whip, famous across three school districts.

Everything is as it ever was.

Still ground-bound since her spectacular fall, gimpy Emily is passing around the temporary tattoos she ordered for the squad. She has one on the apple of either cheek and she’s dotted her knee brace with them. Which all seems sad to me, like she’s our mascot. No one respects a mascot.

We all feel sorry for her. She can’t even hall-stalk with us, can’t keep up with that club boot, and has already become a recruiting target of lacrosse players and the golf team, which could not be sadder, and of the predatory courtship of the field hockey furies, promising to get her knees skinned.

I remember, sort of, being friends with her. Holding her hair back while she gagged herself pea-shoot thin. Even calling her at night instead of Beth, confiding things. But now I don’t know what we’d talk about.


At three twenty Coach, chin high, strolls through the doors to the gym.

Beth, standing in front of the mirror, doesn’t even look up, too busy oil-slicking her lashes with a mascara brush, no cares furrowing her face.

“I have some news, guys,” she says.

I reach out to hold onto my locker door.

“I heard from my source at State Quals. There’s gonna be a scout at Monday’s game. We rock them, we’re rocking Regionals next year.”

Everyone whoops and woo-hoos, jumping on the bleachers, grabbing each other around the necks like the ball-ers do.

Poor boot-braced Emily bursts into tears.

“By next year you’ll be flying again,” RiRi says, hand to her shoulder.

“But not on Monday,” she whimpers. “That won’t be mine.”

“Let’s focus,” Coach says, clapping her hands sharply.

We snap front.

Looking at her, I can’t fathom it. I’d never guess anything else was going on at all. She is ready to ride us. She is sweatless and bolt-straight.

“We need to think about the Celts,” Mindy says.

The Celts squad has serious game, famous for their facial expressions, head bobs and tongues stuck out and dropped jaws and wide eyes when their Flyers hit, when they spring back, the crowd gasping ah, ah, ah.

“They do two-girl Awesomes,” Brinnie Cox says with a sigh, which is how she says everything. “A girl my size can catch both the Flyer’s feet in one palm.”

“Their facials are hot,” RiRi admits.

“I don’t care about their wiggling tongues or bouncing ponytails,” says Coach. “I don’t care about the Celts at all. All I care about is that Regionals scout. The scout’s gotta see our star power.”

We all look uneasily at Tacy.

“Your Flyer isn’t your key to the castle,” Coach says. “It’s about the squad. You gotta show you’re the posse straight from hell. And there’s only one way to do it. We’re going to give that scout something that will guarantee our slot. We’re going to show her a two-two-one.”

The two-two-one.

It will be our shining achievement, if we nail it.

Three stories high of golden girls, two Bottom Bases holding up two Middle Bases in shoulder stands, the Flyer tossed through the center, Bottom Bases platforming her feet, the Middle Bases’ arms lifted to hold her arms outstretched, crucifixion style. Spotters standing behind, waiting for the Flyer’s death-defying Deadman fall.

It’s illegal in competition, but not at a game.

And it’s the kind of stunt you need to nail to make it to Regionals. To a tourney.


“Cap’n,” Coach says, looking up at Beth, halfway up the bleachers again, her hovering black presence. “All yours today. Drill them hard.”

She tosses Beth the whistle.

Beth, one eyebrow raised, catches it.

In an instant, a flare of energy seems to shoot up her body, that sullen slouch uncoiling for the first time in months, since…I can’t even remember.

Coach has just handed her the Big Stick, and thank god she still seems to think it worth taking.

“Gimme some handsprings, bitches,” Beth says, making her slow, willowy way down the stands, arms dangling, snapping her fingers low.

“Don’t f*ck with me, RiRi,” she says. “Loose limbs may fly for your Saturday night specials, but I need you tight as a cherry. Time-travel me back.”

So Beth wrangles us for a while, and it does feel good. And Beth is so on, so animated.

She is enthroned and magnificent.


At some point, I see Coach slink into her office.

