Dare Me

27



SATURDAY AFTERNOON

At home, I drag my phone from under my mattress.

There are seven voicemails from Coach, and sixteen texts. They all say some variation on this: Call me before anything. Call me NOW.

But first, I decide to do some stretches, like Coach showed us.

Cat tilt. Puppy dog. Triangle pose.

She can wait.

I turn the shower on and stand under it a long time.

Then I blow-dry my hair, stretching each strand out languorously, my mind doing various twists and turns.

Somewhere in the back of my head some old cheer motivational words sputter forth: Time comes, you have to listen to yourself.

That seems like something old Coach Templeton—Fish—would’ve said, or printed out from the internet, or typed in scroll font at the bottom of our squad sheets.

As if listening to yourself was just something you could do. As if there were something there to listen to. A self inside you with all kinds of smart things to say.

My fingers touch my open computer screen, our squad Facebook page, all the cheer photos from three years of death defiance and bright ribbons.

Cheerlebrities!!!

There’s one shot of Beth and me in the foreground, our faces glitter-crusted, our mouths open, tongues out, our fingers curled into the devil hand sign.

We look terrifying.

The picture was from last year. At first, I don’t recognize myself. With all the paint, we are impossible to tell apart. Not just Beth and me, but all of us.


The front windows of Coach’s house are still rimy from last night’s frost, and Caitlin’s paper snowflakes scatter across. A lamp glows inside.

It has the feel of a fairy-tale cottage, like one of those paintings at the mall.

Caitlin stands inside the front door, two fingers punched in her mouth. Usually so tidily groomed, her hair looking oddly knotted, like an uncared-for doll. Breadcrumbs scatter up her cheek.

She doesn’t say anything, but then she never does, and I twist past her, my legs brushing against the barbs of her ruffled jumper, which seems more suited for July.

She likes to look pretty, Coach always says, like that is the only thing she really knows about her.


“I didn’t think they’d get to you so fast,” Coach says. She’s washing the windows in the den, wielding a long pole with a squeegee at the end, and a soft duster beneath it. “I was calling and calling. I thought for sure I’d get to you before they did.”

There’s a sheen of sweat on her face.

I don’t say anything because I want that sweat there, at least for now. She’s made me sweat enough.

“It just seemed easiest to tell them you were here that night,” she says. “If you were at my house, then I couldn’t possibly have been at Will’s.”

She looks at me, from under her extended arm, elegant muscles spun tight.

“And you couldn’t have been there either,” she adds. “So we’re both covered.”

“What about Matt?” I say, dropping my voice.

“Oh, he’s back,” she says, gesturing out the window. “He’s outside.”

In the far corner of the lawn, I spot him sitting on the brick edging of an empty flowerbed.

I can’t figure out what he’s doing, but he’s very still.

I’ve never seen him like that, or outside at all. I wonder if he feels peaceful.

“No,” I say, regaining my focus. “I mean he told the cops you were home asleep, right? Which is what he thought anyway?”

Why did you need me as your alibi, I want to say, when you had him.

“This is better, Addy,” she says, the words just tripping from her tongue. “They never believe the spouse. And he was asleep, that’s not much corroboration…”

She stops for a second, eyes fixed on something on the windowpane. A smudge I can’t see.

“I used to use newspapers,” she says. “Then Matt bought me this thing.” She touches her fingers to the duster at the end of the pole. “It’s lamb’s wool.”

I keep waiting for her to say sorry, sorry I didn’t warn you, sorry I didn’t prepare you, sorry I didn’t protect you from all of this. But she’s never been a sorry kind of person.

“Coach,” I say. “Don’t you want to know what I said to the cops?”

She looks at me.

“But I know what you said,” she says.

“How do you know?” I say, kneeling on the sofa where she stands, barefoot. “I might have blown it without even realizing it.”

“I know because you’re smart. I know because I trust you,” she says, and lifts the pole again, telescoping it higher. “I wouldn’t have gotten you into this otherwise.”

“Gotten me into what?” I say, my voice scraping up my throat. “Coach, what am I in?”

She will not look at me. She’s looking out the window.

“My mess,” she says, her voice smaller. “Don’t think I don’t know that.”

I follow her gaze.

Far back on the lawn, Matt French has turned and seems to be looking toward us. Toward me.

