Free Dare Me by Megan Abbott Page B

It’s really just a tight backflip from a standing position and is one of those stunts all real cheerleaders can do in their sleep. RiRi says college cheerleaders do them at parties—“Tuck check!”—to test each other’s drunkenness.
    One of her hands on my waist, Coach uses the other to pull my knees up, flipping me hard as soon as I’m off the ground, her arms like a propeller.
    She is in that focus mode where she doesn’t even look me in the eye but treats my body like a new machine with parts not yet broken in. Which is what it is.
    “If you can’t back tuck,” she says, “you can’t land most tumbling stunts.” What she doesn’t say: since I don’t fly or do Bottom Base, I need to be able to tumble.
    I need to nail it.
    “The pull is just as important as the set,” she is saying, her breath fogging in near dusk. I can feel it on my face as she knocks her hip against mine. “You can have the best set in the world but if you don’t pull your legs around after it, you’re still going to land short.”
    Over and over, I start strong, arms up brace-tight, only to land on my hands, my knees, the tips of my toes.
    It’s a head thing. I feel certain I will fall. And then I do, my foot twisting beneath me.
    “You think too much,” Beth used to tell me.
    She’s right. Because if you think about it, you realize you can’t possibly jump into the air and rotate yourself 360 degrees. No one can do that.
    Beth, of course, does a flawless standing back tuck, and it’s something to see.
    It is incredibly high and perfect.
    But Beth grabs from behind the thighs, not the shins like Coach likes.
    “I don’t want that sloppy stuff from you,” Coach says. “Don’t waste my time with that.”
    Again and again, my shins grass-streaked and the sky heavy with dusk.
    “Chest up,” she shouts, every time I land, to keep me from falling forward.
    Finally, I’m getting cleaner and she stops flipping me. And I start falling. She lets me fall every time.
    “It’s a blind landing, Hanlon,” she says. “You’re trying to find the ground. You gotta know it’s not there.”
    I try to pretend I’m her. Try to feel tight like she does, so tight nothing can touch her. I think of squeezing my whole body into a tight ball.
    “Ride that jump longer,” her voice out there somewhere, vibrating in my ear, her hands there but not.
    And then releasing.
    “Open your body,” she keeps saying, and it’s shuddering through my whole head. “Open it.”
    And I feel myself doing just that, an explosion from the center of me to my toes, my fingertips.
    It is just after dark, the timered deck lamps leaping to life, when I start landing it.
    The feeling is breathtaking, and I know I can do anything.
    I feel like I could rotate myself forever and land every time, arms upraised, chest high, body both shattered then restored. Immaculate.
     
    The night outside her front picture window is blue-shivery, but we are curled on her sofa, our legs folded under ourselves, our bodies loose and victorious.
    “Addy, I know how it probably looks,” Coach is saying to me, leaning close, cigarettes and tall plastic cups of matcha green tea as my back tuck reward. “But you have to understand how things are. With Will and me.”
    She runs her finger around and around the rim of her cup. Her eyes are ringed darkly and it’s like I always hoped it would be. I’m the one she’s telling. She chooses me.
    “And Matt, Addy…” She sighs and arches her back, looking vaguely to the ceiling. “Maybe you think when you’re as old as I am, you couldn’t want things anymore. When I was your age, twenty-seven might as well be a hundred.”
    “You don’t seem old at all,” I say.
    We sit for a while, and she talks. She tells me how it started with Will.
    Seeing her in the parking lot after the college fair, he told her she looked sad and wondered if she would like to sit with him in his car, parked on Ness Street, and listen to music.