Later, while Beth’s busy trash-talking Tacy for a weak back tuck, calling her a sad little p-ssy, I slip over and peer in, see Coach on the phone, her hand over her eyes.

I think: it’s the cops. It’s the cops. What now?


An hour in, we’re ready to run the two-two-one pyramid.

Because I’m not too big and not too small, I’m a Middle Base, one of the two shoulder stands in the middle.

Beneath me stands eagle-shouldered Mindy Coughlin, my feet curled around her collarbone, her body bracing.

But I think it’s worse for me, no floor beneath me, and ninety-four pounds of quaking panic above.

Once we’re up, Tacy will get rocketed between RiRi and me, and we will grab her legs and lock her body in place.

Then she’ll wow them all, flipping backwards into a Deadman, falling into the waiting embrace of the cradle-armed spotters fifteen feet below.

Everyone will gasp, grip their bleacher seats.

The Deadman, that’s our moment of shock and awe.

Despite what Coach says, it really is all about the Flyer.

We can hold her steady as she comes, but if Tacy wobbles, twists, turns the wrong way: snap, crackle, pop.

Which is probably why she looks like a doomed tail gunner waiting to be wedged into a quaking turret.

“You all need to man up for Slaussen,” Beth tells us. “Or she’ll be mat-kill. Two years ago, at the Viking game, I saw a girl jiggle just an inch up there. Her girls didn’t have her. Smack! Her neck hit the ground, skidded so hard that a piece of her blond ponytail ripped from her scalp.”

Tacy’s face goes from green to white to gray. Beth, with that power to annihilate with a single breath. Two months ago, Tacy galloped hard at Beth’s side, lackey under her mighty sway. Oh, the turns of fortune…

Eyes on Tacy’s toned legs, which look like mini-butterfingers, Beth shakes her head.

I realize she’s right. One calf is bigger than the other.

“You always were such a hoodrat,” Beth says, shaking her head. “Always quick to hoist your legs in the air for my sloppy seconds. But I guess you were only hoisting the left one.”

Beth kneels down on the mat in front of Tacy’s dainty body.

Then, she wets her finger and runs it along Tacy’s thigh and calf.

We all observe, like watching a gang recruit get jumped in.

“I thought so,” Beth says, rising and wiggling her index finger, smudged with what looks to me like Mystic Island Radiance. “All the spray tan in the world won’t give you what you don’t have. You either have muscle or you have twig. Or, in your case, Q-tip.”

“I can do it, Beth,” Tacy says, voice pitching high. “Coach knows. I’ve earned my spot.”

“Then let’s see it, meat,” she says, standing back. “Make a believer out of me.”

Stepping back, she turns the speakers up and our game music, bawdy pop with baby-doll vocals cut through with a molasses-throated rap, “Get down, girl, go ’head get down.”

I swing up to Middle Base, above Mindy’s ramming shoulder, her hand foisting up, palm spreading over my bottom.

At that moment, Coach walks back into the gym.

“You got it, Slaussen,” Coach nods, strolling past Beth to the back of the pyramid. Hearing her, such a relief. “You nailed it once, you’ll nail it again.”

Coach inexplicably becoming the good cop in this strange new world.

But RiRi, the other Middle Base, and I feel a joint twinge, our eyes on Tacy’s legs, like little cinnamon sticks that might snap.

When we raise her up, air-puff light, she is shaking like a bobblehead doll, like Emily was. I can feel her try to make herself tight, can feel it radiating through me, but the cartoon terror eyes put a chill in me.

“Ride that bitch,” Beth’s voice booms at us. “Ride it.”

Our arms shaking, we’ve got to lock it in place, but it’s not locking. It’s like trying to make a pair of gummy worms stand straight.

We bring her back down for a second.

“She can’t do it,” Beth pronounces. “Either no two-two-one or we need a new Flyer.”

We are all quiet.

Suddenly, RiRi’s voice rises from behind me. “What about Addy?”

I turn around and look at her, my heart speeding up. She smiles and winks.

