The Falling Girls

by Hayley Krischer

  “Because I’m a flyer,” Chloe says, that big ego coming to the surface again, that light in her eyes that I haven’t seen in so long. “And I soar.”

  “I’m sorry about the car thing the other day. That wasn’t my idea,” I say to Chloe.

  “You’re very good at blaming things on other people, Shade,” she says. “Maybe you should stop doing that.”

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  Practice takes away the sting. It stops the flooding of thoughts about Chloe Orbach that invade my mind all day. All night. The thoughts about Jadis and how she just showed everyone that little pillbox without even telling me.

  At home, I’m back in the same muddy place, sinking in all those thoughts.

  Chloe Clarke’s comment repeating itself. You’re very good at blaming things on other people.

  Who am I blaming?

  The only person I blame right now is myself.

  I turn on the television, and Chloe Orbach is right there, all over the news. A constant badgering. They love her. She is the perfect victim.

  When I close my eyes, she’s swaying in front of me, singing.

  I obsessively scroll through all the memorial posts, searching for something, like I’m going to uncover something I haven’t seen before. Something that will give me a clue to the nagging, terrifying thought, the one that hurts me most. That Jadis had something to do with her death.

  I think of the four of us in the bathroom stall. How Jadis so eagerly placed the Molly right on Chloe’s tongue. How satisfied she was.

  Why was she so satisfied?

  Would I be so satisfied to give a drug to someone Jadis befriended, someone who I saw as a threat? Someone who took her away from me? That’s the difference between us. I’d welcome that person.

  Wouldn’t I?

  Isn’t that what I’ve done with Emma, welcome her?

  Or would I let that person fly out into the void? Would I try to make my mark? Would I try to take a stand or make a statement? Would I try to hurt the person?

  Would Jadis?

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  At practice two days later, I’m more incensed, maybe because I’m so determined to forget. To erase all the noise from my mind. I sprawl out in the middle of our pep talk circle that Coach has started doing because “it’s good for our souls,” and show them a video I have of a full up. You load in, then they pop you like a top in a 360 spin.

  “Coach, you want us to push ourselves to do something new,” I say. “So let’s push ourselves.”

  “When do you want to work on this for?” Keke says.

  “For the first game back,” I say. That gives us about a week and a half.

  I look over at Chloe Clarke because I know she’s got a tight full up.

  She nods. “Let’s do it.”

  Coach works with Chloe Schmidt and Keke, both main bases, on the mechanics of the spin. Keke takes off one of her cheer shoes and hands it to Coach. She holds the shoe as if we’re in it, as if they’re working with an invisible flyer above them. They bend knees and dip at the same time.

  Across the mat, Chloe Clarke and I practice spinning on one foot for the stunt. One white cheer sneaker off to really dig into that grip.

  But the spinning makes me dizzy, and I fall over clumsily a few times.

  “You have to look at one thing across the room. Focus on something,” she says.

  Looking at her now, how graceful she is, I see how she could easily go into competitive cheer. There’s a show-pony component, sure, but it’s also beautiful the way those girls point their toes, extending their limbs like there’s no end.

  “Do you think Chloe’s mother saved those pictures that she put up in her room?” I say.

  “The last time I was there, I didn’t really want to ask her what she was going to do with all those pictures. Chloe’s been going over there a lot more than me. She would know.”

  I glance over at Chloe Schmidt, who is practicing footholds for the full up with Pri and Olivia.

  “Talking to her lately hasn’t been that easy,” I say.

  “I think if people start taking responsibility for their actions, then maybe everyone would be a little less tense.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?” I say.

  “You don’t think you’re at all responsible?”

  That sinking in my chest again. My stomach curdling up.

  “Of course I feel responsible,” I say, whispering. “But it was an accident, Chloe. We all took the same tablet.”

  And only one of us OD’d. But I can’t bring myself to say the words.

  She spins a few more times, her leg locked. Then moves closer to me. Catching her breath. “Did you ask Jadis where she got it?”

  “Of course I asked her,” I say. But did she answer me? No. She didn’t answer me at all.

  Chloe Schmidt calls for a run-through, and we all get into place. Coach starts out with a five, six, seven, eight and on the one, two I load in, Chloe Schmidt first base on my right and Priyanka on my left. Olivia behind me.

  Quickly they heave me up, and on four I’m supposed to spin on that right foot, except something is off and on five I come crashing down. My ass cheek slams on Chloe Schmidt’s shoulders, and I slide through Olivia’s hands. Schmidt huffs away, rolling her shoulder, muttering, Sloppy bitch. I hate working with her.

  Next to me, Chloe Clarke goes up beautifully like she’s done it a million times, and her bases crouch down on the two, three. She spins on the four, five and sticks it, both feet down, their hands wrapped around her ankles and shins on the six, seven, eight.

  “If I was with Chloe instead of her, then maybe I wouldn’t have a dislocated shoulder,” Schmidt yells, running through the door. “I’m getting an ice pack.”

  It’s unnerving.

  “Don’t listen to her,” Chloe Clarke says. “She’s still mad about the car. She says you basically kidnapped us. I told her that we were willing to get in. To do all of it, you know what I mean?”

