The Falling Girls

by Hayley Krischer

  Shade don’t ghost me.

  Shade where are you this is not a FUCKING game

  Jadis is not someone you can escape. One time when my phone died and I was taking an extra-long shower, she showed up at my house, banging at my door, her face so vulnerable. Staring at me with my towel wrapped around me, and I laughed, I thought it was so sweet, all of that attention. But it wasn’t sweet attention, was it? It was her insecurity. Her terror of being left alone.

  If I text her back, it’ll all come tumbling out, that it’s my fault Chloe Orbach is dead. That it’s our fault.

  I keep thinking that I hear her banging on my door. I sneak into the hallway and whisper her name. Jadis? Is that you? But it’s just a tree branch against my window.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  On Monday, we’re back to school. The superintendent sends an email that there will be extra counselors available to speak to. That we need to come together as a family. That we’re all here to support Chloe Orbach’s family and the cheerleading team, which has suffered this tragedy. Reporters are in the front of the building. A news crew that’s been staked out since six o’clock in the morning, someone said. This story is gold for them. Head cheerleader dies at homecoming dance. This is the kind of story crime podcasts are made of.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  After psychology, Jadis waits for me at the classroom door. Biting her nails, her green hair in her face.

  She takes my hand in hers, her palm sweaty.

  “I saw your two friends crying hysterically through the hallway. They’re making a scene.”

  “Their best friend just died,” I say. “How do you expect them to behave?”

  “It’s an act,” she says, and rolls her eyes.

  I turn her toward me and stop her in the hallway, whispering, “Aren’t you just as upset? Just as devastated because we killed someone?”

  Stop, she mouths, and puts her finger to her lips, pulls me to the locker wall.

  “First of all, we didn’t kill anyone. Get that out of your head. Secondly, Emma told me that all three of the Chloes were party girls. That she knows someone who sold Molly a few times to one of them.”

  This detail makes Jadis very happy, you can see that tingle in her eyes. Like she’s made some connection that’s absolved her from guilt.

  “Of course they took it before, Jadis. It’s not like their first time would be at the homecoming dance.”

  “Did it not cross your mind that she took something else before the dance? That the Molly had nothing to do with this?”

  “I have to go to practice,” I say.

  “Oh, practice, right,” she says. “Because practice is more important than everything else.”

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  Coach tells us we’re going to keep it light, and everyone lingers in the locker room, hardly talking. You can tell some of the younger girls like Zoey and Olivia don’t know what to say or do. Their faces, their wide eyes, just looking at us for some kind of permission to speak, to laugh, to talk.

  Chloe Clarke is already whimpering when I get in there. The saddest cheerleader you’ve ever seen. Big T-shirt and sweats. Hiding her whole body. Chloe Orbach would be mortified.

  “Today? Why is she making us do this today?” Chloe sobs. “Cheer should be canceled for the rest of the season. That’s all.” Her head between her legs, sobbing. Keke wraps her arm around her. Olivia sinks down, kneels at her feet, rubbing her calves.

  I can’t get myself to sit with her. I can’t even look at her. I feel so guilty for what happened that I can barely stand.

  “I’ve never known anyone who died before,” Sasha says. “It’s just so real. This is going to define our lives forever. That’s what my sister said.”

  Suddenly Chloe Schmidt comes bounding into the locker room. Her hyper energy taking over. “I have a great idea,” she says, like she’s high on something. Her voice running quick. Her words overlapping.

  “We’re going to make a huge blow-up poster of Chloe for the next game, one of those realistic ones so that she can look like she’s in the picture with us. Or wait, maybe we can do a stand-up cardboard picture of her like a tribute. Or wait, we can go to yearbook and we’ll tell them that we want an entire page dedicated to Chloe. All the pictures from cheer, the years she was a gymnast. Remember? Remember? I still have those pictures.”

  Her voice cracks, and she turns to me. “What about you, Shade? What’s your plan?”

