Dare Me

26



SATURDAY MORNING: TWO DAYS TO FINAL GAME

I wake up with a start, and a picture flashes there.

Last Monday night, Coach opening Will’s apartment door to me. The alarm in her eyes like she’d forgotten she’d called me. The shimmery dampness clinging to her thick hair.

The picture so vivid, it aches. My heart rocketing in my chest, I feel my T-shirt sticking to me, my hung-over body blazing.

Grasping for the warm water bottle by my bed, I know something suddenly. Something I’d forgotten.

The dew on her.

Faint. Like someone who’d showered maybe a half hour before.

And Will, lying on the floor in his towel.

I can’t quite piece it together, but it reminds me of something.

It reminds me of another time.

It reminds me of this:

Will, waving through the lobby doors, his hair wet and seal-slick.

Coach, slipping from behind him, walking toward me, her hair hanging in damp loops to her shoulders, darkening her T-shirt.

The first time I drove to The Towers, the time I came and picked her up. And I knew what they’d been doing before I arrived, because it was all over them.

Their clothes on but they seemed so naked, all their pleasure in each other streaked across their faces.

Fresh from their shower, their shared shower I’d imagined.

I imagine now.

Monday night, Coach and Will, both shower damp, but Will is dead.

She didn’t find his body, Beth said. She was there when it happened. She was already there.


The phone rings and rings and rings. I turn it off and stuff it under my mattress.

The thoughts that come are rough and relentless.

The days leading up to Will’s death, the way Coach had been acting, missing practices, the car accident, and now I wonder if she’d lied about all of it. If she had felt Will slipping away and had been calling, had been begging him to come over, like that day at her house, when she finally lured him there. When she had me wait in the backyard with Caitlin.

And that night. The faintly damp hair. The bleachy tennis shoes. What had that been about, really?

And how did she get to Will’s?

I took a cab, she’d said. I snuck out of the house. Matt was asleep. He took two pills. I had to see Will, Addy. That strangely robotic voice. So I called a cab. But I couldn’t call a cab to take me back, could I?

Snuck out at two in the morning, and Matt French didn’t hear her? It made so much more sense that she’d gone over earlier, made some excuse to Matt, or gone because Matt wasn’t home yet.

Could Will have been done with her, and she…

Suddenly, I think of last week, that sleeping snarl in the night as I lay beside Coach:

How could you do this to me? How?

Pow-pow, I can hear Beth say. Pow-pow.


A Post-it left for me on the kitchen island:

“A, Debbie says someone from PD called for you. Someone steal mascot again? Love, D.”

Yes, Dad, I think, holding the edge of the counter. That’s exactly it.


I’m running on Royston Road when the car pulls up.

I never run. Beth says runners are uncreative masturbators. I didn’t know what that meant, but it made me never want to run.

But this morning, my stepmother’s klonopin still sticky on my tongue, running seems right.

Like at practice, like at games, I can forget everything but the special talents of my special girl body, which does everything I ask it to, which is unravaged and pure, baby-oil soft and fluttered only with the bruises of girl sport.

The feel of the concrete pulsing up my shins is near-exquisite and when the release comes, it’s like hitting a stunt but better because it’s just me and no one can even see, but I’m doing it, doing it anyway and without peering out waiting for anyone to tell me I hit it, because I know I did. I know it.

So I keep running. Until all I feel is nothing.

And no one can touch me. My phone shut off, far from me, and no one even knows where I am, if I’m anywhere at all.

Except the detectives.

It’s just like on TV. They pull up to the curb, and one of them is leaning on the doorframe.

“Adelaide Hanlon?”

I stop, earbuds slipping from my ears.

“Can we ask you a few questions?”


The man gives me a bottle of water. It gives me something to do with my hands, my mouth.

We sit in an office, and when the woman sees my sweated legs puckering a little on the seat, she offers me the desk chair, and she doesn’t seem to care that I sweat on it.

“If you’d feel more comfortable with your parents present,” the man says, “we can call them.”

“No,” I say, shaking my head. “That’s okay.”

They both look at me and nod, as if I am being very wise.

Then they exchange a quick look. He leaves, and the woman stays.

In my head, I start doing my cheer counts. One-two, three-four. I count them until my heart finally slows down. Until I can empty my face, teen-girl bored.

“We’re just trying to confirm a few details about last Monday night,” she says.

She has a tight ponytail that reminds me of Coach’s, and a dimple on one side of her mouth. She doesn’t really smile, but she speaks softly.

Somehow I start to feel okay, like having to talk to the assistant principal about something you know about but had nothing to do with. If you just say as little as possible, they really can’t do anything.


The questions start generally, more like a conversation. What do I like about school? How long have I been a cheerleader? Aren’t some of the stunts dangerous?

When the questions turn, it’s a gentle turn, or she renders it gently.

“So you and Coach French spend time together outside of school?”

The question seems strange. I think I’ve misheard it.

“She’s my coach,” I say.

“And last Monday night, did you see your coach?”

I don’t know what to say. I have no idea what she told them.

“Last Monday?” I say. “I don’t know.”

“Try to remember, okay? Were you at her house last Monday?”

That second part, a gift. At her house. If Coach didn’t tell them that, who would have?

“I guess I was,” I say. “Sometimes I help her with her little girl.”

“Like a babysitter while she goes out?”

“No, no,” I say, calm as I can. Besides, who is she to call me a babysitter? “I don’t babysit.”

“So just pitching in?”

I look at her, at her bare lips and badly plucked eyebrows.

“I hang out there a lot,” I say. “She helps me through stuff. I like being over there.”

“So last Monday you were there with your coach and her husband?”

And her husband. “Yes,” I say, because doesn’t this have to be Coach’s story and don’t our stories have to be straight for both our sakes? “I was.”

“And you knew the sergeant?”

“I’d see him in school.”

“Was your coach friends with him?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “She never said anything to me.”

“You never saw them together?”

“No.”

I have no idea what I’ve done or undone.

“And you like being at Coach’s house. You like spending time there.” She’s watching me closely, but I can’t get over the stitch of stray eyebrow hair to the side of her overgroomed right brow.

How could she miss something like that? That detail, like spotting a slack move in another squad’s routine.

It makes me feel strong.

Deputy Hanlon, stone-cold lieutenant, my old guise—I’d forgotten how good they felt.

“That’s what I said, yes, ma’am.”

I lean back, stretch my legs long, and adjust my ponytail.

“It was a comfortable place to be? They seemed to get along?”

“Yeah,” I say.

“Seem like a happy marriage?”

I look at her with my head tilted, like a dog. Like I can’t guess what she might mean. Who thought about the happiness of marriages?

“Yeah, sure,” I say, and my voice clicks into something else, the way I talk when I have to talk to people who could never understand anything at all but who think they get me, think they get everything about girls like me.

“We like Coach,” I say. “She’s a nice lady.”

And I say, “Sometimes she shows us yoga moves. It’s really fun. She’s awesome. The Big Game is Monday, you should come.”

I lean close, like I’m telling her a secret.

“We kick ass Monday, we’re going to Regionals next year.”


“We may have some more questions,” the detective says, as she walks me out.

“Okay,” I say. “Cool.” Which is a word I never use.

Walking past all the cops, all the detectives, I raise my runner’s shirt a few inches, like I’m shaking it loose from my damp skin.

I let them all see my stomach, its tautness.

I let everyone see I’m not afraid, and that I’m not anything but a silly cheerleader, a feather-bodied sixteen-year-old with no more sense than a marshmallow peep.

I let them see I’m not anything.

Least of all what I am.