The Falling Girls

by Hayley Krischer

  “What the fuck does that mean?” Jadis says, cutting her off. “Do you understand why we’re here?”

  I tell her it’s time to go to the police. It’s time we tell the truth. We have nothing to hide.

  “It wasn’t the Xanax,” I say to her.

  “I know,” she says, her lips quivering.

  “Oh my god, what do you know?” Jadis says.

  “What happened that night at the dance, Chloe? I’m begging you.”

  “She made it so hard for me, always in the middle of the two of them like that. Constantly having to pick a side. Do you know how many nights I had to listen to Chloe Schmidt cry over her? How wounded she was? Chloe first putting her on a pedestal, then icing her out for days.”

  If Chloe lived long enough, would she have done that to me too? Would it have been inevitable? I can’t help but think it.

  “Did you see her do something?”

  “I saw her shaking that Vitaminwater up a little too hard and maybe I saw her slip something in there. I don’t know, Shade. I kept telling myself that I was seeing things. But the more time went on, I kept asking myself how this could be possible?” she says, her eyes wide, unblinking, her voice in tatters, barely able to get it out.

  “When it was just the three of us, Chloe Schmidt used to make these threats in passing. Like, I’m gonna spike that bitch with Xanax. She said it so many times that it became her go-to insult. So I didn’t take it seriously. There was so much drama between them. You say things like that sometimes. Like I hate her. Or I never want to talk to her again. Don’t you?”

  I nod my head. I knew it to be true, to never want to talk to your best friend again. To threaten something like that.

  Jadis and I glance at each other. Jadis looks away first.

  “Chloe Schmidt had a sweet craving because she had been on such a strict diet—no sugar allowed. So I wondered about it because, you know, Vitaminwater is full of sugar. But I let it go because it was a weird night. Homecoming. All of that attention and applause. The adrenaline still racing. And then on top of it, the Molly. That was the biggest surprise,” she says. “She dumped fentanyl powder in the Vitaminwater. Just a little bit of powder, enough to knock her out. Not to kill her, she swore to me. Never to kill her.”

  It was that moment after we took the Molly, when they skipped off. Whatever Chloe wants, Chloe gets, Chloe Schmidt sang.

  “How long did you know about this?”

  “Last night,” she says. “She told me the details late last night.”

  Chloe turns to look at Jadis. “When you gave us all the Molly, that’s when she knew her plan would work.”

  All this time, Chloe Schmidt was trying to get me to believe that Jadis had something to do with it. I doubted my own best friend, questioned all of Jadis’s motives. Everything that Jadis did, every move she made, fueled more doubt.

  And I bought it.

  The manipulation of it all. Those times that Chloe Schmidt cried about losing her best friend. The way Chloe’s mother told me that Chloe Schmidt was spending so much time at her house, that she just wanted to be closer to Chloe, her scent, her memories. And then those girls in school, whispering that I was a murderer. How she tried to shake my confidence, how she let me fall to the turf. Me, six feet up in the air, spinning in a full circle, and she lets go. It takes my breath away.

  “She told me she didn’t want to kill her—just wanted to make her tumble a little so she could pick her back up again. She wanted to humiliate her the way she had been humiliated.”

  Except you don’t make someone tumble with fentanyl. You crush them.

  I think about the way Chloe Schmidt strutted into that funeral with that little black dress, the way she bossed everyone around at practice, the way she went after me. The way she went after Jadis.

  I can hear her Jeep raging down the dead street. I know it’s her Jeep. I know it.

  “You texted her that we were here?” I say.

  “She’s my best friend,” Chloe says, blankly. “What was I supposed to do?”

  Chloe Schmidt races past the recycling bins until she stops short in front of Chloe’s driveway. Slams her Jeep door and marches over like she’s going to knock us down, just barrel right into us.

  I have as much adrenaline as she has, and I meet her at the street and shove her back, my flat palms against her broad shoulders.