  I can barely string a sentence together. I haven’t slept in two nights. My brain is on fire for the terrible thing that I’ve done to my friend. I don’t have a plan.

  “I’d rather figure out what happened to her,” I say. “Wouldn’t you?”

  “I think we know what happened to her—” Chloe Schmidt says snidely to me, then stops herself. “It could have been a heart condition. It could have been anything.”

  “I heard she took something,” Kaitlyn, who can’t do more than a cartwheel, says.

  “You shouldn’t spread gossip until you know the full story,” I say. “None of you should.”

  Kaitlyn lowers her eyes, they all do.

  “That’s why we need a memorial. An over-the-top memorial. So people can remember how larger-than-life Chloe was. But, like, literally. Get it?”

  You’d think Chloe Schmidt’s only plan would be to go to the police, not create a life-sized poster of Chloe Orbach. I’m surprised she hasn’t outed me right away or fed Jadis to the dogs yet.

  “So, Shade?” she says. “What’s your plan?”

  “I don’t have a plan,” I say.

  “It’s weird that you have no thoughts about this,” Chloe Schmidt says. “I’m sorry. It’s just weird.”

  I have plenty of thoughts. Just none that I want to share with the whole squad right now. Nothing I want to share with her.

  “It’s called grief,” I say to her.

  “You can’t press someone to grieve openly and publicly just because that’s what you want,” Zoey says. Little freshman Zoey.

  “Please don’t tell me about grief,” Chloe snaps. She doesn’t need to say any more. We all know what she’s referring to. She’s dealt with death firsthand.

  Zoey apologizes. She’s sorry that she forgot about Chloe’s dad. Everyone is so sorry.

  “All of you owe Chloe Orbach everything,” Chloe Schmidt says. “All of you. Every single one of you got something out of being friends with her and being on this team with her. We are not letting her go down without a blaze of glory. Do you all understand me?”

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  After practice, I follow Chloe Clarke into the bathroom as everyone else is packing up. She’s sitting in the stall crying, and I knock on the door. Tell her it’s me.

  I hear the lock turn, and she tells me to come in. I lean against the door as she sits on the toilet.

  “Did the three of you do Molly a lot?” I say. “It doesn’t matter if you did. I’m not judging. I just want to know. I just want to get something clear in my head.”

  “I only did it once before the dance,” she says. “But Chloe and Chloe . . . a few more times than me.”

  Chloe Clarke tells me the reason they didn’t stick around that night was because she was scared of being questioned by the police while she was still high. It was Chloe Schmidt’s idea, that it would be a mistake to talk to anyone with their eyes dilated and with Molly still in their systems.

  “See, that’s why we have to go to the police,” I say. “Because maybe she took something before the dance and we can explain to them what happened. We can tell them that we were scared—”

  “We are not going to the police,” she snaps. “Cheerleaders who want a National Honor Society Scholarship, who belong to Model UN and volunteer at the soup kitchen, don’t turn themselves i
n to the police, Shade. Someone like you, maybe. But not someone like me.”

  “Someone like me?”

  “Yeah, someone who doesn’t have as much to lose.”

  The glint in her eye. She is dead serious.

  “Really, Chloe? Is that how you see it? That I’m an expendable? That I can just go to jail or something? That I don’t have anything to lose?”

  These girls. Their entitlement. Their reputation is the only thing that matters. How cheer moms will see them. How Mommy will see them. How the town will see them.

  “I sound like such a bitch, I’m sorry,” she says, and I think part of her means it. “You don’t know how messed up I am. You didn’t lose your best friend like I did, Shade.”

  It’s not fair for her to say that. She doesn’t know about that night by the tracks, the way I pressed the needle in Chloe’s skin. The way we talked to each other like we only existed for each other. How does she get to claim Chloe and I don’t? She doesn’t know how consumed I was by Chloe. How I’m still consumed, how when I was around Chloe Orbach, I wasn’t in charge of myself.

