The Falling Girls

by Hayley Krischer

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, New York

  First published in the United States of America by Razorbill, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2021

  Copyright © 2021 by Hayley Krischer

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  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Krischer, Hayley, author.

  Title: The falling girls / Hayley Krischer.

  Description: New York : Razorbill, 2021. | Audience: Ages 14 and up . | Summary: Seventeen-year-old Shade learns that friendship can be toxic after she joins the cheerleading team over her best friend’s objections. Identifiers: LCCN 2021027519 | ISBN 9780593114148 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593114162 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780593114155 (ebook)

  Subjects: CYAC: Best friends—Fiction. | Friendship—Fiction. | Cheerleading—Fiction. | High schools—Fiction. | Schools—Fiction. | LCGFT: Novels.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.1.K748 Fal 2021 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021027519

  Cover illustration © 2021 by Sarah Maxwell

  Cover design by Samira Iravani

  Design by Tony Sahara, adapted for ebook by Michelle Quintero

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any

  responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  pid_prh_5.8.0_c0_r0

  For my parents

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Also by Hayley Krischer

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Part II

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Part III

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Hayley Krischer

  Something Happened to Ali Greenleaf

  “Heather, why can’t you just be a friend?

  Why are you such a megabitch?”

  “Because I can be.”

  —Heathers

  “Even as [she] is for your growth so is [she] for your pruning.”

  —Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

  PROLOGUE

  “You guys, something’s not right,” she says, her voice shaky. “Something’s not right.”

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  Just minutes before, she was saying how beautiful it was. “Isn’t it, Shade? Isn’t it so beautiful?”

  Lights flashing pink and green. The three of us. Sweaty bodies pulsing. Music beating. The vibration through your feet, up through your skin. Faster and faster.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  She’s a whirlwind, spins in the center between us all, dripping in a pink iridescence, like candy, in rainbows. She’s so radiant. Like nothing existed before and she was born right here. Our arms reaching to the pink lights, all of the lights, the whites, the golds. How the pinks and purples stream across her face, a mask of pastel streaks through her hair.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  “What’s happening to me? I can’t breathe,” she says. Her electric-blue cat-eye liner and long fake eyelashes, blinking too fast. She wrenches back, wobbles, and stumbles into Jadis.

  “Get her to the bathroom,” Jadis says.

  “What’s happening? What’s happening to her?”

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  The music pumping too loud and too fast now, my body covered in sweat.

  But her convulsing body slips out of Jadis’s arms, her locks of hair right through Jadis’s fingers, the weight of her body, this fit cheerleader, her body on the wooden gym floor. Her mouth spitting, bubbling.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  “What’s happening? What’s happening?” they’re shrieking.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  One sits down on the ground next to her, that terrified look on her face, shouting, My best friend, my best friend, but the music drowns her out.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  A circle forms. Kids crowd. A teacher hollers over that deep pulsing bass vibrating through the floor, Put away your phones! All of you, put away your phones!

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  I kneel down, my mouth close to hers, push her locks away from her face, that ashen face. I whisper, but I don’t even know if words come out. Then her eyes. Those wide-open eyes, the purple lights flashing over her blank stare. And those eyes, with no life behind them.

  Part

  I

  Chapter

  1

  The pep rally. I wake up before Jadis this morning because I don’t want to be late. Jadis Braff, my best friend, says pep rallies and organized sports are archaic. But I keep us on schedule because I don’t miss pep rallies. No matter how Jadis complains.

  Jadis and I have been best friends since the fourth grade, since she moved into the big-walled castle down the street from me. She’s the person I wake up with almost every morning with her arm across my chest. Her blue veins are translucent through her pale skin. Her light-brown eyelashes. Her newly dyed black hair like the color of tar over her face, that sandy brown, her natural color, the last strand of her childhood and who she used to be, gone.

  Jadis, who tattoos drawings on my body and hers. She taught me how to do it to her too, but I’m not as good. We mark each other because we own each other. Just two weeks ago, we tattooed two tiny hands on each other’s forearms. Inked on our skin forever. Pinkies entwined.

  I shake her lightly and whisper, Wake up, sunshine, to her, but she pulls the covers over her head.

  “Saccharine devil!” she cries. “Make it stop. I curse you back
to your virginal hole.”

  “Hey, don’t virgin-shame me,” I say, and throw a pillow at her.

