Dare Me

by Megan Abbott

“There’s something dangerous about the boredom of teenage girls.”

The more I did it, the more it owned me. It made things matter. It put a spine into my spineless life and that spine spread, into backbone, ribs, collarbone, neck held high.

We’re all the same under our skin, aren’t we? We’re all wanting things we don’t understand. Things we can’t even name. The yearning so deep, like pinions over our hearts.

She told him the way she felt after Caitlin was born, like the secret of life had been told to her at last and the secret was this: in the end all the things you think matter are just disappointment and noise.

Where’d that world go, that world when you’re a kid, and now I can’t remember noticing anything, not the smell of the leaves or the sharp curl of a dried maple on your ankles, walking? I live in cars now, and my own bedroom, the windows sealed shut, my mouth to my phone, hand slick around its neon jelly case, face closed to the world, heart closed to everything.

“I know what that’s like,” he says. “The way you can be saved without ever knowing you were in trouble.”

That’s the hardest part, she said once. There’s nothing bad I can say about him, nothing I can say at all. Which somehow seems the cruelest thing to say, ever.

this is throwing up like coming off the tilt-a-whirl at age seven, like discovering that dead rat under the porch, like finding out someone you loved never loved you at all.

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

“Love is a kind of killing, Addy,” she says. “Don’t you know that?”

it’s like you’re trying to kill each other and yourself. The knowing that what you are all doing, together, is the most delicate thing, fragile as spun glass, and driven by magic and abandon, your body doing things your head knows it can’t, your bodies locking together to defy gravity, logic, death itself. If they told you these things, you would never join cheer. Or maybe you would.

When you have nothing inside you, you feel everything more, and feel you can control all of it.

That’s what people never understand: They see us hard little pretty things, brightly lacquered and sequin-studded, and they laugh, they mock, they arouse themselves. They miss everything. You see, these glitters and sparkle dusts and magicks? It’s war paint, it’s feathers and claws, it’s blood sacrifice.

This feeling, this high, it’s not real. It’s that Jesus-love flooding through me, by which I mean the adderall and the pro clinical hydroxy-hot with green tea extract and the eating-nothing-but-hoodia-lollipops-all-day.

“I choose to excel, not compete—do you? “I choose to make changes, not excuses—do you? “To be motivated, not manipulated. “To be useful, not used.”