“I know they want to talk to the girls on the squad,” she says, her hand gripped around my wrist. “Anything you can tell them, anything at all to help us. To give us a clue of what happened to my baby.”
I shake her off, really yank my hand away, and she stares at me until three women Chloe’s mother’s age swoop in and embrace her. I become just another mourner in line.
Jadis was right. I never should have gone up there to talk to her.
The shock of what they’ll find.
The women wail, grateful that it wasn’t their daughter. “Sylvia, can you believe it?” Chloe’s mother says. “My little girl. My little girl.”
I turn to the casket because that’s what I’m supposed to do. Stand or kneel in front of it. Say a prayer for Chloe. It’s all white, the casket pristine. A white shiny box and white roses. The smell so overwhelming, so floral, so much jasmine, like someone spritzed a mall kiosk perfume everywhere. I may pass out.
I force myself to stand there and look down at her. Her perfect skin, her blonde hair, draped over her shoulders. Her cheeks and her eyelashes so sweet and young and innocent. Sleeping Beauty. Chloe doesn’t look dead. She looks like a statue, and her face, her resting, calm face, looks remarkably like the Chloé ads she covered her room with. Flawless, sleeping, forever young.
I can’t get rid of this feeling, that I’m responsible for her death. How long will I feel this way? Forever? Will I rewind and pause on that night eternally?
Her hands are clasped over each other, and there it is, the bow that I tattooed on her thumb. They tried to cover it up with makeup so no one else would see it. But I can see the outline. I’m so surprised to see it that I gasp, and I close my mouth tight so that I don’t let any other noises out.
That reminder of the two of us that night at the abandoned tracks. The ivy around her wrist. The overgrown grass brushing against our hands. Her hair floating around her face as I gave her the stick and poke.
And now she’s here like this. Forever.
* * *
■ ■ ■
When I get home, my mom is in her bedroom crying. I can hear her from the hallway. Her night table is littered with takeout Chinese food. A pile of lo mein half-eaten in a bowl. Her head is lowered over her knees. I stand there quietly for a minute until she sees me. Her face is wet and streaked with tears.
“Why are you crying, Mom?”
“I’ve been thinking about you having to go to a funeral today. About what happened to your friend Chloe Orbach, and it’s heartbreaking.” She holds in a cry, just to let a few more words out. “I would die if anything happened to you, Shade. I would just die.”
She’s such a good friend to all of these lost women and men who traipse in and out of our house. Making time for all of their readings or gallery openings or their performance art.
“You didn’t even come to any of my games, so save your bullshit for someone else. Say what you want about Chloe Orbach’s mom, but at least she showed up.”
It’s like I stabbed her through the heart. Her mouth agape.
“Shade, why are you being so mean?”
“Don’t look at me like that, Mom,” I say. “Do you know that other girls’ parents come to the games and cheer their daughters on? They take photos and post them on Facebook. They make CHEER MOM shirts with a horrific bedazzle tool. Sparkling rhinestones. And you?” I say, shoving the bowl of noodles from the side of her bed on the floor. “You just sit here smoking weed and eating lo mein.”
She stutters, wiping her tears away, and I start to walk out, telling her that I have to be somewhere.
“Wait, Shade,” she says. “So you’re telling me that smoking weed and eating Chinese food makes me a bad person? Are you kidding me?”
“You’re missing the point.”
“I am proud of you, Shade. I’m always proud of you.”
“Right, if I joined the feminist club. Or if I was the director of the school play or if I was out protesting somewhere or volunteering at the library. But a cheerleader, oh my goodness, how shallow. How old-fashioned and misogynist.”
“I never said that, Shade.” And she gets out of bed and down on her knees so she can pick up the noodles. Her face looking up at me, shedding tears. “I love you and I love anything you do. I’m sorry, okay? I’ll come to the games. I don’t know how to get a ticket . . .”
“It’s a high school football game, Mom! Listen to you. You can travel around the world, you can meet all sorts of artists and bring them back to our house, and you can’t figure out how to go to a fucking high school football game?”
I look around her room. All the artwork from Tibet. All of the paintings from a gallery in London. The Henry Taylor signed poster of Michelle Obama. I want to tear it all off her walls and light it on fire.
It used to be that I liked hiding everything from her. My secret life with Jadis was beyond her reach because the two of us were so isolated, whispering in my bedroom or smoking on the corner or sinking to the bottom of her pool. I’m used to avoiding her and her disappearing on me.
Now she’s paying attention, and I’m supposed to be guilty for my explosions.
I want her to fight back, to punish me or something. The way the cheer moms would do with their kids, the way any mom would do. There would be rules. Limits. Wouldn’t there be?
She’s still on the floor picking up the lo mein, telling me that she loves me and that she’s sorry. She knows I’m taking it out on her because my friend just died, she says.
It’s fine, I tell her. I’m sorry for making a mess. Maybe she’s right and I’m taking it out on her.
