The Falling Girls - Softcover

Krischer, Hayley

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593114167 ISBN 13: 9780593114162

Verlag: Penguin Young Readers Group, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

"A riveting, intimate portrayal of just how intense and all-consuming female friendships can be. Urgent and piercing, The Falling Girls is a gut-punch of a book." —Jessica Goodman, New York Times bestselling author of They Wish They Were Us and They'll Never Catch Us
 
From the author of the unforgettable Something Happened to Ali Greenleaf comes an intoxicating thriller about the dark paths female friendships can take, set against the backdrop of a high school cheerleading squad. Perfect for fans of Megan Abbott and Kathleen Glasgow.

Shade and Jadis are everything to each other. They share clothes, toothbrushes, and even matching stick-and-poke tattoos. So when Shade unexpectedly joins the cheerleading team, Jadis can hardly recognize who her best friend is becoming. 
 
Shade loves the idea of falling into a group of girls; she loves the discipline it takes to push her body to the limits alongside these athletes . Most of all, Shade finds herself drawn to The Three Chloes—the insufferable trio that rules the squad—including the enigmatic cheer captain whose dark side is as compelling as it is alarming.
 
Jadis won't give Shade up so easily, though, and the pull between her old best friend and her new teammates takes a toll on Shade as she tries to forge her own path. So when one of the cheerleaders dies under mysterious circumstances, Shade is determined to get to the bottom of her death. Because she knows Jadis—and if her friend is responsible, doesn't that mean she is, too?
 
In this compelling, nuanced exploration of the layered, intoxicating relationships between teen girls, and all the darkness and light that exists between them, novelist Hayley Krischer weaves a story of loss and betrayal, and the deep reverberations felt at a friendship’s breaking point.  

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Hayley Krischer is a writer and journalist. She is a regular contributor to The New York Times, where she covers women, teenage girls, celebrities, and cultural trends. Her work has also appeared in Marie Claire,The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, and more. Hayley is also the author of Something Happened to Ali Greenleaf. She lives in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, with her husband, two kids, one dog, and three cats.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter

1

The pep rally. I wake up before Jadis this morning because I don’t want to be late. Jadis Braff, my best friend, says pep rallies and organized sports are archaic. But I keep us on schedule because I don’t miss pep rallies. No matter how Jadis complains.

Jadis and I have been best friends since the fourth grade, since she moved into the big-­walled castle down the street from me. She’s the person I wake up with almost every morning with her arm across my chest. Her blue veins are translucent through her pale skin. Her light-­brown eyelashes. Her newly dyed black hair like the color of tar over her face, that sandy brown, her natural color, the last strand of her childhood and who she used to be, gone.

Jadis, who tattoos drawings on my body and hers. She taught me how to do it to her too, but I’m not as good. We mark each other because we own each other. Just two weeks ago, we tattooed two tiny hands on each other’s forearms. Inked on our skin forever. Pinkies entwined.

I shake her lightly and whisper, Wake up, sunshine, to her, but she pulls the covers over her head.

“Saccharine devil!” she cries. “Make it stop. I curse you back to your virginal hole.”

“Hey, don’t virgin-­shame me,” I say, and throw a pillow at her.

She climbs out of my bed and rifles through my clothes like they’re her clothes, and they might as well be. In the bathroom, I swipe deodorant under my arms, then she swipes. I squirt face wash in her palm, then in my own. I brush my teeth and then hand the toothbrush over to her. She pees. I pee. We share everything except bras. She swims in mine. She’s flat and I’m wider, more fleshy.

We stare at ourselves in the mirror. We heard this line in a movie once where a woman described her relationship with her best friend: “We’re the same person, but with different hair.” That’s me and Jadis. We’re the same person, on the inside at least. On the outside, I’m curly and frizzy. She’s straight and geometric. I’m olive-­skinned. She’s ghostly. My wide, dark eyes. Her deep-­set, ocean blues.

Except Jadis is the better, cooler, more interesting version of me. The person everyone stares at when they walk in a room. Like no one else is there. She’s been the coolest girl in our school since . . . forever. Not the most popular or most feared. Just the most brazen.

At the pep rally, we stand out like two sore thumbs. I grab Jadis’s hand, and we stare at the wooden bleachers filled to the brim. Because we’re late, there’s no room except for the front.