I can’t make out his face, but it’s as though I can.

“Coach,” I say, “why was your hair wet?”

“What,” she says, swooping the squeegee back up the window.

“When I got to Will’s apartment that night,” I say, my eyes still on Matt French in the backyard, his rounded-over shoulders. “Why was your hair wet?”

“My hair wet? What kind of…it wasn’t wet.”

“Yes it was,” I say. “It was damp.”

She sets the pole down.

“Oh,” she says, looking at me at last. “So it’s you who doesn’t trust me.”

“No, I…”

“Did the police…did they…?”

“No,” I say. “I just remembered it. I’d forgotten it and I remembered it. I’m just trying…Coach, he was wearing a towel, and your hair…”

Something is happening, that vacant, efficient expression slipping away, revealing something raw, bruised. It’s like I’ve done something powerfully cruel. “I took a bath before I went over there,” she replies. “I always did.”

“But, Coach…”

“Addy,” she says, looking down at me, the pole piercing the cushion, like a staff, or sword, “you need to stop talking to Beth.”

A burr rises up under my skin.

“Because she just wants her pretty doll back,” Coach says quietly, lifting the pole again, pressing the squeegee against the window, making it squeak.

I feel something tighten in me and have a picture suddenly of Beth’s fingers circling my wrist.

Then at last, I say it. “You never told me about the bracelet.”

“The bracelet?” she says, finally releasing the pole and descending from her perch.

“My hamsa bracelet.”

“Your what?”

“To ward off the evil eye. The one I gave you.”

She pauses a second. “Oh, that, right. What about it?”

“Why didn’t you tell me the police found it?” I say, then wait a beat before adding, “under Will’s body.”

She looks at me. “Addy, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You mean they didn’t ask you about it? They found the bracelet under Will’s body.”

“They told you that?” her voice bounds.

“No,” I say. “Beth did.”

I start to feel like my feet are going to slip out from under me, even though I’m sitting down.


We’re standing in front of Coach’s bureau, her smooth mahogany jewelry box before us.

She sets her hands on either side and lifts the top with a shushing sound.

We look at the tidily arranged bracelets woven into the soft ridges. Her tennis bracelet, a few neon sports bracelets, a delicate silver-linked one.

“It’s got to be in here,” she says, fingertip stroking the velvet. “I haven’t worn it in weeks.”

But it’s not.

I look at the box, and at her, at the way her face looks both tight and loose at the same time, veins wriggling at her temples, but her mouth slack, wounded.

“It’s here,” she says, sliding the box off her bureau, everything tumbling radiantly to the carpet.

“It’s not,” I say.

She looks at me, so helpless.

For a long time, maybe, we are both kneeling on the floor, fingers nuzzling into the carpet weave, shaking loose those filmy bracelets, tugging them from the caramel-colored loops.

That beautiful carpet with its dense pile. At least five twists per inch.


“Addy, you’ve listened to Beth, now you need to listen to me. If they found that bracelet, a girl’s bracelet like that, like one of yours,” she says, pointing to my arms, ringed with friendship flosses, neon jellies, a leather braid, “don’t you think they’d have asked you too?”

There’s nothing I can say. I watch her as she walks into the bathroom and shuts the door.

Neither of us wants to reckon openly with how deep Beth’s trickery may go and neither of us wants to reckon with why I have believed her.

I hear the shower start and know I’m meant to leave.


Being part of a pyramid, you never see the pyramid at all.

Later, watching ourselves, it never feels real. Flickering YouTube images of bumblebees swarming, assembling themselves into tall hives.

It’s nothing like it is on the floor. There, you have to bolt your gaze to the bodies in your care, the ones right above you.

Your only focus should be your girl, the one you’re responsible for, the one whose leg, hip, arm you’re bracing. The one who is counting on you.

Left spot, keep your focus on the left flank. Don’t look right.

Right spot, keep your focus on the right flank. Don’t look left.

Eyes on the Flyer’s eyes, shoulders, hips, vigilant for any sign of misalignment, instability, doubt.

This is how you stop falls.

This is how you keep everything from collapsing.

You never get to see the stunt at all.

Eyes on your girl.

And it’s only ever a partial vision, because that’s the only way to keep everyone up in the air.


