Coach thinks Zoey’s mother filmed it on her phone. She doesn’t know if it’s too far away for us to really see each step of it, but she’ll ask.
I know she’s not going to want to go down this road with me. Coach’s job isn’t to suspect anything. Coach’s job is to put all of her faith in her girls.
I thank her. Assure her that I’ll be back at practice next week as soon as the doctor gives the go-ahead.
“There are strong girls on this team. Big personalities. I know Chloe Orbach was one of those people. And I know how close the two of you got in such a short period of time,” she says. “You’ve come such a long way, Shade. You’ve done so much since you’ve been on this team. You’ve added so much to who we are. I hope you know that.”
Coach, our mama bear, gushing. Wanting to believe the best in us.
“Thanks, Coach.”
“Just remember that you came on this team only having done gymnastics for a few years when you were eleven or twelve. Girls like Chloe Clarke, Chloe Orbach, and Chloe Schmidt, these girls have been going to cheer camps and conditioning practices for years. They know exact holds and positions. They know the technicalities. Tumbling. And even with all of that, mistakes can happen.”
“I know, Coach,” I say. “I know.”
* * *
■ ■ ■
Right away, I text Pri to find out what class she’s in. History on the upper level. I tell her to get a pass and meet me in the hallway, but when I run up there, she’s still at her desk. I have to wave to get her attention, and she politely asks for the pass and slinks out.
“We’re doing test prep, Shade, I can’t be out here,” she says.
“Listen to me,” I say, out of breath. “Do you remember exactly how I fell?”
“How you fell at the game?”
“Yes, technically. What happened? What went wrong?”
“Honestly, Shade,” she says, kind of mumbling. “I would never want to put the blame on anyone.”
Of course not, I tell her. Of course we won’t do that.
Let it out, I want to scream.
“We went over it with Coach. Because Chloe Schmidt was going on and on about how she saw your legs spread apart and wanted me to back her up on that detail, but I didn’t see anything like that. I was looking right at your body because I have to let go of you for that split second while you spin. I know you’re not a base, and I know being a flyer is terrifying. But so is basing, trust me. You’re responsible for so much. You have to understand in that stunt, my job is to attack your ankle and cup your left foot.”
She starts to tear up, wiping the wetness away from those long black lashes.
“Oh, Pri.”
“I remember thinking that your body looked so tight. It was clear you were going to hit it. But then the next thing I knew, you lost your footing on your right side and I couldn’t catch you.” She lowers her head, sniffling. “I’m so sorry I couldn’t catch you, Shade. I’ve been dreaming about you falling for the past three nights.” Her head collapses in her hands, and she lets out a sob.
I stroke her soft hair, her head on my shoulder, and stare down the long empty hallway. It was so clear: Something happened at the game. I haven’t been imagining it.
“It’s not your fault, Pri,” I say, hugging her. The back of my throat tightening. “It’s not your fault at all.”
Chapter
31
I run out of school and start to walk home through the light snow. The wet flakes on my face, meshing with my tears. I grunt as I walk, holding in all that pain, my head pounding now.
An older man with jeans and suspenders salts his front walk.
“Shouldn’t someone your age be in school?” he says.
I keep trudging along, and he mutters something about kids these days.
I’m at my front door, and the key is jammed in the handle. The snow gets heavier, and I kick at the door.
My heart’s beating so hard that it feels like it’s going to thump out of my chest. I’m remembering the way Chloe Orbach tormented Chloe Schmidt in her Jeep that day after practice. When she blabbed about how Chloe Schmidt got liposuction and lied to her followers. That was a stab of betrayal, wasn’t it? Not only did she bring it up—but she did it in front of me.
Then Chloe Schmidt branded me as an interloper at the homecoming game.
If you’re Chloe Schmidt, you’d want revenge. You’d want to hit back.
Chloe Schmidt hated me. I don’t need video of the game to know what she did. I can picture the whole thing blazing through my mind. Falling with no ground under me. Crashing into Priyanka because Chloe Schmidt didn’t have my foot. I remember it clearly, don’t I?
Her hand wasn’t there.
What did the doctor say after I described the fall? I could have broken my neck.
If Chloe Schmidt could do that to me so recklessly, what else could she do? All those tears for Chloe Orbach, she even camped out in Chloe’s bedroom. My best friend, she cried. My best friend. Could it all have been a show?
All this time I kept thinking it was Jadis who did something to Chloe Orbach. I accused her of it. But what if it wasn’t?
I sink down to my knees. I can’t stop the tears from pouring out. I hold my arm over my face and scream. My muffled cries.
My mother flings open the door. “What is it, Shade? What happened? Why are you home?” My hair is all wet from the snow, my nose full of snot. I can’t stop crying. I can’t stop crying. I can’t even get the words out because I don’t have any words.
What would the words be? That I had it all wrong? That I thought maybe for a minute that Jadis killed Chloe Orbach? How could I have even thought that about her?
My mom peels my hair from my wet face, holding me tightly and rocking me.
* * *
■ ■ ■
Thirty minutes later, I’m in bed, calmer because my mom gave me half an Ativan. Pills are my mother’s answer to everything.
My body shakes as she rubs my back, but slowly, carefully, my mind is untangling. The Ativan doing its job. It’s not like a sleeping pill where it knocks you out. It makes you drowsy, but mostly, it makes you not care. Someone could come in and take you in a white van and lock you up in a cellar and you’d say, Uh-huh.
Or if someone suggested that your best friend tried to kill the captain of the cheerleading team, you might shrug. I can see why people get addicted to this stuff, because you don’t feel.
I start to fade out, my eyes shutting, then I hear my mother calling me.
“Shade?” my mother says, still sitting there on the side of my bed like she used to when I was little. “Where did you get this awful mat? It smells like feet.”
* * *
■ ■ ■
Numb, but awake, a buzz comes through my phone about an hour later. It’s an alert for Chloe Orbach. I had set it to pop up multiple times a day, but most of them are nothing. They’re all Chloe Schmidt being quoted, saying how she misses her best friend. How detectives are working on the investigations. Montages of Chloe Orbach and how her life was taken too soon.
This one is different. My neck and chest tightening up as I read it.
Chloe Orbach, the Groveton cheerleader who died last month at the homecoming dance, had Xanax, MDMA, also known as “Molly,” and fentanyl in her system, according to a toxicology report released by the Passaic County Medical Examiner’s office. In a statement provided, Ms. Orbach’s family said they plan to investigate how Ms. Orbach obtained the drugs that led to her death.
Xanax, MDMA, and fentanyl.
My whole belly, acidic, stabbing pains through my ribs. I look out my window, focus on something concrete, the gray sky. The bare trees like skeletons.
I go right to Instagram. Because that’s where Chloe Schmidt shares her most intimate secrets.
I swipe past the
reels of her and her personal chef, the two of them in her massive kitchen, the kind of kitchen that I’m sure Chloe Orbach would have wanted. The one that any one of us would want. Chloe’s mother and her newly tightened face strolling in and out, tasting her daughter’s creations. Kissing her daughter and leaving. Just the whole thing perfectly adorable.
No update yet about the toxicology report.
And then I see that she has a new story. It was posted seconds ago.
In big white letters against a fuchsia background: If anyone thinks they’re better than me or thinks they can break me and Chloe apart, I have news for you: You can’t.
Break them apart how?
Chloe Schmidt, my god, what are you thinking?
Then another story appears, connected to the first. Just a picture of Chloe Clarke and Chloe Schmidt with their arms around each other, two all-American girls, cheerleaders, best friends forever and ever. Except the picture had been cut on one side; someone else’s arm and head had been there. The wisps of blonde hair make it obvious who it was.
