Dare Me

5



WEEK THREE

We’re getting better all the time.

We are all locking stunts, focusing. Emily nailed her standing back handspring, which we never thought she would, with those soft-rise breasts she once had. We are stronger and we are learning how to feel each other’s bodies, to know when we will not fall.

Nights, in bed, I hear the thuds on the gym floor, feel that thud through my bones, through the center of me.

Already I can feel my muscles thrusting under my skin. I even start eating because if I don’t, my head goes soft. The first week, I pass out twice in calc, the second time hitting my head SMACK on the edge of a desk.

Can’t have that, Coach says.

“You can’t slap the treadmill before school and then expect to make it to lunch on your a.m. diet coke,” Coach says, coming at me in the nurse’s office. Charging in with such purpose, making even lumberjack-chested Nurse Vance, twice her size, jump back.

Her hands are riffling through my purse, thwacking the bag of sugar-free jolly ranchers at my chest.

I’m meant to throw them away, which I do, fast.

“Don’t worry,” Coach says. “No one gets fat on my watch.”

So I start with the egg whites and almonds and the spinach, like wilting lily pads between my teeth. It’s so boring, not like eating at all because you don’t feel the sweet grit on your tongue all day and night, singing on the edge of your teeth.

But my body is tight-tight-tightening. Hard and smooth, like hers, my waist pared down to nothing, like hers.

The walk, her walk, feet planted out, like a ballerina. I wonder if Coach was a ballerina once, her hair pulled into a fierce dark bun, collarbones poking.

We all do the walk.

Not Beth, though, and not some of the girls, like Tacy Slaussen, who cotton more to Beth’s dusky glower, the way she hitches her cheer skirt low, the way she slinks over to the freshman squad, perched in the stands to watch us. The way she reaches up and yanks the pom off one of the girl’s socks and sinks it purposefully into the bottom of her plastic coke cup.

This is what Beth does, while some of us make ourselves hard and beautiful.


Jordy Brennan, fleet around the track, a soft tangle of cord skimming from his earbuds.

I watch him four days in a row, under the bleachers, my wrist wrapped around one of the underhangs, fingers clenching and unclenching.

“You got a thing for deviated septums, Addy-Faddy?” Beth asks.

“I don’t know,” I say, scratching my palms.

“What’s the story, anyway?” she says. “He’s dull as a plank of wood.” She pings the bleacher post, which is actually aluminum.

“He looks like he’s thinking things,” I say, jumping a little on my toes, feeling like some dumb cheerleader. “Like maybe he actually thinks about things.”

“Deep thoughts,” Beth says, pulling her ponytail tight, “about puma treads.”

I didn’t tell her what Coach said, somehow didn’t want her to know Coach had even given me a ride home.

Beth floats forward from the bleacher skeleton and lingers on the edge of the track.

He’s pounding toward us, the huff-huff rattling in me, jolting between my hips.

“Jordy Brennan,” Beth shouts, voice deep and clear. “Come here.”

There’s a rollicking in my chest as he slows to stop just past us, then does an about-face and slows to a cool-man stride as he makes his way over.

“Yeah,” he says, up close his eyes green and blank as poker felt.

“Jordy Brennan,” Beth says, throwing her cigarette on the ground. “It’s your lucky day.”


Fifteen minutes later, the three of us drifting along in his pocked Malibu, Beth directs Jordy to the convenience store on Royston Road, the place where the football players all buy their beer from the grim-faced man behind the counter, extra five-dollar charge just for the plastic bag.

We take the 40s, which I never like, all warm and sour by the time you get halfway in, and the three of us drive up to Sutton Ridge, where that girl jumped last spring.

Seventeen and brokenhearted, she jumped.

RiRi saw the whole thing, from Blake Barnett’s car.

Right before, RiRi saw a screech owl burst from behind the water tank.

Her eyes lifted, so did Blake’s, to the top of the rutted ridge. A place haunted by ruined Indians, or so we heard as kids spooking on Halloween. Apache maidens swan-diving over lost love for white men who abandoned them.

Together, RiRi and Blake watched.

Blake recognized the girl from St. Reggie’s, and nearly shouted out to her, but didn’t.

Arms stretched wide, her hands strangely spinning, and walking backwards fast.