  I nod, my tailbone burning from slamming into Schmidt’s shoulder.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  The next day before lunch, Jadis barrels through people in the hallway, then bashes her palm into my locker door.

  “Those cunts.”

  She shows me a social media post. It’s a photo of Jadis. The caption reads: Chloe knows what you did.

  “They posted a picture of me.”

  I grab the phone out of her hand. Scroll through. Another photo. A drawing of a tablet with a crown on it. Everything tightens up inside of me. I didn’t think they’d come after her like this. Chloe Schmidt maybe. But not Chloe Clarke.

  “You have to stop them, Shade. They’re going to get me in deep trouble. I’m not kidding.”

  “There’s no reason for you to get in trouble. You didn’t do anything, right? We didn’t do anything. We took Molly together, that’s all.”

  I say this to her hoping it’ll feel open-ended. That she’ll give me something in response. Because I’m looking for some kind of awful detail, because I have racing thoughts about Jadis and what she’s capable of.

  “If the police ask us questions . . . and if they ask those two bitches why anyone might want to hurt Chloe Orbach, then who do you think they’re going to point at? Isn’t that what they implied in the car? Isn’t that what they’re announcing to everyone with that Instagram story?”

  Her face is darker now, and she stands there, staring into me, zipping and unzipping her black hoodie, her jaw grinding like metal blades. So much rage that I don’t know what’s left of her. I don’t know her at all.

  “They’re all against us,” Jadis says. “You have to quit cheer or they’re going to take us down. Don’t you understand?”

  My heart sinks. Jadis will often say things just to p
ush for a reaction, but I wonder if this time she means it. If she thinks me quitting cheer—as if I even would—would somehow protect us from the tangled situation she’s got us in.

  “I’m not quitting cheer.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I love cheer,” I say, and it’s like I smacked her in the face. I don’t even tell her the real feelings I have. That I have to keep going, that I want to keep going, for Chloe Orbach. That her voice drowns out my insecurities. That when I’m at cheer, it’s the only thing that stops me from feeling so guilty about everything. About bringing Jadis to the dance. About joining the team. About having a careless mother who doesn’t take any of these social nuances into consideration.

  “What will it do if I quit cheer anyway?” I say. “How will it change anything?”

  “You have a death wish,” she says, and walks away.

  Chapter

  24

  I’m so tired. Practicing so hard this week. The strumming of Jadis’s threats. The way the school feels like it’s on fire with gossip about what happened to Chloe. So I work harder at practice, slamming my back tuck with Zoey until I hurt. The more I work it, the tighter I hold my core, the louder the sound of the pounding on the mat, the less my mind races.

  I miss Chloe Orbach. She floats in my mind, the way she used to walk into cheer with her kombucha and her turkey and her arnica gel and take care of us.

  The way she took care of me.

  That blonde hair always flying behind her, I miss that. The way she embraced life. Fearless and wild-eyed, I’d always remember her that way. Like the way you see those posters of dead celebrities—forever beautiful and forever young. I shake her away.

  In the locker room, changing, it’s like she’s waiting there for me, and I slip around the doorway searching for her. Nothing.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  I go home and pound down on my standing full, falling into a stack of pillows. My body exhausted. If I just put my head down for a few seconds. For a few minutes.

  Darkness. My phone buzzes next to me, and it’s an hour later. I must have passed out, stretched across the pillows on my floor.

  The call says it’s from Chloe Orbach.

  My heart stops. I sit up quick, the room fuzzy, my head throbbing, and I grab the phone from the floor. “Hello?” I say, shaky.

  On the phone, a cracked, broken voice. A woman.

  “Shade? It’s Chloe Orbach’s mother. I’m sorry to bother you,” she says.

  Sit up, wipe my face, rub my eyes. Try to sound awake. “Hi, Mrs. Orbach.”

  “You know I’m not Mrs. Orbach. I’m Mrs. Amato. I’m remarried.”

  “Right, of course, I’m sorry—”

  “Look, I’m just going to get to the point here. I’m calling people in my daughter’s phone because I’m just having problems digesting all of this. Chloe Schmidt mentioned the night my daughter . . . the night she . . . And I just need answers, because this is just not my daughter. The police are suggesting drugs because her autopsy suggests it. Can you believe they cut open my little girl? She was perfectly healthy. I just need to understand. Maybe you can help me understand?”

  “Of course, of course,” I say. But what can I tell her? How do I explain her daughter to her? A girl living in her own house, and she didn’t even know who she was. She didn’t know that she winced that night when her mother made her cheer with her. Or that she was ashamed of where she lived. That Chloe Orbach wanted out of that old static mold her mother had formed around her and she was willing to go to all lengths to claw her way out of it.

  “You have such an unusual name. Shade. People thought the name Chloe was unusual when I named her that, at least my family did. We didn’t know it was one of the most popular names. And my god, how could I know that Chloe would be best friends with two other girls who had the same name?”

  I hear her sniffling, her breath shortening, her voice groggy like she’s been drinking.

