Dare Me Read Online Free PDF Page B

menstrual cramps the previous day and needed an emergency acutonic session.
    “Coach, no lie, they ding these big forks, like the kind you use to flip steaks on a grill,” Beth says, and none of us can watch her, “and the sound just zings through you and straightens your ovaries all out.”
    Beth, she runs her hand over her hips, like she’s showing us how quiet and subdued her ovaries now are. How she has vanquished them.
    “It’s hard being a girl,” Beth adds, shaking her head with elaborate weariness.
    Coach looks at her, hands curved lightly around her clipboard. Face blank.
    She will not play.
    Instead, she looks right through Beth.
    “The timing is way off on the tuck jumps,” she says, turning away from Beth.
    That’s it?
    “And I know why,” Coach says. “I can see sugar glazed all over you girls. You’re all shiny with bad living.”
    Suddenly, I’ve forgotten all about Beth and I can only feel all the grease on me. As hard as I try, there are slips, and I feel like Coach is looking just at me, seeing the cinnamoned snack puffs I’d snuck that morning. My teeth ache with it. My stomach is swollen with it. I feel weak and desecrated.
    “We’re going to hit it extra hard today,” Coach says. “Hit you in places no tuning forks can. Line up.”
    That’s when we know: we’re paying for Beth’s sins.
    The jump drill comes, and then the high kicks and then floor crunches and then running the gym track until RiRi throws up in the corner, a sloshing mix of slim-fast and sugar-free powdered donuts.
    Beth, though, she sacks up. I’ll give her that. At least she doesn’t make it any worse for any of us. Sweat glittering on her, dappling her eyelashes, she kills it.
    She will not sit down after, when we all collapse on the mats, our sweaty limbs crisscrossing. She will not sit down, will not let the steel slip from between her shoulders.
    She has so much pride that, even if I’m weary of her, of her fighting ways, her gauntlet-tossing, I can’t say there isn’t something else that beams in me. An old ember licked to fresh fire again. Beth, the old Beth, before high school, before Ben Trammel, all the boys and self-sorrow, the divorce and the adderall and the suspensions.
    That Beth at the bike racks, third grade, her braids dangling, her chin up, fists knotted around a pair of dull scissors, peeling into Brady Carr’s tire. Brady Carr, who shoved me off the spinabout, tearing a long strip of skin from my ankle to my knee.
    Tugging the rubber from his tire, her fingernails ripped red, she looked up at me, grinning wide, front teeth gapped and wild heroic.
    How could you ever forget that?
     
    We all want to “take it to the next level”—that’s what we keep calling it. For us, the next level means doing a real basket toss, with three or four girls hurling a Flyer ten, fifteen, twenty feet in the air, and that Flyer flipping and twisting her way back down into their arms. And not even Beth has ever done a stunt like this, not this high, not without a mat. We were never that kind of squad, not a tourney squad. Not a serious squad.
    Once we master a basket toss, we can do real stunts, real pyramids, because they are pyramids that end with true flying, with girls loaded up and slingshot into the air. The gasp-ahh awesomeness we’ve always dreamed of.
    We have been YouTubing basket tosses all day, watching sprightly girl after sprightly girl get thrown by her huskier squadmates into the air and then try to ride it as far as she can. Arms extended, back arched, she is reaching for something, and only stops when she has to.
    Mostly, though, we watch girls fall.
    “A girl over at St. Reggie’s died doing a basket toss that high last year,” Emily says, her voice grave, like she’s giving a press conference on TV. “She landed chest down in everyone’s arms and her spleen popped like a balloon.”
    “Spleens don’t pop,” Beth says, though how she knows this is unclear.
    “But I heard she had