Chloe Schmidt’s face is sour as she climbs in her Jeep and sinks behind the wheel.
“Really, it’s okay. I don’t need a ride,” I say.
But Chloe Orbach grabs my hand. “You stay right here. You are not walking.”
She snakes her way over to the driver’s side and leans up against the door. “Tell the truth,” Chloe Orbach says. “How many followers do you have now? Two hundred and fifty K? That’s a lot of young girls. A lot of impressionable minds. A lot of girls with eating disorders. A lot of guys who dream of you at night, who get hard under the sheets—”
“Chloe, enough,” Clarke says.
“What? Her followers know all about her viral This is what my stomach looks like from all angles TikTok, and how everyone should be #normalizenormalbodies and #bodyacceptance and how body confident she is, but I find it curious that she didn’t mention the liposuction she got over the summer because she couldn’t get her thighs to stop touching. I wonder what they would say to that?” Orbach says.
Chloe Schmidt’s mouth opens wide, and Chloe Orbach doesn’t even look away.
“Where is this coming from?” Chloe Clarke barks.
“Unity. Isn’t that what Coach preaches? Chloe here thinks she’s above all that. She’s entirely comfortable making one of our top girls walk home.”
“I can’t believe you,” Chloe Schmidt seethes.
“Right back at you, bitch,” Chloe Orbach says. Then she turns to Chloe Clarke. “To answer your question, let’s just say I’ve been holding it in all week.”
They all do something, these Instagram and TikTok girls. You’re morphing yourself into your own little Frankenstein every time you take a picture, getting that creamy filter on, massaging that angle so your chin doesn’t look so weak. But to be a body-positive Instagrammer who secretly hates her body? Who gets liposuction and then doesn’t come clean about it to her followers? These are secrets you tell your best friend in the middle of the night. The secrets you’re ashamed of, that you don’t even want to admit to yourself.
Maybe Chloe Schmidt is waiting for the right moment to tell her followers. Maybe she’s working up to it. None of that matters.
What matters is that Chloe Orbach spilled classified information. In front of me.
Now, that’s a betrayal. It’s the cruelest thing.
Chloe Clarke turns to Chloe Schmidt and begs her to give me a ride. Just to end this. I still don’t want a ride, but when Chloe Schmidt tells me to get in, I can’t say no. Too much has already been sacrificed.
It’s decided that Chloe Schmidt will drive me to Chloe Clarke’s house and I’ll walk from there. We jump in the Jeep, and she takes off before we can even sit. Chloe Orbach lets out a screech and a howl. As if she didn’t just out her best friend. As if there wasn’t some lingering threat that she may do it again, maybe publicly. Chloe Orbach whines for Chloe Schmidt to let it go. That she loves her. That she would never tell another soul. That she shouldn’t be so sensitive.
I flash to Jadis. The way she tells me, “I’m just being honest.”
Chloe Orbach’s face, a wild smile like nothing even happened.
Chloe Schmidt scowls in the rearview mirror as she makes a sharp turn. Chloe Orbach holds on tight, laughing, and I’m the one who slides over, practically falling out of the Jeep. Chloe knocks right into me, my ribs smashing against the door. I groan because I’m already sore from the basket tosses.
I reach up to grip the outer rail so I can sit straight, and though I’ve been hiding it for the past few days in my high-rise booty shorts, the shifting has pushed down the fabric, and there she is, in full view. My new stick and poke.
My flying girl.
My falling girl.
I can feel my shorts sink further below my hip, this cheap elastic, and because I’m holding so tight to the frame, I can’t pull them back up.
“Oh my god,” Chloe says, scooting back to her side. “A new one? You got a new one, Shade?”
This ride is feverish, with Chloe Schmidt riding over sidewalks and hitting all the potholes.
“Shade, lift up your shirt.”
“Stop, Chloe. I’m not lifting up my shirt.”
Chloe Orbach slides over to me and pulls at my shorts, stretching them out so she can see the whole thing. I smack her hand away and push her back, knee her in the chest because she’s practically on top of me like an impatient child, her hair blowing all over the place. But she’s grabbing and reaching for me, not letting me go until my head smacks against the rail.
“Let me see!”
“What are you trying to look at?” Chloe Clarke turns around now from the passenger seat.
“Shade has a new tattoo. I want to see it,” she screams, squeezing me still. “But she won’t let me!”
“Honestly, Shade, don’t you know already that Chloe always gets her way,” Chloe Schmidt says, seething. “Haven’t you figured that out already? Just show her the damn tattoo.”
Chloe Orbach stands up, her hair through the wind, holding on to the top of the frame, and screams. Screams like someone is chasing her. Screams like she’s in the middle of a nightmare. She’s not even looking at me now. She’s just grasping for air, screaming.
“I just want to see it!” Standing, riding the bumps and the road like she’s surfing across some dangerous wave in the ocean. No fear in this one. No fear.
But I laugh, an uncomfortable laugh, a release, because here’s Chloe Orbach, so wild, and it makes me want to stand up there and scream right along with her. Just let everything go and feel as breathless and as free.
“If you come down I’ll show you,” I say. “Just come down.”
And she plops next to me, like a puppy, her face so close to mine. Her perfect eyebrows. The whites of her eyes. Her blonde hair everywhere. She doesn’t even try to get it out of her face.
I stretch out my shorts so my hip is completely exposed. My stomach in knots. She makes me so nervous. So I let her see it. My girl, my falling or flying girl. Whatever she is.
“Wow, I love it,” she says. She says it with sincerity. “Who did this?”
“Jadis did it.” Jadis. Who would hate me sharing this with Chloe Orbach. Just showing this to Chloe Orbach would make her nuts.
Chloe Clarke whines that she wants to see it too. She turns her body toward me. So I pull down my shorts again. Why not? It was my idea, wasn’t it?
“Is she falling or flying?” Orbach says.
After the way I watched Chloe Orbach tear Chloe Schmidt apart, there’s no way I’ll ever admit to her how I really feel about this tattoo. That it makes me feel weak. That she’s falling. That maybe, somewhere in the back of Jadis’s mind, she wanted to hurt me.
“Oh, flying,” I say, my voice solid. “She’s definitely flying.”
“Shade Meyer. The flyer!” and she grasps my thigh. “See! This girl’s so dedicated she got herself a flyer tat. Because that girl wants more than a basket. She wants so many rotations that she pukes her brains out. Isn’t that right, Shade?”
She’s not wrong. That’s what I want. At the very least I’d like to get ten feet up in that basket. Is that so much to ask?
“It’s the most beautiful thing and you’re going to be so beautiful doing it.” She takes my arm and shakes it up and down. “I’m so excited, Shade. Aren’t you excited? Say you’re excited.”
“I’m excited,” I say, but it’s flat. “I feel embarrassed.”
“About what?”
“That I want this so badly.”
Chloe stares at me, her eyes filling up. She grabs my hand, the Jeep banging up and down, sloshing over each bump. “You do not need permission to want something, Shade Meyer. If you want it, you take it. And if that’s not enough, you take more.” She goes on a rant about how girls are supposed to yearn for everything to be fair, that we’re supposed to want e
veryone to play nice, and worse, even worse, she says, we’re supposed to make all this niceness appear natural.
I look up quickly and feel Chloe Schmidt’s hot eyes on me through the rearview mirror.
Chloe shakes me. “Say you’re a flyer.”
A rush rams through me from deep inside, up through my aching ribs, legs prickly, a full-body chill. “I’m a flyer!”
It’s hard not to get caught up in Chloe’s excitement. She assaults you with it until you give in. And she’s not wrong. Top girls scream from the pinnacle. They’re up there at the peak.
It’s why I’m in this white Jeep with the Three Chloes. You don’t just get here, bouncing in the back seat, by accident.
With the sun in front of us and the wind in my hair, I take my ponytail out and let it all fall around me, a smile exploding on my face.
“Let that hair go, girl!” Chloe Clarke says, and takes out her pony too, then reaches over the seat and snatches the elastic out of Chloe Schmidt’s hair too. The whole thing, so damn free. Hair flapping everywhere. Like I’m part of something sweet and good. It feels like the kind of moment that’s meant to be a greeting card, and I want to hold my breath to stay in it, because moments like this always fade.
Chloe Schmidt peels into Chloe Clarke’s driveway. Slams the car into park.
“Chloe! Road rager!” Chloe Orbach screams. “Wow, get all that anger out! You’ll burn even more calories and it’s a success all around!”
“I told you I had an appointment,” Chloe Schmidt shrieks. “How come you can’t listen?”
Chloe Clarke hops out of the Jeep, and I’m right behind her. “Please don’t kill each other,” Clarke says, a heavy worry in her voice.
Then Chloe Schmidt hits the gas, goes in reverse, the tires squealing, beckoning out, and then they’re gone.
* * *
■ ■ ■
“What’s going on between the two of them?” I say once they turn the corner.
Chloe tells me some of what I already know. That Chloe Schmidt’s father died from cancer years ago. That her mother got remarried to someone who’s fine in theory, but an asshole in real life. That her mother grounds her if she comes home a minute after midnight. Her mother is all gung-ho body positivity on the outside, but she’s also the one who suggested Chloe get lipo this summer. Which she tells me I cannot say anything about.
“Chloe Orbach, as you just saw, loves to give her shit, you know, just stick it to her,” she says. “I used to think it was entertaining because of how hypocritical her online presence is, but now I just think it’s manipulative.”
“So why does she do it? Chloe Orbach, I mean.”
“Why? Because she has a lot of envy.”
“Chloe Schmidt’s father died of cancer, how much envy can you have?”
“Orbach’s father isn’t exactly in her life either, so she doesn’t see it that way,” she says. “And I’m in the middle. I’ve talked to Chloe about it, but she just doesn’t know when to stop.” She looks away, then gives me the kind of face that makes it seem like she’s said too much.
“Friendships are complicated,” I say, thinking of Jadis.
“I love that girl and I’m loyal to her to the end. But it’s not easy being her best friend. It’s a job these days.”
“Who, Chloe Schmidt?”
“No, but her too. Trust me,” she says, and pauses. “I mean Chloe Orbach.” She pauses again, stares off into the distance, seeming surprised that she even said it out loud.
She shakes her head, says she has to go. As I drift away from her front steps, she calls out to me. “Sometimes people push you into a corner, Shade. You just get pushed and pushed until you can’t take it anymore. I’ve tried to talk to her about it. About all of this stuff, but she doesn’t want to listen to me.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means that our little cheer team isn’t so perfect. It means there are deep flaws.”
She opens the door to her house and turns back to me.
“I love them both, Shade,” she says.
“I know,” I tell her from the end of the driveway. “I know.”
* * *
■ ■ ■
Walking up the driveway to my house, it’s one of those beautiful nights at dusk when everything above you and in front of you turns a dusty rose. I get a text from Jadis.
Look at what one of your Chloes is posting.
I scroll through Instagram to find Chloe Schmidt, and she posted something from TikTok to her Instagram stories when she was supposed to be working out with her special coach. She’s lip-synching to Alec Benjamin’s song “The Knife in My Back.”
I thought we were friends, but now we’re enemies.
The TikTok is in black and white. Just a close-up of her face talking to the camera. Over a thousand likes.
The caption says: “I trusted you.”
Trouble in paradise? Jadis texts.
She’s too happy about it. And that irritates me. So I swipe my phone off.
Chapter
13
Coach wants a full out, which is equivalent to a dress rehearsal for a play. This means she wants the sharp details. The phony gestures. The head snaps. The toe points. Your smile, plastic. There’s five more days until homecoming.
They lift Chloe Clarke and me on one leg on a count of five. Pri doesn’t even shake anymore. She’s got me in a vise. She and Schmidt hold steady, Sasha behind me, her hands wrapped around my ankle. I look across at Chloe, and our eyes meet. She gives me the cheer wink and nod. Chin up. I make a face like I’m going to puke.
