Dare Me

8



Noonish, at the Guard recruitment table, we’re watching the bet unfold.

All week, Beth has kept Sarge Will in her sights, determined to take RiRi down. They both agreed: whoever can get him to do a below-the-waist touch.

Beth works those school corridors like a gunslinger, spurred boots click-clacking. They lip over her knees, tall and shiny, and you’re not supposed to wear boots with your cheer skirt, you’re not supposed to wear boots like that at all.

As for RiRi, her cheer skirt tugged heavenward, waistband high enough to show what her mama gave her. The two of them, they’re dangerous.

Sarge, though, is above all this. All the girls are hurling themselves at him, but he never blinks, not once. He smiles, but his smile doesn’t really seem like a smile but the kind of thing you do with your mouth when you know everyone is watching.

Sometimes it’s like each hip swivel is a burden he strains under. So, he just smoothly shifts such attentions over to the corporal, the private, whoever the hard-jawed thug next to him is, the one we never look at, that brush of acne on his chin, that angry look on him, like the boys who get into fights after one beer, who shove their girlfriends at parties and knock their shoulder blades loose, who pop their collarbones like buttons. We never look at them. Or I don’t.

The worst is Corporal Prine, the one with the barrelhouse shoulders and the broad head like an eraser stub. A few weeks ago, I spotted him standing in front of the door of my English class. He seemed to be staring right at me, his razor-burned cheeks studded red. I tried not to pay attention, but then he did something with his tongue and hand that could not be ignored.

But Sarge, he can do anything. Yet the more we try, the less interested he seems. Most days, he seems to be some other place entirely, some place in which girls like us have no place at all.

Even Beth at her tartiest can’t provoke him.

I don’t see it, but I hear about it—the flash of her skirt, the star-spangled panties—and I don’t believe it. I didn’t flash anything, she tells me later. Just crooked her index finger, made him lean close, and asked him if she could feel his weapon.

But Sarge didn’t bat a downy eyelash.

Oh, the daily frustration on RiRi’s candy-mouthed face, and worse still Beth’s glower, which she wears like a black veil all day.

Between Coach and Sarge, she has much to be unhappy about.

But instead of wrath and plots, she is quiet, brooding.

There’s a witchiness to it, and it worries me.


It’s during those weeks that I see Coach’s husband for the first time, through the half-open study door. He’s reading a sheaf of paper while slowly pulling off his necktie. I can’t even tell you what he looks like except there’s nothing to notice at all.

The next time, and the time after, it’s always like this presence. Matt’s here. Oh, that’s just Matt, finally home. That’s the pizza guy for Matt. And sometimes just “he.” There he is, oh, we can’t turn on the stereo, he’s here. Oh, you know him, he’s working. He never, ever stops.

He is always on his cell phone and he always looks tired. Once or twice we see him in the backyard, talking into his bluetooth, pacing around. We see him sitting on a stool at the kitchen island, spreadsheets spread across the table, his laptop swiveling, screen glowing green on him.

He works very hard, and he’s not interesting at all.

Or maybe he is, but Coach never seems interested. And when he’s there, it feels weirdly like Dad’s home. A nice enough Dad, and not a buzzkill Dad except, I guess, for Coach, who seems to sink inside a little. Once he tried to ask about how we planned our pyramids because he studied real pyramids in college engineering and wondered if it was similar. But no one knew what to say and there was a long pause until Coach, her eyes shifting away, said that we were just tired because we’d been working on sequences all night.

“Man fears time,” he said, as he walked off into his study, smiling at us all and kind of saluting good night, “yet time fears the pyramids.”

Once, I’m passing the door to his study and I see him there, and the computer screen flickering, reflected on the window behind him. And I see he’s playing Scrabble online. And something about it makes me crashingly sad.


“Beth, just come, will you? Just once, come with us.”

We have been trying for the last three weeks. But when Beth does concede, I don’t like how easy it is.

“Let’s see what all of you have going on over there,” she says, eyes flashing. “I’d like to see for myself.”