On my way out, I see Matt French still roaming around the backyard. It strikes me how few times I’ve seen him without his laptop in front of him, or his headset on. He looks lost.

I stop at the kitchen window, wondering what Coach has told him. What he believes.

Matt French reaches out to a branch spoking from a tall hawthorn bush, the one Caitlin is always cutting herself on, its hooks curling under her feet.

He looks no sadder than usual, which is sad enough.

Suddenly, he looks up and it’s like he sees me, but I think I must be too far, too small behind the paned window.

But I think he sees me.


“You made it up,” I say.

I’m at Beth’s house, in her bathroom. She has her leg propped up on the toilet seat, where she’s examining it with care.

“The Asian girl did the sugar wax on me, and she is comprehensive in her approach,” she says, shaking a flame-colored bottle of Our Desire, her mother’s perfume. “Except now I reek of pop-tart. Frosted. With sprinkles.”

“You made it up,” I repeat, smacking her leg off the toilet seat. “The cops never asked her about any bracelet. You made all that up.”

“The hot fuzz called you in, eh?” she says, standing up straight, still shaking the perfume bottle, shaking it side to side like some dirty boy gesture. “They called me in too. I go right after practice today.”

“They never found any bracelet at all, did they?”

“You’d best stay right, girl,” she says, lifting her leg back up, sending a fine mist of bitter orange and ylang-ylang over it.

This I don’t like. She can’t batter at me like I’m Tacy, like I’m some JV.

“What made you finally ask her?” she says.

I knock her foot off the toilet seat again and sit down on its furred lid.

“You made it up,” I say. “If the detectives found a bracelet, they would’ve asked me about it.”

“Addy, I can’t make you believe me,” she says, looking down at me. “And as for you and Coach…”

She lays her hand on my head, like a benediction.

“We are never deceived,” she says, her voice deep and ringing. “We deceive ourselves.”


We are lying on Beth’s deep blue bedroom carpet, as we’ve done a hundred, a thousand times, collapsing from our labors, the wages of war, one kind or another. Adrift on that speckless ultramarine, Beth would lay out all her martial machinations for me, her attaché, her envoy. Sometimes her mouthpiece. Whatever was required.

In some ways, Beth was almost never wrong in her judgments.

Paper-thin, master cleansed Emily was not, in fact, strong enough to do the stunt.

Tacy didn’t have the head game or the strong legs of a true Flyer.

With Beth, so full of lies, you have to push past the lie to see the deeper truth that drives it. Because Beth is almost always lying about something, but the lying is her way of rendering something else, something tucked away or confounded, manifest.

And you have to keep playing, and maybe the truth will reveal itself, maybe Beth will get tired and finally show her hand. Or maybe it’ll stop being fun for her, and she’ll just hurl that truth in your face, and make you cry.

I never liked you anyway.

You’re just so goddamned fat it depresses me.

I saw your dad at the mall buying lingerie with a strange woman.

Casey Jaye said you can’t throw a back handspring for shit, and she told RiRi there’s something weird about you, but she wouldn’t say what.

Oh, and I only pretended to care.

“It can’t be easy,” she says, surveying her lotioned legs, “knowing you were an accessory to a crime, even if it’s after the fact. It’s not really a position a red-blooded All-American teenage girl expects to be put in, especially given everything you’ve done for your Coach.”

“Like the things I’ve done for you?” I say. “Did you think I was going to be your lieutenant forever?”

“What have you ever done for me,” she replies, her eyes snake-slitted, “that you didn’t want to do?”

Flipping over on her stomach, she props her tanned chin on one palm and reaches out to me with her other.

“Oh, Addy. You can’t even see it, you’re so love-blind. I’m sorry about that. And sorry to have to do this to you. Really, I am.”

“I’m not…love-blind,” I stutter, the word throwing me. Which I guess it’s meant to, but—

“But you’re bringing a knife to a gunfight,” she continues. “You can’t see the facts, even laid out plain. Even when the po-lice department, Addy, calls you in to the station to investigate her lover’s murder. What will it take?”

I feel a sob creep into my chest, she’s just so damned good and I can’t breathe.

“You keep saying these things,” I say, “but you’ve never given me any real reason to believe why you think she would ever…”

Beth slants her head. “Why she would ever?” she repeats, singsongy. “Why wouldn’t she?”

