The Falling Girls

by Hayley Krischer

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  Coach Demi wants us to warm up with leg kicks and thigh stretches. Her full name: Demi Alvarado. She’s a local girl who went to the state college. She’s not very sporty, with her long straight black hair and tight jeans and her cropped T-shirt.

  I heard she’s going through a divorce from a lacrosse player who also went to our high school. It’s so messy that she had to get a restraining order. Coach has us running laps to warm up. Twenty minutes later, I’m so covered with sweat I don’t notice anyone else. Then a deep stretch and it feels so good to spread my legs and hips. To pull my muscles apart because I haven’t in so long.

  “Let’s get into a rhythm first,” Coach says. “Let’s get into a beat. Rhythm. Beat. We have a lot of new girls here, but we’re one person. We’re one unit. Unity. We’re a team. Get on the same period schedule so you can share tampons and Advil and borrow underwear. If I see one girl with Thinx or pads, I swear to god, I’ll cut it up in front of you. Understand me? No pads. You don’t know how to put in a tampon, one of these girls will teach you. We’re all the same. We all do the same thing. Do not break from the team.”

  Clap. Tight. Elbows tucked. Clap. Tight. Unity. Elbows tucked. Clap.

  My eyes on Chloe Orbach, her hands clasped together. Her elbows close to her ribs. Each clap with sharp precision. Her body locked in. Coach struts between us as everyone follows Chloe.

  Everyone bouncing, clasping, bouncing, clasping. Elbows tucked. Tight. Don’t lift your elbows. Don’t move your body. Just the hands. Clap. Bounce. Clap. Until my hands tingle from all the clapping, my palms slapping against each other. My fingers cramping up. Who knew so much would go into a clap?

  I stop for a second because my hands are so tired. Imagine stopping because of your hands?

  “Shade? What are you doing?” Coach says. She’s so tiny, so muscular, like she could punt me with one baby kick.

  “My hands,” I say, but they’re all staring at me. Laughing at me.

  “Her hands,” Chloe Clarke says, the words dripping from her tongue.

  “Her poor little hands,” Chloe Schmidt squeals.

  While the newbies are practicing basic cheer moves, the Three Chloes work on load-in drills and toe touches. I hear them whispering about intermittent fasting and reminiscing about their last three summers in hardcore cheer camp. I watch Chloe Orbach tuck Chloe Clarke’s dark hair behind her ears and massage Chloe Schmidt’s thick shoulders with arnica. The three of them an impenetrable unit.

  Coach has us do fifty push-ups and one hundred and fifty crunches. My body aches like it’s never ached before.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  After practice, I limp out of the locker room with jelly legs, dragging my bag over to Jadis’s car.

  “Oh my god. What have they done to you?” she says. “You’re wearing booty shorts. I’ll kill them. I swear I’ll destroy them.”

  I ignore her. This is just Jadis, her drama.

  “Watch this,” I say.

  I show her a toe touch, even though I didn’t get to try it at practice. I clap first, jump up, and graze at the tip of my sneaker.

  “Impressive. By the way, your whole crotch is sticking out.”

  I stretch the booty shorts down. But they pop back up.

  Chapter

  5

  It’s a little less than four weeks to homecoming, and I know this because Gretchen, the senior who I’ve heard drinks a glass of whole milk every morning with her breakfast, has made an Advent calendar for the big day. Instead of a Christmas tree with little numbers on it, she brings in a cutout poster of a cheerleader from the 1950s piking in the air. There are little flaps with numbers peeking underneath up and down the poster.

  Gretchen rips the first one off. “Twenty-six days!” she says, hopping up and down.

  Homecoming has always been one of those town-wide events Jadis and I avoided. Too Americana. Too Friday Night Lights. Too parochial. Boys home from college with their red Solo cups filled with beer from kegs their parents secured for them. Their catered parties after the big game with an endless supply of Mike’s Hard Lemonade.

  The worst part, or the most atrociously entertaining (depends on how you look at it), is the homecoming court. The girls and their hair and their gowns parading around in cars with sashes like the Miss America pageant.

  I didn’t factor in homecoming.

  My brain hurts from the thought of it.