  She climbs out of my bed and rifles through my clothes like they’re her clothes, and they might as well be. In the bathroom, I swipe deodorant under my arms, then she swipes. I squirt face wash in her palm, then in my own. I brush my teeth and then hand the toothbrush over to her. She pees. I pee. We share everything except bras. She swims in mine. She’s flat and I’m wider, more fleshy.

  We stare at ourselves in the mirror. We heard this line in a movie once where a woman described her relationship with her best friend: “We’re the same person, but with different hair.” That’s me and Jadis. We’re the same person, on the inside at least. On the outside, I’m curly and frizzy. She’s straight and geometric. I’m olive-skinned. She’s ghostly. My wide, dark eyes. Her deep-set, ocean blues.

  Except Jadis is the better, cooler, more interesting version of me. The person everyone stares at when they walk in a room. Like no one else is there. She’s been the coolest girl in our school since . . . forever. Not the most popular or most feared. Just the most brazen.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  At the pep rally, we stand out like two sore thumbs. I grab Jadis’s hand, and we stare at the wooden bleachers filled to the brim. Because we’re late, there’s no room except for the front.

  “Take a seat, girls,” Mr. Falcone, the oldest teacher on earth, says to us.

  “Just trying to find a spot,” I say, and then he points to the front row. We stare at him in horror.

  “I’m not sitting here,” Jadis says. “I’m sure there’s a place in the back.” Because the front row is an unthinkable gesture. I want to be here probably more than anyone else, and we never sit up front. It’s way easier sitting on the last bleacher against that cold wall because there, no one looks at you. Up there you have a vantage point. You can see everyone below. You get the best view of the cheer stunts from up top. I can watch their moves with my mouth agape. I can gasp or be critical at the back and no one notices how into it I really am. Up front, you’re left on display.

  “Would it hurt you to smile, girls?” he says, his greasy comb-over like an animal’s nest. “When I was a kid, girls used to smile.”

  I promise you that girls his age didn’t smile. Especially when they were talking to him.

  So we sit down because we have no choice. The pep rally is about to start, and the place is packed. Say what you want about the cheerleaders, but they always get a crowd. Down in the front, you can feel the pulse of the room. You get the full view. We’re so close to the cheer squad I can see the hair on their arms. The clogged blackheads on their noses. The stubble in their armpits. Rashy thighs. Their coach, pacing back and forth. All those cheer championship banners from twenty years ago filling the gym walls like ghosts.

  “I can’t wait to get waterboarded by pom-poms and the Three Chloes,” Jadis sneers.

  The Three Chloes are Chloe Orbach, Chloe Clarke, and Chloe Schmidt. The in-your-face tight circle that heads the squad. They’re all juniors, like me and Jadis.

  Their uniform tops cropped a little shorter than everyone else’s, their tight cheerleader stomachs and glossed lips glinting under the gym’s dingy lights. They’re ferocious about their bond, the way they grip each other’s hands in the hallway, making a wall so you have to walk around them. They’ve been doing it since middle school, so everyone is used to it.

  Except for Jadis.

  Jadis, of course, has to make a point that this is not 1958 and you can’t just rule a hallway, so she forces her way between them until they split apart.

  The Three Chloes are the reason anyone comes to the pep rally.

  The blaring dance party music starts as the cheer squad and their hyperfocused faces, their eyes wide, jaws clenched, take their places. There are only five of them out there; they’re a skeleton of a team. The Three Chloes and two seniors, Gretchen Paley and Keke Achebe. There’s a desperation. No giggling on the side. No tightening each other’s bows.

  During a graduation party in June, two girls from the cheerleading team, Randi Schaffer and Isla Davidson, went to the hospital for alcohol poisoning. The year before that, one girl broke her collarbone trying to do a stunt. Another girl needed knee surgery. There were endless school meetings about the number of concussions cheerleaders were getting. Football players had helmets and precautions. They had a concussion expert on the turf. Cheerleaders, on the other hand, had two-inch-thick gym mats separating their heads from the ground. That was it.

  Right away, the focus is on Chloe Orbach. Her wild, blonde ponytail tied back in a giant white bow. The other girls shaking their gold pom-poms in a line, in formation, waiting for their leader.

  Chloe Orbach sprints into a roundoff and then hurtles her body into three backflips, one exploding after the other.

  That’s all it takes. Three perfect backflips, and I’m in a trance.

  Spread out in a line. Clap, thigh slap, head nod. All of them, grunting, “We. Will show. Who’s best.” And they hurl their bodies into perfectly synchronized back tucks.

