Dare Me Read Free Page B

and he bought her the car. Barely information at all. As little as she can share and still share something.
    So focused, so intent, she’ll only answer questions when we’ve done our sprints, our bridge bends, our hundreds of searing crunches, backs sliding, squeaking on the floor.
    That prettiness, that bright-beaming prettiness she wears almost like a shameful thing, a flounce she keeps pulling tight, a tinkling charm she stills under her hand.
    It’s when she’s walking away from us, it’s when she’s dismissed us that RiRi calls out, “Hey Coach, hey, Co-o-ach. What’s that on your ankle?”
    The tattoo creeps above her running anklet, a violet blur.
    She doesn’t even turn her head, you wouldn’t even know she heard.
    “Coach, what is it?”
    “A mistake,” she says. That hard little voice of hers. A mistake.
     
    Ah, steel-strung coach with a reckless past, a bawdy past.
    “Bet we find her in an old episode of Girls Gone Wild: The Prehistoric Years. ” That’s Beth, of course. On Emily’s laptop. Beth typing Coach’s name into YouTube, bottom-trawling.
    She doesn’t find anything. Somehow I knew she wouldn’t. Someone that steely-strung, there’s nothing you could find.
     
    After practice, dwindling Emily, back flat on the locker room linoleum, curls her stomach upon herself over and over, fighting to get tighter, to whittle herself down to Coach specs. I stay with her, hold her feet down, keep her pudged ankles from swiveling.
    And it turns out Coach hasn’t left either. She’s in her office, talking on the phone. We see her through the glass, opening and closing the blinds, hand coiled around the plastic wand. Staring out the window to the parking lot. Open, shut, open, shut.
    When she hangs up, she opens the office door. The shush of the door swinging open, and it’s beginning.
    She opens the door and sees us, and the nod of her head, permitting entry.
    The office smells like smoke, like the sofa in the teachers’ lounge with that hard stain in the sunken center. Everybody has a story about that stain.
    There’s a picture on her desk of her little girl. Coach says her name is Caitlin and she’s four years old with a bleary mouth and flushed skin and eyes that glaze so dumbly I wonder how does anyone have kids.
    “She’s so cute,” spurts Emily. “Like a doll or something.”
    Like a doll, or something.
    Coach looks at the photo, like she’s never seen it before. She squints.
    “They get mad at me, at day care,” she says, like she’s thinking about it. “I’m always the last one to pick up. The last mom, at least.”
    She puts down the photo and looks at us.
    “I remember those,” she says, nodding at the flossy bracelets banding up and down our forearms.
    She tells us she made them when she was a kid and she can’t believe they’re popular again. Friendship bracelets, she calls them. But we would never call them that.
    “They’re just bracelets,” I say.
    She looks at me, lighting a cigarette with a twiggy old match, like the man who sells us jugs of wine out of the back of his store on Shelter Road.
    “We called this ‘Snake around the Pole,’” she says, lifting the one on Emily’s wrist with a crooking finger, her cigarette flaring.
    “That’s a Chinese Staircase,” I say. I don’t know why I keep correcting her.
    “What’s that one?” she says, poking at my wrist, the cigarette tip flush on my skin.
    I stare at it, and at Coach’s cool tanned finger.
    “A Love-Me-Knot.” Emily grins. “That’s the easy one. I know who made you that.”
    I don’t say anything.
    Coach looks at me. “Guys don’t make these.”
    “They sure don’t,” Emily says, and you can almost see her tongue flicking.
    “I don’t even know who gave it to me,” I say.
    But then I remember it was Casey Jaye, this girl I tumbled with at cheer camp last summer, but Beth didn’t like her and camp ended anyway. Funny how people you know at camp can seem so close and then the