  Coach starts us out in a power circle outside. We need a second flyer, and she wants a volunteer. So many of the new girls cower, shoulders hunched, timid and embarrassed. No one takes the plunge. But me, I have no excuse. This is why I’m here. Because I watched Chloe Clarke fly up to the rafters that day at the pep rally. If I don’t raise my hand, then what am I doing here?

  So I raise my hand. Gingerly.

  “If you want to be a flyer,” Chloe Orbach spurts out, “then you have to raise your hand a lot higher than that.”

  I reach my hand all the way up and wiggle my fingers around in the air.

  Chloe nods in approval. “Good,” she says. “Good. We can work with this.”

  Coach wants us to pair off and attempt something new: stretches, stunts, flips. Anything. She wants to suss us out, see what we can do before she deems positions.

  Chloe Orbach takes my hand to partner off with me. I just assumed she’d work with the two other Chloes—it’s impossible for me to hide my surprise. My big eyes have always been a giveaway.

  “What?” Chloe says to me. “I can’t pair up with someone new?”

  “You absolutely can,” I say. But it makes me uneasy. Because the rest of them are going to wonder why she decided to shine on me.

  “Okay,” Chloe says, giving me her most golden of Chloe Orbach grins, her whole face lighting up. The way she looks at me with so much promise, like I’m a jam-packed football field on a Friday night. I’m a U.S. All Star Federation. “What you got for me?”

  I tell her about my scorpion, how I can stretch my body into a standing split. One leg solid on the ground. Back arched. Other leg high above my head, hands stretching so that it reaches up to the sky. I used to do scorpions when I was a kid and I know I can still pull one out now.

  On her count, I climb up on a short cheer box. Lift my left ankle and stretch my leg up. My standing knee starts shaking, my thigh muscles twitching.

  “Break that shit apart,” Chloe Orbach’s saying forcefully. “There’s no buckling in cheer.”

  And I want to do a perfect scorpion. I want to show her I can. To show her, and myself, that I deserve to be here. Of course, this isn’t something I need to do. The other new girls are barely able to get their toe touches down.

  I start again. Do a couple of quad stretches. Get my muscles hot. Back up on the cheer box, praying that I don’t lose my balance. The two other Chloes make their way over, and I try not to pay attention to them. I stare into the rickety wire fence on the hill. Focus, Shade. Focus. Tunnel vision. Spread my body. Grab my back heel. And I can feel it’s not right. My body imbalanced, my knee buckles, just like she told me not to, and I fall over, my shoulder crashing into the mat.

  Suddenly there’s a group of them around me. Studying me. I stare up at Gretchen, who’s the closest, my face in line with her pale-white, bruise-adorned legs. I reach my hand out to her, thinking she’s going to pull me up.

  “Nah, you help yourself up on this squad,” she says.

  “Just remember, Shade, that falling is not failing,” Keke says, projecting her staunch military vibe from behind Gretchen, her dark skin gleaming in the afternoon sun. “Falling is part of what you do if you’re going to be a flyer.”

  “When we were freshmen, they threw flyers for fun, remember that, Chloe?” Chloe Schmidt says to Chloe Clarke.

  “Oh yeah, they tossed me without a mat onc
e,” Clarke answers, picking a hangnail. “Landed flat on my back. Knocked the wind out of me so bad I thought I broke a rib.”

  “I think all of you need to back off and give her a chance,” Chloe Orbach says.

  I dust myself off. I remember this from gymnastics, that everyone expects our bodies to be made of armor. We’re not allowed to get hurt. We’re not allowed to cry out in pain. You take it. You pretend like falling on your shoulder doesn’t matter. You hold back those tears and you don’t shed one single drop from your eye.

  Everyone’s crowded around now. The new girls take notice when you fall because they’re happy it’s not them.

  So I get up there again on the box. My third time.

  “You can do it, Shade,” Chloe Orbach says. “This is what the town wants. And you have to give them what they want. They want cheerleaders up high, waving to the crowd. So that the football moms in their sweatshirts will post it on their little community Facebook page where everyone pretends to like each other and root for the cheerleaders because we’re so fucking cute.”