  “I saw a video of our routine,” I shout at her wildly, my voice deep and ragged. “I saw you let go of my foot. What do you think Coach will say when I show it to her?” I feel everything stiffening in my body. As if what she did to me was the worst of it.

  In a low voice it comes to me. “What did you do to Chloe Orbach?”

  “What did I do to her? What did I do that she hadn’t already done to me?” she says, struggling to get away from me, but I have a lock hold on her forearm. Her voice lower and shaky, like she’s transported somewhere else.

  “Do you know when I got my Jeep, the first place I went was to Chloe Orbach’s house. It was so warm, a perfect night to be outside and ride around with the top down. That shitty little house of hers on the hill. My Jeep was like a goddamn carriage coming to save her. I walked up the crumbling staircase. The bottom of the front door covered in mold. She said her mother had to fire the housekeeper because they couldn’t afford her anymore. There was never a housekeeper to begin with.”

  Her mouth grimacing, shaking.

  “The first thing she said? Give me the keys, bitch. Of course I was like, You’re not driving my Jeep, Chloe. Are you insane? Oh, but you know Chloe Orbach. She pissed all over everything, like a territorial wolf. Aren’t best friends supposed to share everything? she said. Wasn’t everything that was mine hers? Did it have to be the Jeep too? I bought that Jeep with the money my father left me before he died. And she knew that. Wasn’t it enough that I had given her that lapis heart and diamond necklace from that jewelry influencer on Instagram? Wasn’t it enough that she came to all of my cooking classes? That I gave her half the Lululemon leggings my mother bought for me? That she spent all of middle school living in my house? Nothing was enough.”

  The heart-shaped necklace with the diamonds. I told her how pretty I thought it was in the hallway one day and she blew it off, rolling her eyes. Thank Instagram.

  “She kept pushing me about the Jeep. Pushing and pushing, and I kept telling her to stop as I clutched the keys in my hand. She ripped the keys away from me and threw them into the street, cackling.

  “She gave me that good cheer pivot that you know she had, and she said to me: I hope you fucking crash.”

  Chloe Schmidt gets quiet, real quiet. Her eyes down. I think she forgets that we’re even there.

  “I could have torn her apart right there, told her she was a user or told her to get her father to buy her a Jeep of her own. But, oh, that’s right. She doesn’t have a father. Just a drunken joke of a stepfather with his two barrel-headed sons. At least I knew what it was like to have a father who loved me and left me something. Not like her, who had nothing except for a cringey cheerleader mother.”

  “Why are you telling us this, Chloe?” I say.

  “Because I want you to know. I want all of you to know what kind of friend I was to her. How much I put up with. And through all of it, I was still her best friend. Her most loyal friend.”

  The anger back in Chloe Schmidt’s face again, so much more anger than I’ve seen before. A flush of fury, and she swings her arm out of my grip.

  “You killed your best friend and you tried to put it on me,” Jadis is saying, growling. She follows Chloe Schmidt to the Jeep, so close to her, so filled with rage, that I wonder if she’s going to hit her.

  “Because she was mean to you? Because she threw your keys in the dirt? Because she bullied you? Because she said something horrible to you that she couldn’t take back?” Jadis says. “Why?�
�

  “Because I didn’t like her,” Chloe says. “Sometimes it’s as simple as that.”

  An alarm inside of me sets off, the tragedy of it all sinking in, that Chloe Schmidt murdered Chloe Orbach.

  Chloe hops in her Jeep, backs out of the driveway, and peels away.

  Chloe Clarke buries her face in her hands and screams, a terrible scream filled with loss. I try to soothe, to shush Chloe, but there’s no cork for this devastation. And I want to wrap my arms around her, I want to tell her that it’s going to be okay, because that’s what you do in this sort of situation, when you’re watching someone hysterical like this, so fragile. When there are no other words.

  While we wait for the police, Chloe’s mom paces inside, on the phone with a lawyer. I can hear her sobbing.