“What if Addy were Top Girl?”

Coach looks over at me, eyebrows raised. I feel Beth’s gaze on me too.

“Addy doesn’t like to be on top,” Beth says, poker-faced.

“Hey!” Tacy cries. “I’ve been flying all season.”

Coach nods. “It’s something to think about, long haul,” she says. “But for now we need Addy right where she is, in the middle. She’s our spine.”

I don’t like all the eyes on me. I wish RiRi had never said anything.

It doesn’t matter anyway because, a second later, everyone is just looking at Tacy again.

“She can’t, Coach,” says Beth, as simply as she’s ever said anything.

My hands fresh off Tacy’s kindling hipbone, I feel certain Beth is right.

“Look at her,” Beth scoffs. “She’s not trained up.”

These are fighting words and we all know it. It’s spit in the eye to any coach.

“She just wants my spot, Coach,” Tacy nearly whimpers. “I can do it. Elevator me up again.”

“Slaussen?” Coach looks over at Tacy. “Are you ready?”

“Yes!”

Beth sighs loudly. “What happens,” she practically sings, “when a pretty young coach takes a ragtag team of misfits and feebs under her wing? Why, they fly, fly, fly.”

Coach looks at her.

“We just needed someone to believe in us,” Beth finishes.

“Stop gaming her, Cassidy,” Coach says, staring her down, duel-at-dawn, but her tone still flat, toneless, “or I’m gonna ground-bound you instead.”

“Look at her leg,” Beth says, “like a wishbone twanging.”

“Cassidy,” Coach says, like she’s forgotten the caution she’s supposed to use with Beth, or she’s just stopped caring. “When you start showing me you can do more than flash your tits and treat your mouth like a sewer, then maybe we’ll have something to talk about.”

Don’t, Coach, I think. Don’t.

“You heard the coach,“ Beth says, turning to us with a smile. “Load her up and let her fall.”

The music thumping again, Beth counting off, Mindy and Cori line up, Bottom Bases. Spotters Paige and a JV stand behind them and load up the second level, RiRi and me, our bodies springing up to shoulder stands, their palms cradling our calves.

Facing each other, we lift Tacy between us, throwing her above us into a stand, our arms lifted high, hands tight on her wrists. Her arms outstretched, Jesus-style, her left leg knee-bent in front of her, the girls beneath grasping her right foot to hold her in place.

For a second, she is solid.

Seven, eight, Beth counting off until the Deadman and it is time. Time for us to drop her backwards into a stiff-spined horizontal fall. Ready for Paige, the JV, all her spotters to catch her down below.

We let go.

Her eyes wild, Tacy drops, but her body seems to rubberize, limbs like spaghetti. As her hand grapples for me, I feel myself sliding down with her, Paige and Cori, on the ground, shouting, “Slaus, here, here, here. Hold it!”

But she plunges, our hands empty.

The sickly sound as Tacy, still half in Paige’s sloping arms, hits the mat, face first.

RiRi and I still on high, I think my knees might give, but I hear Coach’s voice, iron smooth, “Hanlon, slow down that dismount,” as RiRi and I sink down.

I feel something clamping on me, and Beth is right there, her hand gripping my arm all the way down. Depositing me safely on the mat, feet first.

Coach is on the floor with Tacy, strewn from the spotters’ tangled arms, her feet still in their grip even as her head, neck tilted, her chin split wide open, swabs the mat.

“At least she can fall well,” RiRi mutters.

Her mouth opening in a strangled sob, Tacy’s teeth blare bright red.

“You come at the king,” Beth says, “you best not miss.”


RiRi and I take Tacy to Nurse Vance, who slaps on the butterfly bandages and tells me to take Tacy to the hospital for stitches, which sends her into a new round of sobs.

“Your modeling career is over,” I say.

Walking to her locker, Tacy is purple-lipped and cotton-tufted, crying about the Game and the scouts and how she’s got to do the two-two-one, she’s the only one light enough, which isn’t even true, and Coach damn well better let her cheer, no matter what she looks like.