  Four of the girls turn in to make a circle. Their bodies in a blue-and-white blur. White bows clipped in their ponytails, their arms up to the sky, those pom-poms whizzing.

  Then on Chloe Orbach’s one, two, three count, they rocket Chloe Clarke, dark hair, big brown eyes. They propel her up to the gym’s rafters, her long, tan legs in a wide V, arms out to the side, huge smile on her face, all that glitter sparkling in the light. Then she comes down as hard and as quick.

  And they catch her, and somehow she rises again and does a tight scorpion, one leg above her head, the other straight as a pin, and she spins in a double down back into their arms. (I watch competitive cheer videos incessantly on YouTube. I know the terms.) The three of them, Chloe Schmidt, Gretchen, and Keke, catch her like she’s nothing.

  The crowd screams and the girls, in sync, drop to their stomachs. Except for Chloe Schmidt, who flips her body backward and then lands hard, two feet planted on the ground. Like it’s nothing. Like she didn’t just lift Chloe Clarke seconds before that flip. If that’s not enough, she jumps up with her knees to her chest, then one leg stretched out, then down again, rounding her arms up, and explodes into a spread eagle.

  It’s everything I want.

  I was a mini gymnast. For a little over a year when I was eleven and twelve. Twice a week. Splits and handstands and roundoffs and back handsprings. “She’s a natural,” the coaches told my mother. And wasn’t I? My little tween body, so skinny and malleable, so flexible, just weirdly flexible, that I could do all of these routines so easily. I never got my mother’s jokes when I was little. “Being flexible runs in the family, honey,” she’d guffaw. How embarrassing.

  The Three Chloes were there too. They were equally as assertive then as they are now. Just as aggressive, with Chloe Orbach as their leader.

  They played this game where they’d rate us, all of us. It was the beginning of middle school, that time when girls like the Three Chloes delight in punishing other kids. Their little squeaking voices. “You get a four. Bad form.” Shit like that. They were gymnastic terrorists.

  A parent complained that the Three Chloes were intimidating her daughter. But the gymnastics coach, a beast of a man, tiny, a powerful chest and spindly legs, said it was good for competition. So the ratings went on, and I’d watch girls get ripped apart, waiting for it to be my turn.

  And then I learned how to do a back tuck on the balance beam before Chloe Orbach, and this became a problem. I could feel Chloe Orbach, her eyes on me while I was up on the beam. She screamed, “Five!” right there in front of everyone, and I tripped off, landing on my bottom and falling to my side, something I had never done.

  I wanted to kill Chloe Orbach, because I knew I was better than her. But she had what I didn’t have: discipline. And a mother
who wouldn’t let her quit. A mother who talked her up, who made sure she made it to the gym on time, who bought her real competition leotards, not the cheap black ones from Target I wore.

  I was humiliated and I refused to go back to gymnastics. My mother was relieved when I quit. She didn’t want to drive anyway, and she always said gymnastics would stunt my growth and that the costumes were tacky. “I couldn’t stand doing small talk with those mothers,” she said, “especially Chloe Orbach’s mother. Jesus. What a maniac.”

  And so that was the end of gymnastics.

  Watching them now at the pep rally reminds me of how still, all these years later, I can go right down into a split without even trying. Some people run to relax. I do handstands in the middle of the room. Back walkovers while I’m watching a show. Competitive cheer documentaries. Gymnastics qualifiers. They say our muscles remember. And mine never forgot.

  Jadis nudges closer to me just as the squad breaks. “Well, that was jam-packed with energy,” she deadpans. “Did you get your cheerleader fix?”

  “For five girls, they’re really good. They’re tight.”

  “Oh, please. You’re just as good as they are, Shade. I’ve seen you backflip off a fence. You can do a split without even stretching. Those no-handed cartwheel air thingies.”

  “Aerials.”

  “Right. So don’t tell me you’re not as good.”

  But she’s wrong. I can’t do that. I can’t fly.

  The squad lines up, everyone back in formation. Everyone together. Hands over thighs. Faces smiling. Shoulders back. Shoes gleaming. Chloe Orbach commanding them into the next drill.

  That fire. That drive to keep going. And that’s when something in my brain clicks. Because Jadis is right. I’m watching them, but it could be me. It’s so clear that I belong out there. That my body is throbbing to be on the gym floor. Then there’s a deep rush up my chest and into my throat, an excitement. The way it feels the first time you kiss someone. Taking your breath away.