Dare Me by Megan Abbott Read Free Book Online Page A

it when I lift my cheer skirt over my head,” Beth says, side by side with me on the floor in front of her locker. “You might try that next time.”
    “Maybe you need some new tricks,” RiRi yawns, eyes hot on Sarge Will. “What worked with your junior high PE teach might not roll with the big brass here.”
    This is how it starts, Beth rising to her feet like them’s fighting words, and asking RiRi if she’d care to make it interesting.
    I can tell from RiRi’s face that she would not care to do so at all, but it’s the prairie whistle of the Old West, high noon at ole Sutton Grove High. You can hear Beth’s tin star rattling against her chest.
    So much better to have Beth face off with party girl RiRi than with Coach.
    It’s not that Beth just rolls for anybody or even most people, but when she does, it’s a star turn, it’s page one. Like with Ben Trammel, or the time everyone saw her and Mike LaSalle, ebony against her ivory, in the holly hedges at St. Mary’s after the game. All those forked nettles studding his letterman jacket, all up and down the felted arms, and his neck bristled red.
    Everyone talked about it, but I was the one who saw her after. The bright pain in her face, like she didn’t know why she’d done it, the alarm in her eyes, pin struck.
     
    We’ve been angling, I have. Coach, what’s your place look like? Coach, we want to meet little Caitlin too, we do.
    Coach, show us, show us, let us in.
    None of us ever think she will. We’ve tried for five weeks. I dream of it, driving by her house like a boy might do.
    The next Saturday at the home game, Tacy kicks out that basket toss like she’s been doing it all her life, and she adds a toe touch, and we do a hanging pyramid, with Emily and Tacy swinging like trapdoors off RiRi’s arms, which whips up the crowd to fierce delirium.
    There is such an ease to it. In the parking lot after, we’re all feeling so good, like we could annihilate an invading army, or go to Regionals or State.
    Beth is hoisting between her fingers a very fine bottle of spiced rum from some boy on the Norsemen team. He wants to party with us, and promises big excitement at his uncle’s apartment, up on the Far Ridge.
    Just the kind of wild night we’d all maneuver endlessly for, trading promises and fashioning elaborate lies, a string of phone calls home to marshal a fleet of alibis no parent could pierce.
    Beth is the dark mistress of such nights and seems always to know where the secret house party is, or the bar with the bouncer who knows her brother, or the college boy hangout by the freeway where no one ever cards anybody and the floors are sticky with beer and the college boys are so glad for girls like us, who never ask them even one question ever.
    But as we conspire around Beth’s car, my hand stroking the borrowed bottle, mouth clove-streaked and face rum-suffused, Coach walks past us, car keys jangling loudly.
    “Going home, Coach?” Emily asks, swiveling her nutraslimmed hips madly to the music thudding from the car stereo. “Why don’t you come out with us instead?”
    We all look wide-eyed at Emily’s pirate-boldness, Tacy’s head perched merrily on Emily’s shoulder, like a parrot.
    Coach smiles a little, her eyes, thoughtful now, wandering past us, into the dark thicket of trees banded around the parking lot.
    “Why don’t you all come to my house instead?” she says, just like that. “Why don’t you come over?”
     
     “The smell of desperation,” Beth says, “is appalling.”
    Beth does not wish to go to Coach’s house.
    “It’s not my job,” she adds, as we all look at her blankly, “to make her feel like she matters.”
     
    Standing in the front hallway, we wait while Coach sends off the babysitter, an older woman named Barbara in a peach chenille sweater that hangs to her knees.
    She lets us poke our heads in and see little Caitlin fast asleep. The room is blushing pink with one of those rotating lanterns that wobble