Dare Me

25



FRIDAY NIGHT

Sprawled on the hood of my car, we are high up on the south face of the ridge, right where it drops a thousand miles or more, into the deepest part of the earth.

We have been drinking cough-syrupy wine that clings to the tongue. Beth calls it hobo wine, and it feels like we are hobos now. Wanderers. Midnight ramblers.

I forget everything and think that, hidden up here behind the sparkly granite of a thousand gorges and knobs, I am safe from all hazard.

But there is Beth beside me, breathing wildly and talking in ragged lopes that seem to streak around my head, across the sky above us.

At some point I stop listening and instead focus on the loveliness of my own white hands, bending and canting them above me, against the black sky.

“Do you hear what I’m saying, Addy?” she asks.

“You were speaking of dark forces,” I tell her, guessing, because this is usually what Beth is speaking of.

“You know who I thought I saw yesterday,” she says, “driving her whorey Kia over by St. Reggie’s?”

“Who?”

“Casey Jaye. All last summer, cheer buddies in your camp bunk, giggling together in your matching sports bras, and that love knot she gave you.”

“It wasn’t anything,” I say, feeling an unaccountable blush. “It didn’t mean anything.”

“Opening her thighs to show you her tight quads. I knew her wormy heart. But I shot my wad too soon and you weren’t ready to believe me. You didn’t want to.”

She will never let it go. She will never forget it.

But then she jerks up suddenly and I nearly slide from the car hood, hands gripping her jacket.

“Look out there,” she says, pointing into the distance, the place where Sutton Grove would be if it weren’t just nightness out there.

I peer off into the black, but I can’t see anything, just a shimmer of some town somewhere that’s mostly, if not fully, asleep.


A lush wino haze upon me, I guess I’ve been hoping, with colossal naïveté, that Beth will determine she has won, that she is Captain, that Coach is barely even a coach these days, ceding more and more power, and now she will let it go…she will let it go and Coach will be free.

It’s all over, or nearly so.

The police will realize the truth, and it will all be over.

And Beth will be done.

Or nearly so.

I am drunk.

“With her private jokes and her yoga orgies and her backyard jamborees,” Beth is saying. “All of you curled at her feet. Cleopatra in a hoodie. I never fell for any of it.”

“You never fell for it once,” I agree, trying to fight off the feeling of menace piercing the haze.

“But when I look out there,” she says, sweeping her hand across the lightless horizon, “all I can think is that she’s getting away with it. Getting away with everything.”

“Beth,” I warn. My eyes on the velvety dark below. The expanse of nothingness that suddenly seems to be throbbing, nervous, alive.

What does lie down there?

In this state, the unruly despair of Will’s life, the battered end of it, comes to me freshly.

I want sparkled cheeks, high laughter, and good times, and I never asked for any of this. Except I did.

“Addy,” she says, kicking her feet in the air. “I’ve got that fever in my blood. I’m ready for some trouble. Are you?”

I am not. Oh, I am not. But who would leave Beth alone when she’s like this?

“Let’s go look the devil in the eye, girlfriend,” she says, tilting that wine bottle to my lips, to my open mouth, and I drink, drink, drink.


Beth now at the wheel, we are looping endlessly, in curling figure eights, and the streetlamps overhead are popping over my eyes.

Then we’re climbing upward again and there’s a pause between songs and I hear a roar in my ears. Face to the window, I see the crashing interstate is newly below us.

We’re nearly there before I realize where she’s taken me.

“I don’t want to be here,” I whisper.

She stops the car in front of the lightboxed sign, The Towers.

We sit, the light greening our faces.

“This is not a place I want to be,” I say again, louder now.

“Can you feel the energy here?” she says, putting lip gloss on with her finger, like we are readying for our dates. “It’s some black mojo.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Our great captain’s captain, the she-wolf. The li-o-ness. I can feel her here,” she smiles spookily. “How it was for her that night.”

I don’t say anything.

“The night she done shot her lover dead,” Beth says, crooking her fingers into little guns.

Bang-bang, she whispers in my ear, bang-bang!

And there it is. She has said it.

“You have lost your mind,” I say, the words heavy in my mouth. “You have lost it.”

“Hey, Coach,” Beth sings, her grin wider and wider, “where you goin’ with that gun in your hand?”

“Shut up,” I say, my hand leaping out and shoving at her, a strange half laugh coming from me.

But then I’m shoving harder and I’m not laughing, and Beth grabs my hands and locks them together. When did she get so sober?

“He killed himself,” I say, so loud it hurts me to hear. “She didn’t do anything. She’d never do anything like that.”

