Dare Me

30



MONDAY: TWELVE HOURS TO FINAL GAME

Work hard and believe in yourself. That’s what they always tell you. But that’s not really it at all. It’s the things you can’t say aloud, the knowledge that what you’re doing, climbing high, jumping, hurling yourself into the air, hooking arms, legs around each other to create something that will collapse with the bobble of one knee, a twist of a wrist.

Standing back, Emily said, saying the thing you’re never supposed to say, it’s like you’re trying to kill each other and yourself.

The knowing that what you are all doing, together, is the most delicate thing, fragile as spun glass, and driven by magic and abandon, your body doing things your head knows it can’t, your bodies locking together to defy gravity, logic, death itself.

If they told you these things, you would never join cheer. Or maybe you would.


In the morning, it takes a long time under the showerhead to get my blood moving. To pinprick my skin to life. To get my head game.

I stand under the bracing gush for so long, looking at my body, counting every bruise. Touching every tender place. Watching the swirl at my feet.

I’m really just trying to jack up my heart.

I think, This is my body, and I can make it do things. I can make it move, flip, fly.

After the squall of a blow-dryer, I gather my hair, sliding in bobby pin after bobby pin, pulling it all into place.

I stand in front of the mirror, my face bare, flushed, taut.

Slowly, my hands lifting, the sticky nozzle, dusty brushes, oily wands waving in front of my face, fuchsia streaking up my cheeks, my lashes stiffened to brilliant black, my hair stiff, gleaming, pin-tucked.

The perfumed mist, thick in my throat, settling.

I look in the mirror.

And it’s finally me there, and I look like no one I’ve ever seen before.


“Game Day—Kill Celts!!” shrieks the banner across the school entrance, a tissue paper eagle, wings stiff and high, rising behind it.

I let my heart rise to it.


The morning passes, I don’t see Beth at all, and Coach has called in sick. That’s all anyone can talk about.

She’s abandoned us twice, three times over. We are losing count.

She doesn’t care about us at all.

She hates us.

“What did we do wrong?” the JV girl sobs, pressing her face against her locker door. “What did we do?”


School skitters by without touching me, and Tacy, face bleach-white, will not meet my gaze.

I am thinking of things, of the Abyss and its greasy stare and how I won’t blink. I can’t.


At three fifteen we are in the gym, jumping high.

“Scout’s a-coming!” RiRi hollers. “Wait till she sees what we got!”

Everyone screams.

And it feels like God touching me. What would I do without this, because here I am, propelling to heaven itself, soles resting on Mindy’s knotty shoulders—or on the floor, knees sponging, lifting Brinnie Cox, nimble feet in my palm, surging her straight to God.

That feeling, it is God’s greatest gift.

Just like that adderall. Found that morning in the corner of my hoodie pocket from a long ago act of Beth’s generosity, it gallops through me, and I know I can do anything.

When you have nothing inside you, you feel everything more, and feel you can control all of it.

With Jesus in my heart, and with that seismic blast, who could stop my ascent? Any of ours?


In the locker room, forty minutes to game time, we are Vegas showgirl–spangled. The air thick with biofreeze and tiger balm and hairspray and the sugared coconut of tawny body sprays, it is like being in a soft cocoon of sugar and love.

There’s RiRi, slinging her curling iron like a gunfighter, shaping the spring-shot ponytail, its helix curls.

There’s Paige Shepherd, temp tattoo blazing across her tan face, kicking her leg high and twisting, tumbling into Mindy’s arms, her wrists black duct-taped like Roman gladiator cuffs.

See Cori Brisky, rubbing flexall on her numbing wrists, her smile showing all her teeth, and how sharp they are, and I know that there’s a jungle princess in there who’s ready for hot blood.

See even shell-shocked Emily, our fallen comrade, fingers glazed with icy hot, running it across Mindy’s armor shoulder blades, whispering in her ear.

And there I am. If you could see me—tall, tight, lightsome, and powerful, flipping my back tucks on the slippery tile, afraid of nothing, no one. Just try to stop me.

That’s what people never understand: They see us hard little pretty things, brightly lacquered and sequin-studded, and they laugh, they mock, they arouse themselves. They miss everything.

