Dare Me (8 page)

Little Caitlin, her
doughy face with that cherry-stem mouth, baby-soft hair sticking to her bulbed forehead.

Sitting on Coach’s sofa, I watch her amble around her strewn toys, the pink plastic and the yellow fluff of girlhood, everything glitter-silted. She steps with such care through the detritus of purple-maned ponies, gauzy-winged tutus, and all the big-eyed dolls—dolls nearly as empty-eyed as Caitlin, who reminds me of one of those stiff-limbed walking ones the richest girls always had, and we’d knock them over with the backs of our hands, or walk them into swimming pools or down basement stairs. Like stacking them up in pyramids just to watch them fall.

“I know, I know. Please, will you, will you…listen to me, baby. Listen close.”

In the dark dining room, Coach is on the phone, fingers hooked around the bottom of the low-hanging chandelier, turning it, twisting it in circles until I hear a sickly creak.

For hours she’s been hand-wringing, jabbing her thumb into the center of her palm, molding it there, her teeth nearly grinding, her eyes straying constantly to her cell phone. Ten times in ten minutes, a phantom vibration. Picking it up, nearly shaking it. Begging it to come to life. We can’t finish a conversation, sure can’t practice dive rolls in the yard. Any of the things she promised me.

Finally, her surrender, slipping into the other room and her voice high and rushed.
Will? Will? But you…but Will…

Now, Caitlin’s play-doh feet stomp over mine, her gummy hands on my knees as she pushes by me, and I want out. It’s all so sticky and unfun and I feel the air clog in my throat. For the first time since Coach let me into her home, I wish I’d gone instead with RiRi to her new boyfriend’s place, where they were drinking ginger-and-Jack in the backyard and smashing croquet balls up and down the long slope of the lawn.

But then Coach, phone raised high in hand like a trophy, tears into the living room, her face suddenly shooting nervy energy.

She is transformed.

“Addy, can you do me a favor?” she says, fingering the hamsa bracelet, its amulet flaring at me. “Just this once?”

She kneels down before me, her arms resting on my knees. It’s like a proposal.

Her face so soft and eager, I feel like she must feel when she looks at me.

“Yes,” I say, smiling. “Sure, yes. Yes.”
Always.

“It won’t be long,” Coach says. “Just a little while.”

She tells me Will’s having a hard time. Today, she says, is the third anniversary of his wife’s death.

My legs tingling, it’s like Lanvers Peak again, and I have a sense of my grand importance. Jump, jump, jump—how high, Coach? Just tell me, how high?

When he arrives, Will doesn’t quite look like himself, his face sheet-creased and he smells like beer and sweat, a dampness on him that seems to go to the bone. A six-pack is wedged under his arm. He sort of burrows against Coach for a minute and I pretend to look out the window.

While Coach hustles Caitlin off to the backyard, we sit on the sofa together, the cold beer bottles pressing against my legs.

There is a long, silent minute, my eyes following the milky rise and fall of his Adam’s apple, me so hypnotized, and thinking somehow of Coach’s fingers there.

“Addy,” he finally says, and I’m relieved someone is saying something. “I’m sorry I interrupted you two. You were probably doing things. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” I say.

When I was seven, my dad’s best friend died from a heart attack on the golf course and my dad locked himself in the garage for an hour and my stepmom wouldn’t let me knock on the door. Later, I think I crawled on his lap and I remember how he let me sit there for an hour and never once asked me to move so he could change the TV channel.

I don’t guess I should sit on Will’s lap but wish I could do something.

“Can I tell you something, Addy?” he says, and he’s not looking at me but at the furred white lamb on the coffee table, its head bent. “This awful thing happened to me on the way here.”

“What?” I say, rising up in my seat.

“I was coming out of the Beer Depot on Royston Road and there’s this bus stop out front. This old woman was coming off the bus, carrying her shopping bags. She had this hat with a big red flower, like a poppy, the ones you wear on Veterans’ Day. That’s what you’re supposed to wear on Veterans’ Day.

“When she saw me, she stopped in her tracks, right on the bottom step. She just stopped. It was like she knew me.