My head throbs, not knowing what to believe now, ever, except I believe them both—Beth and Coach, in different ways—when their words wormhole into my brain. They make everything seem real. Dark. Painful. True.

“It kills me, I tell you,” Beth says, “the way you all fawn over her. The way you, Addy, the way you fawned over them both. She isn’t what you think, and neither was he. They were not star-crossed. He was just a guy, like all of them. They f*cked each other and he got tired of her before she got tired of him. She gets everything she wants, and she couldn’t stand not getting him anymore.”

The throbbing becoming something else, something worse and more insistent.

I lift myself up to sitting position, my head light and everything lifting lightly in me. The edge of hysteria sliding into her voice, it can come to no good.

“And none of us gets away with anything,” she says, climbing up onto her knees in front of me. “None of us.”

“You don’t know anything,” I say. “Neither of us knows.”

She looks at me, and for a second I almost see all the misery and rage, centuries of it, tumbling across her face.

“She’s not a killer,” I say, trying to make my voice bore-thick.

She looks down at me, her eyes depthful and ruinous.

“Love is a kind of killing, Addy,” she says. “Don’t you know that?”


There are three hours before practice, the Big Practice before the Big Game.

I can’t live in Beth’s head a moment longer, so I spend a few hours at the mall, wandering, hands knotted around my jug of kombucha, its fermented threads swirling around the bottom of the bottle.

Coach, my Coach. I think of that pearl-smooth face of hers and wonder if I can ever imagine it, try to picture her hard, ordered body doing the thing Beth says she’s done.

It’s impossible and I keep trying but the image that comes instead is of her, legs hooked hard around Will in the teachers’ lounge, the elation, everything in her unpinned, untucked, unveiled. No one looking, no one watching, and everything hers.

He is mine, he is mine, and I will do anything to feel this always.

Anything.

Feeling Will slipping from her, might she find herself doing something she never thought she’d do?

Maybe it’s a feeling I know.

It’s the feeling that sends me out to The Towers again, second time in as many days, some magnetic stroke tickling inside me, summoning me there.


Pulling into the lot, I see no sign of police. There are even fewer cars than usual on this blustery day, the wind whistling under my windshield wipers and the sky raw and melancholy.

I sit for a long time, punching radio presets, then turning my car off, putting my earbuds in, drowning in the plaintive songs of adolescent heartache, then quickly becoming disgusted by them and flinging my player to the floor of my car.

Then, the flinging seems to be part of the same counterfeit world of those tinny teenbox songs, and I hate myself too.

But that’s when I realize that I’ve been on a stakeout, without even knowing it.

Because there, walking across the parking lot into Building A, is Corporal Gregory Prine.

I’d know that bullet head anywhere.

I watch him enter the building and then, without even thinking, I follow him, sneakers squeaking across the wet parking lot.

Stopped short by the locked lobby doors, I can’t guess why he has a key and wonder if it’s Will’s key. I stand at the big buzzer board where I stood five days ago, and I try to be Beth-bold, my dayglo nails dancing over the silver buttons, pressing them all, waiting for any crackling voice, the ringing wail of entry.

“Sorry, I live in Fourteen-B and forgot my keys. My mom’s not home, can you buzz me in?”

Someone does, and before I know it, I’m in the elevator, a slick sweat on me now, and the fluorescent light hissing, and then I’m in the empty hallway on Will’s empty floor.

I’m not scared at all but seem to be fueled by the same kind of chemical rush like at a game, like when there’s just been too much slim-FX and nothing to eat but sugar-free jell-o so you can get back the space between your upper thighs, it’s a feeling most spectacular.

I have it now and it’s so strong in me I can’t stop myself from charging forward, my foot accidentally punting a piece of crime-scene tape, catching it on the tip of my puma.

And there I am, standing in front of number 27-G, a lone strip of tape still curled around its handle.

But before I can decide what I plan to do—ring the bell, burst in like some gangbanger—I stop myself, tripping backwards against the stairwell door, inhaling deeply three times.

Prine, what if he…

That’s when I notice that the door to the neighboring apartment is just slightly ajar, and a whoosh from the heating unit has nudged it farther open.