  Chloe is talking about something everyone wants but doesn’t have the guts to say: celebrity. That’s what she expects, small-town celebrity status. To bask in that glory. To command the crowd’s attention.

  “You can do that, Shade. You can all be superstars,” she says.

  Chloe Orbach turns to the new girls, their blank stares, their baby faces, all of them hypnotized by her.

  “What are you dolts waiting for?” she says to them, her words sharp and mean, a one-eighty from her encouraging tone a second ago. “Can we get some excitement here, Jesus. Your dark little hearts. Your fearful little faces. Be a fucking cheerleader, for god’s sake.”

  The collective embarrassment. Getting called out by Chloe Orbach is not something to be proud of. So I get a few claps from them. But I can see their worry. They’re scared Chloe’s going to make them press their bodies into some unnatural position. That they’re next.

  “Dig deep in that grit, Shade,” Keke calls to me.

  I grab my foot, arching my back until I can lift my leg high enough and bring it to my other hand. If I reach forward any further, I’ll either fall over or pull my quadriceps. It’s not a great scorpion, but I’m doing it.

  Chloe Orbach jumps up and flails around, screaming. “We’ve got a scorpion! We’ve got a scorpion!” My back foot touching the sky. My chest out. My ever flexible body, perfectly still.

  Coach tells us that she wants both me and Chloe Clarke to get geared up for one-leg extension stunts, then she wants me to learn a basket toss by next week. She says this as if it’s completely normal to toss another human being up in the air, have her balance on one leg like a stone-cold bitch, and then catch her as she’s racing back down to the earth.

  “Yeah, it’ll be a breeze.”

  Coach laughs, and it’s the signal for everyone to laugh. Except I think she’s serious, and maybe she thinks I’m serious too.

  “How many feet do you throw someone in a basket?” I ask Chloe Orbach.

  “Oh, about fifteen feet,” Chloe Schmidt chimes in. “Twenty if you haven’t eaten lunch.”

  Just a few days ago I was the girl who secretly watched YouTube videos of college cheerleaders at two o’clock in the morning, carefully rewinding the video as they flipped in the air, flying high enough to touch the gym rafters, free of judgments, while Jadis lightly snored next to me.

  Here, I can be someone else. Here, I don’t have to hide that want and that desire to go up high. Here, I can be that girl too.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  At night, asleep with Jadis lightly breathing next to me, my eyes wide open, staring at the blank ceiling, I practice my routine with the tiniest of motions, trying not to wake her. I shut my eyes and I dream of my spine curling into a perfect scorpion, foot in hand, shooting up to the sky.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  By midweek, Coach breaks up the pairings because it’s good for the brain, she says. It’ll help broaden this new energy. New girls, new partners.

  Chloe Orbach works with baby freshman Zoey on toe touches and back tucks. I hear Chloe telling Zoey she’s got to pull her locs back tight in a ponytail like everyone else with long hair. Zoey gives her a swift nod and wraps her locs in a bun. Sasha, the one whose shoulders could hold a Mack truck, will base me with Chloe Schmidt. Priyanka, who’s got the thighs of a professional soccer player, will backspot me. Gretchen, Keke, and Kaitlyn will base Chloe Clarke.

  But Chloe Schmidt doesn’t want to base me. She doesn’t think it seems fair to be held back by the new girl.

  “I’ve always based Chloe, Coach. Why does that have to change now?” she says.

  I want to speak up because I’d much rather Keke and Gretchen base me. The amount of trust that I’m going to have to put in Chloe Schmidt, I want her to want to do it.

  But she’s relentless. She rants about how she almost broke her arm last year when that cheer wannabe, Madeline Steiner, slammed on top of her. How she was in a sling for four weeks because that girl wasn’t ready. She hurls her pom-poms to the ground.

  “You’ll get used to it,” Coach says to Chloe Schmidt, and then points to the Three Chloes, who’ve somehow melded together again. “You will all get used to it.”

  Coach seems to have a plan. She’s breaking up The Chloes.

  “Thanks a lot, new girl,” Schmidt says to me as she breezes by. Girls like her are always looking for scapegoats.

  “Don’t let her get to you,” Chloe Orbach says, like it’s boring to her. It reminds me of a Jadis tactic: If you pretend like you don’t care, eventually you won’t.