I could see all of a sudden that she was, in fact, acting like a mom would act. That she was like all the other moms in that way—she was scared of losing me.
Chapter
22
I ask Jadis to pick me up after practice. I tell her it’s to talk about the funeral, but it’s really because I want her to know what Chloe Orbach’s mother said about the police and the toxicology report. It doesn’t feel right to me to put that in text. Call me paranoid.
We sit in the middle of the parking lot, idling, her looking around, watching for something.
“We could have talked about this last night if I had slept over,” she says. She hasn’t slept over in a few days. Maybe it’s been a week. Everything has been a blur since that night. The truth is, I don’t want her breathing in my neck, cuddling into my hip. I don’t want her body hanging across mine right now. I’m too unsettled by her.
When I’m around her, I feel that twitching, that discomfort. There’s an empty space between us, and I don’t know what to put there.
In the side mirror I see Chloe and Chloe stroll to Chloe Schmidt’s Jeep.
Then, suddenly, Jadis throws the car into reverse, riding backward in the parking lot. She quickly brakes, her tires squealing so that she blocks Chloe’s car in.
“Jadis, what—?” I say.
“Those bitches don’t want to talk to us. I’m going to make them talk.”
I’m not going to lie. Part of me admires it. Only Jadis would have this kind of moxie.
“Hey! What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Chloe Schmidt says in Jadis’s window.
“Both of you get in the back seat,” Jadis says. “We’re going for a drive.”
“Are you insane?” Chloe Schmidt says. “We’re not going for a drive with you.”
“Unless you’re talking to the police and telling them everything, then you need to get in the car so we can talk,” Jadis says.
“Oh, how do you know that we haven’t already talked to the police and told them everything?” Chloe Schmidt says.
“Because you wouldn’t have run out of the gym that night. That’s how I know.”
* * *
■ ■ ■
The four of us in the car, Jadis peels out
of the parking lot. Slow down, I tell her, we don’t want to get pulled over. But there’s no getting through to her right now. I can see the way she’s clutching the wheel, her head jutting forward.
Jadis drives up the hill through the barren trees, up to Barbour Hill, along the rocky cliffs. The gravel kicks up under the tires as we pass under the evergreens. I roll down the window and try to catch my breath. Behind me in the side mirror I can see Chloe Clarke clutching on to herself, like if she let go, she’d break apart.
“So what do you want to talk about?” Chloe Schmidt says, peeling off her varsity jacket, then rolling her lip gloss all over her already shimmering lips.
“Were you somewhere before the dance?” Jadis asks her.
“We were at my house getting ready and then we went to the dance,” she says. “What does it matter to you?”
“It matters because we don’t trust either one of you,” Jadis says.
Chloe Clarke shakes her head and starts crying. “I don’t want to be in this car with you. You’re scaring me. All of you.”
I reach through the seat for her hand to comfort her, but Chloe Schmidt swats me away.
“We’re friends,” I say, pleading with all of them. “We just need to figure this out, but we have to do it together.”
Except we’re not friends. Our common denominator was Chloe Orbach, and she’s gone.
“Before we get all chummy,” Jadis says, “let’s remember why we are in my car, okay?”
“Oh, I remember,” Chloe Schmidt says. “We’re here because Chloe is dead. Oh, and that’s right, because you gave her a tablet of Molly with a crown on it specifically for her. Oh, and then she died.”
Jadis doesn’t say anything because what can she say? There’s no denying that she did give her the crown. This conversation is going to get uglier.
“Look, we don’t know what happened. One minute we were dancing, the next minute Chloe fell to the ground,” I say, trying to stay calm. “We need to have the same story.”
“It’s called telling the truth,” Chloe Clarke says, her voice cracking. “And the truth is that Jadis got the Molly. That we all took it. And something happened to her. That’s the truth.”
“Oh, so you want to tell the truth about taking Molly at the school dance? Really?” I say. “You want to get kicked off of cheer for doing illegal drugs? We’ll get expelled from school too.”
I hate every word that came out of my mouth and I hate saying it to Chloe Clarke, so angry like that, because she doesn’t deserve it. But we’re stuck with each other now and we need solutions.
Chloe Clarke starts to shake, really shake, sobbing, her head over her knees. Schmidt rubs her back, tries to calm her down, but there’s no calming her.
“Where did you get the Molly?” Chloe Schmidt says to Jadis, smacking at the back of her seat. “That’s what I would like to know.”
“Don’t ask me that question,” Jadis says.
“It’s a simple question!” Schmidt says, and all I can hear is Chloe Clarke wailing over and over that Chloe didn’t deserve this and that she’s gonna puke.
“Pull over,” I’m saying to Jadis. “Pull over!”
The car screeches to the side of the road. Chloe Clarke’s face is flushed in fear. I follow her out, feeling shaky myself. Hands on my knees and try to catch my breath. We’re toward the top now, and you can see old houses in the woods below, the turrets peeking up through the trees. The tracks cutting down below it all, the ones where I tattooed the bow on Chloe’s thumb.