I walk slowly toward it, peeking in.

Inside, it’s the mirror image of Will’s apartment but spartan-bare.

The same parquet entry, the same sandy carpet.

The only difference seems to be the plastic lazy susan perched on the table in the entryway. Stuffed with brochures: Luxury Living on Nature’s Edge.

Were I to step closer, to step inside, I’m sure I’d see the same leather sofa slashed across the center of the room.

But I don’t step closer. Somehow, I feel if it were an inch closer, this sofa will become that sofa, and there on the carpet, I will see it. Him.

But mostly, the place just feels empty.

Except it’s not.

A door thumps, then the sound of feet skimming across the carpet, and heading toward me is the bullet head himself, a plastic grocery store bag clutched in that ham-hock hand.

It all happens so fast. Spotting me, he stops short in front of the open door.

Gorilla-puffed chest, sunglasses perched on his crew-cut head, he blinks spasmodically, red rushing up his thick neck and face.

It’s as if he can’t believe his eyes, and I nearly can’t either.

“Oh,” he says, “it’s one of you.”


Back in the near-empty parking lot, we sit together in my car.

“Listen,” he says, the plastic grocery bag hooked daintily around his wrist. “I haven’t said anything. So don’t worry.”

“What do you mean?” I say, marveling still at the idea of Prine in my car, us both here. Everything.

“I have some priors. I had a substance problem,” he says, fingers crackling noisily at the bag. “So I’m not saying a goddamn thing to those cops. You can tell her not to worry. And you can tell her to leave me the hell out of this.”

I don’t know who “she” is, but I don’t ask.

There is a palpable sense of revelation coming and I want to tread carefully. Finally someone not smart enough to lie to me, or even to know why he should.

Though, as I’m sitting there with him, his left foot ensnared by the cheetah-print sports bra on my car floor, it strikes me he might be thinking the same thing.

“So you live here or something?” I ask, fingering my gearshift.

“No,” he says, watching my hand. He takes a breath. “Sarge let me crash in that apartment. He knew no one was living there. The realtors are always just leaving it open. He gave me the building key. For when things get tough at home.”

He looks over at me, sheepish.

“My old man and me don’t always see eye to eye,” he explains. “Sarge understood…Sarge, he was such a good guy.”

Suddenly, Prine’s eyes fill. I try to hide my surprise. He turns away and looks out the window, flipping his sunglasses down.

“So why are you here now?” I ask.

“I had to see what I left behind,” he says. Looking down, he opens his plastic bag, showing me a travel-size mouthwash, a single-blade razor, a dusty bar of soap.

He lowers his voice to a whisper, even though there’s no sign of life anywhere. Luxury Living on Nature’s Edge.

“Listen, the cops don’t know I was here that night,” he says.

I try not to let him see my flinch.

“Okay,” I say.

“It doesn’t matter anyway,” he says. “I left before any gunshot. I don’t know what the hell happened. But I did hear the two of them headboard banging for a good fifteen minutes before midnight and I couldn’t get any sleep.”

Coach, there, that night. When Will was still alive.

I take this fact, this staggering and harrowing fact, and put it in a far corner in my head. For now. I can’t look at it. It is there for safekeeping.

“That’s how it always was with them,” he says. “I don’t like hearing other people’s private business. And, to be honest, the two of them, it made me sad.”

He looks at me, fingers plucking at the bag loop.

“I mean, that was a messed-up situation, right?” he looks at me, raising his eyebrows. “You could see something bad was going to happen. Something was going to go down.”

I know he’s waiting for some kind of confirmation, but I don’t say anything.

“The point is,” he goes on, “like I promised her, I’m not saying a goddamned word.”

“Her?” I ask, measuring my voice. Hiding everything.

“Your friend,” he says, a little impatiently now. “The brunette.”

“Beth?”

“Beth,” he says. “The one with the tits. I mean, you seem nice, but so did she at first. Girl like that, she could make trouble for me.”

Craning his neck, he looks up at the apartment building, ominously.

“All of you, you’re a whole lot of trouble,” he says, softly. “I don’t need that kind of trouble.”

A whole lot of trouble, I think.

“Guess Sarge found out, didn’t he?” he looks at me, grimly. “Queen of the hive. Don’t mess with the queen.”

