Free Dare Me by Megan Abbott Page A

time Coach finds us in the locker room, Beth and me jackrabbity with titillation, everything that had opened, gloriously, is shut again.
    She is once more that iron ingot, hard and feverless, walking with purpose but without hurry, with no wilt or lilt in her step, no hair out of place from that shiny crest of hers.
     
    In her office, she pulls the blinds down on the door then shakes out a handful of cigarettes on the desk.
    This has never happened before, this offering.
    Beth and I each take one, and I know what it means for me, to me.
    And I know what it means to Beth, high on her new power perch, nuzzling her new wisdom close to her freckled chest.
    But this, the extent of this, I can’t think about yet.
    Coach lights mine and when she does I look in her eyes and that’s when I see she hasn’t put on all the calm she wants. Those flat gray eyes are jumping.
    Beth, leaning back in Coach’s seat, kicks her legs up and props her feet against the front of the desk. Scuffing its laminated edge.
    She is very pleased.
    As Coach walks past me to the window, I catch the scent, just barely. Sharp and fleshy and stinging my nose and making me think of Drew Calhoun’s bedsheets that time, the smell on them, even though we didn’t, but he did.
    “I need you to understand what Will—what the Sergeant and I have is a real thing,” she lets her gaze flit over us quickly. “A true thing.”
    Out of the corner of my eye, I see Beth piano-keying her fingers along her chin.
    “I never thought it would happen,” Coach says, and I think she means cheating on her husband. But then she says, “I never thought I’d feel like this.”
    I look at her, her hands pulling at the wand of the window blinds, lacing around it and tugging like a little girl with her whole hand wrapped around her father’s index finger.
    Feel like what, I want to ask, but don’t.
    “Do you guys understand?” she asks, tilting her head, a strand of that perfect hair slipping across her face, grazing her mouth.
    I do not look at Beth.
    “I waited my whole life for it,” Coach says, and I feel a buzzing in my chest. “I never thought it would happen. And then it did.”
    She looks at us.
    “Wait until it happens to you,” she says, breathing hard and her body twisting with it. With these magic words.
    “Wait until it’s you.”
     
    Don’t tell anyone.
    That night, fingers plucking the buttons on my duvet cover, thumbs on my phone, Beth’s texts blipping under my fingers. Agreed. This is just us. We keep quiet 4 now.
    I shut off my phone.
    Wriggling there, thinking it all through, I start to see, for the first time, how it might be for Coach, young and pretty and strong. Why should she be stuck all day rousting chickens like us, or at least like some of us, on the shellacked floors of the Sutton Grove High School gym, our hapless ponytails flying, smarting off, being lazy, spitting gum on the floor, whining about periods and boys? She spends all her days like this and then home to her kid, pucker-mouthed and red-faced, a day of sugar and agitation in preschool, and her husband at work until the nightly news sometimes.
    I start to think of it differently, as a home filled not with ease and liberty but with irritation and woe. Who wouldn’t need the ministrations of the likes of Sergeant Will, and what he might give her? I wonder what he gives her and why we aren’t enough.

10
    “I knew, ” Beth says, before practice the next day, lifting her leg into a heel stretch. “I knew there was something wrong with her. What a fake, what a liar.”
    “Beth,” I say. But the warning flare in her eyes says I better tread lightly.
    “Beth,” I say, “can you show me how you get your foot behind your head like that? Can you help?”
     
    We are in Coach’s backyard after practice, just the two of us. She has invited me. Just me.
    We haven’t spoken about Sarge Will, not yet.
    Coach is trying to help me with my standing back tuck, which is weak at best.