“My favorite hobby is tormenting my mother too,” I say.
“Cheer is not a joke to me, Shade,” she snaps. “I’m not doing it on a whim or a dare or to piss off my little rebellious best friend.”
I blush. So this is how they see me.
“It’s not clown school either, by the way,” she says.
“I didn’t mean it like that, Chloe—”
“I don’t have to be at this school to cheer,” she says. “I’m dedicated to my friends. I choose to be at this school to cheer.”
I want to shrink away, pretend this conversation never happened. I just wanted some cheer tips, that’s all. I didn’t intend to dive into the psychology of Texas cheer moms. I apologize for the clown school comment.
“I just want to work with you. Because you’re so good and I have so much to learn. There’s no ulterior motive. I’m committed to the squad. I’m committed to being a cheerleader.”
She gives me a long stare. Her eyes don’t move from my gaze, not once.
“Then we have a lot of work to do.”
* * *
■ ■ ■
Later that afternoon at practice, Chloe Clarke runs flyer stretches with me. Hold a hollow, legs up in the air, no room on the ground between your back, squeeze your core. Stand on one leg for five minutes with your eyes closed for balance.
Then she has me lean into the gate that surrounds the field with my leg up above my head for five counts of fifteen. The soccer boys stop their drills on the other side of the fence to gawk.
“They always watch,” she says. “You get used to it.”
But I can’t even concentrate because they’re pointing at me. My legs spread so far apart. They make it so obvious, so gross while Chloe Clarke attempts to tear me in two. She counts slowly, shaking out my leg.
“Get out of your head, Shade,” she’s saying even though my body’s screaming in pain, my leg rising higher.
Chloe Orbach glances over at me as I’m hitched up against the fence.
“You gonna make her stand like that forever?” Orbach calls out to Clarke. “She’s gonna rip her vagina apart, and we have our first game Saturday.”
I give Chloe Clarke my sad eyes, and she tells me I can stop.
I bring my leg down slowly, crumbling to the ground.
But Coach wants us to build stamina. So she ends practice with five reps of toe touches into back tucks—only one of those is part of our routine for the game on Saturday. Most of us can barely get through three, so she cuts it short and sends us running. Two laps. My abs ache in pain when I breathe.
After practice, Chloe Orbach strolls over to me with baby Zoey trailing behind, panting and catching her breath. She signals to Chloe Schmidt and Chloe Clarke, who slowly jog from across the field.
She kneels next to me and opens a small bag. A bag of goodies, she says, and rubs my thighs with arnica. She tells me I’m going to take four Advil because two Advil is for pussies. She tells me to cut out dairy. Not to eat carbs. Everything is about protein. That’s the only thing that’ll strengthen my muscles. She places the Advil on my tongue. “Now swallow.”
I take a protein bar out of my bag, but Chloe throws it over by a tree. Too much sugar, she says. Too much crap.
She’s got kombucha and five rolls of turkey. One for me. One for Zoey. One for her. And one each for the other two Chloes. She gives the turkey to me first. Chloe Schmidt sighs. “Be patient, Schmidty,” she says, “or you’ll get the turkey last.”
“Not funny,” Schmidt says, and snatches it out of Chloe’s fingers.
They blow little kisses at each other.
“Love you, Chlo,” Orbach says.
“Love you, Chlo,” Schmidt says back.
Zoey crawls over and shoves the turkey in her mouth.
I savor my turkey. I’m starving.
Chloe Orbach opens the kombucha and sips it. Passes it to Chloe Clarke. Then to Chloe Schmidt. Then to me. I sip back the kombucha. It tingles in my mouth.
I feel so taken care of.
* * *
■ ■ ■
On Fridays, the day before a game, all of the athletes and cheerleaders wear their uniforms to school. Some school spirit bullshit. I show up with my legs shaved and oiled, traipsing through the hallway, my cheer skirt swishing over my thighs with every step, every bounce. The feel of my tight, sleeveless top.
Everyone else prowls the hall with their black leggings and their hoodies, blending into the dank, unventilated high school air. I’m not like any of them. Not anymore.
I see Chloe Orbach outside the cafeteria, that big smile, all teeth, pink lips sparkling, the blue heart-shaped necklace with diamonds around it on a chain.
“Pretty necklace,” I say.
“This?” she says, and rolls her eyes. “Thank Instagram.” But I feel like I’m missing something. “Soooo first day wearing your uniform in school. How does it feel?” she says.
My instinct is to make some snarky quip, something Jadis would say, like, Feels like I rule the school.
Once, I would have been embarrassed by all this attention. But the uniform is a symbol for what I know deep down in my short existence as a cheerleader. That nothing can shake me. Not when I crash down onto the mat after they elevator me up. Not the sweaty hands grabbing at my body. Not the way my spine cracks if I land the wrong way in my tuck. Nothing.
“I feel like we’re a girl gang, and we’re going to torment some people and break some windows and smash some shit up,” I say.
She starts to laugh uncontrollably, this intoxicating release, and tugs my hair close as I laugh too, our foreheads touching, our hair entangled.
She swipes her arm through mine and we stroll down the hall as she whispers to me, “Let’s go smash some shit up.”