“Take a seat, girls,” Mr. Falcone, the oldest teacher on earth, says to us.

“Just trying to find a spot,” I say, and then he points to the front row. We stare at him in horror.

“I’m not sitting here,” Jadis says. “I’m sure there’s a place in the back.” Because the front row is an unthinkable gesture. I want to be here probably more than anyone else, and we never sit up front. It’s way easier sitting on the last bleacher against that cold wall because there, no one looks at you. Up there you have a vantage point. You can see everyone below. You get the best view of the cheer stunts from up top. I can watch their moves with my mouth agape. I can gasp or be critical at the back and no one notices how into it I really am. Up front, you’re left on display.

“Would it hurt you to smile, girls?” he says, his greasy comb-­over like an animal’s nest. “When I was a kid, girls used to smile.”

I promise you that girls his age didn’t smile. Especially when they were talking to him.

So we sit down because we have no choice. The pep rally is about to start, and the place is packed. Say what you want about the cheerleaders, but they always get a crowd. Down in the front, you can feel the pulse of the room. You get the full view. We’re so close to the cheer squad I can see the hair on their arms. The clogged blackheads on their noses. The stubble in their armpits. Rashy thighs. Their coach, pacing back and forth. All those cheer championship banners from twenty years ago filling the gym walls like ghosts.

“I can’t wait to get waterboarded by pom-­poms and the Three Chloes,” Jadis sneers.

The Three Chloes are Chloe Orbach, Chloe Clarke, and Chloe Schmidt. The in-­your-­face tight circle that heads the squad. They’re all juniors, like me and Jadis.

Their uniform tops cropped a little shorter than everyone else’s, their tight cheerleader stomachs and glossed lips glinting under the gym’s dingy lights. They’re ferocious about their bond, the way they grip each other’s hands in the hallway, making a wall so you have to walk around them. They’ve been doing it since middle school, so everyone is used to it.

Except for Jadis.

Jadis, of course, has to make a point that this is not 1958 and you can’t just rule a hallway, so she forces her way between them until they split apart.

The Three Chloes are the reason anyone comes to the pep rally.

The blaring dance party music starts as the cheer squad and their hyperfocused faces, their eyes wide, jaws clenched, take their places. There are only five of them out there; they’re a skeleton of a team. The Three Chloes and two seniors, Gretchen Paley and Keke Achebe. There’s a desperation. No giggling on the side. No tightening each other’s bows.

During a graduation party in June, two girls from the cheerleading team, Randi Schaffer and Isla Davidson, went to the hospital for alcohol poisoning. The year before that, one girl broke her collarbone trying to do a stunt. Another girl needed knee surgery. There were endless school meetings about the number of concussions cheerleaders were getting. Football players had helmets and precautions. They had a concussion expert on the turf. Cheerleaders, on the other hand, had two-­inch-­thick gym mats separating their heads from the ground. That was it.

Right away, the focus is on Chloe Orbach. Her wild, blonde ponytail tied back in a giant white bow. The other girls shaking their gold pom-­poms in a line, in formation, waiting for their leader.

Chloe Orbach sprints into a roundoff and then hurtles her body into three backflips, one exploding after the other.

That’s all it takes. Three perfect backflips, and I’m in a trance.

Spread out in a line. Clap, thigh slap, head nod. All of them, grunting, “We. Will show. Who’s best.” And they hurl their bodies into perfectly synchronized back tucks.

Four of the girls turn in to make a circle. Their bodies in a blue-­and-­white blur. White bows clipped in their ponytails, their arms up to the sky, those pom-­poms whizzing.

Then on Chloe Orbach’s one, two, three count, they rocket Chloe Clarke, dark hair, big brown eyes. They propel her up to the gym’s rafters, her long, tan legs in a wide V, arms out to the side, huge smile on her face, all that glitter sparkling in the light. Then she comes down as hard and as quick.

And they catch her, and somehow she rises again and does a tight scorpion, one leg above her head, the other straight as a pin, and she spins in a double down back into their arms. (I watch competitive cheer videos incessantly on YouTube. I know the terms.) The three of them, Chloe Schmidt, Gretchen, and Keke, catch her like she’s nothing.

The crowd screams and the girls, in sync, drop to their stomachs. Except for Chloe Schmidt, who flips her body backward and then...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Young Readers Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2022
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593114167
• ISBN 13: 9780593114162
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 320
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar