After practice, Chloe Orbach and I fade away. She tells Chloe Schmidt to drive home without her. She doesn’t mention the trainer, the #bodyconfidence, or the chef. She just says it matter of fact, “I’m walking home with Shade.”
And you would think that Chloe Schmidt would be like, Cool, please walk home with Shade. That she would be happy about the break, but no, she gives her a hard time. Teasing her about walking home, how she’s going to be a derelict, a streetwalker. How a blonde cheerleader like her is going to get snatched and tied up in someone’s trunk. When none of that gets Chloe’s attention, she keeps going. That she’s doing it to get those extra steps in. That maybe someone ate too many Doritos last night.
“Mmmhmmm,” Chloe Orbach says back to her, completely detached, and walks the other way.
Icing someone out is worse than a comeback. It’s worse than tearing her apart. You can’t work with someone who ices you out. You just have to take it. Chloe Schmidt slams the Jeep door with Chloe Clarke inside, her mouth twitching, a tic I’ve noticed when she’s upset. And they drive away.
* * *
■ ■ ■
Chloe and I wander to the abandoned railroad tracks, neither of us wanting to go home. They haven’t been used in the twenty years since they built the high-speed rail line that goes into New York City.
She knows about a crumbling emergency staircase behind someone’s house, so we sneak through the yard, trying to hide behind a row of hedges. But an old guy comes out on to his back patio and yells at us for cutting though his yard.
“You kids! You can’t just trespass like this every damn day. I’m calling the cops. That’s it.”
“Sorry, sir,” Chloe yelps.
We climb down behind the house into a deep trench, just before the graffiti-tagged trestle, and graze through the overgrown grass sprouting its way between the wooden planks of the old track.
“I love this time right before homecoming,” she says. “Before it gets dark at five o’clock. Right before the injuries. Before we all get burned out on practice.”
We walk down the track on autopilot, kicking stones. Dusk lingers between the tree branches. Everything still green, the ivy climbing up the tree trunks hasn’t turned brown yet.
“It used to be me and Chloe Schmidt, you know. We were the closest. Inseparable,” she says.
I grunt. “I find that hard to believe.”
“ ’Cause I’m such a bitch to her?”
“You could say that.”
She grabs a dead branch from the ground, whips it into the air, and it lands in a pile of rubble. “I’m so tired of everyone these days. So bored from all the same bullshit. It makes me want to lash out, and then I just end up lashing out at her.”
I have a flash of that night we crammed in her bedroom, how I saw through her. All those Chloé ads on her wall and how she so carefully pinned them up like an art installation. The way her mom treated her like a windup toy. She made that wall of Chloés because that’s how she wants to see herself—beautiful, unbothered, and in control.
“This is going to sound weird, but I think I really started resenting Chloe after her dad died. And I wasn’t even close with him, but everything changed.”
“Why would you resent her after her dad died?” I say.
“Once he was gone, I spent every weekend at Chloe’s, just me, Chloe, and her mom. She’d cook, make pancakes, we drew on the walls in her bedroom. Séances to try to talk to her dead dad. Dancing and gymnastics at his grave. I’d answer the phone at her house like I lived there,” she says, as if she’s so far away. “Her house was so big, so beautiful. It was around the same time my mother was getting married to the idiot who gets drunk in my basement. Then my mother got pregnant with those half-wit brats. Chloe’s house was . . . I loved being there.”
I try to picture Chloe Schmidt and Chloe Orbach bonding together, the two of them inseparable. It’s hard to imagine, seeing how they are now.
“So what changed?”
“Well, Chloe’s mother got remarried. The trainer came in, the Weight Watchers meetings, a personal chef who only cooked vegan.” She angrily tugs a chunk of ivy off a tree until it snaps. “No more sleepovers because they had early morning workout times. The nanny got fired. Sometimes I’d get glimpses of the old Chloe when she’d come to my house and spray whipped cream in her mouth. Last time I was over there, her mother had just gotten a face-lift and with all those bruises, staring in the mirror, she was saying that the doctor didn’t do enough and she’d need another one soon. Chloe’s standing there going, ‘Ma, let the swelling go down first before you book a second one.’ But that’s what happens when you have more money than God. You spend it on your face.”
She tightly wraps the ivy around her arm, and it makes a dent in her skin. She loosens it and then ties it like a bracelet.
“Chloe Clarke moved into town around the time Chloe Schmidt’s mother got married, and it became the three of us. It was like we were forever sealed because of our names.”
Forever sealed. It sounds familiar. That’s how it’s always felt between me and Jadis. Lately I’m not so sure.
“I know Chloe and I say awful stuff to each other. But then we make up. And then it starts all over again. I guess you could say we’re in an abusive relationship. Sometimes I think we need couples therapy. Or maybe we just need to break up for a little while. You know, a trial separation,” she says. “I’ve said enough about me and Chloe. What about you and Jadis?”
“Jadis?” I say. “You’d have to tear us apart. There’d be blood.”
“BFFs for life!” she squawks, and drifts over to the rail to do a couple of split leaps. She jumps off and sways in the tall meadow grass, humming that Lana Del Rey song. “All I wanna do is get high by the beach, get high by the beach, get high.”