I look at him and wonder which queen he means.


Driving away, I can’t begin to unravel it all. Why would Beth want Prine to keep quiet about hearing Coach in Will’s apartment that night? And why didn’t she tell me, at least, if her aim is to convince me of Coach’s guilt?

But the pulsing center is this: Coach was there with Will that night, Will alive. She and Will in bed.

The picture in my head now, Coach standing before me, bleached sneakers in hand.

Coach.

Tilting pyramid-top, reaching for me, bucking for my arm, knowing what it will mean. Where it would take both of us.


“Two days, four hours,” RiRi says, fingers tapping on her thighs anxiously. “Fifty-two hours till the game, hollaback girls. Where is she?”

We are all standing in the gym, waiting for Coach.

I haven’t figured out what I will do when she does arrive, if I will let my face betray anything.

I slide two Tylenol with codeine, leftovers from last year’s thumb jam, under my tongue and wait.

But Coach doesn’t show.

And Beth, well, she’s not there either.

“I don’t understand how Coach could do this to us,” Tacy yowls, her battered lip now a frosted lavender. “Two days before the big game.”

“It must be some kind of test,” Paige Shepherd says, chin-nodding with unsure surety. “To show us we can do it on our own.”

RiRi is doing a straddle stretch against the wall, which usually calms her down.

“No,” she says. “Something’s wrong. Really wrong. I’ve been hearing things. What if this is all about Sarge Stud?”

Oh, this causes quite a conflagration.

“My brother—listen to this!” Brinnie Cox gasps through those big chiclet teeth of hers. “My brother works at the sub shop next to the police station where the cops come in for lunch and he heard them mention Coach. And I don’t know what they said, but…”

There’s scurrying and speculations spun like long sticky gum strands, but I am out of it.

Instead, I work it. I pound that mat. I’m doing my tucks, over and over, curling my body sharklike upon itself.

“You are so f*cking tight,” RiRi murmurs, strolling by.

I slap her thigh hard and grin.

“You’re better than you ever were with Beth,” she says.

“I’m working harder,” I say.

“You were kicking it with Casey Jaye last summer,” RiRi says. “You were so good.”

“Why are you bringing that up?” I say. “Why does everyone always want to talk about that?”

It’s the thing no one can let go of. But I can. I’d like to never think of any of it again.

“I was glad when you two got together,” she says. “That’s all I’m saying.”

I think suddenly of Casey, the ease of her light hands on me, flipping my hips up, laughing.

“You know,” RiRi says, “Casey told me she thought you were the bravest, best cheerleader she ever knew and she’s cheered her whole life.”

“She meant Beth,” I say. “She must have meant Beth.”

Addy, Casey whispered one night, hanging from the bunk above me. She’s never going to let it be you. F*ck your four inches. You’re light as air. You could be Top Girl. You’re a badass and beautiful. You should be captain.

“And that fight between you and Beth, we all knew it was coming,” RiRi says, shaking her head. “Four of us to pull you two off each other.”

“It was an accident,” I say, but no one ever believed me. “My hand got caught.”

One day, tumbling class by the lake, I was spotting Beth’s handspring. When my arm flung up, my fingers caught her hoop earring, pulling it clean through.

I was trying to catch you, I’d told her, the hoop still hooked through my fingers. You were bending.

But she’d just stood there, holding the side of her head, a brick red trickle between tan fingers.

Everyone whispered that it was about Casey, but it wasn’t. It was an accident. Beth and her big door-knocker earrings. It just happened.

Sometimes now, when she’s not looking, I stare at her earlobe and want to touch it, to understand something.

I never thought you’d be friends again after that, RiRi said later. But we were. No one understands. They never have.

“I stood with her when they stitched up her ear,” RiRi says now. “I never saw her cry before. I never knew she had tear ducts. Hell, I never knew she had blood in her.”

“It was just a fight,” I say, remembering the two of us tangled up, someone screaming.

“I thought,” RiRi says, “‘Addy’s finally manning up to Beth.’ None of us ever had the guts.”

“A stupid fight, like girls do,” I say.

“And, for what it’s worth, Beth talked all kinds of trash about Casey,” RiRi says, “but I never believed it.”