  Coach heard Chloe Schmidt’s snipe and now she’s annoyed. She calls us back in a circle.

  “Your bodies are at war. Do you understand? You’re an army.” She tells us that if we don’t take care of each other, we’ll get hurt.

  Coach raises her right arm in the direction of the football players behind the fence in the upper field. Their shoulder pads and their helmets and their padded tight pants. All of their equipment. We’re naked compared to them.

  “You don’t have gear like they do. But you have your strength. You have your skin. You have skill. But it’s up to you. You want to play mind games?” She points to Chloe Schmidt. “Or do you want to take our team to the next level?”

  “Yes!” everyone chants. She wants to hear it again.

  “YES!”

  “Then stop working against each other. Stop tearing each other down. You’re allowed to be a masterpiece and a work in progress simultaneously,” she says, and I think about what that means. What she’s saying to us. That we’re perfect and messy all at once. It’s the first time I feel defined.

  “Do you want it? Tell me you want it!”

  “WE WANT IT,” everyone screams.

  She tells us we have to do a set of twenty-five push-ups and a four-minute plank, then run the track.

  Everyone moans and hits the ground.

  “You could say something to Coach about splitting up me and Chloe,” Chloe Schmidt says to Chloe Orbach when we’re facedown in our planks.

  “I wouldn’t let those girls lift me. Not if you paid me,” Clarke says, adding fuel to the fire, then lowers her head, counting to herself.

  “You were one of those girls once,” Chloe Orbach says to her.

  “Yeah, when I was a fetus,” she says. “I came out of the womb doing a double down and you know it.”

  We’re on minute two, and my thigh muscles twitch uncontrollably,

  “It was my idea actually, you know, to change things up,” Chloe Orbach says, so aloof. As if she hasn’t just dropped a nuclear bomb between them.

  You can see Chloe Schmidt’s chest heaving up and down, her face reddening. “What? Why would you do that to us?” She breaks her plank and plops to the ground.r />
  “Both of you have gotten too complacent,” Chloe Orbach says, sweat dripping down her nose, then licks it away with her tongue without even flinching in her plank, not for a second. “It’s not a good look.”

  Chapter

  6

  The next morning I make a beeline to Chloe Clarke’s locker, and she throws me a bored stare as she shuffles through a binder. I instantly regret approaching her.

  “Hey, I just wanted to see if we could practice a little together,” I say. The truth is I want the Three Chloes to like me, not just one Chloe. It would make things a whole lot easier if I was less of a threat to them, which is how things seem to be right now. “I could really use your help. You know, so I don’t fall flat on my face.”

  “I thought you were a natural, at least that’s what Chloe says about you.”

  She shoves the binder back in her locker and slams it shut.

  “You have no idea what you’re dealing with, Shade. One minute Chloe Orbach will profess loyalty to you. And the next, she’ll turn on you and cackle as blood seeps out of your crushed skull.”

  I do not expect to hear a Macbeth-level warning from her about Chloe Orbach.

  “I thought she was your best friend.”

  “She is. And I would step in front of a train for her, don’t you forget it. She’s the reason I’m on the cheer team.”

  “Where else would you be?” I say, not understanding the seriousness in her voice. “Clown school?”

  But Chloe doesn’t think this is funny. As soon as I say it, I want to take it back. I don’t want it to seem like I’m making fun of her. I want to tell her about those days I used to watch them with wide-eyed amazement, the Three Chloes, flying off monkey bars at the playground, their perfect landings. Everyone gawking at them like they were rock stars. Even Jadis was transfixed by their show.

  “My mom thinks that this level of cheer is a waste of time. It’s not going to get me a scholarship. It’s not going to get me any sponsorships. It’s not going to win me any awards. She thinks I should be doing competitive cheer and that she’s spent enough money on camps, private cheer lessons, and pyramid workshops. Oh, and how can I forget the stunting camps? My mom’s from West Texas, okay? This is a religion to her.” Then she says, in a high-pitched voice that I take to be her mother’s, “And after all that dedication and money, you insist on being a lowly high school cheerleader.” Chloe shakes her head and tsks. “All those expectations down the drain.”