She cut Chloe Orbach out of the picture.
Just cut her out like she didn’t even exist.
I take my finger off the screen and try to go back to the first slide to take a screenshot, but then the whole thing is gone.
Just like that. Poof.
* * *
■ ■ ■
I sneak out of my house, because my mother keeps wanting to tend to me. She’s certainly had enough practice from all her unstable friends. I don’t want her to know I’m gone.
Down at the bottom of my block, that spot where Jadis and I meet. I run into the field, throwing my hands down into the frozen ground, that light dust of snow and sharp meadow grass pressing into my palms. I do it again and again, tossing my body backward. I’m dizzy and I know I shouldn’t be doing this. Staggering across the field. I should pay attention to an injury, not ignore it, not tumble on rock-solid earth without a spotter. Blame the Ativan. My mind’s detached, but my body wants to ride hard.
Feed your focus, Coach always says, but what if you don’t know what your focus is?
Go. I clap, shiver, squeezing my palms together. Double back handspring, down on the ground, and I rise up again. Smoky breath whisking from my mouth. Step back, inhale. Soar straight up in the air like a fucking bird with wings and twist my hips, knee across my body, flip over and land on my feet. I stumble, but I don’t fall.
I scroll through my contacts in the dark. Who do I call, who do I call? I hit Chloe Clarke’s number. It can’t be text, I need words from her. I know she won’t answer, but I dial again and again, piling up all of those missed calls. Don’t ignore me, Chloe. Don’t you dare.
Trudge back up my street, and my phone buzzes in the quiet night.
“Chloe?” I say, breathless, standing still.
“It’s not a good look for you, being a stalker.”
“Did you see the tox report? Did you see what else was in her system? Xanax and fentanyl,” I say, a car whizzing by. My fingers freezing, holding my phone tight against my ear.
“Where are you? Sounds like you’re on a road. Aren’t you supposed to be home resting?”
“When did she take the Xanax, Chloe?”
I hear her mumbling something to her mom, that she’s not hungry. I’ll eat later, Mom. I love you too. Yes, I promise, everything’s fine, I hear her say. This dangerous game of pretend that we’ve been playing. First trickling in, then swooping its wings around us.
“You don’t understand, Shade. Chloe Schmidt’s mother has a pharmacy in her bathroom. And so we were at Chloe Schmidt’s house before the dance,” she says softly. “We all took a little Xan, just to take the edge off. Chloe and Chloe were fighting, and it was my idea. It was a bottle right there on her mother’s vanity, so I opened it up and split it up into quarters. Anyway, I thought it would relax us for a minute. All that meanness, I couldn’t take it anymore.”
This is the first I’m hearing about Xanax, even though I asked her multiple times if Chloe took anything before the dance.
“A quarter of a tab of Xanax isn’t going to kill someone,” I say to her.
“You don’t know that,” she says, shaky. “Together with the Molly. You don’t know that.”
“Okay, so let me get this straight. You think you killed her?” I say this in disbelief. Like she can’t be serious.
“Read the toxicology report, Shade! That’s one of the reasons we didn’t want to go to the police. Because of the Xanax.”
Back at the library that day, Miss Perfect Cheerleader swore up and down she left the gym after Chloe Orbach collapsed because she was saving face, because a cheerleader and an honor student would never ever do Molly.
Now she’s telling me it’s because of the Xanax.
“That’s why Schmidt’s been covering for me. She’s been protecting me since it was my idea to steal the Xanax. Because I feel responsible for rummaging through her mom’s stuff.”
Chloe Schmidt, my oh-so-loyal base who was supposed to keep me from crashing into the turf? She’s been protecting Chloe Clarke?
“Because we would do anything for each other,” Clarke says. “Anything.”
I think about what Chloe Schmidt wrote on her Instagram today. If anyone thinks they’re better than me or thinks they can break me and Chloe apart, I have news for you: You can’t.
