Dare Me by Megan Abbott Read Free Book Online

and a shudder bores through me, and if it weren’t for RiRi next to me, feeling my tremor, flashing me her terror, a starry span of panic before my eyes, I wouldn’t have driven that steel back into my blood, my muscles, my everything.
    Made it tight and iron-fast for Tacy, who seemed to be in the air for minutes, hours, a radiant creature with white-blond hair spread wing-like, finally sinking safely, ecstatically, into all our arms.
     
    It’s hours later, and we’re in Emily’s dad’s car sneaking swigs of blackberry cordial, swiped from RiRi’s garage, where her brother hides it.
    We’re waiting in the parking lot of the Electric Crayon, its neon sign radiating sex and chaos, the cordial tickling our mouths and bellies almost unbearably.
    We’ve never been on Haber Road before, except the time we went with RiRi’s sister to Modern Women’s Clinic to get ofloxacin and she told us after how she almost choked when they stuck that big swab down her throat, but it was still better than what Tim Martinson had stuck down her throat.
    We all laughed even though it didn’t really seem funny and none of us want to end up at Modern Women’s Clinic ever, the matted-down wall-to-wall, and the buzzing fluorescent lights, and the girl behind the front desk who sang softly to herself, “Boys trying to touch my junk-junk-junk. Gonna get me some crunk-crunk-crunk.”
    An hour slides by before Tacy finally comes out of the Electric Crayon, tugging her jeans down so we can see the Sutton Grove eagle soaring there, the envy so strong it almost makes me burst.
    Coach, she wouldn’t come with us no matter how much we begged. But she did slip Tacy forty bucks for it. Two smooth twenties, tucked in our new Flyer’s trembling hands.
    We never heard of any coach doing that, ever.
    Nudging my fingers under the sticking bandage on her lower back, I touch that red-raw eagle, making Tacy wince with pained pleasure.
    Me, me, me, it should be me.

7
    WEEK FIVE
    “I’ve heard some things about Ms. Colette French,” Beth tells me. “I have contacts.”
    “Beth,” I say. I know this tone, I know how things start.
    “I don’t have anything to report yet,” she says, “but be ready.”
    Like bamboo slowly sliding under fingernails. She has started.
    But Beth also grows easily bored. That’s what I have to remember.
     
    I am glad, then, when Beth seems to have found something—someone—else to do.
    Monday morning, the recruiting table is struck in the first-floor hallway, by the language labs.
    The posters blare red, the heavy ripple of the flag insignia.
    Discover Your Path to Honor.
    Recruiters, out for fresh, disaffected-teen blood.
    “Who needs cheer?” Beth says. “I’m enlisting.”
    They came last year too, and always sent the broadest-shouldered, bluest-eyed Guardsmen, the ones with arms like twisted oak and booming voices that echo down the corridor.
    This year, though, they have Sergeant Will, who is entirely different. Who, with his square jaw and smooth, knife-parted hair, is handsome in a way unfamiliar to us. A grown-up man, a man in real life.
    Sarge Will makes us dizzy, that mix of hard and soft, the riven-granite profile blurred by the most delicate of mouths, the creasy warmth around his eyes—eyes that seem to catch far-off things blinking in the fluorescent lights. He seems to see things we can’t, and to be thinking about them with great care.
    He is older—he may be as old as thirty-two—and he is a man in the way that none of the others, or no one else we know or ever knew, are men.
    Before practice, or during lunch, a lot of the girls like to hang around and finger the brochures. Spread Your Wings, they say.
    Fresh off her latest breakup with Catholic Patrick, lovely RiRi spends pass time lingering at the table, leaning across it, arms pressed tight against either side of her breasts, framing them V-like and drawing one foot up her other leg, like she says men like.
    “Personally, I find they like