RiRi watched it, the whole thing.

She said it was terrible and kinda beautiful.

I bet it was, jumping from so high, so very high, into the dark plush of that grieving ravine.

All us girls might look down into that same gorge on nights steeped in the sorrows of womanhood. I never felt so much, but looking now, I thought I might yet.

Beth walks up extra high on the ridge, swinging her 40 with surprising grace, and Jordy ducks his big boy head against me and kisses me smearily for a half hour or more.

He tells me this is a special spot for him.

At nights sometimes he runs up here, playing his music and forgetting everything.

“Maybe,” he says, “that’s how cheerleading is for you.”

Then, he ripples his hands up and down me, gentle and with those great empty eyes of his shut tight, lashes long like a girl’s. That funny way his nose bends slightly right, like a boxer’s.

“Isn’t she pretty, Jordy?” I hear Beth’s rippling voice from somewhere, “when she looks into your eyes?”

I rest my lips on his cheekbone, near the crook of his nose, and he shudders.

The way his eyelashes tickle, and his hard heavy boy hands, grave and turbulent, I can feel all kinds of wonder and surprises charging through him.

All of this moves me, powerfully, and the day feels rare, the dusk falling purple, and I must be drunk because I think I hear Beth’s voice far away, saying crazy things, asking me if I feel different, and loved.


Jordy Brennan’s name buzzes on my phone that night, a spare text with “u”s and “r”s and cautious wonderings. But the thing that was there, the feeling huddling in me at the gorge, is already gone.

His wanting, so easily won—well, it bores me. I know every flex and twist of it, because there are no flexes and twists to it.

And instead I want to see Coach again, and tell her about it. I wonder what she’ll say.


Beth calls after, and we have a long-winding talk, the 40-ouncers still heavy on us both.

She is asking if I remember how we used to hang on the monkey bars, hooking our legs around each other, and how strong we got and how no one could ever beat us, and we could never beat each other, but we’d agree to each release our hands at the count of three, and that she always cheated, and I always let her, standing beneath, looking up at her and grinning my gap-toothed, pre-orthodontic grin.

Such reminiscence is unlike Beth, but she is drunk and I think she may still be drinking, her mother’s V.S.O.P., and she sounds affected by our time at the gorge, and possibly by other things.

“I hate how everything changes, always,” she says. “But you don’t.”


In the parking lot the next day, Coach tilts her head and gives me a whisper of a smile.

Wanting to present this to her, I feel a funny kind of pride. Like she’d asked me to do a stunt for her, “Give me that pop cradle, Addy. Straight up, straight up—” and there I am, legs arrow-piked, and the feeling when my feet land on that hard floor, the fearsome quake through my ankles, legs, hips.

So I tell her, my hand sweeping across my mouth, like I can barely say it. Just messed around a little. Jordy Brennan. Jordy Brennan. Just like you said.

“Which one is that?” she says.

I feel something slither a little loose in me. Which one?

“You see him on the track,” I insist. “You were talking about him. You talked to me about him and his high-tops. The crick in his nose.”

She looks at me, quiet like.

“So was he a good kisser?” she asks, and I still don’t know if she remembers him.

I don’t say anything.

“Did he open his mouth right away?” she asks.

At first, I think I misheard her.

“Or did you make him work for it?” she continues, grinning slyly.

“It wasn’t like that,” I say, and is she making fun of me?

“So,” she asks, her voice softer, straighter, “what was it like?”

“I don’t know,” I say, not meeting her eyes, my face burning. Somehow it feels like I’m talking to a boy, a guy, an older one, or from another school. “I don’t think I want it to go anywhere.”

She looks at me and then nods, like I’ve said something wise.

“You’re a smart girl, Addy,” she says. She pauses, then adds, “You can make a lot of mistakes, just wondering about boys.”

I nod back, thinking about the word she uses, about the word “boys.” Because that’s what Jordy Brennan is, a boy. A boy. Not even a guy.

Coach, after all, is married to a man. Coach, after all, has known the world of men. Who even knows how many or what kinds.

She jangles her car keys into her fingers, sliding into her car.

She looks at me through the window, a winking look, but it’s between us. We’ve shared something.

And it brings her closer to me.