“And this thing happened. I just couldn’t move. I was just standing there, beer in my hand, and we just locked eyes. And something happened.”

His stare is glassy, and he has one finger tracing the tops of the beer bottles sitting between his legs.

“Did she know you from somewhere?” I ask, not sure I’m following.

“Yes. Except she didn’t. I never saw her before in my life. But, Addy, she knew me. She kept staring at me from under that poppy hat. And these black eyes, like lumps of coal. She would not let me go.” He shakes his head back and forth. “She would not let me go.”

I’m listening, but I don’t know what I’m hearing. I wonder how many beers Will has had, or if this is what mourning can look like, diffuse and mysterious.

“Addy, I think…” He has his eyes fixed again on the toy lamb on the coffee table, its head tilted, like a broken neck. “She
knew
things about me. It all became clear. She
knew.
The things I did as a kid, the Slip ’N Slide accident with my cousin and the sparkler bombs in the church parking lot and the time my dad showed up drunk at my job at the Hamburger Train and I shoved him and he fell on the wet floor and hit his head. And the first time in the Guard, and how now, after those bad drinking years, I only remember the MEDCAP missions, those little Allahaddin girls who slipped me love poems. I never remember any of the rest of it at all.”

He pauses, his beer bottle tilting in his hand.

“She knew things I never told anyone,” he says. “Like about my wife. Six years we were together, I never bought her a Valentine’s Day card.”

The empty bottle slips from his fingers, rolls across the sofa cushion.

“She knew all those things. And then I did.”

I don’t know what to say. I want to understand, to touch a bit of this shiny despair.

“What did you do?” I finally ask.

He laughs, the hard sound of it making me jump. “I ran,” he says. “Like a kid. Like seeing the bogey man. A witch.”

We are both quiet for a moment. I’m thinking of the old woman. I can see the poppy-blooming hat, and her face, her eyes inked black and all-knowing. I wonder if anything like that will ever happen to me.

Will leans down and picks up his bottle, setting it on the coffee table, its clammy bottom ringing the wood.

“Remember that night we all drove up the peak?” he says suddenly.

“Yes,” I say.

“I wish it could always be like that,” he says, twisting off a new beer cap.

I look at him.

Then he says, “Look at you,” reaching out and flicking my blond braid. “You’re so easy to talk to, Addy.”

I try to smile.

“Let me ask you,” he says, pressing the bottle against his damp forehead. “Do people see you, so pretty and your hair like a doll, and do they know about those things you hold inside of you?”

How did he know I held such things?
And what things?

“Can I trust you, Addy?” he asks.

I say he can. Does anyone ever answer that question with a no?

And I wait for him to say more. But he just looks at me, his eyes blood-webbed and so sorrowful.

None of it makes much sense and I think Will must be very drunk or something. Something.

For a second it all overwhelms me, and all I want is to listen to music, or do a bleacher sprint, or feel the featherweight of Tacy’s elfin foot in my flat palm, her counting on me to hold her up, and it being so easy.

“I’m sorry I ruined your afternoon,” he says.

I’m in the backyard, leaning on the enormous dutch door playhouse Caitlin occupies, jumbo chalk jammed in her chubby hands. Still half breathless from my talk with Sarge Will, I smoke three of Coach’s American Spirits and think about what’s going on inside.

Nearly an hour goes by, those two inside, and Caitlin falls asleep in the playhouse, her mouth sucked over the corner of the foam table inside.

Her hair scalloped into a ponytail, Coach runs barefoot across the lawn. I think she’s going to hug me, but she’s not a hugger, and kind of arm-hooks me, Coach-like, wringing my shoulder.

“Thank you, Addy,” she says, breathlessly. “Thanks, okay?”

And she smiles, with all her teeth, her face taffy pink.

It’s like I’ve just done the greatest thing I could ever do for her, like a single-based split catch, like a pike open basket at the State Championship, like a balm over her heart.

For a moment, my fingers touch her hard back, which shudders like a bird’s.

Touching it is like touching them, their beauty.

Party tonite,
flashes Beth’s text.

