“Did you go there to do something else?”
There’s an anxious pause, her mouth open.
“Like what?”
“Like to hurt someone?”
And there it is. I’ve finally said it. Something that I can’t take back.
The boys splash around behind us, far away enough so I know they can’t completely hear us. I hear Drew mumble, “Catfight.” Of course that’s what a bunch of guys would chalk it up to. A catfight. Every part of my body, shaking. Like I can’t catch my breath, and all of the images, all of them from that night at the dance. The Molly that she gave Chloe Orbach. How excited she was to share it.
I feel dizzy, like I might fall down. Panic comes over me in flashes of heat. First my arms then my chest then my neck. Those images again, how Chloe Orbach opened her mouth and stuck her tongue out. How Jadis carefully placed it at the tip. It’s like I brought a lamb to the slaughter. The heat rising up to my face now. My whole body, engulfed.
It’s not the first time I thought she could be responsible.
But if I say it out loud, once I ask her, it would make it real.
“Did you want to hurt Chloe Orbach?” I say.
She reaches for the bag of Twizzlers, rips it open, and shoves one in her mouth, holding it between her lips like it’s a cigarette.
“I see what those bitches are doing, you know,” she says.
“Oh? What’s that?”
“They’re trying to get you to think I did this. They’re trying to turn you against me. They’re trying turn us against each other.”
“Like I would let anyone do that to us.”
“Wouldn’t you though?” She looks up at me, chomps on her Twizzler. “Did I mention that I’m trying to stop vaping?”
“No, you didn’t,” I say.
“I’m trying to kick things that aren’t good for me. I’m trying to get rid of toxic things in my life.”
“Who even are you?” I say.
“Who is anyone?”
This game of hers, wordplay and dares, cryptic answers. It scares me, and I’ve had enough of it. She got what she wanted. A video that shows me reveling after my friend died. A denial of any wrongdoing.
* * *
■ ■ ■
I stumble out of Jadis’s house, and she’s following me down the barren street, calling after me, promising that she’s going to delete the video or that she did delete the video. I don’t even know what she’s saying anymore. I can’t think straight. The only thing in my mind, the only thing that I can even see is that Molly, the crown that she fed to Chloe Orbach.
I’m walking in the middle of the street like some lost straggler and she’s behind me in the dark, begging me to turn around, to talk to her. How was she supposed to respond to that question: Did you want to hurt Chloe Orbach?
Maybe she’s right, maybe it was ridiculous to ask her or to expect the truth.
Except it all breaks apart in this moment. I can feel it like a quick bite—our friendship will never be the same. Everything inside of me shuts off. I can’t turn around and make it okay.
I stomp over the yellow lines on the road and leave her voice behind me.
“Shade, c’mon, Shade,” she’s calling. “They’re doing this to us. They’re putting the wedge between us.”
But the feeling just gets worse. That feeling of sickness and dread, all of it piling up inside me.
That if Jadis did this, if she really gave Chloe Orbach something different than the rest of us, it wasn’t to hurt Chloe Orbach. If she did it, if she did something so horrific, she did it to hurt me.
Jadis was so willing to go to that homecoming dance. She hardly needed convincing. Maybe it was because she had a plan all along.
If Chloe Orbach died that night because of some revenge fantasy that Jadis concocted, then I don’t know how I’m going to live with myself.
Chapter
27
I wait for Chloe Clarke in the library during study hall the next day. I didn’t want to talk to her at practice the day before. Too many people around. The library has sounds of its own. It’s an old building, so the floors are wooden and creaky. The lights on the library desks, a greenish blue, everyone studying, pallid and ghostlike.
I’m reluctant to talk to Chloe, but I don’t feel like I have another option. It’s not as if I can talk to anyone else about this. And it feels like a volcano in my chest, hot and pulsing.
Madeline Steiner and Rory Green are just behind me. Rory and I were the only sixth graders in pre-algebra. I didn’t even know I was good at math, but I tested high. Jadis tested high too. But she didn’t want to be in a class with seventh graders. Too much pressure from the teachers. She’d rather get an A in an easy class and breeze through.
But then Rory and I started studying together, and Jadis hated that. Hated Rory. Every day it was something else, this assault on Rory Green. Rory Green smells like tuna fish. Rory Green doesn’t wear a bra. Rory Green is a know-it-all. Rory Green has yellow teeth. She infiltrated my mind with so much negativity about Rory Green that I started to look at her that way. Why did Rory have to eat a tuna fish sandwich every day for lunch? Did she not brush her teeth? Why did she think she was always right?
“Those seventh graders are all stuck up,” Jadis said, all-knowingly.
So I told my mother I hated the teacher. That being in a seventh-grade class made me nervous, that I was having anxiety attacks. That I didn’t want to be a spectacle. She spoke to the guidance counselor and had me moved me out of the class. And I stopped talking to Rory Green. Pretended she didn’t exist. Ghosted her when she texted me and ignored her in the hallway.
I hear them talking about me now. Rory and Madeline. The two of them best friends. They probably study together. They probably sleep with their phones next to their pillows saying goodnight a million times.