“Don’t you love that song?” she says, throwing her head back, swaying more. “Isn’t it so dreamy? Like you could just fall into it.” She rocks her hips back and forth, swirling her arms up in the air.
I watch her in a trance for I don’t know how long, beholden to her as she sings the same line over and over, all of it blurring, the meadow grass and her blonde hair, her fingers floating above her, until I hear a kid calling out from somewhere in the neighborhood above us, and I’m shook out of it. I turn away, embarrassed that I was riveted for so long.
“Shade. Shade. Shade,” she says, and sits on a rock next to me. “What kind of name is Shade anyway?”
“It’s my mother’s version of poetry. She thought that she was giving me a name that represented relief. You know, because where do you escape to when the sun is so hot?”
“Ahhhh, in the shade.” Her face in awe with those pink and gold dots making her look so sweet, that big smile. “That is what you’re like, Shade. Sweet relief.”
She swirls her finger across the tattoo on my arm, the intertwined pinkies. My whole chest tightens, my breath quickening.
“Okay, let’s talk about something serious,” she says.
“What’s that?”
“I want one of those tattoos,” she says, and points to mine. “And I want one right now.”
“I don’t even have the stuff for it,” I say. “It’s all at Jadis’s house.”
She unzips her backpack and pulls out a gallon-size plastic bag. Inside, wrapped in white tissue paper, is a pack of needles, a bottle of ink, thread, and alcohol wipes.
“What? How did you know what to get?”
“YouTube. Duh.” She’s got this silly smile on her face. But she means it. She wants me to give her a stick and poke right here at the tracks.
Really, the person to call is Jadis. And the funny thing about Jadis is that if I called her, she would come right down here, through that old guy’s yard, give him the finger, and then do a stick and poke on Chloe Orbach like it’s no big deal.
But I don’t
want to share Chloe Orbach with Jadis. I don’t want Jadis down here like she has some hold on Chloe forever, with her cheer critiques, talking over us and judging me for this, for being one of them. “It’s going to bleed a little,” I say. “Just so you know.”
“You’re so cute, Shade, taking care of me.”
Chloe turns on her phone’s flashlight and rests it up against a rock.
“I’ve only done a few of these,” I say, my hand trembling.
“I intrinsically trust you,” she says. She touches the edge of my nose with her finger like I’m her pet. She wants a little cheer bow on her thumb. A bow is two triangles and a circle in the middle. Of course I can do this.
I swab the needle with the alcohol pad. Tie it around the pencil with the thread. Looping it over and over. Dip it in black ink, then little sharp pokes, tracing the outline. I think about something Jadis said once, how when you tattoo someone you’re taking a little bit of them and making them yours. I’m leaving a mark on Chloe’s skin that’ll be there forever, or at least until her mother finds out and makes her get it lasered off.
But for now, she’s mine.
It only takes around twenty minutes, her breath in my hair as she watches me poke at her skin, her pink skin, the soft blonde hairs on her knuckles. Shaping that sweet bow, so innocent. Just two cheerleaders on abandoned tracks, doing jailhouse tattoos.
What could be more pure?
We both lie back on the gravel when I’m done. She’s talking really fast, and I get it because that’s how it feels after you get a stick and poke, your nervous system pumping and your blood tingling. It’s real dark now, the crickets chirping, and the sky is so clear that the stars, or satellites, whatever the hell they are, sparkle like glitter.
She starts telling me about an astrology class she took to get out of the house, away from her stepfather who is too careless to lock his liquor cabinet and away from her mother who wishes she was twenty-five again. Her mother who wishes she was her.
“Did you know that when we were in gymnastics together, my mother used to drone on about what a natural you were. Endlessly. It drove me absolutely bananas. That Shade Meyer. What a natural. Oh my god, I was so jealous of you. I wanted to kill you.”
“You tormented me,” I say. “I quit gymnastics because of you.”
“Yeah, I know,” she says, smugly, no remorse.
I sit up and face her. “So you know I quit because of you?”
“I wanted to be you,” she says, twisting my curls. “So I had to destroy you.”
She smirks, raises an eyebrow.
A thought flutters through me. Me as a twelve-year-old, helpless and mad on the ground after I fell off the balance beam. How I was terrified of her. How I hated her.
Now I want to be a good cheerleader for her. I want to be as good as her. I want to be better than all of them.
I think of that first day when I promised Jadis that nothing would change between us, but it was a lie. Everything’s changed.
I’ve changed.
* * *
■ ■ ■
That night I dream about cheer. It’s the same dream I’ve been having all week about stunting. Except this time I’m flying up in the air, toe touch, head whip, and then Chloe Orbach catches me in her arms. And I’m safe.
Chapter
15
Just before the homecoming game Friday late afternoon. I stare in the mirror and I draw a G in black on my cheek. Glitter dotted under my eyebrows. Hair slicked back in a tight ponytail and that bow smack on top of my head. If Jadis saw me, she’d tell me that she doesn’t recognize me. But I can see myself through all of this. Through the glitter. Through the heavy eye makeup. Through the uniform, tight across my now muscular body. My arms, cut. My stomach, flat. No more pooch. I do a horrible wink-and-nod head shake.
