Part 6 (2/2)

Nudging my fingers under the sticking bandage on her lower back, I touch that red-raw eagle, making Tacy wince with pained pleasure.

Me, me, me, it should be me.

7

WEEK FIVE

”I've heard some things about Ms. Colette French,” Beth tells me. ”I have contacts.” things about Ms. Colette French,” Beth tells me. ”I have contacts.”

”Beth,” I say. I know this tone, I know how things start.

”I don't have anything to report yet,” she says, ”but be ready.”

Like bamboo slowly sliding under fingernails. She has started.

But Beth also grows easily bored. That's what I have to remember.

I am glad, then, when Beth seems to have found something-someone-else to do.

Monday morning, the recruiting table is struck in the first-floor hallway, by the language labs.

The posters blare red, the heavy ripple of the flag insignia.

Discover Your Path to Honor.

Recruiters, out for fresh, disaffected-teen blood.

”Who needs cheer?” Beth says. ”I'm enlisting.”

They came last year too, and always sent the broadest-shouldered, bluest-eyed Guardsmen, the ones with arms like twisted oak and booming voices that echo down the corridor.

This year, though, they have Sergeant Will, who is entirely different. Who, with his square jaw and smooth, knife-parted hair, is handsome in a way unfamiliar to us. A grown-up man, a man in real life.

Sarge Will makes us dizzy, that mix of hard and soft, the riven-granite profile blurred by the most delicate of mouths, the creasy warmth around his eyes-eyes that seem to catch far-off things blinking in the fluorescent lights. He seems to see things we can't, and to be thinking about them with great care.

He is older-he may be as old as thirty-two-and he is a man in the way that none of the others, or no one else we know or ever knew, are men.

Before practice, or during lunch, a lot of the girls like to hang around and finger the brochures. Spread Your Wings, Spread Your Wings, they say. they say.

Fresh off her latest breakup with Catholic Patrick, lovely RiRi spends pa.s.s time lingering at the table, leaning across it, arms pressed tight against either side of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, framing them V-like and drawing one foot up her other leg, like she says men like.

”Personally, I find they like it when I lift my cheer skirt over my head,” Beth says, side by side with me on the floor in front of her locker. ”You might try that next time.”

”Maybe you need some new tricks,” RiRi yawns, eyes hot on Sarge Will. ”What worked with your junior high PE teach might not roll with the big bra.s.s here.”

This is how it starts, Beth rising to her feet like them's fighting words, and asking RiRi if she'd care to make it interesting.

I can tell from RiRi's face that she would not care to do so at all, but it's the prairie whistle of the Old West, high noon at ole Sutton Grove High. You can hear Beth's tin star rattling against her chest.

So much better to have Beth face off with party girl RiRi than with Coach.

It's not that Beth just rolls for anybody or even most people, but when she does, it's a star turn, it's page one. Like with Ben Trammel, or the time everyone saw her and Mike LaSalle, ebony against her ivory, in the holly hedges at St. Mary's after the game. All those forked nettles studding his letterman jacket, all up and down the felted arms, and his neck bristled red.

Everyone talked about it, but I was the one who saw her after. The bright pain in her face, like she didn't know why she'd done it, the alarm in her eyes, pin struck.

We've been angling, I have. Coach, what's your place look like? Coach, we want to meet little Caitlin too, we do. Coach, what's your place look like? Coach, we want to meet little Caitlin too, we do.

Coach, show us, show us, let us in.

None of us ever think she will. We've tried for five weeks. I dream of it, driving by her house like a boy might do.

The next Sat.u.r.day at the home game, Tacy kicks out that basket toss like she's been doing it all her life, and she adds a toe touch, and we do a hanging pyramid, with Emily and Tacy swinging like trapdoors off RiRi's arms, which whips up the crowd to fierce delirium.

There is such an ease to it. In the parking lot after, we're all feeling so good, like we could annihilate an invading army, or go to Regionals or State.

Beth is hoisting between her fingers a very fine bottle of spiced rum from some boy on the Nors.e.m.e.n team. He wants to party with us, and promises big excitement at his uncle's apartment, up on the Far Ridge.

Just the kind of wild night we'd all maneuver endlessly for, trading promises and fas.h.i.+oning elaborate lies, a string of phone calls home to marshal a fleet of alibis no parent could pierce.

Beth is the dark mistress of such nights and seems always to know where the secret house party is, or the bar with the bouncer who knows her brother, or the college boy hangout by the freeway where no one ever cards anybody and the floors are sticky with beer and the college boys are so glad for girls like us, who never ask them even one question ever.

But as we conspire around Beth's car, my hand stroking the borrowed bottle, mouth clove-streaked and face rum-suffused, Coach walks past us, car keys jangling loudly.

”Going home, Coach?” Emily asks, swiveling her nutraslimmed hips madly to the music thudding from the car stereo. ”Why don't you come out with us instead?”

We all look wide-eyed at Emily's pirate-boldness, Tacy's head perched merrily on Emily's shoulder, like a parrot.

Coach smiles a little, her eyes, thoughtful now, wandering past us, into the dark thicket of trees banded around the parking lot.

”Why don't you all come to my house instead?” she says, just like that. ”Why don't you come over?”

”The smell of desperation,” Beth says, ”is appalling.”

Beth does not wish to go to Coach's house.

”It's not my job,” she adds, as we all look at her blankly, ”to make her feel like she matters.”

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