Chapter
7
I’m up earlier than I thought I would be on game day. That feeling so real now, more so than yesterday at school when we played dress-up in our uniforms. Staring in the mirror, fully outfitted.
Who is she, this girl with the uniform? With the biceps beginning to peek out? Who is this girl with this hair framing her face, the glitter lined below her brows, with this skirt and this tight-fitting cheer top?
Will anyone recognize that it’s me? Do I recognize myself?
One thing I didn’t expect: I like the way I look.
I prance into the kitchen, and my mother practically spits out her coffee.
“Your hair,” she says, pausing, her mouth wide open, “is tied back in a bow.”
My hair has never, ever been tied back in a bow. Not even when I was little. My mom had a thing against bows, particularly because there was a young television star who started a big bow sensation and so all of the girls at school wore big bows, in every color of the rainbow, in their hair.
I was maybe in the fourth grade. We were at Target, and I grabbed a yellow bow from the shelf. A life-size cardboard cutout of the television star with her curly hair messily pulled back stood in front of the display.
“You are not wearing one of those,” my mother said, snatching it out of my hand and throwing it back in the pile.
“I want to wear a big bow, Mommy. Everyone has a big bow!” I cried. Other mothers surrounding the display stared at us in horror. I could hear one woman whisper to another, Just let her have the bow. Isn’t that why we’re all here?
“You look at me, Shade,” she said, making sure all of the mothers heard her. “I’m raising you to be an independent girl. Not a girl who follows trends, unless Coco Chanel dictates them. You don’t wear an ugly bow because some marketing person decided to stick a bow in some girl’s hair. Do you understand me?”
I cried all the way home. I never wore the bow.
Except for today. And it feels good to wear this bow even though I, too, hate the bow. I despise the bow. But I get gr
eat pleasure in watching the color drain from my mother’s face.
“Oh, stop being so dramatic, Mom,” I say. “Think of it like a crown. We’re all queens.”
* * *
■ ■ ■
The sunlight shining on our cold faces, the hardcore dads in the stadium, staring at us with their beady eyes. Chloe Orbach told me it’s going to feel like some of them want to undress you. The moms are either CrossFit rats with their hard bodies and tight warm-up gear, or they’re trying to cover themselves with their big boyfriend jeans and oversized sweatshirts.
Chloe Orbach zigzags through the rest of the squad to check on me in the back.
“They’re all staring at us,” I say. The fans, the parents, and the kids running up and down the metal bleachers.
“Don’t look at them,” she says. “Keep your focus on me in front.”
But that’s when I see Jadis, her black hair, her white skin, sitting with Dave Sozo at the top of the stands, waving at me.
“Jadis is friends with Sozo?” Chloe Orbach says.
“She’s friends with everyone,” I say.
“Not everyone. Anyway, Sozo is a juicehead,” she says, and marches back to her captain’s spot. I wave back to Jadis, get Chloe’s smack talk out of my mind.
This week is simple cheers. No scorpions or pyramids yet. Avoid concussions. Our voices fall into sync and vibrate together. We are the tower of power, above all the rest! We are the tower of power, GHS!
I feel it building in me, that excitement as everyone jumps up and down, toe touches and back handsprings and roundoffs, the energy rising. And when our team scores, the crowd screeches and the squad goes bananas, all of us holding each other, and I get caught up in the excitement of it.
I’ve always been one of those people who hated sports. But when you’re right there on the field, it’s impossible not to feed off the energy of a winning team, all that testosterone and that manic spirit and the thrill of it all.
At halftime we run out to the field and do a version of that pep rally routine with Chloe Clarke exploding into the air, between all those shaking pom-poms. All of us in sync with a toe-touch back tuck. Zoey and I cross back handspring, then follow Chloe Orbach, who leads us in a V-shape across the field as we bleat out: GHS has the fire, we will be, the best!
I hear the high-pitched moms screaming and clapping from the stands. The marching band blares “Don’t Stop Believin’.” I’m dizzy from the coordination of it all, the calculating moves and the grueling practice behind it. I’m ashamed that I never saw it before.
* * *
■ ■ ■
After the game, Jadis meets me at the side entrance to the stadium. Sozo’s gone off to hang out with the rest of the sweaty jocks.
“How did we look?” I say.
“You didn’t even smile once,” she says, and takes a long hit off her vape. “Not that I’m surprised. I mean, that cheesy face they all do is kind of gross.” And she throws her head back, releases a wide, fake smile.
After working my body down to the bone for the past week, this is not what I want to hear from my best friend. But I have to remember that this is classic Jadis. She’s learned to fill all her anger and her resentment with what she describes as “brutal honesty.” I’ve seen her do it to lots of people, and now she’s directing it at me.
“I was having a good time out there. Sorry you couldn’t see that,” I say, and shrug, pretend like she hasn’t gotten to me. That’s the best way to deal with her when she’s like this. Be a brick wall.
“Are you though? Having a good time?” she says, her jaw clenched. She opens up her phone and flips through the photos she snapped of all of us. It surprises me how far she’s taking this.