“I heard they’re looking at the surveillance tapes,” Madeline whispers.
“Shh. She’s going to hear you,” Rory says.
It’s so obvious that they want me to hear them. They’re not trying at all to be quiet.
“Murderer,” Madeline hisses.
I turn to them and point my finger. My broken face glaring. I’m scarier than I’ve ever been.
“I can hear both of you,” I say crisply. “Shut up.”
Rory’s face looks disappointed. That she had once thought so much of me. And now look at who I am, caught up in all this madness.
My mother would love a girl like Rory Green. In the feminist club. Focusing on her grades. Making sure she saves the planet. Raising money for small villages in Guatemala. Doing a clothing drive for women’s shelters.
They sneer at me and stand up. They’re not the kind of girls who want to fight. They’re just the kind of girls who want to passively talk behind your back until you break. But I’m not the kind of girl who breaks so easily.
Chloe sits down just as they walk away.
“Why are we meeting here like this?” she says. “Isn’t it bad enough that we’re being scrutinized by #crimetok or whatever they want to call themselves?”
“Where else would you like to meet? A dark alley?”
I remember what Emma said to me earlier in the week, how she finds it weird that we were in the bathroom together doing Molly. Jadis and the cheerleaders. That’s how people see me now. As one of them.
“When you think about what happened to Chloe, what do you imagine?”
“I think about a lot of things,” she says. “I think it’s not fair that she died. That she had her whole life ahead of her.”
I tell Chloe what Rory and Madeline said about the surveillance tapes. I leave out the part about how they called me a murderer.
“So what?” Chloe says. “We were hanging out in the bathroom together. That’s what friends do. They can’t point the finger at us for that.”
<
br /> “I feel like I’m going crazy,” I say, and then finally spit it out. “Do you think it’s my fault?” I want her to absolve me. I want her to make it go away.
“No, I don’t think it’s your fault,” she says, shaking her head.
We sit quiet for a moment, and I almost say it, part of me is dying to say it, just to release it, I think Jadis might have killed her. But I swallow the words until they’re buried deep. This is not something I can say to Chloe, no matter what I believe.
“The cops came to my house. They had questions for me about that night,” she says, leaning in closer to me. “There was a woman detective who looked like Jennifer Lopez. It was like she was there because she was trying to trick me. She said she used to be a cheerleader. A top girl like me.”
“What did you tell her?”
But she doesn’t answer my question. She picks at a nail, fixating on it until she pulls it back, and I watch her, wondering if she’ll peel the whole thing off, it looks so painful. Those long nails of hers. I wrap my hand around her wrist. “Chloe, stop. You’re going to make it bleed.”
I almost stun myself after I say it. Isn’t that what we do when we’re surrounded by the unknowns? We pick and pick at something until it bleeds? Until it unearths itself?
“We have to hold it together until the toxicology report comes out,” I say. “That’s all. We have to just wait. If we can hold on until then—”
“I don’t know if I can, Shade. I can’t take all this lying. Everything just feels worse instead of feeling better,” she says. “I can’t even decipher what’s a lie and what’s not. What’s the truth?”
“What does Chloe Schmidt say?”
“You know what Chloe Schmidt says,” and she sighs deeply pulling her hair away from her face. “She wants to tell the cops that Jadis gave us the Molly.”
I think about the bullshit texts that Chloe Schmidt has sent me. The truth shall set you free.
“So why doesn’t she?” I say. “What’s stopping her?”
“I don’t know,” she says, and exhales. “At first she said it was because she didn’t want to get me in trouble. Now she just keeps threatening it. I’m almost ready for her to just do it.”
This terrifies me. The idea of Chloe Schmidt going to the police and throwing Jadis to the wolves.
“Chloe, it was an accident,” I say. “It had to have been an accident. A horrible accident.”
I shift in my chair, uncomfortable. I sound too desperate. Like I’m trying to convince myself, and aren’t I?
“There are stories like this all the time. That someone couldn’t handle a drug because they had an underlying condition. An allergic reaction. A blood clot. Something.”
I’m reaching. I can feel myself reaching for anything. For some answer that’ll make this all better. Something that will make Jadis not guilty. Something that will make it so Jadis, the person I once called my best friend, is not a murderer.
But there’s nothing there.
Tears run down my cheeks, my body curls over, and I hide my face in my sweatshirt.
“I just feel so terrible. I just feel so responsible,” I say.
Chloe stands up from her chair, and the legs squeak through the cavernous room. Everyone stares. She pulls her arm around my shoulder and walks me out of the library.
I sink down against the cool cement wall.
“It’s not your fault, Shade,” she says. “You’re a good person. I promise you.”
“How do you know though? You’ve known me for all of a few months,” I say. And I’ve known Jadis forever.
“What do you do when you thought you knew someone like the back of your hand?” I say, quietly sobbing. Trying so hard to hold it in. Feeling so bare even in this empty hallway. “What happens then?”
* * *
■ ■ ■
Chloe walks with me to practice, which kind of surprises me, but I take it. We get there early and do laps together. Feet stomping the track, my body hearing that thud thud thud, meditating on it until Jadis’s voice bangs its way back into my head.
