Dare Me

3



WEEK ONE

It isn’t immediate. No head-knocking conversion.

But with each day that week, the New Coach continues to hold our interest—a feat.

We let her drill us, we run tumbles. We show her all our routines and we keep our claps tight and our roundoffs smooth.

Then we show her our most heralded routine, the one we ended last basketball season with, lots of chorus line flips and toe touches and a big finish where we all pop Beth up into a straddle sit, her arms V-split above her head.

Coach seems almost to be watching, her foot perched on top of the crunking boom box.

Then she asks us what else we got.

“But everyone loved that number,” peeps Brinnie Cox. “They had us do it again at graduation.”

We all want Brinnie to shut up.


Coach, she’s just tighter, fleeter than we’d expected, and that first week, we take notice. Planted in front of us, her body held so lightly but so surely.

We can’t fluster her, and we are surprised.

We can fluster everyone, not just Fish but the endless sad parade of straw-man subs, dusty-shouldered geometry teachers and crepey-skinned guidance counselors.

Let’s face it, we’re the only animation in the whole drop-ceiling, glass-bricked tomb of a school. We’re the only thing moving, breathing, popping.

And we know it. You can feel that knowingness on us.

Look at them, that’s what we can hear them—everyone—say when, Game Day, we stride the hallways, pack-like, our ponytails rocking, our skirts like diamonds.

Who do they think they are?

But we know just who we are.

Just like Coach knows who she is. It’s in the click and tap of both her aloofness and nerve. So unconcerned with our nonsense. Bored with it. A boredom we know.

Right off, she won something there, even if—or because—she didn’t ask for it, care about it. Not because she’s bored but because we’re not interesting enough for her.

Not yet, at least.


The second day, she takes a piece of Emily’s flab in her fingers. Pixie-eyed, apple-breasted Emily lifts her arms languorously above her head in an epic yawn. Oh, we know this routine, this routine which so provokes Mrs. Dieterle and makes Mr. Callahan turn red and cross his legs.

Coach’s hand appears out of nowhere and reaches for the spot laid bare by Emily’s tank top lifted high. She plucks the baby fat there and twists it, hard. So hard Emily’s mouth gives a little pop. The gasp, like a squeeze toy.

“Fix it,” Coach says, eyes lifting from the skin between her fingers to Emily’s stricken eyes.

Fix it. Just like that.

Fix it? Fix it? Emily, sobbing in the locker room after, and Beth rolling her eyes, her head, her neck in annoyed circles.

“She can’t say things like that, can she?” Emily wails.

Emily whose balloony breasts and hip-cascades are the joy of all the boys, their ga-ga throats stretched to follow her gait, to stretch around corridor corners just to see that cheer skirt dance.

All those posters and PSAs and health class presentations on body image and the way you can burst blood vessels in your face and rupture your esophagus if you can’t stop ramming those sno balls down your throat every night, knowing they’ll have to come back up again, you sad weak girl.

Because of all this, Coach surely can’t tell a girl, a sensitive, body-conscious teenage girl, to get rid of the tender little tuck around her waist, can she?

She can.

Coach can say anything.

And there’s Emily, keening over the toilet bowl after practice, begging me to kick her in the gut so she can expel the rest, all that cookie dough and cool ranch, the smell making me roil. Emily, a girl made entirely of donut sticks, cheese powder, and haribo.

I kick, I do.

She would do the same for me.


Wednesday, Brinnie Cox says she might quit.

“I can’t do it,” she pules to Beth and me. “Did you hear my head hit the mat on the dismount? I think Mindy did it on purpose. It’s easy for a Base. Her body’s like a big chunk of rubber. We’re not trained for stunts.”

“That’s why we’re training for stunts,” I say. I know Brinnie would rather be pom-shaking, grinding, and ass-slapping during halftime, or all the time.

Brinnie’s the one Beth and I have always ridden the hardest, out of irritation. “I don’t like her big teeth or her chicken bone legs,” Beth would say. “Get her out of here.”