Then, a new sob choking in her, she takes a deep breath.

“But it should be Beth anyway,” she whispers, dramatically. “Beth’s Top Girl.”

For a second, I hear RiRi. What about Addy? What if Addy were Top Girl?

But it never has been me, has it? I never wanted it to. I was never a stunter, I was a spotter, a hoister. That’s what I am.

And Top Girls were different from the rest of us.

I think of Beth last year, after the Norsemen game, all of us drinking with the players up on the ridge, and Brian Brun thrusting her above his head, hands gripping around her ankles, her feet tucked in his palms, then one leg flung behind her, rendering her celebrated Bow ’n’ Arrow, as she spun and lifted her right leg straight in the air, slipping it behind her glossy head, making one beautiful line of Bethness, all of us gasping.

It’s all we could talk about, dream about, for days, weeks.

“It’s always been Beth,” she slurs, grazing her temple with the back of her wrist. “And the squad is what counts. Cheer, I never knew it mattered so much. Not until Coach picked me. She changed my life. Now it’s all I can think about, Addy. I hear the counts in my sleep. Don’t you? I don’t ever want them to end.”

I tell her to stop talking.

“Don’t you see, Addy?” she says, words tumbling in her mouth, eyes shiny and crazed. “When we go out there Monday night, we need to show them what we can do. What we are. We need to make them know it. We need to give them more than awesomeness.

“We need to give them greatness.”


It hurts to turn the steering wheel. I can still feel Tacy’s grasping fingers, the fear my arm socket might pop. The sound of Beth saying, “Ride that bitch…ride her.”

And Beth, the way her hand fastened on me, stopping my fall.

And after, Coach saying, as I walked the limping Tacy across the gym, “Next time, Hanlon, when you let her go, keep those arms to the side. Don’t let her see your hands are there. If she does, she’ll grab for them. Wouldn’t you?”

Wouldn’t you? I want to ask.

I think of injured Emily again, withering up in the stands. And I remember how, last week, she posted on my Facebook wall: “U never call me anymore. None of U.” And I decided it was a joke, one of Emily’s endless LOLs.

I couldn’t be bothered.

At the games she sits, just barely separated from the bleacher crowd—in the borderland, the nowhere zone between our bronzed glory and the gray blur of everything, everyone else in this sad world.


At home later:

U put a hex on Slaus, I text Beth.

U shoulda given *her* the hamsa, she replies.

Like at a hypnotist’s cue, my head floods with the image of my bracelet in Will’s apartment. A crimson ring on his carpet.

But I keep hearing Beth’s words in my head:…Coach must’ve told you they asked her about the bracelet. You two thick as thieves.

Why hasn’t Coach told me?

I think I should just call her and ask her about it. But I don’t.

I want her to tell me.

It doesn’t mean anything if I have to ask her.

A blipping text message comes hours later, but it’s from Beth: Guess who’s flying Mon nite?

Tacy’s out, Beth’s in. A peculiar mix of terror and relief floods through me—and then the taunting mystery of what kind of conversation transpired between Beth and Coach during those hours after practice to lead to this.

R U happy now? I text back.

But there’s no reply.


It’s the dark muddle of the night when I feel the phone hissing in my hand.

Come outside.

I flick my blinds with a finger and see a car out front, Coach behind the wheel.

The cold grass crunching under my feet, I bound across the lawn.

We sit in the car, which is Matt French’s and isn’t as nice as Coach’s car. It smells like cigarettes, though I’ve never seen Matt French smoke.

The cup holder is stained with three, four coffee rings like the center of an old tree.

Something’s wreathing my ankle, maybe the hand loops of a plastic bag, or the curled edges of an old receipt, some stray Matt Frenchness left behind.

Something about how messy the car is makes me feel things, like that time I saw him, after midnight, drooped over a bowl of cereal, and understood it was his dinner, that gritty bowl of Coach’s special holistic blend of organic gravel, soot, and matches, and Matt French hunched over it by himself on the kitchen island, socked feet dangling, headphones on, tuning out all our hysteria and gum chewing.