They’re doing this to us. They’re putting the wedge between us.
And I run faster, pounding the track hard so my thighs are hot, so I can hear my breath in my ears. I run until I numb out the pain.
Tomorrow is the first game back, and my practice is rough, but I don’t stop until I have that double back handspring full. Coach hugs me at the end of practice, telling me that she’s so proud, and I’m stiff from her touch. If I let myself settle even for a second, this whole hard facade will melt away. I’ll dissolve into a puddle.
Chapter
28
At home that night, in my bed with a blue KT Tape up my calves. My eyes closed because I can’t scroll through Instagram anymore. I hear the bell and some murmuring. A minute later, my mom knocks on the door.
With her is a short woman with muscles popping under her tight athletic shirt. A gun on her hip. She introduces herself as Detective De Leon. The cop that went to Chloe Clarke’s house. She makes it real chummy first, tells me she was a cheerleader, just like she told Chloe.
“What spot are you?”
“Flyer,” I say.
“Ah, me too. But we called flyers ‘top girl’ on my squad. We were really competitive. I saw a couple of fights between cheerleaders in my day,” she says with a chuckle.
I don’t laugh.
Detective Cheerleader leans against my wall. She tells me she knows how cheerleaders stick together. That this accident with Chloe Orbach must have been terrible for us. She knows we’re all so devastated.
“I met with two of her other friends,” she says. “Both Chloes. Ms. Clarke and Ms. Schmidt. It can get really confusing being friends with so many people with the same name. When I was your age, I had a lot of friends named Jennifer. We’d call them by their last initial. Jennifer W. Jennifer J. Jennifer S.” She pulls out a notepad. “So what do you call these girls?”
“Just Chloe,” I say.
My eyes blinking from being nervous, my jaw tightening.
“I heard you were with Chloe Orbach that night. Can I ask some questions just to understand what happened? I promise it won’t be long.”
I nod again, lick my lips. She wants to get an idea about Chloe. If she was happy. If she showed signs of depression. If she’d want to harm herself.
“Chloe was never depressed,” I say. “Not that I knew of.”
“I heard you were close with her. Were you dancing with her that night when she collapsed?”
“Yeah, we were all dancing,” I say. Like it’s no big deal. Girls dancing together. What could possibly be suspicious about that?
“Were you taking anything that night, Shade? Maybe you let off some steam, all that work you put into cheer? I remember those days. I know how much pressure it can be. Maybe you guys did something? Maybe you were experimenting with something. Like an illegal substance?”
I glance over at my mom, who is leaning against my dresser. How worried she must be.
I’m trying to control my breath, wondering what Chloe Clarke really told Detective Cheerleader. If she already gave us away, and everything she told me at the library was a lie. Wouldn’t the detective have called me down to the station and made me fess up if that was the case? Isn’t this just a ploy to get me to talk?
“I don’t do drugs,” I say. My voice as straight as I can make it. “I’m a cheerleader. That’s strictly against the rules.”
“Okay, but sometimes even cheerleaders need to let go. Sometimes cheerleaders need to unwind,” she says. “And look, if that’s the case, we don’t want to get anyone in trouble. We just want to know what happened to your friend.”
I don’t say any more. I have to talk to Jadis first. Because if they’re talking to me now, they’re going to talk to her next.
“Do you thi
nk she was well liked on the team? I mean, she was the captain, but did people like her?”
“Everyone loved her,” I say. I hold back what I really want to say, which is that she fought with some people. That her own best friends had issues with her. That she was like any other girl and she could sweep you up in her manic energy, but that she was also complicated.
“Who else was with you that night at the dance? You said there were a bunch of you dancing. You, Ms. Schmidt, Ms. Clarke. Who else?”
My heart stops.
“My friend Jadis. Jadis Braff.”
“And is Jadis on the cheerleading team?”
I laugh. “No, she’s not.”
“Why is that funny?”
“It’s just that Jadis is anything but a cheerleader.”
She nods. Pausing. Waiting for me to say something else. But maybe I’ve said too much.
“How did Ms. Braff become friends with Ms. Orbach?”
“Through me,” I say, telling her the biggest lie of them all. “We were all friends. We all became friends.” It hurts my mouth to smile, but I do. I give my best cheer grin.
Because that’s what I’ve been training all this time for. To fake it.
When Detective Cheerleader leaves, my mom calls a lawyer friend of hers who says not to answer any more questions from any cops whatsoever.
* * *
■ ■ ■
I text Jadis frantically, and she doesn’t get back to me for about an hour. The fallout of our new relationship is that now she makes me wait. I almost call her out on it, but for what? That night I walked away from her, I sealed that. Me.
I want to shake her, make her listen to me. Oh, Jadis, if I could just convince you to tell the truth! What would it take?
We meet at the bottom of the street. Our regular spot. But nothing about this place feels good now.
“Why does it matter, anyway? You’re so worried about me ghosting you and instead you should be focusing on why those bitches are trying to frame me. Your teammates.”
The Falling Girls Page 17