You see, these glitters and sparkle dusts and magicks? It’s war paint, it’s feathers and claws, it’s blood sacrifice.

But where’s our fearsome leader? Either of them?

We need somebody to gather all this hectic energy, to link these pulsing organs into one powerful, unstoppable body.

What if that somebody were me?

Moving girl to girl, I start back-stroking, French-braiding, tiger-balming, offering rallying words, C’mon girls, let’s show them what we got.

I even talk, for the first time ever, to that poor yellow peep JV, the one who will have to fly tonight if Beth doesn’t show, the one shivering like a downy chick.

I know I can lift her, I can.

She’s not a girl but a butterfly resting on my fingertips.

But then there’s a clatter from the backdoors, and a flurry of whoops and bratty squeals and, baby lamb JV tucked under my arm, I turn and know I will see her.

Beth.

Leaping up on the locker room bench, eyelids scorched with blue glitter, she heaves her throaty voice to the drop ceiling.

“Hella, bitches!” she bellows, rocking her feet on the bench so it shudders. “Our scout, that Regionals scout, I can feel her out there, waiting. And, bitches, she is so ready to be f*cked.”

The gasp from us is loud and exultant.

“I’ve just trawled through that gym to check out the Celt squad and I’ve never seen anything so appalling. Ana girls with accordion ribs, a coupla dykey ringers with treebark legs and Charlie Brown faces. And those Celt ballers, skidding and squeaking, tossing that baby’s ball around like they’re kings of the world? Pathetic.”

Everyone, so eager, twirling near her, just like the old days when she’d preen and twist and flash her blue Eagles tatts and we’d clamor, Give it to us, Captain, rise up, rise up!…

“You know who the stars are? We are. Why? Because we don’t throw around a f*cking rubber ball. You know what we throw around? Live girls. Do you know who flies? We do. You know what we hurl to the rafters? Each other.”

I hear Emily’s tender gasp behind me, her boot brace clacking, and the muffled squeal of the JV Flyer.

“Tonight, you’ve got to spill their blood,” she says, her raised arm, her temples, her neck pulsing, “or I promise you they will spill yours.”

There’s a dark roiling on Beth and it’s starting to sweep through us. We are letting it, all of us.

“Brace those arms. Bolt those knees. Look at that crowd like you’re about to give them the best piece of ass they ever had. Sell it.”

The feelings charging through the room, they’re complicated and incendiary and none of us, not even me, can name them all. Everything in Beth, in her swarthy energy, so repulsive and so captivating—

“Bases, eyes on your Flyer, she is yours. You lock her to your heart. You lose her, blood on the mat. She is yours. Make her.”

All the swirling ponytails nod in unison, as if they know, as if any of us know what Beth, veins tight on her upstretched arms, means or could ever mean.

“JV,” Beth says, pointing her witching finger at the yearling under my arm, and because none of us really know her name. “You fail, you fail all of us. So you will not fail.”

The JV shakes her head back and forth, looking like she might cry.

“Girlie, you’ve been a chick long enough. I need you to show me that egg tooth,” she says, slipping her fingers under JV’s tank top, heaving her up on the bench with her. “Tonight’s the night, you’re gonna pip through the shell.”

Beth tugs the girl under her own bronzed arm, stares her down and nearly laps her face. “So stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood. We’ve come to bury them. We’ve come to plow their bones by the final bell.”

She pounds her pumas until that bench rattles, our bodies shake.

“It’s harvest day, girlies,” she says, her voice like crackling lightning. “Get busy when the corn is ripe.”


I almost fall for it, for Beth’s hoodoo grandiosity.

Our captain, like Beth from before, our noble, proud, heart-strong Beth, and this Beth too, a warrior nearly vanquished but not quite, never quite.

We few, we happy few, she might say, we band of sistuhs, for she today that sheds her blood with me, shall be my sistuh always.

Couldn’t I just let that be enough for these two hours?

But then Tacy sputters in, late, her face still bruise-dappled and her eyes lightless, damned.

And I’m reminded of everything.

Including the feel of my foot pressed against her face, what she made me do.

This feeling, this high, it’s not real. It’s that Jesus-love flooding through me, by which I mean the adderall and the pro clinical hydroxy-hot with green tea extract and the eating-nothing-but-hoodia-lollipops-all-day.

And most of all the high that comes from Beth’s dark supply.

I don’t want it.


Ten minutes to game time, and no Coach to stop the squad, everyone’s breaking rules and whirring through the back bleachers, scout-spotting.

Back in the locker room, I sit, trying to get my game head on.

SCOUT! 3 row frm top, lft — lady w. cap + mirror shades! RiRi texts.

I hear a rustling one row over and there’s Beth, hands in her locker, tugging off her rows of friendship bracelets, tightening her pin-straight ponytail. Eyes on herself in her stick-on mirror, face blue and frightening.

Were it not for the angle of her locker door, the way the parking lot lights slant through the high windows, I might never have seen it.

But I did.

The hot glow of an evil eye, lurking between a pile of hair ties and toe socks.

A hamsa bracelet. Coach’s hamsa bracelet. My hamsa bracelet.


Hands to her slick shea-buttered arms, I catch her by surprise, flipping her around.

“What, did you think I wouldn’t show?” she says, and her blood all up in her cheeks and temples. “I’d never let the squad down.”

My chest lurching, I grab the bracelet with one hand and, with the other, shove her into the shower stalls.

“You did it. You took it. You lied about all of it,” I shout raggedly, my voice echoing to the slimy ceiling of the showers. “It was never in Will’s apartment, was it?”

“No,” she says, with an odd stuttering laugh, “of course not.”

“Why did you tell me the police found it?”

“I wanted you to see,” she says. “She was hiding everything from you. She never cared about you.”

“But you stole it. You were going to try to plant it, something,” I say, squeezing her so hard I feel one of my nails start to give. “My god, Beth.”

“Oh, Addy,” she says, still laughing, her head shaking back and forth. “I took it a long time ago. That time we slept at her house.”

I think of it now. That long-ago night of the Comfort Inn party. Beth, the wounded kitty. Those hours I’d abandoned her to Coach’s sofa, left her free to prowl the house, her viper’s crawl. Shadows flitting by all night.

“But that was before everything,” I say. “Why?”

“She didn’t deserve it,” Beth says, her voice rising, throaty, the laughing gone. “She’d tossed it on the kitchen window ledge, like an old sponge. She didn’t deserve it.”

Wrestling away from me, she shoves hard, her face a blue smear.

“And now her time is up,” she says, husky-voiced and deadly grave. “Now she’ll see what I can do.”

Face so close, painted shooting stars slashing up her temples, she’s heated up on her own words. But I can smell something dank and musky on her, like she has been clawing hard through loamy earth. Like she has very little left.

Which means it’s my time.

“You’re not going to the cops,” I say, voice as cold and hard as I can manage. “You never were. You don’t want them to find out what you did.”

Maybe I thought I’d never see surprise on her face again, but there it is. It almost frightens me.

“What I did?” she says. “I gave you your goddamned day, and you used it to let her spit more venom in your ear. When I think of the yogi hold that cheer bitch has over you, I wanna puke.”

“Beth, I know it all now,” I say, pushing myself close to her, towering over her. “You used Tacy to send that picture of you and Will to Coach’s husband. Tacy told me everything.”

A stitch of panic rises over that high brow, her back rustling against the vinyl curtain, and here I am, I suddenly realize, five inches taller than the little shrub, the little Napoleon. I just never felt it before.

“Slaussen. I should’ve guessed it,” she says, grinning wryly. “I never saw a fox eat a rabbit before. I’d like to. How did she taste?”


“Did you hope Matt French would look at the picture and think you were Coach?”

“I didn’t care what he thought,” she says, chin jutting high, graveling her voice. “All I cared about was getting her out. Someone had to get us out—”

Somehow my hand has a hold of the bottom of her ponytail, fingers slapping against her scarred ear.

It’s like how it sometimes is with me and Beth, the closeness that comes from being hand to hand, arm to arm, body to body, and always spotting each other. I know her body and the way it turns, the way it moves, and what makes her shake.