She yells across at me. “You gotta do it back, Shade.”
“But it’s so cheesy,” I moan.
I feel Sasha’s arms shake behind me. “Don’t you dare mess this up, Shade,” Chloe Schmidt snaps, “or Coach’ll make us do it again and I swear to god—”
So I wink and nod, an extra-wide smile on my face. It’s so embarrassing, yet it comes so easy to me now.
Chloe Orbach counts five, six, seven, eight and Chloe and I move into our scorpions at the same time. Kicking my foot back so it meets my hand perfectly. Clockwork.
Now the cradle. All week I’ve been working on being strong in the air in my scorp, no buckling, but the cradle is harder. You have to trust your bases and your backspot aren’t going to drop you, that they’re going to toss you up enough so they have time to catch you on the landing. And I’ve landed it, but not on the same count with Chloe Clarke.
I keep my leg perfectly steady while Pri counts one, two and I pop, catapulting into the sky, up in the air, like slow motion, like I could fly all day.
“Point those toes, Shade,” Coach roars. And I lock my legs, square my body, my arms clean and tight at my sides. My stomach drops the way it does when you’re on a roller coaster. Slightly open at the catch, Sasha’s arms bang underneath my armpits, and my ribs throb, yet none of it matters because I’m secure. I bounce to the ground, and we finish it off by waving like maniacs at the pretend crowd.
Chloe Clarke and I are in sync, like we’ve been doing this for years.
After the full out, Chloe Orbach feeds me sliced turkey and tells me that’s the highest she’s seen me fly.
“You’re warriors,” Coach says, clapping. “All of you should be proud of yourselves. Every single one of you.”
* * *
■ ■ ■
“You look happy,” my mother says that night as I’m rifling through the fridge for something that’s not pasta. “Do you feel happy?”
“I do,” I tell her. “It’s weird. I didn’t think just being on the cheer squad would make me feel good like this. It’s hard to explain.” And it is hard to explain, all that energy I have when I’m at practice, all that soreness at the end of the day. I crave it. I think about it at school, wanting to push myself, wanting t
o make the other girls proud. I feel, finally, part of something.
“It’s called purpose, honey,” she says. “You’ve found purpose.”
My mother wants to know how Jadis is taking all this. That it must be hard for her.
I shrug. “Jadis has a girlfriend. Jadis has a lot of things. She’s fine.” I don’t tell her how I really feel, like a rope’s been cut between us. I cringe thinking about the homecoming dance, hoping it was the right move inviting her.
“All friendships have hills and valleys, Shade. It’s perfectly normal,” she says. “I’ve had my share of them. Esthere and I, there was a time when we weren’t talking. It went on for about a year, actually.”
But this irritates me because I hate when she inserts her opinion about everything, when she compares us, trying to tell me how similar we are.
If her life was different, maybe we wouldn’t seem like such outcasts.
“Your friends are unstable. That’s why you have drama with them,” I snap. “I’m nothing like you.”
It’s an awful thing to say to my mother, I know I can be incredibly hard on her, and I wish I could take it back, but it’s also true. If she lived some regular life and surrounded herself with some regular women who had jobs in an office, or if she had a friend who was an accountant or a lawyer, anything steady, then maybe I’d listen to her. But her friends have come in and out of our house for so long, with their beer breath and their affairs and their caftans and their lips stained with red wine.
She nods, tears in her eyes.
So I apologize, and she accepts it even though the truth is I don’t want any of my friendships to have hills and valleys like hers do. I want my friendships to be steady, a plateau.
I don’t want to be anything like her.
Chapter
14
The next day, another full out, all of us pushing ourselves hard, even little baby Zoey who’s on Chloe Orbach’s shoulders, straight and tight for the first time instead of hunched over like a terrified mouse. Zoey, who was scared of a back handspring on the first day, is now the center of our pyramid. Who would have thought?
The Falling Girls Page 8