Once, practicing double hook jumps, Beth and I made loud comments across the gym about how Brinnie’s slutty sister got caught making out with the assistant custodian until Brinnie ran off to the far showers to cry.

“All I know is,” Brinnie lisps now, through those big teeth, “my head is killing me.”

“If you ruptured a blood vessel,” Beth replies, “you could be slowly bleeding inside your head.”

“You probably already have brain damage,” I add, eyeing her closely. “I’m sorry, but it’s true.”

“The blood may be squeezing your brain against the side of your skull,” Beth says, “which eventually will kill you.”

Brinnie’s eyes wide and wet and brimming, I know we have achieved our goal.


On the last day of that first week, Coach calls a special meeting.

There are anxious texts and phone calls. Talk of cuts to the squad and who might it be?

But her announcement is simple.

“There isn’t going to be a squad captain anymore,” she says, standing before us.

Everyone looks at Beth.

I’ve known Beth since second grade, since we braided our bodies together in sleeping bags at girl camp, since we first blood-brothered ourselves to each other. I know Beth and can read her every raised eyebrow, every toe pivot. She holds certain things—calculus, hall passes, her mother, stop signs—in a steely contempt that drives her hard.

Once, she dunked her mother’s toothbrush in the toilet, and she calls her father “the Mole,” though none of us can remember why, and there was that time she called our phys ed teacher a cunt, though no one could prove it.

But there are other things about her that not everyone knows.

She rides horses, has a secret library of erotic literature, is barely five feet tall and yet has the strongest legs I’ve ever seen.

I might also tell this: In eighth grade, no, summer after, at a beer party, Beth put her scornful little-girl mouth on Ben Trammel, you know where. I remember the sight. He was grinning, holding her head down, gripping her hair like he’d caught a trout with his bare hand, and everyone found out. I didn’t tell. People still talk about it. I don’t.

I never knew why she did it, or the other things she’s done since. I never asked, that’s not how we are.

We don’t judge.

The main thing about Beth, though, is this: she has always been our captain, my captain, even back in peewee, in junior high, then JV, and now the Big Leagues.

Beth has always been captain, and me her badass lieutenant, since the day she and I, after three weeks of flipping roundoffs together in her backyard, first made squad together.

She was born to it, and we never thought of cheer any other way.

Sometimes I think captain is the only reason Beth even comes to school, bothers with any of us, anything at all.

“I just don’t see any need for a captain. I don’t see what it’s gotten you,” Coach says, glance passing over Beth. “But thank you for your service, Cassidy.”

Hand me your badge, your gun.

Everyone pads their sneakers anxiously, and RiRi peers dramatically at Beth, arching her whole back to see her reaction.

But Beth gives no reaction.

Beth doesn’t seem to care at all.

Doesn’t even care enough to yawn.


“I was sure it’d be bad,” whispers Emily to me, doing jump squats in the locker room later. “Like when she got mad at that math sub and keyed his car.”

But, knowing Beth, I figure it will be some time before we see her true response.

“What’ll cheer be like now?” wonders Emily, lunging breathlessly, paring that body down to size. Fixing it. “What does it mean?”

What it means, we soon see, is no more hours whiled away talking about the lemonade diet and who had an abortion during summer break.

Coach has no interest in that, of course. She tells us we’d best get our act together.

End of that first week, new regime, our legs are loose and soft, our bodies flopping. Our moves less than tight. She says we look sloppy and juvenile, like Disney tweensters on a parade float. She is right.

And so it’s bleacher sprints for us.

Oh, to know such pain. Hammering up and down those bleacher steps to the pulse of her endless whistle. Twenty-one high steps and forty-three smaller steps. Again, again, again.

We can feel it in our shins the next day.

Our spines.

We can feel it everywhere.

Stairwell to hell, we call it, which Beth says is just bad poetry.

By Saturday practice, though, we’re already—some of us—starting to look forward to that pain, which feels like something real.

And we know we will get a lot better fast, and no injuries either because we’re running a tight routine.