Dare Me Read Free Page A

cool retort.
    “My daughter,” Mrs. Cassidy once slurred to me, slathering her neck with crème de la mer, “has been a delinquent since the day she was born.”
    So I get in Beth’s car, thinking a drive might do some kind of soothing magic, like with a colicky baby.
    “The test’s tomorrow,” I say, fingering my calc book.
    “She lives on Fairhurst,” she says, ignoring me.
    “Who?”
    “French. The coach.”
    “How do you know?”
    Beth doesn’t even give me a shrug, has never, ever answered a question she didn’t feel like answering.
    “You wanna see it? It’s pretty lame.”
    “I don’t want to see it,” I say, but I do. Of course I do.
    “This isn’t about the captain thing?” I say, very quiet, like not quite sure I want to say it aloud.
    “What captain thing?” Beth says, not even looking at me.
    The house on Fairhurst is not small. A ranch house, split level. It’s a house, what can I say? But there is something to it, okay. Knowing Coach is in there, behind the big picture window, the light tawny and soft, it seems like more.
    There’s a tricycle in the driveway with streamers, pink and narrow, flittering in the night air.
    “A little girl,” Beth says, cool-like. “She has a little girl.”
     
    “Don’t think of a pyramid as a stationary object,” Coach tells us. “Don’t think of it as a structure at all. It’s a living thing.”
    With Coach Fish, when we would do pyramids, we used to think of it as stacking ourselves. Building it layer by layer.
    Now we are learning that the pyramid isn’t about girls climbing on top of each other and staying still. It’s about breathing something to life. Together. Each of us a singular organ feeding the other organs, creating something larger.
    We are learning that our bodies are our own and they are the squad’s and that is all.
    We are learning that we are the only people in the world when we are on the floor. We will wear our smiles, tight and meaningless, but inside, all we care for is Stunt. Stunt is all.
    At the bottom, our hardcore Base girls, Mindy and Cori, my feet on Mindy’s shoulders, her body vibrating through mine, mine vibrating through Emily above me.
    The Middle Bases in place, the Flyer rises not by climbing, not by being lifted, it’s not a staircase, a series of tedious steps. No, we bounce and swing to bring everyone up, and the momentum makes you realize you are part of something. Something real.
    “A pyramid is a body, it needs blood and beats and heat. ONE, TWO, THREE. What keeps it up, what keeps it alive is the bounding of your bodies, the rhythm you build together. With each count, you are becoming one, you are creating life. FOUR, FIVE, SIX.”
    And I feel Mindy beneath me, the sinew of her, we are moving as one person, we are bringing Beth up and she is part of us too, and her blood shooting through me, her heart pounding with mine. The same heart.
    “The only moment the pyramid is still is when you make it still,” Coach says. “All your bodies one body, and you DO NOT MOVE. You are marble. You are stone.
    “And you won’t move because you won’t be able to, because you’re not that hot chick bouncing down the hallway, that ponytail-swinging girl, mouth filled with nothings. You’re not pretty, you’re not cute young things, you’re not a girl at all, not even a person. You’re the most vital part of one thing, the perfect thing. Until, SEVEN, EIGHT, and…
    “We blow it all apart.”
     
    After, our bodies spent, our limbs slick, we query her.
    Sweatless and erect, she looks down at our wasted loins, water bottles rolling over our chests and foreheads.
    “Coach, where’d you go to high school?” one of us asks.
    “Coach, what’s your husband like?”
    “Coach, is that your car in the faculty lot, or your husband’s?”
    We try every day, most of us. The information comes slow, wriggling out. She’d gone to school over in Stony Creek, her husband works in a mirrored office tower downtown,