  Chapter

  36

  CHEERLEADER KILLS BEST FRIEND AT HOMECOMING DANCE

  On Saturday, November 7, high school cheerleader Chloe Schmidt was supposed to rally the home team at the Groveton Panthers’ football game.

  Instead of cheering, Schmidt was arrested for murder.

  Yesterday, Schmidt pled guilty to drugging her best friend, cheer captain Chloe Orbach, with fentanyl, an opioid that is 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine. Schmidt, Orbach, and three other friends, all minors, took MDMA, also known on the street as Molly or ecstasy, at the homecoming dance.

  “We are devastated about the senseless death of Chloe Orbach,” said Jonie Verinza, Groveton High School principal. “We do not condone any use of illegal drugs or alcoholic substances during school functions.”

  A source close to Schmidt told The Groveton Post that she and Orbach had been fighting for months. “Their relationship was explosive,” the source said. “They were on the verge of a breakup, which Chloe couldn’t handle. “

  Suffice it to say that most friendship breakups do not end in murder. And it has the town asking: Why would a teenage girl kill her best friend?

  “That’s the million-dollar question,” sociologist Stacia Karols, a professor at New York University, said. “But the real question is, what happened in their friendship that caused Ms. Schmidt to resort to this kind of brutality?”

  When you add together teenage hormones, a developing brain, and genetics, you are dealing with an explosive mix.

  Friendship breakups can be a trigger for erratic behavior, Karols said. Because as common as friendship breakups between women are, they’re also taboo. They’re humiliating, according to Karols.

  “No one really wants to admit that they’ve fallen out with their friend,” she explained. “Because breakups between women go against all of women’s ingrained social and emotional tendencies. Female friendships are the glue that keeps society together.”

  Studies show that when men are dealing with stress, they go into a “fight or flight” mode. Women retreat and they run to their friends. But if the friendship is the cause of the stress—who do you turn to?

  Francesca Mironda, PhD, a clinical psychologist who specializes in adolescent codependency, theorized that it is possible that Schmidt and Orbach had a classic codependent relationship that went wrong. The American Psychological Association describes codependency “as an unhealthy devotion to a relationship at the cost of one’s personal and psychological needs.”

  In a codependent romantic relationship or a platonic friendship, one person can lose themselves in the other person, ignoring their own feelings.

  “Eventually you need that friend to need you. And if that disappears, then it can be soul-crushing to the relationship,” Dr. Mironda said. “It’s impossible to say why Ms. Schmidt did what she did, but based on the evidence, based on her cold response to police, it seems that there was an element of rejection. It’s possible that Ms. Schmidt no longer felt needed, that she was no longer cared for in the way that she had once been.”

  “My heart is absolutely broken,” Groveton cheerleading coach Demi Alvarado said. “All of my girls are tough, resilient athletes. But it is going to take a long time for us to heal from this. Maybe we never will.”

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  Two weeks into this and noise from the media doesn’t stop. All the newspapers. National newspapers picked up the story. Crime podcasts. Everyone asked the same question. How could a girl just decide to kill her best friend? Couldn’t she just stop talking to her? Couldn’t she tell her that she didn’t want to be friends anymore?

  It’s so much more complicated than that.

  I’m not making excuses for Chloe Schmidt, but there was very much an all-or-nothing mentality around Chloe Orbach. When she fluttered around you, she encompassed you. She didn’t let you go. I don’t know what it was like for Chloe Schmidt to slowly lose that over time, but I imagine it was devastating.

  Jadis says she’s a sociopath.

  They’re saying in the comments that Chloe could get life in prison with parole after fifteen years. I scroll through all the comments, reading opinions people have from across the globe about this horror. A girl who kills her best friend. Someone writes that they’ll wait until she’s eighteen to try her so they can stick her in women’s prison. That she doesn’t deserve to be in juvy.