The rest of the girls with big smiles stretching across their faces. Me, my body in sync with everyone, but my expression is lifeless. I look like I’m in shock.
I push the phone away. “It’s my first game. Gimme a break, Jadis.”
“Yeah. Maybe you just need time to get used to it,” she says, her voice all sweet and concerned. “Yeah, that’s all it is.”
But it’s unsettling to see myself that way, which was her intention.
“No more pictures,” I say. “I don’t need a paparazzi, thanks.”
She slips the phone in her back pocket, looking a little wounded. I stand there strong in front of her, no buckling. I see her taking it all in. My uniform. The glitter. The bow.
“You really want this, don’t you?” she says.
“Yes,” I say. “I do.”
Chapter
8
We spend most of our second week working on a pyramid and the new routine, loading me up into my scorpion. But just as I’m catching my foot in my hand, I wobble and fall onto Sasha and Chloe Schmidt.
“My shoulders are fine, they’re fine. They can take a lot of pain,” Sasha says as she barely catches me.
But no matter how many times I apologize, Chloe Schmidt charges away muttering, “Oh my fucking god, this is bullshit,” like clockwork.
Friday night, Chloe Orbach invites all of us to her house because she says we need to bond before tomorrow’s game. I get a text from Jadis as I walk over there.
Night swim? she writes. It’s warm out. The kind of night where she and I would eat a little bit of a gummy and go skinny-dipping like we did most of the summer.
Have to go to Chloe O’s sorry
She doesn’t text me back.
Chloe’s house is on the North End, the richer side of town. I expect her house to look like one of the Tudors with the big lawns, or like Chloe Schmidt’s massive Victorian, but it’s not that way. Chloe’s house is an ugly ranch with paint chipping. There’s leaves everywhere and overgrown bushes with long bare tendrils that no one has cleaned up or clipped in a long time. Scratches cover the front door like someone was desperate to break in. Their neighbors with their well-kept Victorian homes must hate them.
Everyone’s there: Keke, Gretchen, Kaitlyn, Olivia, Sasha, Priyanka, Zoey, and of course the other two Chloes. We file into Chloe’s bedroom, and she’s filled up half a Hydro Flask with vodka. Poured water in her stepfather’s stash to make it look full again. She says he never notices. Her bedroom is painted a sophisticated dusty rose. Everything else is pink. A faded pink blanket is thrown across the bed. Peachy pink carpet. Bright pink tattered chair. Tiny pastel garlands hang from the ceiling.
And then there, across the room, an entire wall slathered with messily taped-up pages from magazines. Pictures upon pictures of women and girls. All of them in some action shot. Walking toward the Eiffel Tower swathed in gold chains. In a fringe coat in a meadow. In a fancy convertible driving down a side street in New York. A gang of girls in virginal white flowing dresses. Women in sunglasses, women layered in silk pink blouses, draping fabrics and giant leather purses, girls with long wavy hair.
At the bottom of every single picture, the name in large white letters:
CHLOÉ
Chloé. Chloé. Chloé. Chloé.
“Where . . . did you get these?” I say.
“Oh, just from magazines. You know. From the fashion house? Chloé?”
I don’t know Chloé the brand, but I don’t want to admit that to her so I just nod. Anyway, I’m too stunned to say anything. Her name over and over, with these women, pale and rail-thin in layers of clothes. All of them, staring back at us, a hall of mirrors like in Versailles, but instead of images of Chloe Orbach herself, it’s her name, with an accented “e,” flashing over and over again.
She created a shrine to herself. A cult of Chloes.
I think of Jadis, the pictures of skulls and crows and tombstones and black-and-white pictures of Paul Newman and Liz Taylor, of Kristen Stewart (her favorite), the desert, Siouxsie Sioux and cemeteries, her Joy Division poster, all messily pasted up on her walls.
But this? Your o
wn name bleating across your room? This, Jadis would die over. The utter narcissism, Jadis would cackle. I can hear her now.
“What do you think, Shade?” Chloe Orbach says to me.
“I love it,” I say. Is there any other way?
“It’s my favorite thing in the world,” Olivia says. “My mother won’t let me hang up any posters because she doesn’t want me putting holes in the wall.”
“Tape it up then,” Chloe says.
“My mother also doesn’t want me using tape on the walls.”
“It sounds like you need some medicine, a little escape from all those rules,” Chloe Orbach says. She shakes the Hydro Flask and pats the bed. Olivia crawls up next to her and takes a few sips of the vodka.
Tell us everything about the shrine to Chloe, we beg her. How long did it take? Did she do it by herself? Where did she find all the pictures? It’s an invitation to cram up on Chloe Orbach’s bed, legs and arms and feet, sipping vodka and rolling around, playing with each other’s hair, softer than we are at practice.
It’s like we’ve been close for years, even though we’ve only known each other for two weeks. Wrapping our bodies around each other at practice, spotting hips and backs, hands all over each other’s thighs—it quickly fuses you.
“I found all these old Vogues online. Chloe helped me,” she says, pointing to Chloe Clarke. “We started with just a few, right, Chloe?” she says, staring, fingering the edge of a page coming loose from the wall.
The Falling Girls Page 5