I intrinsically trust you. That’s what she said to me.
“I want go to home,” Chloe Clarke says. “I want to get out of here and go home.”
I hear Chloe Schmidt jumbling through the bag in the car to get her phone.
“I just want to make sure we’re all clear,” Jadis says. “That our stories all match up.”
But we haven’t gotten anywhere. Nothing matches up. Nothing is clear.
Chloe Clarke walks down the gravel road and I trail her, begging her to stop and talk to me.
She tells me that she’s been running the scenario over and over in her head. That she’s been trying to talk to Chloe Orbach in her dreams, asking her what happened to her.
I hear Chloe Schmidt and Jadis bickering in the car behind us. Something about the definition of a true friend.
“I know Jadis and you are like this, Shade,” Chloe says, crossing her middle and index fingers over each other. “And I know that no one wants to believe that best friends can do horrible things. But don’t you want to know?”
“Know what?”
“It’s so obvious, Shade. Where did she get the Molly?”
* * *
■ ■ ■
The ride back is quiet. Endless. The sky dark and empty. Jadis drops them off in the school parking lot and speeds away. Her reckless driving; I clutch on to the car handle. I think of the days leading up to Jadis getting her license, six months ahead of me. It was one of the most exciting times of my life. We were so eager for that license. It was the key to everything, the key to our freedom. Taking road trips. Cruising around Groveton. Going to concerts without having to ask our mostly absent mothers for a ride. Having to worry about them not remembering to pick us up.
But now I hate driving with her. She drives too fast, looking for trouble. All I want to do is crawl out of this car and get away from her.
Where did she get the Molly?
If Jadis just came clean to me about this, then we’d have something. We’d have some explanation at least. We’d have a story. But to keep it a secret, to insist on not telling even me?
Why?
We pass a thick row of those electrical towers. The empty field around them.
“I hate Groveton. I hate all these towers and all of these condos and I can’t wait to get out of here,” Jadis says.
“I didn’t know this was going to turn into a Bruce Springsteen song,” I say, trying to crack a joke.
“You know I think Bruce Springsteen is an overhyped old man, so I don’t even know what that’s in reference to.”
I sigh deeply.
I turn to her, my whole body. “I need to hear it from you, Jadis. Where did you get the Molly?”
“Oh my god!” she says, and slams her hands against the steering wheel. “I already told you that I got the Molly from a good source. Stop questioning me. You sound like them.”
“Don’t you see that you’ve set yourself up to be the bad guy here? The jealous best friend who cuts the cheerleader’s Molly with something lethal. They write TV shows about this, Jadis,” I say. “So if you could just explain—”
“I was trying to do a nice thing, Shade. I really was. I saw how much fun you were having with them and I just wanted to be part of that, get wrapped up in that like you were. Represent that other side of you. That wilder side. That independent side . . .”
But then she trails off. I’m not sure if she stops because what she’s saying is bullshit or because she sees I don’t care. I rest my head on the glass. I just feel tired.
* * *
■ ■ ■
In the shower, the water running over my face, replaying what Jadis said to me in the car. That she got the Molly from a good source. Source. It’s cryptic and unlike her. She doesn’t keep secrets like that from me, not anything this big, this important. At least she didn’t use to. Maybe that’s my fault.
Just like all of this is my fault.
I dream that night that Jadis cuts me open and splits me in half. That she’s doing a stick and poke of a heart pierced with an arrow on one side. On the other side, by my hip where my falling girl tattoo is, she scribbles something in black marker that I can’t read. When I ask her what it says, she whispers in my ear.
“You can’t get rid of me.”
Chapter
23
“You remind me of all the possibilities, Shade,” she says. And it makes me want to cry.
The gym is filled with our bodies smacking against the mat. A squad of nice girls, sweet girls, jamming their hands against the ground, fighting against gravity, making our bodies aggressively twist and turn and hurt.
All for you.
Coach thinks if I have something to focus on, something new, that it’ll be good for me. Since I have a tight back handspring, she wants me to try a standing full. A standing full is like a back tuck with a twist. You’re fighting against everything your body wants to do, which is land. You’re trying to fly in the air, stay up as long as you can to spin.
Zoey is the only other person besides Chloe Clarke on the team who can do a standing full. Her tiny little body whips through the air, and so she spots me so I can work on my back tuck. I power up and arch my back, pushing my whole body over, but it’s a terrible landing. My whole body jolts forward, and I land on my knees.
Chloe Clarke calls over to me, “You can’t tackle it like a back handspring. It’s entirely different.”
I’m surprised she even sees me, she’s been in so much of her own private melancholy. “You’re rotating too low. Remember, Shade. You’re shooting up, like a rocket. Think of your trajectory.” She stretches her arms straight up to the sky, those long fingers, then walks over to stretch my arms up. “This is where you want to go. Up. You need height first, then push your body over.”
Zoey stares at her in awe. “How were you able to explain that? How did you know the exact way to say it?”
The Falling Girls Page 13