Rebs,
I type back.
Away game.

After,
she says.
Comfort Inn Haber.

Nu uh.

Uh huh.

That prickle behind my ear. The Comfort Inn. Older brothers and sisters are always talking about how it used to be called the Maid Marian, with a second-floor walkway slung so low it looked like the hookers—real live hookers like in the movies, only with worse skin—would slide right off into the courtyard. You’d only drive by when you had to go downtown, like a class trip to the museum and the teachers so embarrassed that you’d be passing Maid Marian, with all those maids all in a row.

When it became the Comfort Inn, they tore out the walkway and you couldn’t see the hookers anymore, but the whole place still quivered with a sense of dirty deeds.

And Beth, and her dirty deeds. I want to say no, but I want to say yes. I want to say yes to keep my eyes on Beth and want to say yes because it’s a party at the Comfort Inn on Haber Road.

So I say yes.

“Whose party?” RiRi asks, reaching under her shirt, plucking first her right breast higher, then her left, so they crest out the top. “Your dealer’s?”

“My dealer could buy Haber Road tip to tail,” Beth says. Beth doesn’t have a dealer, but there is a guy over on Hillcrest who graduated Sutton Grove ten years ago and he sells her adderall, which she sometimes shares and which feels like oxygen blasting through my brain, blowing everything away and leaving only immense joy that shakes tic tac–like in my chest and then sinks away so fast it takes everything from me and my sad life.

“So whose party?” I ask.

She grins.

I didn’t believe her at first, but there it is. There’s five or six of them, all from the Guard.

All Will’s men.

They’re wearing regular clothes, but their haircuts and close shaves give them away, and the way they stand, feet planted apart, chests puffed out. One of them even has his at-ease hands behind his back, which makes it hard to hold his beer.

I recognize the PFC with the red brush cut who walks Sarge Will to his car every day and the other one, with the ham-hock hands and the bowlegs.

There’s a little bar set up on the long plywood dresser and they’re huddled around it, and no one’s on the drooping beds with the nubby spreads, and the lights are pitched low and soft and there’s almost a peacefulness about it.

It’s just a place to have a party, that’s all. A little party, two adjoining rooms, the clock radio jangling softly and one PFC reaching above his hand, absentmindedly twirling the overhanging lamp, sending glades of light across the room like a mirror ball, like Caitlin’s magic lantern.

Then, bullet-headed Corporal Prine steps out of the bathroom, his thumb dug in the neck of his beer bottle.

RiRi, looking at me, shaking her head, mouthing,
Hell-no.

The other ones are all decked out in ironed polo shirts and pressed everything, but Prine is wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with skulls and bones and a big knife wedged in one of the skulls. The words
LOVE KILLS
are scrolled across it.

Nodding that big thick eraser-tip head of his, Prine beckons toward us.

Shrugging off her letter jacket, Beth, resplendent in a gold halter top, walks toward him, smiling slantily in that Beth way that feels like new trouble.

But RiRi is hip-shaking and she dips her hand in mine, and RiRi’s ease with boys is such solace and soon we are dancing, pop-pop-popping our hips and RiRi doing the robot arm.

There’s rum and diet cokes mixed special for us and all the alcopops we can drink, and the PFCs are gentlemanly and suggest we play a game called beer blow. I never do figure out what the point is except it involves a lot of us bending over the table and blowing playing cards off an empty bottle, and then drinking, and then drinking again.

I don’t care about anything, not the stain on the bedspread or the ceiling, or the way the bathroom sink drags away from the wall when you hold onto it, when you try to stay upright, not the crusted carpet under my feet, my shoes flung off as I climb up on the bed with RiRi, when we dance together, our hips knocking, and the Guardsmen all watch and cheer. I don’t care about anything at all.

I don’t care because it’s like this: the rum, and the hard lemonade, and the shot of tequila zoom and zag through me, and the spell cast so deeply.

The whole high school world of gum-stuck, locker-slamming, shoe-skidding tedium slips away and it’s all just warm and gushing perfection.

“Tell Coach to come,” RiRi is burbling. “Tell her we’re with the Guard.” She’s fumbling with my phone, trying to send a text.

