Dare Me (19 page)

SUNDAY: ONE DAY TO FINAL GAME

She’s given me
one day and I have no plan for it, no idea.

All the voices from recent days, all the threats and calamity, and I can’t think my way through any of it, least of all those words from Coach:
I was there, Addy, but I didn’t do anything. I was with him, but I found him too.

It’s all true.

Everything is.

Crawling under the covers Sunday morning, three a.m., I take more codeine-dosed Tylenol, and the dreams that come are muddled and grotesque.

Finally twisting myself into a trembling sleep, I dream of Will.

He comes to me, his arm outstretched, palm closed. When he opens it, it’s filled with shark teeth, the kind they show you in science class.

“Those are Beth’s,” I say, and he smiles, his mouth black as a hole.

“No,” he says, “they’re yours.”

When I wake up, there’s a newfound energy in me that boosts me from bed, that feels like the day before a Big Game. That feels powerful. It’s the day of readying.

Standing in front of the mirror, toothbrush frothing, I feel certain things will happen and this time maybe I will be ready for them.

I try to find a way to reach PFC Tibbs. I think he might share more with me, reveal something, as Prine did. But I can’t find a number for him, and there’s no answer at the regional Guard office, so I have no way to reach him without Beth.

I drive to the police station, park in the back. Wait for an hour, door-watching.

I think about going inside, but I’m afraid the detectives will see me.

I was there, but I didn’t do anything. I was with him, but I found him too. It’s all true.

Beth or Coach, who do I believe when one never tells the truth and one gives me nothing but riddles?

Something about it reminds me of pre-calc. Permutations and combinations.
Consider any situation in which there are exactly two possibilities: Succeed or Fail. Yes or No. In or Out. Boy or Girl.

Left or right.
You’re the Left Base, you know your only job is to strut that left side of the pyramid, hold that weight and keep your girl up.

But am I on the right side, or the left?

Watching the back door of the police station, I ponder a third way. I imagine going inside, telling them everything, letting them sort it all out.

But it’s not the soldier heart in me.

I’m just about to start my car when my phone rings.

I don’t recognize the number, but I answer.

“Addy?” A man says.

“Yes?”

“This is Mr. French,” he says. “Matt French.”

I turn off my car.

“Hey, Mr. French, how are you?” I say, on babysitter autopilot, like during those long three-minute rides home with the fathers wanting to know all about cheerleading and what it does to our bodies.

Except it’s not one of our dads, it’s Matt French and he’s calling me and I’ve been a party to his family’s ruin.

“I’m sorry to bother you,” he says.

“How did you…?” I say. “So you got my number from Coach? You…”

“This isn’t weird, okay?” he says quickly. “It’s not.”

“No, I know,” I say, but how is this not weird?

Matt French. I picture him standing in his yard, this forlorn figure. I picture him always like he’s looking at us through glass—windshields, sliding patio doors. I don’t know if I could even picture his face if I tried, but the sight of that sad slump in his shoulders is with me now.

“Can I ask you a question, Addy?” his voice muffled, like his mouth is pressed close to the phone.

“Yes.”

“I’m trying to figure something out. If I tell you a phone number off my call log, do you think you could tell me if you recognize it?”

“Yes,” I say before I can even think.

“Okay,” he says, and he reads off a phone number. I type it in and a name comes up.

Tacy.

I say her name out loud.

“Tacy,” he repeats. “Tacy who? Is she your friend?”

“Tacy Slaussen. She’s on the squad,” I say. “She’s our Flyer. Was our Flyer.”

There’s a pause, a heavy one. I get the feeling something monumental is occurring. At first I think he’s processing what I’m saying, but then I realize he’s the one waiting for me to process something.

He wants me to remember something, mark something, know something.

It’s like he’s the one giving something to me.

I just don’t know what.

“I was glad it wasn’t your phone number,” he says. “I was glad it wasn’t you.”

“What wasn’t me?” I ask. “Mr. French, I—”

“Good-bye, Addy,” he says, soft and toneless. And there’s a click.

The phone call knifes its way through my head.

