Dare Me

by Megan Abbott

After, you stand in front of the steaming mirror, the fuchsia streaks gone, the lashes unsparkled. And it’s just you there, and you look like no one you’ve ever seen before. You don’t look like anybody at all.

Ages fourteen to eighteen, a girl needs something to kill all that time, that endless itchy waiting, every hour, every day for something—anything—to begin.

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

All those misty images of cheerleaders frolicking in locker rooms, pom-poms sprawling over bare bud breasts. All those endless fantasies and dirty boy-dreams, they’re all true, in a way. Mostly it’s noisy and sweaty, it’s the roughness of bruised and dented girl bodies, feet sore from floor pounding, elbows skinned red.

She was the one who showed me all the dark wonders of life, the real life, the life I’d only seen flickering from the corner of my eye. Did I ever feel anything at all until she showed me what feeling meant?

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.

Did she look at us that first week and see past the glossed hair and shiny legs, our glittered brow bones and girl bravado? See past all that to everything beneath, all our miseries, the way we all hated ourselves but much more everyone else? Could she see past all of that to something else, something quivering and real, something poised to be transformed, turned out, made? See that she could make us, stick her hands in our glitter-gritted insides and build us into magnificent teen gladiators?

you’re not that hot chick bouncing down the hallway, that ponytail-swinging girl, mouth filled with nothings. You’re not pretty, you’re not cute young things, you’re not a girl at all, not even a person. You’re the most vital part of one thing, the perfect thing.

He smiles, but his smile doesn’t really seem like a smile but the kind of thing you do with your mouth when you know everyone is watching.

I never was anything to anyone before. Not like this. I never was, before. Now I am.

Who thought about the happiness of marriages?

As if listening to yourself was just something you could do. As if there were something there to listen to. A self inside you with all kinds of smart things to say.

He looks no sadder than usual, which is sad enough.

“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?”

She’s not a girl but a butterfly resting on my fingertips.

she would laugh, which was her way of crying.

There was a wonder in it, and who needs to talk of such wonders? We nestle them away, deep in the fury at the center of us, where things can be held tightly, protected, and secretly cherished as a special notion we once held, then had to stow away.