  I keep this locked up in my thoughts. Sharing it with her would mean giving up something that’s mine. And I don’t want to share.

  “We were tight. She opened up to me about a lot.” I say this gingerly. I know how vague it sounds.

  “Look, I’m sure you two got close. But there are things you didn’t know about Chloe,” she says. She tells me how much Chloe was hurting. How much she hated her house, her mother, those brothers. That she had a harder life than any of us really knew. That she was always trying to mask how she really felt. Maybe that’s why she was determined to get that stick and poke from me, even though, as Jadis said, I’m a novice. Because she wanted to be someone else.

  “She had a lot of pain, Shade. And she could be really cruel because of it,” she says, shaking her head. “She was envious of Chloe Schmidt. The chef. The personal trainer. The Jeep. Everything. She was tortured by it.”

  I think of what my mother once told me. That envy isn’t jealousy. Envy is hate.

  Chloe Schmidt knew how much Chloe Orbach envied her. But did she know how much she hated her?

  Chapter

  21

  Football players sit on benches in front of the funeral home crying.

  Inside, rows and rows of chairs. All of them filled. The room hot and crowded. A line snakes through the hallway with people waiting to pay respects to Chloe’s family. Chloe’s little brothers. Their sister will be a martyr now. The girl with the shrine of beautiful Chloés all over her bedroom. All the stages of Chloe in a slide show. A wonderful friend, big sister, dedicated daughter. Baby Chloe. Innocent Chloe.

  And then, the biggest picture of them all. The golden-haired cheerleader. A towering image of her there with her blonde hair blowing in the wind, her perfectly white teeth sparkling. Just like the cardboard cutout that Chloe Schmidt talked about.

  God, Chloe Orbach would have loved this funeral. She would have relished it.

  I can see Chloe’s mother’s blonde hair bobbing in front of her casket, Chloe’s embalmed body just a few feet away. Jews don’t do it this way, and I’ve never seen a dead body before. I’m scared to see Chloe like that. I don’t know if I want to see what they’ve done to her.

  Chloe Schmidt struts in like she owns the place in a black baby-doll dress with a white Peter Pan collar with cat whiskers embroidered onto it. Her thighs glistening like she just shaved and oiled them. Lips in a peach hue I’ve never seen. All of her hair down, unbrushed and wild. Not at all like the girl I saw babbling about losing her best friend in the gym that night.

  I hold on to the laminated card of Chloe’s face, smiling, a poem on the back. Something about rainbows and sunshine and when I see you again. A child isn’t supposed to go before their parent.

  Keke gets in line behind me and I smile, the two of us stuck in this long hallway together. I’m glad to see her among these faces of sad strangers.

  Chloe Schmidt holds court way up ahead, kissing strangers young and old like she’s part of a wedding receiving line. Like she’s part of Chloe Orbach’s family. I guess when you’ve known each other for so long, that’s what happens. You meet the cousins and aunts and the uncles, and they all feel like they know you because they watched you grow up.

  “I have a weird question to ask you,” I say to Keke. “What were the Three Chloes like before I got on the team? Like, last year?”

  “Trios are a problem,” she says. “There’s always someone left out. Two against one.”

  “I knew they were fighting recently,” I say.

  “It wasn’t just recently. It had been going on since last year,” Keke says. “Did you know they were attacking each other in their Instagram stories?”

  “I knew,” I told her.

  “They were always posting cryptic messages like I told you so. Or You’re pathetic. But everyone knew they were talking about each other.”

  Once, in the beginning of the year, Keke saw Chloe Schmidt crying after school in the locker room, and Chloe broke down to her, saying she felt so betrayed. That everyone could see what Chloe Orbach was posting and everyone knew that it was about her.

  “She was just so devastated, saying she felt publicly humiliated. Saying that I didn’t know what it was like to be friends with someone like . . .” Keke looks around and mouths Chloe Orbach. “That she just liked to lift people up and then break people apart. It made me so sad to hear it. That wasn’t the girl I knew.”