Matt French has found out something, or everything. It’s all blown apart and he’s going through her e-mails, her phone calls, everything. He’s amassing all the pieces, pieces that will damn us all, will damn us both.

Adulteress, Murderer,
and
Accessory to.

But that doesn’t fit with the call. With what he asked and what he didn’t. And there’s the way he sounded too. Unsteady but reserved, troubled but strangely calm.

I tap Tacy’s number. I almost never call her, maybe I never have, but we all have each other’s numbers in our phone. And Coach has them all in hers. Squad rules.

Which is how Matt French might have Tacy’s number.

Except I don’t think he was looking at Coach’s phone when he read off the number. If he were looking at Coach’s phone, it would say “Tacy” or “Slaussen.” It would say something.

My
call log, that’s what he said. His phone.

His phone.

But why would Tacy call Mr. French? And if she did, why wouldn’t he know who she was?

So I call Tacy’s number, but it goes straight to voicemail.

Hey, beyotch, I’m out somewhere, lookin sick n sexified. Leave a message. If this is Brinnie, I never called you a bore. I called you a whore.

I’m glad it wasn’t your phone number,
he’d said.
I’m glad it wasn’t you.

Matt French, what is it you want me to know?

I drive to Tacy’s house, but she’s not there. Her jug-jawed sister is, the one who I always hear in the speech lab droning on about Intelligent Design when the Forensic League meets after school.

“Oh,” she says, eyeing me. “You’re one of those.”

Slouched against the doorframe, she’s eating wrinkly raisins from a small baggie, which is just the kind of thing those kinds of girls are always doing.

“She’s not here,” she says. “She borrowed my car to go to the school. To practice her hip rolling and pelvis thrusts.”

Looking at the cloudy Ziploc in her hand, at the sad gray sweater and peace sign nose ring, I say, “We don’t need to practice those.”

I see the ice blue hatchback in the parking lot, and pull in next to it.

The gym backdoor is propped open with a rubber-banded wedge of dry erasers, like we do when we want a place to drink Malibu before a party. And now some of us use it to practice weekends, off-hours, or we have since Coach drove our bodies to perfection, elevated our squad into sublimity.

I hear her first, her wheezy grunts and the soft push of pumas on airy mats.

Cheek still puffed from Thursday’s fall, she’s running tumbles. Throwing roundoff back handsprings, one after another. She should have a spotter because her technique, as ever, is pussy-weak.

“Stop throwing head,” I shout. “Arms against your ears.”

She stutters to a stop, nearly crashing into the padded wall at the far end.

“Fire, form, control, perfection,” I count off, like Coach always did.

“Who cares,” moans Tacy, breathlessly. “I’m ground-bound anyway. With Beth back, my life is practically over.”

She slides down the wall and collapses onto the floor, pulling cotton wisps from her glossed mouth. God love Tacy, full makeup on a Sunday morning, by herself, in the school gym.

“It’s only one game,” I say, even as I know it’s the Big Game, the Biggest Ever, and who cares about cheering spring baseball?

“Besides,” I add, “how long do you really think Beth can possibly last as captain?”

“I don’t know,” Tacy says, now picking cotton from under her grape-lacquered fingernails. “I think she might be captain forever.”

“Why would you think that?”

“Because of what’s happening,” she says. “Coach French was the only one who could ever stop her. And now Coach is gone.”

“She’s not gone, she just—”

“She’s not coming back. Face it, Addy, it’s all over for Coach.” She looks at me, that swollen face of hers, lapin-jowled. “Which sucks because Coach was the only one who ever saw it in me. My
potential,
my
promise.
”

“Slaus, the only reason Coach put you up there is because you’re ninety-four pounds and you’re Beth’s pigeon,” I say, wanting to wring her little-girl neck. “If you care so goddamned much about Coach, why do you keep helping Beth?”

She looks startled but too dumb to be startled enough.

“I’m not helping Beth. Not anymore.”

“But you were.”

She takes a deep breath.

“Well, you don’t know what’s happened, Addy. Coach maybe did something really bad,” she says, shaking her head. “It’s Beth’s fault, sort of. But that’s no excuse. My dad says we’re an excuse society now.”