That was a message meant for me. She must have known, or had some idea, that Chloe Clarke was going to spill it about the Xanax. That she had too much guilt to hold it back any longer.
The post was a warning for me to back off. But to back off from what?
Would Chloe Schmidt’s mother have fentanyl in her bathroom? It’s possible. That day at the tracks, Chloe Orbach told me that Schmidt’s mother recently had a face-lift. Between the face-lift and the liposuction, a “pharmacy,” according to Chloe Clarke, I’m sure she’s got enough pills to anesthetize a large animal. Rich people can always get their hands on strong drugs.
It makes me want to scream for doubting Jadis the way I did.
I know I can’t convince Chloe of anything in this moment; her loyalty to Chloe Schmidt is too strong. You can’t penetrate best friends like that. Not when they’re in cover-up mode. The two of them, they’ve had practice constructing lies to teachers, coaches, boys, and parents for years.
Until I can put all this together, I need her to think that I’m coming from a compassionate place. Isn’t that what my mom likes to say: Find compassion, Shade.
I do feel sorry for Chloe Clarke. All that posturing for so long. All that pressure will make you do stupid things. Like turn your back on the truth.
Part
III
Chapter
32
For everything that I can’t stand about my mother, for all of her trips and her opinions and her friends floating in and out, she gives people chances and understands people. I know she feels that sometimes you have to look deep into what people are capable of.
I need my mother to tell me that Jadis has nothing to do with this.
She’ll set me straight about Jadis. She’ll tell me that our friendship hit a bump. That Jadis has her own long list of problems that has nothing to do with me, that has nothing to do with Chloe Orbach’s death. Nothing at all.
* * *
■ ■ ■
I don’t expect to see her doing her fish face in her bathroom mirror, dabbing blush on her round cheeks. Next to her, my hair so similar to hers, my cheekbones and my eye shape. I don’t usually see the similarity, but I can’t look away from it tonight. Even with my face flushed from the cold, with my mind wild.
“You’re going out?” I say.
She glances at me funny. “Sienna called me last-minute. She has a ticket to that jazz club in Newark. I wasn’t going to leave you, but I went in your room and you weren’t there,” she says.
“I needed some fresh air,” I say. “You could have texted me if you wanted me to come home.”
“You could have told me you were going,” she says, sounding hurt. “I didn’t want to seem like a nag.”
“I wouldn’t mind if you sounded like a nag once in a while. You’d sound like a mom.”
She kisses my forehead, then turns to the mirror, doing the fish face and prune lips. I sidle up next to her and make the same fish face. It’s become a joke between us, and anyone who knows her.
I need to get to the point before it’s time for her to leave. I can see her being antsy already. Another swipe of the blush, another pass of mascara.
“I’m glad you’re feeling better,” she says. She must read my need to talk, because she leans against the sink. “So what’s up?”
“Does something have to be up for me to come in here and talk to you?”
“Usually, you only come to talk to me because I’ve done something wrong. Usually, you’re not talking to me at all.”
“I’m sorry, Mom. I’m sorry that I’ve been taking it out on you.”
“Oh?” she says. “I didn’t expect you to say that.”
“I’ve been going through some things. Things between me and Jadis have been . . . hard.”
“I figured it had gotten complicated once you started cheer.” She sprays a frizz tamer in her hair and scrunches. Fish face. Scrunch. Fish face. Scrunch.
“Mom, do you think Jadis is a good friend?”
“Jadis?” she says. “Jadis is very loyal.”
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
“Well, this isn’t a secret. But Jadis has a lot of problems. She comes from a family of neglect. And when someone has too many problems, it’s not easy for them to be a good friend because they’re only worried about surviving,” she says. “And I love Jadis. She’s spent so much time here. She came with us on that Jersey Shore vacation. When your grandmother was alive, you brought her to Florida. She’s seen it all. But she’s been different this past year. She’s been distant.”
The Falling Girls Page 19