  “I never knew my daughter did any of that stuff. That’s what they’re saying, that she was taking something that night. They just don’t know what. I never knew a thing about my daughter. I really thought I knew everything. How naive was I?”

  “I don’t know what to say, Mrs. Orbach . . . I mean, Mrs. Amato. I’m just so sorry.”

  “Chloe Schmidt, she’s been so hurt by all of this. Poor Chloe. She calls me every day, do you know that? Sometimes she just comes over and sits in Chloe’s room and cries. I’ve known her since she was in kindergarten. Just a little girl.”

  Chloe Schmidt calling her mother every day would piss Chloe Orbach off to no end. I wonder if she’s doing it to torment Chloe in the afterlife. To give her a big fuck you now that she’s dead. I imagine her rummaging through Chloe’s room, fingering all those Chloé pictures, snuggling in her bed, trying on her clothes, seeing what she can borrow.

  Who am I to say? Maybe it’s everything that their friendship represented. All of that animosity disguised as love.

  “I feel bad for my daughter’s friends more than I do for my boys. My boys don’t even seem to notice what’s happened. I think in some way they think their sister is coming back. Anyway, Chloe Schmidt, she thinks maybe it’s possible that someone did this to her. Is that possible? You hear about these rape drugs. That’s what the police said too. That maybe someone gave her one of those roofies.”

  “A roofie? In her drink?” I say. “Chloe wasn’t drinking.”

  My stomach turns, that acid coming up again. I don’t say anything.

  “She never had a heart problem before. She never had even a murmur. There’d have to be a reason. And so the detectives think that one of her friends could have accidentally given her something. Maybe you were one of those girls? Did you give her something and you’re just scared to tell?”

  I flash back to the bathroom. The way Jadis placed the queen’s crown on Chloe’s tongue.

  “I didn’t give her anything.”

  I say it like it’s true. When I know I’m the one who got her into that bathroom stall with Jadis in the first place. She never would have been around Jadis, not twenty feet from Jadis, if it wasn’t for me.

  “Did you know my daughter had a tattoo? Someone gave her a tattoo on her thumb. A bow. The mortician tried to hide it, but I could still see it was there. Chloe Clarke told me it was one of her new friends. She was always getting different girls to come around, bringing them in to cheer. But a tattoo? That someone would carve that into her body in such a vile way? Why would she let someone do that to her?”

  I wish I could tell her what a fun night we had doing that stick and poke. How excited Chloe was. That it had nothing to do with pain. That it had everything to do with joy. That we became so close, the two of us. She just wanted to be closer to me. And I wanted to be closer to her. How do you explain this? Chloe’s mother will never understand. She’ll always judge me for it.

  “Did my daughter hate me?” she says, crying. It doesn’t even seem that she’s talking to me now. She could be talking to anyone. To God. To the clouds. The sky. Whoever took her daughter from her. “Is that why she would do this to me? Why she would leave me like this?”

  Yelling in the background. Boys’ voices. Chloe Orbach’s brothers fighting, maybe. Screaming, and then a wail of agony.

  “I have to go,” she says, and hangs up just like that.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  It’s Saturday, and my mom has been gone since Thursday on a forest bath retreat. She and her friend are going to bathe themselves in the sounds of the forest, she told me. I almost told her that it’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard, but I know I’ve been awful to her lately, so I shut up.

  That afternoon I invite Zoey over because if I don’t fill every hour, I think about Chloe. The guilt is all-consuming, and I can’t turn it off. I play it over in my head, the way Jadi
s opened up that little pillbox in the middle of the gym, how Jadis placed that Molly on her tongue, how Chloe was all of a sudden on the floor, and how we passed through those gym doors into the night.

  Zoey brings her gym mat, and we cover it with pillows. I’m going to flip myself into this thing until I can shake the images from the homecoming dance from my mind.

  Over and over back tuck, then rotating my body while I’m up in the air, Zoey spotting me, then twisting into the standing full. I do it so many times, land on my hips until I’m limping.

  I rest my face on the pillows, just for a minute. Just to stop for a few seconds.

  “What do you think happened to Chloe?” she says. “I didn’t want to ask you, but I feel like we’re all just avoiding it.”

  I tell her to go first. I want to know what she thinks.

  She tells me that three main conspiracy theories have blown up about Chloe Orbach’s death, and they’re circulating the freshman class.

  There’s a cheer coup. There’s a widely circulated Tik-Tok that the squad wanted to get rid of Chloe because of some secret war.

  It was revenge. On Instagram, somehow it got out about Chloe Orbach’s wall of Chloés. The theory is that people hated her because she was a narcissist. All she cared about was herself. People got sick of her.

  It was jealousy. On Facebook, someone posted copies of an article about a cheer mom in Texas who planned to kill her daughter’s cheer rival. They think the murderer is hoping for a Netflix deal.

  Surprisingly, no one mentions drugs.

  “How did the wall of Chloés get out? Someone had to have taken a picture of it,” I say. Could it have been one of the girls from the team?

  “I don’t know,” she says softly. “People think it’s weird that Gretchen and Keke are both seniors but Chloe Orbach got the captain’s spot. You understand that Black girls get overlooked for these spots, don’t you, Shade?”