“Tacy,” I say, my voice grinding, “tell me what you mean. Tell me what you know.”

I press my foot against her bendy-straw leg, press it hard.

She looks at me, rabbit scared, and I know I need to slather some honey but keep that foot pressed too. That’s what she loves. Both those things at once.

“Tacy, I’m the only one who can help you now,” I say. “I’m the only one who can help.”

Her tears come and I fight off the urge to slap those swollen dewlaps of hers. I fight it off because she’s about to give me gold, and she doesn’t even know it. She thinks her gossip, her petty grievances are significant, but they are tiny pinholes. The things around them, though, the fabric of Beth’s lies and fictions, they are the gold.

“Coach was sleeping with the Sarge,” she says, eyes saucering up at me. “And she loved him. And then Coach found out. About Beth. About Sarge and Beth.”

I’m leaning against the padded gym wall and Tacy’s still on the floor, legs tucked tight, looking up at me, and talking, talking, talking.

She isn’t what you think, and neither was he.
That’s what Beth said.
He was just a guy, like all of them.

But Will, Will and Beth? I just can’t make my head believe it.

“This was right when he first started coming to the school,” she says. I’m relieved for that. Before Coach, before all that. Lost, wandering, wondering Will. “And they had that bet, her and RiRi. She wanted to beat RiRi. She said RiRi was all tits and eyeliner and she would eat her heart whole.

“So one day after school she was waiting by his truck for him. You know how he’d park in the back, behind the school lot, on Ness Street?”

I used to walk Coach there. Coach, whose face would flush at the sight of his SUV shadowed under the oak tree, its leathery leaves hovering, the shadows of them across her face as she turned to look at me, to say,
Here he is, Addy, here is my man.

“My job was to wait by the tree with my phone,” Tacy is saying, “so I could take a picture to prove she’d done it.”

I don’t know what’s coming, but I feel a churning in my gut.

“So she’s out there, waiting for him in her miniskirt,” Tacy says, her fingers carelessly grazing my ankle as I stand above her. “Well, Beth, she’s a hot bitch, and Sarge was a guy, right?”

He’s a guy, right.

“But he couldn’t go through with it,” she sighs, resting her fingers on my ankle bone. “Just kid stuff. And I only got one half-decent shot, but you couldn’t see much.”

I don’t say anything.

“But here was the thing,” Tacy says, shaking one of her fingers. “Beth never did show it to RiRi. Maybe she knew it wouldn’t be good enough to win the bet. Finally I asked her about it and she had me text it to her. She said she was saving it. She just kept it on her phone. She loved to flash it at me.”

This seems like Beth and I wonder why she never flashed it at me. But I guess I know. Once we found out about Coach and Will, she couldn’t be sure where I’d stand. She couldn’t be sure I’d play for her side. She was right.

“Then all of a sudden she tells me something happened to her phone,” Tacy says, “and she lost the picture and she needed me to send it again.”

The memory comes to me: Coach torpedoing Beth’s twizzler-red phone down the toilet.

“So I say, tell me what you need it for first,” Tacy says, looking up at me, her smile coming and going as she tries to read me, read how I’m taking this, and if I want to play with her, to relish all this just a little.

“So she
had
to tell me,” she, rocking in her seat, so eager to recount it, to relive the moment. “And that’s when she said she was going to use it so Coach would stop giving her such a hard time.”

I rest my back against the wall, not looking down at Tacy, sliding away from her, her hot breath on my legs.

“So that’s when she told me about Coach and Will,” she says. “She had to.”

I look down at her, that lapin face squinting with conspiratorial pleasure, and I say nothing.

“So, after three years of hustling for that queen bitch, now I had something Beth wanted,” Tacy says, her voice sharpening in a way that’s almost impressive. “Beth had lost the goods. She didn’t even e-mail the picture to herself or save it on her computer. She thinks she’s so goddamned smart. How smart is that? But it was
me.
I saved the picture. And now she needed something from me.”

That’s a feeling I know so well it’s like she’s stuck her fingernail to my own beating heart. But it doesn’t warm me to her.

You and me, Tacy? We share nothing.