Because it’s all okay because these are Will’s men and nothing bad could ever happen, one of them is pressing our heads together, wanting us to kiss.

“Always ready,” he says. “Always there.”

“We could never be girlfriends like this before,” RiRi says, hugging me close. “Until this year. You were always Beth’s girl. She never wanted to share you. Girl has such a hard-on for you. I was even scared of you. I was always scared of both of you.”

She’s looking at me, eyes wide, like she’s surprised herself.

This hot, sloshing feeling low in me, I’ve known it before, at house parties, at bonfires on the ridge with clanking kegs and plastic cups, and every boy becomes the prettiest I ever saw. But this is better somehow—the Comfort Inn on Haber Road!—better still these men, grown men, Guardsmen—Will’s men. Bearing somehow the sheen of Will.

Who am I not to curl myself under their hard, angled arms? Like Coach with Will. That could be me.

It’s late when we can’t find Beth.

At first I’m sure she’s with Prine, but then PFC Tibbs, the sweet, gingered one with the whistle in his voice, shows me Prine passed out on the bed in the adjoining room, and there’s no Beth.

Prine’s jeans are around his ankles and his boxer shorts half yanked off, leaving a view of fleshy abandon. Even though he’s alone, it feels sinister. Maybe it’s the smell, which is ripe and unwholesome.

The PFC takes me for a walk down every hallway and into every stairwell, talking about his sister and how he worries about her at State, hears tales of fraternity lap dances and early morning walks of shame.

We look for Beth for an hour or more, and I hold on to some kind of calm only because, walking under the long bands of humming fluorescents, I’m concentrating very hard and won’t miss any deodorized nook of the motel.

But each burning hallway is like the previous one, all of them yellow-bright and empty.

I’m nearly night-air-sobered by the time we find her asleep in my car, face slack and childlike, except she has no shoes and, far as I can tell, her skirt riding up, no underwear.

When she jolts awake, she says dark and woolly things about Prine.

How he took her to the adjoining room and tore off her underpants and pulled his pants down and all kinds of things are slipping from her drunken mouth.

He put his hands there, pushed down on my shoulders, my jaw, it hurts.

You’re always supposed to believe these things. That’s what they tell you in Health Class, the woman from Planned Parenthood, the nose-pierced college student from Girls, Inc. Females never lie about these important things. You must never doubt them. You must always believe them.

But Beth isn’t like the girls they’re talking about. Beth isn’t like a girl at all. The squall in her, you can’t ever peer through all that, can you?

It’s impossible to puzzle through someone like Beth who always knows more about you than you know about yourself. She always beats you to the punch.

“I better call someone,” says the PFC, standing back from us, far from my ministrations, farther still from Beth’s sprawl, a seat belt twisted around her bare ankle, her feet gravel-pocked.

I try to untangle her, and Beth’s left leg drops to one side and we both see the flaring red mark on the inside, the shape of a thumbprint. And a matching one on her other thigh.

“I better call the Sarge,” he says, his voice strangled.

Suddenly, Beth jerks, her elbow jagging out at me, her eyes sharp and focused on the poor private.

“Call Sarge,” she says. “Go ahead and call him. It’s on him. I’ve called him five times. I’ve called him for hours. It’s on him.”

Why would Beth call Will?

I look back at the PFC. I’m shaking my head. I’m giving him a look like
oh-crazy-drunk-girl.

Beth is a liar. This is a lie, the only thing between Beth and Will is her failed campaign. This is just Beth blowing buckshot everywhere.

“I’ve got it,” I say. “I’ve got her. You can go.”

Standing back, the PFC lifts his hands up.

The relief on his face is astounding.

“You cannot bring her here, Addy,” Coach is saying, my phone clutched to my ear. “Take her home. Take her to your house.”

I’m looking at Beth, corkscrewed into the crook of my front seat, her eyes nearly closed but with a discomforting glistening there.

“I can’t,” I whisper, my varsity jacket sleeve snagging in the steering wheel,
sober up, sober up.
“She’s saying things. About that Prine guy.”