I had, though. And I stripped my bunk of sheets and walked down to the end of the cabin, to the bunk Beth had already vacated for me. And I never talked to Casey again.

“Addy, you could still do it,” RiRi says now. “You could be captain, anything.”

“Shut the f*ck up,” I say.

RiRi brushes back, like I’ve hit her.

“That was a long time ago,” I add, setting my arms up for another tuck. “That was last summer.”


A half hour passes, everyone doing lazy tuck jumps and stretches, before we hear the sound.

Coach Templeton’s ancient boom box sliding across the gym floor, blasting bratty girl rap: “Take me low, where my girlies go, where we hit it till they’re kneeling, till there’s glitter on the ceiling…”

All our heads turn, and there is Beth, white-socked and whistle swinging.

“Bitches,” Beth hollahs, ringingly. “Front and center and show me your badass selves. I’m self-deputized.”

“What do you mean?” demands Tacy. “Where’s Coach?” Our now perpetual lament.

“Didn’t you hear?” Beth says, turning the music up louder, the rattle in it sending a few girls to their feet, bouncily. “She got hauled in by the po-po.”

“What are you talking about?” I say.

“She’s at the station house. The cops picked her up in the squad car. Her ball-and-chain went with her.”

I don’t let her catch my eye.

“How do you know?” RiRi says, cocking an eyebrow.

“I went over there to see if Coach needed a ride. Barbara-the-Babysitter told me. She looked scared pantless. She said the cops came in with trash bags. Started hauling off stuff.”

Everyone exchanges wide-eyed glances.

“But I’m not here for idle gossip,” she says. “Show me you got something other than chicken hearts behind those padded bras.”

Everyone starts forming their lines, I can’t even believe how quickly.

Clapping tight and shaking their legs out and faces tomato-bursting.

Like they’re eager for it.

Like anyone will do, if they’re hard enough.

“And no more tantric chants and bullshit,” Beth says. “I want to see blood on the floor. And remember what old Coach Temp used to say…”

She steps back as everyone but me assembles for their back tucks.

“Cheer, cheer, have no fear!” they all chant. Some of them are even smiling.

Grinning, Beth gives the response: “When you’re flying high, look to the sky, and scream Eagles, Eagles, Eagles!”


An hour later, we hit the two-two-one, Beth our Flyer.

Tossed up between RiRi and me, already six feet up, our legs braced by Mindy and Cori beneath us. Tossed up, our ponytailed apex.

My arms lifted above, I have her right side, her right wrist, her arm like a batten, hard and motionless, and RiRi her left.

She, spine so straight, the line of her neck, her body still, tight, perfect.

I have her, we have her, and Beth is higher than I’ve ever seen anyone.


After everyone has scattered to the locker room, I spot a lone figure watching practice from high up in the stands.

No tan for her, no nothing, but thinner than ever, a bobby pin, and she seems to be saying something to me.

That mammoth brace on her knee and her mouth open, a big O, straining to rise.

It’s Emily. And she’s saying something.

“What?” I call up. “What do you want, Royce?”

Slowly, she gimps her way down the stands, each step meaning a wide swing of her leg.

It never occurs to me to climb up and meet her.

“Addy,” she is saying, breathless. “I never saw it before.”

“Saw what?”

“I never saw the stunts. From back there,” she says. “I never saw us.”

“What do you mean?” I say, a slight ripple in my chest.

“Did you ever really think about it? About what we’re doing?” she says, holding tight to the railing.

She starts talking, breathless and high, about the way we are stacked, like toothpicks, like pixy stix, our bodies like feathers, light and tensile. Our minds focused, unnourished, possessed. The entire structure bounding to life by our elastic bodies vaulting into each other, sticking, and then…

A pyramid isn’t a stationary object. It’s a living thing.…The only moment it’s still is when you make it still, all your bodies one body, until…we blow it all apart.

“I had to cover my eyes,” she says. “I couldn’t look. I never knew what we were doing before. I never knew because I was doing it. Now I see.”

I am not listening at all, her voice getting more shrill, but I can’t hear. A month on the DL, a month stateside, this is what happens.

I just look hard into her baby blue eyes.

“Standing back,” she says, mouth hanging in horror, “it’s like you’re trying to kill each other and yourself.”

I look at her, folding my arms.

“You were never one of us,” I say.