  “What did you say to her?”

  “I told her that sometimes friendships need a break. But she was shocked that I would even suggest that. She went on and on about how she couldn’t just stop being friends with her. That it didn’t work that way.”

  I never thought I’d relate to Chloe Schmidt, but hearing that, that she couldn’t just stop being friends, I understood exactly what she meant.

  “Chloe was tough,” Keke says, whispering. “I’m not gonna lie. It’s not every day that you get a junior who fights to be captain when you have two seniors on the team.”

  She tells me about Chloe Orbach’s campaign over the summer. Gretch and Keke were going to be co-captains because they were seniors and that’s just the way they did it. But Chloe didn’t like that. She complained to Coach. She said there should be an application. She wasn’t mean about it, Keke says, but she was forceful, argued it like a case.

  Keke tells me Chloe made a tryout packet with requirements, with essay questions. With an open form about how to improve school spirit. With thirty-seven leadership questions, like: Do you hold yourself accountable? How do you plan to keep each squad member motivated? What accomplishments are you most proud of?

  “It had a fundraising plan, okay?” Keke says, and rolls her eyes, shakes her head. “Me and Gretch, we were going to be seniors. Do you think either of us wanted that kind of responsibility? I had SAT and ACT tests to study for, plus I have a job. Gretchen works at the pharmacy. It’s not like either of us could just go home after cheer and make fundraising plans. We decided that if this girl wants captain so bad then we’d let her have it. Who was going to stop a driving force like that?”

  “What happened to all the packets after she became captain?” I say. “I just had to sign my name on a line to get on the team. It wasn’t exactly difficult.”

  “I saw them in the recycling bin after practice one day, I guess it was before the janitor came, and I couldn’t believe it. But what could I say? I wanted Coach to think I was a team player. So I shut my mouth,” she says. “Once Chloe became captain, she became top dog. She made up all the rules.”

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  As I get closer to the casket, to Chloe’s family, I hear people saying that she looks so beautiful. Look at her, that gorgeous face. I can’t imagine a corpse being beautiful. If they think she looks beautiful no
w, they didn’t see Chloe Orbach in the flesh. They didn’t see her on the field. Those muscular thighs. That fresh face, the translucent skin, always glowing. Vibrant. Alive. Pushing me to push myself. The way she commanded us. The way she wanted more.

  People are telling her mother, Sit, you’re going to pass out. You need to sit. But she’s fighting all of them. “I’m going to stand until this is over, until every last person who has come to say goodbye to my daughter is gone,” she says. Finally, it’s my turn, and I shake her hand because I don’t know what else to do. Her hand is soft and lifeless.

  “I’m so sorry,” I say, thinking that she can see through me to what happened that night. The flashing lights. The purple glow. The tablets with the crown and the star and the heart. Like candy. Deathly candy. Chloe collapsing. Focus, Shade. Focus.

  She stares at me with vacant eyes. Deep blue circles.

  “I’m very sorry for your loss. Chloe was a really special person,” I say. It comes out so unnaturally.

  She smiles at me, her face robotic-looking. Her lips quivering. Her hands on mine.

  “The police are going through her bedroom,” Chloe’s mother says. “Right after the funeral. Can you believe it? My little girl. They’re asking so many questions. Can’t they leave her in peace?”

  It’s as if she isn’t even saying it to me. She’s just speaking to the gods or the heavens or whoever decides that a teenage girl is supposed to be unnaturally taken away from her mother.

  “And then there’s the toxicology report,” she says. “It’ll take some time, they told me. My husband has some pull at the police department, so we won’t have to wait as long as most people. Just a few weeks. Have you talked to the police yet?”

  “Me? No.” The whole night in a flashback. Me and Jadis running out of the gym. Sirens, swirling lights. Chloe and Chloe just gone. The teacher screaming, Put your phones away.