My hands in hers, she leans toward me, very close, her wine-thick breath in my face, my hands knotted in hers so tight I feel a hot tear in my eye corner.

“She would never do anything like that,” she repeats back to me, nodding.

“She loved him,” I say, the words sounding small and ridiculous.

“Right,” Beth says, smiling, pressing my hands against her own hard ribcage, like clutching in the backseat with a boy, “because no one’s ever killed the person they love.”

“You’re drunk, you’re drunk and awful,” I say, and I’m trying to get my hands free, and we’re rocking, our faces so close. “An awful bitch, the worst I ever knew.”

She drops my hands at last, tilting her head and watching me.

Suddenly, the alcohol heaving in me, my hands palsied, I have to get out of the car.

Feet on the smooth, freshly poured asphalt of the lot, I breathe deep.

But this is what she wants because she gets out too.

I look at her, face shot through not with moonlight but with the wan blue of the bank of parking lot lights.

“Let’s go,” I say. “I don’t need this—”

“Do you smell something?” Beth asks, suddenly. “Like flowers or something. Honeysuckle.”

“I don’t smell anything,” I say.

I smell all kinds of things, most of all chlorine. Bleach. Blood.

“Did you know the government is studying the possibility that people might give off these scents when they’re lying?” Beth says, and I must be dreaming. “And each smell is very individual. Like a fingerprint.”

I’ve dreamed my way into one of Beth’s nightmares, the one where we’re standing above the gorge, like an open throat.

“I wonder if yours is honeysuckle,” she says.

“I’m not lying about anything,” I say.

“Honeysuckle so sweet I can taste it. You’re good enough to eat, Addy-Faddy,” she says, and I feel she’s monstrous now.

“He killed himself,” I say, my voice almost too low to hear. “It’s the truth, if you want to know.”

“You lie and lie, and I keep lapping it up,” she says, clucking her tongue. “Not anymore.”

“He did. He shot himself in the mouth on his carpet,” I say, and it’s not even my voice, not even my words, but they come so fast and so sure. “It’s the truth.”

Beth is watching me, and there’s no stopping me now.

“He shot himself,” I say. I wish I could stop, but I can’t stop until I convince her. “He fell on the carpet and his head was black. And he died there.”

With those security floodlights glaring, her face like marble, she says nothing.

And I keep going.

“You don’t know,” I say, the wind whipping my hair into my face, my mouth. “Because you didn’t see. But I know.”

“How do you know?” she darts back, and repeats her question from the girls’ restroom. “Were you there?”

“Of course I was,” I say, almost a howl, my breath sliding from me.

“Of course you were,” she says, fingers reaching out, lacing through my blowing hair.

“So that’s how I know,” I say, tightening my voice. “That’s how I know more than you. I saw his body. I saw it lying there.”

She is quiet for a moment.

“You saw him kill himself.”

“No, after.”

“Ah, so you saw him after he was already dead. After Coach shot him dead.”

“No,” I say, my voice loud. “We found him together. We got to his apartment and there he was.”

There is a pause.

“I see,” she says, an unspeakably lewd leer rising. “So what exactly was going on that Coach would bring you to the Sarge’s apartment, at all hours of the night. Were you some virgin prize—”

“No,” I nearly shout, feeling stomach-sick. “She found him and she called me. I went and got her.”

She smiles faintly. “Huh,” she says.

My stomach turning, I lean against the open car door, breathing in.

“Wait,” I say, heeling back, dropping into the front seat. “You saw us that night. You saw me come home after.”

“I didn’t need to see you,” she says, toe-kicking at my ankles. It’s not really an answer, though. “I know all your beats, Addy.”

“You know everything,” I mutter.

“I know you, Addy,” she says. “Better than you ever could. You’ve never been able to look at anything about yourself. You count on me to do it for you.”

I press my face into the car headrest.

“And what you’ve just told me,” she continues, “I’m glad you finally fessed up, but it doesn’t change anything.”

Turning my head slowly toward her, my mouth drifting open…

“What?”

“All it proves, Addy, is that you lied to me. But I knew that already.”


Later, in bed, the alcohol leaching from me, I cannot make my head stop.

Drunk and weak, I gave her everything.

I feel outmaneuvered, outflanked.

Because I was.

Don’t you believe me now? I’d said, whining like a little JV, all the way home.

Don’t you get it? she’d said, shaking her head. He was done with her. And now she’s done with him. And now she’s sunk you down in it with her. And soon she’ll be done with you too.

She made you her accomplice.

She made you her bitch—but then again, weren’t you already?


I think I will never sleep and then, finally, I do.