Dare Me Part 30

"You made it up," I say.

I'm at Beth's house, in her bathroom. She has her leg propped up on the toilet seat, where she's examining it with care.

"The Asian girl did the sugar wax on me, and she is comprehensive in her approach," she says, shaking a flame-colored bottle of Our Desire, her mother's perfume. "Except now I reek of pop-tart. Frosted. With sprinkles."

"You made it up," I repeat, smacking her leg off the toilet seat. "The cops never asked her about any bracelet. You made all that up."

"The hot fuzz called you in, eh?" she says, standing up straight, still shaking the perfume bottle, shaking it side to side like some dirty boy gesture. "They called me in too. I go right after practice today."

"They never found any bracelet at all, did they?"

"You'd best stay right, girl," she says, lifting her leg back up, sending a fine mist of bitter orange and ylang-ylang over it.

This I don't like. She can't batter at me like I'm Tacy, like I'm some JV.

"What made you finally ask her?" she says.

I knock her foot off the toilet seat again and sit down on its furred lid.

"You made it up," I say. "If the detectives found a bracelet, they would've asked me about it."

"Addy, I can't make you believe me," she says, looking down at me. "And as for you and Coach..."

She lays her hand on my head, like a benediction.

"We are never deceived," she says, her voice deep and ringing. "We deceive ourselves."

We are lying on Beth's deep blue bedroom carpet, as we've done a hundred, a thousand times, collapsing from our labors, the wages of war, one kind or another. Adrift on that speckless ultramarine, Beth would lay out all her martial machinations for me, her attache, her envoy. Sometimes her mouthpiece. Whatever was required.

In some ways, Beth was almost never wrong in her judgments.

Paper-thin, master cleansed Emily was not, in fact, strong enough to do the stunt.

Tacy didn't have the head game or the strong legs of a true Flyer.

With Beth, so full of lies, you have to push past the lie to see the deeper truth that drives it. Because Beth is almost always lying about something, but the lying is her way of rendering something else, something tucked away or confounded, manifest.

And you have to keep playing, and maybe the truth will reveal itself, maybe Beth will get tired and finally show her hand. Or maybe it'll stop being fun for her, and she'll just hurl that truth in your face, and make you cry.

I never liked you anyway.

You're just so G.o.dd.a.m.ned fat it depresses me.

I saw your dad at the mall buying lingerie with a strange woman.

Casey Jaye said you can't throw a back handspring for s.h.i.+t, and she told RiRi there's something weird about you, but she wouldn't say what.

Oh, and I only pretended to care.

"It can't be easy," she says, surveying her lotioned legs, "knowing you were an accessory to a crime, even if it's after the fact. after the fact. It's not really a position a red-blooded All-American teenage girl expects to be put in, especially given everything you've done for your Coach." It's not really a position a red-blooded All-American teenage girl expects to be put in, especially given everything you've done for your Coach."

"Like the things I've done for you?" I say. "Did you think I was going to be your lieutenant forever?"

"What have you ever done for me," she replies, her eyes snake-slitted, "that you didn't want to do?"

Flipping over on her stomach, she props her tanned chin on one palm and reaches out to me with her other.

"Oh, Addy. You can't even see it, you're so love-blind. I'm sorry about that. And sorry to have to do this to you. Really, I am."

"I'm not...love-blind," I stutter, the word throwing me. Which I guess it's meant to, but- "But you're bringing a knife to a gunfight," she continues. "You can't see the facts, even laid out plain. Even when the po-lice po-lice department, Addy, calls you in to the station to investigate her lover's murder. What will it take?" department, Addy, calls you in to the station to investigate her lover's murder. What will it take?"

I feel a sob creep into my chest, she's just so d.a.m.ned good and I can't breathe.

"You keep saying these things," I say, "but you've never given me any real reason to believe why you think she would ever..."

Beth slants her head. "Why she would ever?" she repeats, singsongy. "Why wouldn't wouldn't she?" she?"

My head throbs, not knowing what to believe now, ever, except I believe them both-Beth and Coach, in different ways-when their words wormhole into my brain. They make everything seem real. Dark. Painful. True.

"It kills me, I tell you," Beth says, "the way you all fawn over her. The way you, Addy, the way you you fawned over them both. She isn't what you think, and neither was he. They were not star-crossed. He was just a guy, like all of them. They f.u.c.ked each other and he got tired of her before she got tired of him. She gets everything she wants, and she couldn't stand not getting him anymore." fawned over them both. She isn't what you think, and neither was he. They were not star-crossed. He was just a guy, like all of them. They f.u.c.ked each other and he got tired of her before she got tired of him. She gets everything she wants, and she couldn't stand not getting him anymore."

The throbbing becoming something else, something worse and more insistent.

I lift myself up to sitting position, my head light and everything lifting lightly in me. The edge of hysteria sliding into her voice, it can come to no good.

"And none of us gets away with anything," she says, climbing up onto her knees in front of me. "None of us."

"You don't know anything," I say. "Neither of us knows."

She looks at me, and for a second I almost see all the misery and rage, centuries of it, tumbling across her face.

"She's not a killer," I say, trying to make my voice bore-thick.

She looks down at me, her eyes depthful and ruinous.

"Love is a kind of killing, Addy," she says. "Don't you know that?"

There are three hours before practice, the Big Practice before the Big Game.

I can't live in Beth's head a moment longer, so I spend a few hours at the mall, wandering, hands knotted around my jug of kombucha, its fermented threads swirling around the bottom of the bottle.