  I try to imagine Chloe Schmidt in prison with grown women. How she’d fall asleep every night crying, fantasizing about her white Jeep, about her Instagram account and the way her life used to be.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  Jadis’s mother is taking a temporary leave from work that’ll extend through the holidays. She’s scared something is going to happen to Jadis. Taking Molly at the homecoming dance was the thing that finally got Jadis’s mother’s attention. I’m not sure why that was the final straw, but it was.

  Jadis is going to an artsy boarding school up in Vermont after winter break. A place where she can be herself, where she can draw, her mother says. But we both know it’s more than that. It’s a place where other people can look after her.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  I walk down to Jadis’s house, my feet crunching over frozen leaves. Her mom decided to cover up the pool earlier than New Year’s. When we asked her why, she said, “Too much has been left uncertain. We should start to follow some rules and close the pool in September like normal people. We don’t always need to stand out, do we?”

  The pool is covered up with a big black casing. The lounge chairs, except for two old ones, are all put away. There’s nothing more depressing than a pool off-season. Makes you think back about what was and how it’s all dead now.

  “Did I tell you my mom invited my aunt and her husband over for Thanksgiving? My cousins who I haven’t seen in two years are coming too.”

  “Wow, she’s taking this let’s-be-a-family kick seriously,” I say.

  “Yeah,” Jadis says, her mind gazing somewhere else. “My new therapist told her we should have family dinners. And also I talked about you today.”

  “Oh? What did you tell her?”

  “Well, she asked me if I was mad at you for joining cheer. I explained to her that I wasn’t mad about the cheer itself. It was really about me being mad that you wanted to do something without me. It was like you broke up with me, but you didn’t tell me. You just kept pretending that everything was fine between us even though it wasn’t at all.”

  I want to deny it, tell her it’s not true. That I didn’t break up with her. But in a way, I did. I did break up with her and I didn’t know it either.

  “I’m sorry, Jadis. I’m sorry for everything.” And I am. I’m sorry for getting her wrapped up in the Three Chloes. I’m sorry for dragging her into this mess. I’m sorry that she thought she had to bring something like Molly to the dance to make me happy. I’m not sure if I could have done anything differently though. If I had, what would it had been?

  “Why are you sorry? Sorry for having wants and desires? F
or making new friends? You shouldn’t feel sorry for that,” she says. “Just say it, Shade. You felt trapped in our friendship.”

  Jadis shakes her head. Takes out her vape. Draws in heavy and releases the smoke, and it’s like a double cloud mixed in with her breath.

  “That’s not it at all,” I say, and I want to cry, that clenched feeling in the back of my throat. With my finger, I hover over those two pinkies tattooed on her forearm. “That’s what you thought. But that’s not what happened. I just wanted to be . . . myself.” I say, and I can hardly get the words out. I don’t know what about that is so difficult to convey. That I wanted to be completely enmeshed with her, inseparable as we’d been for so long. No ending, no beginning.

  But I wanted to be me too.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  Chloe Orbach’s death and Chloe Schmidt’s arrest put the future of the whole squad into question. Just before Thanksgiving, parents came out in droves to a school board meeting, protesting about cheer saying it was an old-fashioned, outdated cult. Not even a real sport. No protection for the girls. No real goal except to cheer for the boys. And now this. One cheerleader killed another one? Her motive so shallow and unclear.

  “What kinds of girls are we raising?” one mother said. “The hypersexuality of their uniforms is offensive.”

  That’s only how it looks from the outside. People didn’t understand the drive of the team and how hard we worked. We lifted each other up and gave each other hope. What other sport could you say that about? Where a team stands on the sidelines trying to bring aspiration and optimism to a crowd of screaming fans?

  The football moms showed up at the school board meeting to support the cheer moms and the squad. Altogether, about thirty of them spoke, many of them with CHEER MOM bedazzled on their sweatshirts, each of them starting their speeches with: What is this country turning to? How could you imagine a town without cheerleaders?