My eyes catch Beth’s purse on the car floor, half unzipped.

That’s how I see her neon-lime panties inside.

Folded neatly, like a handkerchief.

You cannot judge how women will behave after an assault,
the pamphlets always say. But.

“Prine?” Coach’s voice turns spiky. “Corporal Prine? What are you talking about?”

I tell her about the party, the words tripping fast, my head spongy and confused.
Just let us come over, Coach, just let us.

I don’t tell her that I’m already driving to Fairhurst, to her house.

“Coach, she wanted us to call Sarge,” I say, fast as a bullet. “She says she called him a bunch of times.”

A pause, then her voice like a needle in my ear:

“Get the bitch over here now.”

Like this, the car floating, the streetlamps like spotlights coning in on us. And Coach’s voice pounding.
Why would you go to that party, Addy? Is she saying Prine hurt her? He’s no high school QB. They call him the Mauler. Addy, I thought you were smarter than this.

Climbing up Coach’s front porch, I’m holding Beth up, her bare feet scraping on the cement.

She said not to knock, so I just send a text. Seconds later, Coach appears at the door, an oversized T-shirt with
AURIT FINANCIAL SERVICES
written on it, and a logo that looks like a winding road leading up to the sky.

The stony glare as she looks at Beth brings me straight to sober, sends my spine to full erectness. I even want to comb my hair.

“For god’s sake, Hanlon,” she says.
Hanlon
now. “I expected more from you.”

I can’t pretend it doesn’t sting.

We are all hard whispers and shoving arms, hustling Beth to the den.

Just as Coach shakes the vellux blanket over Beth, hair streaked across her face, we hear Matt French coming down the stairs.

It all feels very bad.

He looks tired, his face rubbed to redness, brow knotted.

“Colette,” he says, his eyes taking it all in. “What’s going on here?”

But Coach doesn’t flinch.

“Now you see what I put up with all week,” she says, almost like she’s annoyed with him, which is a great technique. “And now Saturday night too. These girls are nothing but boxed wine and havoc.”

They both turn and look at me. I don’t know what to say, but I have never drunk boxed wine.

“Colette,” he says, “can you come talk to me for a second?”

They walk into the next room for a minute and I can hear his voice rise a little, can make out a few words—
responsibilities
and
what if
and
young girls.

“What do you want me to do? These girls’ parents just don’t care,” she says, which feels funny to hear.

A few seconds go by and then they both reappear.

“Matt, go back to bed,” she says, trying for an aggrieved smile, one hand on his back. “You’re exhausted. I’ll take care of it.”

Matt French looks over at Beth, buried on the sofa, and then away.

For a second, his gaze rests on me. His sleep-smeared face, the worry on it, and his bloodshot eyes on me.

“Good night, Addy,” he says, and I honestly never knew he knew my name.

I watch him duck his head under the archway then ascend the carpeted steps.

Good night, Matt French.

Pulling me into the bathroom, Coach sits me down on the tub ledge, the questions coming so fast and the pink lights flaming.

“I don’t know what happened,” I say, but Beth’s words keep caroming back:
hand on the back of my head and shoved it down there and kept saying, “Do me, cheerleader. Do me.”

Coach makes me repeat everything five, ten times, or so it seems. I’m getting head spins. At some point I start to slide against the shower curtain, but she yanks me up again and makes me drink four cups of water back-to-back.

“What do
you
think happened?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “You saw her legs, the red marks?”

But then, my hand to my own leg, I think of the dusky violet bruise I have in the very same spot from Mindy’s gouging thumb, lifting me to a thigh stand.

And there’s the matter of those lime panties, folded tidily in Beth’s purse.

But Coach isn’t listening, isn’t even looking at me.

She has Beth’s phone in her hand. I never even saw her take it.

She’s scrolling through call history. Outgoing calls and texts to “Sarge Will,” six, seven, eight of them.

Suddenly, she flinches.

A text,
Come on by, Sarge Stud, we’re all waiting.
There’s a picture attached that looks to be Beth’s zebra-print bra, breasts pressed tightly together.