“You started all this,” I say, fingers gripping tight. “It was you.”

Snaking her fingers between mine, she swipes my hand from her hair and rolls her eyes with comic book magnitude.

“For f*ck’s sake, f*ck me if Coach’s husband mistakenly thought his wife was f*cking the National Guard recruiter. Oh, wait,” she says. “She was.”

“You set it all in motion,” I say. Then wielding another hidden card, “You knew Coach was with Sarge that night. Prine told me everything.”

She doesn’t say anything, just stares at me, the angry blue war paint blaring.

“If you wanted me to believe Coach killed Will,” I say, “why didn’t you tell me she was there?”

And then I realize it. “You were afraid I’d tell Coach. Warn her.”

“I wasn’t afraid you would warn her,” she says. “I knew you would. You’re just her little p-ssy, and always were.”

I shove her shoulder, and she laughs, an aching laugh, a laugh I remember most from the worst times for Beth, the scariest times after bad nights with boys or her mother, and I’d try to say tender things and she would laugh, which was her way of crying.

“Prine’s gonna do what I say, Addy,” she says, curling her hand on top of mine, pressing it into her own sharp shoulder. “He thinks I might statutory him, or worse.”

“You knew all along,” I say, feeling her veins pulsing under my grip. “All your lies—”

“My lies?” she says. “All you’ve done is lie to me. All you’ve ever done. But you’ve always been the fox. Stone cold.”

“I’m telling everything, Beth,” I say.

Like there’s a fever in my brain, or Jesus in my heart, my hands are on her again, hurling both her shoulders back against the shower tiles, her eyes flashing and her mouth a tight grin.

She’s trying to smile, yes, but there’s a horror in it. Push harder, push harder. Ride that bitch.

“What can you tell? All you have is Slaussen,” she says. “You think I can’t win back that rabbit heart of hers? I have my two front teeth sunk in it. I have things I can tell about her, about Coach, about you—”

My hand whips across her face so fast I gasp.

But she doesn’t flinch. Instead, eyes darkening, she slides back against the wall, tilting her face so it smears against the damp tiles, her spangled mask blurring blue.

She doesn’t say anything for a second and the silence feels heavy, epic. I don’t know what to do with myself except listen to my own breathing.

“He said he was sick with himself over it,” she says, quietly, darkly.

It takes me a second to realize she’s talking about Will.

“Like I was this dirty thing he’d done,” she says.

She puts a hand to the back of her head, rubbing it with an eerie softness, like she’s in slow motion. “Who is he to call me dirty?” she asks, her eyelashes slipping glitter.

I’m thinking of the snapshot of the two of them, the look on his face.

“You should’ve seen how he looked at me after,” she says. “Like you’re looking at me now.”

I don’t know what to say to this.

“Then I saw him and Coach together,” she says, “the way they just gloated in their f*cking. So freaking enthralled with themselves, and you just so enthralled with them. With her.”

There is the secret song in me of an old Beth, schoolyard Beth, playground and sleeping bag and bikes with streamers Beth. The Beth who never wanted me to sleep over at Katie Lerner’s house, and would always wait in front of my house the night I got back from summer vacation. The Beth who always, chin to my shoulder, looked out for me, and I for her. Our bodies interlocked.

“But, Beth, you can stop now,” I say, shaking my head. “You can stop all this.”

Something stirs in her face and she’s looking down at my clenched, glitter-crusted hands on her arms.

“I did it for all of us,” she says. “I did it for you, Addy. Somebody had to. And it’s always been me.”

I let my hands go, staring, not sure what to do or what she means.

“The funny thing is, Addy, it turns out you were the dangerous one,” she says, voice steadying now, drawing strength.

She walks past me and, her palm clasped over her scarred left ear, adds, “You were the tough one, the cruel one. The fox. You just couldn’t admit it. You’ve always done whatever you wanted. It was always you.”

And she’s gone.

I hear her whistling through the locker room, and her voice, mournful but resonant now.

“Arrow in the quiver,” she sings. “At daggers drawn.”