That girl in the mirror is me. Clean clap clean. I’m ready.
* * *
■ ■ ■
I walk out of my bathroom and my mother is waiting for me in the hall. “Well, look at you. Aren’t you all gussied up?” she says, with a little twang in her voice.
“Gussied? What’s that supposed to mean? It’s my uniform, Mom.” I can see what she thinks, that her daughter looks like one of those girls on those pageant shows on some obscure cable network. The kind of show where the mother feeds the kid Mountain Dew in a sippy cup and then dresses her up to look like a Miss America contestant.
“No, no. I didn’t mean it like that. You look great, honey. You look like a . . . cheerleader,” she says, and shockingly, it seems to be sincere.
“Cheerleading really should be considered a sport,” I say, and I don’t know why I’m so defensive. I guess because I have this pang of fleeting guilt that I’m not the kind of daughter who sails across the world in a boat by herself, single-handedly warring against climate change.
“I have no doubt that whatever you’re doing out there is more strategic and more complicated than any of those games the masses consider sports.”
I melt when she says it. I don’t ever think I want her approval, but when I get it, it changes my world. I can feel the smile spread across my face, and I feel bad that I was so mean to her earlier in the week.
She gives me a kiss on the head. “I would give you a kiss on the cheek, but I don’t want to mess up your makeup.”
She takes her phone out and tells me to do my best cheer pose. So I lift my arms up into a high V then smile.
“I get a smile too?” she says. “Goodness.”
I blush, because smiling for my mom is better than I thought it would be.
* * *
■ ■ ■
On the sidelines, we stretch out as the crowd fills up. Gretch passes around a glitter stick, her impenetrable positivity. I look up into the stands for Jadis because she told me she would be here, and I’m taken by the sea of faces. Little girls with their daddies, cramming into the bleachers, their bellies pressed up against the metal bar, staring at us with wide eyes. The moms wearing their FOOTBALL MOM sweatshirts in glitter with their thermoses filled with steaming hot cocoa. The college boys and their Solo cups, pointing, their heavy stares.
Chloe Orbach sidles up against me, playfully shoving her hip into mine, then wiggles her thumb at me, the one with the new bow that I tattooed on her the other night.
“I can’t stop staring at it,” she says, stroking it. “I had to hide it from my mother, of course. She’d have a shit fit. Look at her up there.” She points at her mother, with her blonde hair, her perfect curling-iron curls, in her CHEER MOM sweatshirt, shaking her little metallic pom-pom.
“So fucking embarrassing,” she says, and turns away.
I scan the stands again to see if I can find Jadis.
“Looking for your mom?” Chloe says.
“Oh, no,” I say, and don’t bother to tell her who I’m really searching for. “My mom doesn’t do football games.”
“Wow, you’re so lucky.”
We start with simple cheers. We are the tower of power, above all the rest. Easy stuff, waiting for people to get there. Between cheers, Coach preaches: “Starve your distractions. Feed your focus.”
How do you starve your distractions when that’s all you have?
Then I see a girl with bright green hair, the color of grass, hopping up through the middle of the stands. I know without even seeing her face, it’s Jadis.
Jadis with bright green hair.
She’s up at the back. I can tell it’s her by those bony shoulders, the fringe from the Japanese feather razor she bought online to cut wisps through her ends. Following behind her, Emma Scanlen, the two of them in all black, standing out between a sea of periwinkle-blue and white jerseys.
“What is she, the Green Goblin?” Chloe Schmidt mutters. She’s next to me in the back line. She says it low enough so no one else hears her.
It’s hard to react to a comment like this when the whole town is watching you. All of those faces up there in the bleachers. I want to walk away from her, switch positions, but I’m stuck in this spot.
“What is your problem?” I say.
“The moment you came on this team, you turned Chloe against me. That’s my problem,” she growls. “You. You’re an interloper.”
Something about her scares me. The way she looks at me so open-faced, with her hands still at her hips in cheerleader position. Her back straight up the way an animal does when they’re threatened.
Chloe Orbach bellows: “On five, let’s go!”
I’m rattled. Face front. Hands on hips. Fake smile. Chin up.
Ready, and!
Let’s go!
Get fired up! Get fired up!
Let’s go!
Everyone bounces around, clapping and waving to the crowd. That contagious cheer energy bubbling over. Then there’s a few moments between cheers where we’re supposed to face the crowd and keep everyone pumped and riled up.
Chloe Clarke swiftly turns to both of us. “What’s going on?”
“Ask Chloe,” I say. “She started a fight with me.”
“I’m sick of it,” she says to Chloe Clarke, “I’m sick of being blamed for everything.” Tears in her eyes now, this look of despair like she really believes what she’s saying.
Chloe Schmidt is not the girl I want to have an irrational argument with right now. The clock on the scoreboard says there’s 8:56 left, so we’re inching closer to halftime. This is the girl who, in about twenty minutes, is supposed to toss me ten feet in the air and then catch me in her arms.
“I’m sorry the two of you are having problems,” I say to her. “But I promise you, I have nothing to do with it.”
The Falling Girls Page 9