Three Saturdays in a row, we’ve lounged, grown-up like, at Casa French, the grill fired up, Coach flipping salmon on cedar planks. Nothing ever tasted so good, even though we all only pick at it, shred it to pink filings on our plates, our mouths focused eagerly on the tickly white wine served in fine stemware that tinggged when your nails clicked it.

It’s harder to enjoy it with Beth there, feeling her dismissive eyes on everything. But the wine helps.

We have a routine down, Emily and me lighting all the candles, the hurricane lanterns with the hand-painted ladybugs that Matt brought all the way from South Carolina, and the tall gas torch that Coach says is just like what they have on the beach in Bali, though she’s never been there, none of us have. Beth, dull-eyed and afflicted, says it’s the same ones she’s seen in Maui, or even San Diego, or the Rainforest Café out on Route 9.

Eventually, though, the wine whirls even through Beth and it’s so fun looking around the table at everyone’s blooming, candlelit faces.

Mostly, it’s all of us chicken-jabbering and Coach, her silent, half-smiling self. She listens and listens, and the stories, as before, get darker and more intimate. Oh, RiRi, maybe one day you’ll find a boy who loves you for more than your double-jointed jaw. And Emily, six weeks running on splenda and cabbage broth, as caved-in as your belly looks you’ll never get that round face of yours any thinner at all unless you take a hammer and chisel.

By the time Husband Matt comes home around eleven, we are all pretty drunk, Coach maybe even a little bit, that bloom to her face and her tongue slipping around words, and when RiRi takes off her top and runs around the yard, shouting into the bushes for boys, Coach just laughs and says it’s time we met some real men, and that’s when we see him standing at the kitchen island, and we all think that’s hysterical, except Matt French, who looks tired and flips open his laptop and asks us if we could be quiet, which we can’t possibly be.

Beth, who keeps saying she isn’t drunk at all, but she never admits to being drunk, starts talking to him and asking him questions about his job, and if he likes it, and what his commute is like. She squeezes her breasts together in her tank top and leans on the kitchen island, fingers grazing his computer mouse rhythmically.

He looks at her, his brow knitted high in a way that I do find sweet, and asks if her parents might wonder where she is.

Over Beth’s shoulder, he’s throwing these looks at Coach, who finally says she’ll drive us all home and Emily and Beth can pick up their cars tomorrow.

When we’re walking out, I look back at him, and his face looks troubled, like years ago, eighth grade, and my dad, who no longer bothers, watching me as I left the house with Beth, our bodies suddenly so ripe and comely and there was nothing he could do.


The next day, hung over on the L-shaped sofa in Beth’s living room, I wake up to Beth’s hair dangling over me. Leaning over the back of the cushion, she tells me she didn’t have any fun at all. And she’s talking big, which always feels ominous.

“Sitting there on the deck, like it’s her throne,” she says, cotton-mouthed and craggy. “I didn’t like it there. I don’t like the way she conducts herself.” There’s a hitch in her voice and I wonder if she’s still drunk, or I am.

“So high on her seat,” Beth says. “All of you mooning like schoolgirls.”

But we are schoolgirls, I think to myself.

“You have always been soft to these things, Addy,” she says. “Last summer you were.”

And I don’t want her to talk about last summer again, and all our bickerings at cheer camp when everyone thought we were busting up. Because this has nothing to do with that girly nonsense.

“I tell you, Adelaide, I know her kind.”

Climbing over the back of the sofa, Beth swings her bare legs, nestling into me, and I’m listening but not listening because I don’t like that hitch in her voice.

“She better enjoy it while she can,” she rumbles, burrowing her head into the pillow I’ve tucked under my arm, burrowing her head into me, like always. “Because in a few years she’ll probably pop out another kid and her hips’ll spread like rising dough and before she knows it, she’ll be coaching field hockey instead.”

Twisting her fingers in my hair, she tunnels into me and the pillow behind me, hiding herself.

“Who will want her then?” she asks.

Then answers.

“None of us.”