And now. Poor Matt, in some airport or office tower in Georgia, some conference room someplace where men like Matt French go to do whatever it is they do, which is not interesting to any of us, but maybe it would be if we knew. Though I doubt it.

Except sometimes I think of him, and the soulful clutter in his eyes, which is not like Will’s eyes were because Will’s eyes always seemed about Will. And Matt French’s seem only about Coach.

“He’s still gone?” I ask.

“Gone?” she asks, looking at me quizzically.

“Matt,” I say.

She pauses. “Oh,” she says, turning her face away for a second. “Yeah.”

As if he were an afterthought.

Hands curling around the steering wheel, she says, “There’s something new, Addy.”

The bracelet, she’s going to tell me at last.

“The police,” she says. “I think they’re hearing things. They asked me what the nature of our relationship was. That’s how they put it.”

“Oh,” I say.

“I told them again that we were friends. They’re probably just trying to understand his state of mind.”

“Oh,” I repeat.

“They had a lot of new questions about the last contact I’d had with him. I think they—and the Guard—they want to understand how he might have come to this,” she says.

The words don’t feel like hers, exactly. So formal, her mouth moving slowly around them like they don’t fit.

“I’m sure it’s fine, Addy,” she says, her fingers clenching tighter. “But it seemed like I should tell you.”

“I’m glad you told me,” I say. But she hasn’t told me anything. “Is that all?”

As if sensing my disappointment, she pats me on the shoulder.

“Addy, nothing can really happen if we keep tight,” she says, resting her fingers there. I don’t remember her ever touching me like that. “Keep strong. Focus. After all, it’s just you and me who know everything.”

“Right,” I say. And I want to feel the dazey warmth of sharing things with her, but she’s not sharing, not really, and so all I feel is Beth, the way she seems now, crouched, watchful, hovering.

“So we’re good?” she asks.

Part of me wants to tell her everything, all the ways she needs to watch for Beth, knives out. But she’s telling me only what she wants to. So I don’t say any more.

“I gave it to Beth,” Coach says, reading my thoughts, like she can. Like they both can. “She’s Top Girl. She’s flying at the final game.”

Coach, I want to say, what makes you think you can stop there? You have to give her everything until we figure out what she wants. Until she does.

“First I made her captain. Now I’ve made her Top Girl,” she says, eyes on me, searching.

She didn’t make me Top Girl, I can hear Beth saying. I made me Top Girl. I made myself.

She loops her fingers around the gearshift.

“I don’t know what else to do,” she says, a slightly stunned look on her face. “Jesus, she’s just a seventeen-year-old kid. Why should I…”

There’s a pause.

“She’ll get bored with it all,” she says, as if trying to convince herself. “They always do.”


At home that night I spend an hour, forehead nearly pressed to my laptop screen, reading the news.

No Answers Yet: Guardsman Cause of Death Still Under Investigation.

What would it mean if it were murder? What does it have to do with Coach, with me?

Coach, Coach, like my very own sergeant, who took me straight into the fog of war…

I wanted to be a part of your world, but I didn’t know your world was this.


That night, I dream about that time with Beth, the first drunk I ever had, both of us climbing up Black Ash Ridge. She kept saying, Are you sure you’re ready, Addy. Are you? And I promised I was, our heads schnapps-fuzzed and our bodies ecstatic. She said, But you’re not afraid, Addy, are you? Show me that lion heart.

Later, I remember falling back, great big Xs for eyes and half delirious, and Beth crawling over to me, her shirt off and flaming red bra. She says she will stop me from log-rolling to my death. She promises she will save me, us.

Just don’t look down, Addy, just never look down.

…and her voice, like it was coming from a deep gorge inside me, vibrating through my chest, my throat, my head, my heart.

When you gaze into the Abyss, Addy, she says, her eyes glowing above me like two blazing stars, laughing or even crying, the Abyss gazes into you.