Coach, my Coach. I think of that pearl-smooth face of hers and wonder if I can ever imagine it, try to picture her hard, ordered body doing the thing Beth says she's done.

It's impossible and I keep trying but the image that comes instead is of her, legs hooked hard around Will in the teachers' lounge, the elation, everything in her unpinned, untucked, unveiled. No one looking, no one watching, and everything hers.

He is mine, he is mine, and I will do anything to feel this always.

Anything.

Feeling Will slipping from her, might she find herself doing something she never thought she'd do?

Maybe it's a feeling I know.

It's the feeling that sends me out to The Towers again, second time in as many days, some magnetic stroke tickling inside me, summoning me there.

Pulling into the lot, I see no sign of police. There are even fewer cars than usual on this bl.u.s.tery day, the wind whistling under my winds.h.i.+eld wipers and the sky raw and melancholy.

I sit for a long time, punching radio presets, then turning my car off, putting my earbuds in, drowning in the plaintive songs of adolescent heartache, then quickly becoming disgusted by them and flinging my player to the floor of my car.

Then, the flinging seems to be part of the same counterfeit world of those tinny teenbox songs, and I hate myself too.

But that's when I realize that I've been on a stakeout, without even knowing it.

Because there, walking across the parking lot into Building A, is Corporal Gregory Prine.

I'd know that bullet head anywhere.

I watch him enter the building and then, without even thinking, I follow him, sneakers squeaking across the wet parking lot.

Stopped short by the locked lobby doors, I can't guess why he has a key and wonder if it's Will's key. I stand at the big buzzer board where I stood five days ago, and I try to be Beth-bold, my dayglo nails dancing over the silver b.u.t.tons, pressing them all, waiting for any crackling voice, the ringing wail of entry.

"Sorry, I live in Fourteen-B and forgot my keys. My mom's not home, can you buzz me in?"

Someone does, and before I know it, I'm in the elevator, a slick sweat on me now, and the fluorescent light hissing, and then I'm in the empty hallway on Will's empty floor.

I'm not scared at all but seem to be fueled by the same kind of chemical rush like at a game, like when there's just been too much slim-FX and nothing to eat but sugar-free jell-o so you can get back the s.p.a.ce between your upper thighs, it's a feeling most spectacular.

I have it now and it's so strong in me I can't stop myself from charging forward, my foot accidentally punting a piece of crime-scene tape, catching it on the tip of my puma.

And there I am, standing in front of number 27-G, a lone strip of tape still curled around its handle.

But before I can decide what I plan to do-ring the bell, burst in like some g.a.n.g.b.a.n.ger-I stop myself, tripping backwards against the stairwell door, inhaling deeply three times.

Prine, what if he...

That's when I notice that the door to the neighboring apartment is just slightly ajar, and a whoosh from the heating unit has nudged it farther open.

I walk slowly toward it, peeking in.

Inside, it's the mirror image of Will's apartment but spartan-bare.

The same parquet entry, the same sandy carpet.

The only difference seems to be the plastic lazy susan perched on the table in the entryway. Stuffed with brochures: Luxury Living on Nature's Edge. Luxury Living on Nature's Edge.

Were I to step closer, to step inside, I'm sure I'd see the same leather sofa slashed across the center of the room.

But I don't step closer. Somehow, I feel if it were an inch closer, this sofa will become that sofa, and there on the carpet, I will see it. Him.

But mostly, the place just feels empty.

Except it's not.

A door thumps, then the sound of feet skimming across the carpet, and heading toward me is the bullet head himself, a plastic grocery store bag clutched in that ham-hock hand.

It all happens so fast. Spotting me, he stops short in front of the open door.

Gorilla-puffed chest, sungla.s.ses perched on his crew-cut head, he blinks spasmodically, red rus.h.i.+ng up his thick neck and face.

It's as if he can't believe his eyes, and I nearly can't either.

"Oh," he says, "it's one of you."

Back in the near-empty parking lot, we sit together in my car.

"Listen," he says, the plastic grocery bag hooked daintily around his wrist. "I haven't said anything. So don't worry."

"What do you mean?" I say, marveling still at the idea of Prine in my car, us both here. Everything.

"I have some priors. I had a substance problem," he says, fingers crackling noisily at the bag. "So I'm not saying a G.o.dd.a.m.n thing to those cops. You can tell her not to worry. And you can tell her to leave me the h.e.l.l out of this."

I don't know who "she" is, but I don't ask.

There is a palpable sense of revelation coming and I want to tread carefully. Finally someone not smart enough to lie to me, or even to know why he should.

Though, as I'm sitting there with him, his left foot ensnared by the cheetah-print sports bra on my car floor, it strikes me he might be thinking the same thing.

"So you live here or something?" I ask, fingering my gears.h.i.+ft.

"No," he says, watching my hand. He takes a breath. "Sarge let me crash in that apartment. He knew no one was living there. The realtors are always just leaving it open. He gave me the building key. For when things get tough at home."

He looks over at me, sheepish.

"My old man and me don't always see eye to eye," he explains. "Sarge understood...Sarge, he was such a good guy."

Suddenly, Prine's eyes fill. I try to hide my surprise. He turns away and looks out the window, flipping his sungla.s.ses down.

"So why are you here now?" I ask.

"I had to see what I left behind," he says. Looking down, he opens his plastic bag, showing me a travel-size mouthwash, a single-blade razor, a dusty bar of soap.