The Nine Lives of Chloe King (2 page)

“I don’t want to sound old-fashioned, but—”

“It’s gonna stunt my growth?”

“It’s a gateway drug.” Mrs. King put her hands on her hips. In black Donna Karan capris with a silk-and-wool scoop neck and her pixie haircut, Chloe’s mom didn’t look like a mom. She looked like someone out of a Chardonnay ad.

“You have
got
to be kidding me,” Chloe couldn’t keep herself from saying.

“There’s an article in the
Week.”
Her mother’s gray eyes narrowed, her expertly lined lips pursed. “Coffee leads to cigarettes leads to cocaine and crystal methampheta-mines.”

“Crystal
meth,
Mom. It’s crystal
meth”
Chloe kissed her on the cheek as she walked past her to the door.

“I’m talking to you about not smoking, just like the ads say to!”

“Message received!” Chloe called back, waving without turning around.

She walked down to Irving Street, then continued walking north to the southern side of Golden Gate Park, stopping at Café Eland for the two promised coffees. Paul didn’t partake; she got him a diet Coke instead. Amy was already at the bus stop, juggling a bag of bagels, her army pack, and a cell phone.

“You know, real punks don’t—“Chloe put her hand to her ear and shook it, mimicking a phone.

“Bite me.” Amy put down her bag and threw her phone in, pretending not to care about it. Today she wore a short plaid kiltlike skirt, a black turtleneck, fishnets, and cat-eye glasses; the overall effect was somewhere between rebellious librarian and geek-punk.

The two of them were comfortably silent on the bus, just drinking coffee and glad to have a seat. Amy might be a morning person, but Chloe needed at least another hour before she would be truly sociable. Her best friend had learned that years ago and politely accommodated her.

There wasn’t much to look at out the bus window; just another black-and-white-and-gray early morning in San Francisco, full of grumpy-faced people going to work and bums finding their street corners, Chloe’s reflection in the dusty window was almost monochromatic except for her light hazel eyes. They glowed almost orange in the light when the bus got to Kearny Street and the sun broke through.

Chloe felt her spirits rise: this was the San Francisco of postcards and dreams, a city of ocean and sky and sun. It really was glorious.

Paul was already there, sitting on the steps of the tower, reading a comic book.

“Happy pre-birthday, Chlo,” he said, getting up and lightly kissing her on the cheek, a surprisingly mature, touchy-feely act. He held out a brown bag.

Chloe smiled curiously and then opened it—a plastic bottle of Popov vodka was nestled within.

“Hey, I figure if we’re going to be truants, why not go all the way?” He grinned, his eyes squeezing into slits zipped shut by his lashes. There was a slight indentation in his short, black, and overgelled hair where his earphones had rested.

“Thanks, Paul.” She pointed up. “Shall we?”

“What if you had to choose just one of these views to look at for the rest of your life,” Chloe said. “Which one would it be?”

Amy and Paul looked up from each other, almost intrigued. The three of them had been sitting around for the past hour, not really doing much, with Chloe’s two best friends occasionally exchanging giggly glances. That had grown old real fast.

Half of Coit Tower’s windows showed spectacular, sun-drenched San Francisco scenery, the other nine looked out into a formless, gray-white abyss.

“I’d wait until the sun cleared before making my choice,” Amy said, pragmatic as ever. She swirled her cup of coffee for emphasis, mixing its contents. Chloe sighed; she should have expected that answer.

Paul walked from window to window, game. “Well, the bridge is beautiful, with all the fog and clouds and sunset and dawn—”

“Bor-ing,” Amy cut in.

“The Transamerica Pyramid is too sharp and weird—”

“And
phallic.”

“I guess I would choose the harbor,” Paul decided. Looking over his shoulder, Chloe could see colorful little sailboats coming and going with the wind, dreamy, hazy islands in the distance. She smiled. It was a
very
Paul choice.

“Definitely
not
Russian Hill,” Amy added, trying to regain control of the conversation. “Fugly sprawl with a capital
Fug.”

“Made your decision just in time, Paul …”

As they watched, low clouds came rolling down from the hills, replacing each of the nine windows, enclosing the views in a white, total darkness. What should have been a beautiful blue day with puffy white clouds, now that they were out of Inner Sunset, had rapidly given way to the same old stupid weather.

This wasn’t exactly what Chloe had expected for her sixteenth-birthday-school-blow-off day.

To be fair, she always expected more than life was likely to give: in this case, a golden sunny
Stand by Me/Ferris Bueller
these-are-the-best-days-of-our-lives sort of experience.

“So dude,” Amy said, changing the subject. “What’s up with you and Comrade Ilychovich?”

Chloe sighed and sank down against the wall, taking a last swallow from her own cup. Like Amy’s, it was spiked with Paul’s birthday present to her. Paul had already drunk his diet Coke and was now sipping directly from the amazingly cheesy plastic vodka flask. Chloe looked dreamily at the black-and-red onion domes on the label.

“He’s … just … so …
hot.”

“And
so
out of your league,” Amy pointed out.

“Alyec is steely-eyed, chisel-faced young Russian,” Paul said with a thick cold war accent. “Possibly with modeling contract. Sources say Agent Keira Hendelson getting close to his …
cover.”

“Screw her.” Chloe threw her empty cup at the wall, picturing it smashing into the student council’s blond little president.

“You
could
be related, you know,” Amy pointed out. “That could be a problem. He could be a cousin or nephew or something of your biological parents.”

“The old Soviet Union’s a big place. Genetically, I think we’re okay. It’s the getting to actually
date
him that’s the problem.”

“You could just, I don’t know, go up to him and like,
talk
to him or something,” Paul suggested.

“He’s always surrounded by the Blond One and her Gang of Four,” Chloe reminded him.

“Nothing gained, nothing lost.”

Yeah, right.
Like
he
had ever asked anyone out.

Amy swigged the last of her coffee and belched. “Oh, crap, I’ve got to pee.”

Paul blushed. He always got nervous when either Amy or Chloe discussed anything like bodily functions in front of him—so usually Chloe didn’t talk about that stuff when he was around.

But today she felt … well, odd. Jumpy, impatient. Not to mention a little annoyed with both him
and
Amy. This was supposed to be
her
birthday thing. So far it sucked.

“Too bad you can’t do it standing up, like Paul,” she said, watching him blush out of the corner of her eye. “You could go over the edge.”

Now, what had made her say that?

She stood up. Leaning against the stone wall, Chloe peered down. All she could see was swirling whiteness and, off to her left, one water-stained red pylon of the Golden Gate Bridge.

What would happen if I dropped a penny from up here?
Chloe wondered.
Would it make a tunnel through the fog? That would be cool
A tunnel two hundred feet long and half an inch across.

She climbed up into a window and dug into her jeans pocket, hunting for spare change, not bothering to put her other hand on the wall for balance.

The tower suddenly seemed to tilt forward.

“What—,” she began to say.

Chloe tried to resteady herself by leaning back into the window frame, grasping for the wall, but the fog had left it clammy and slick. She pitched forward, her left foot slipping out from beneath her.

“Chloe!”

She threw her arms back, desperately trying to rebalance herself. For a brief second she felt Paul’s warm fingers against her own. She looked into his face—a smile of relief broke across it, pink flushed across the tops of his high cheekbones. But then the moment was over: Amy was shrieking and Chloe felt nothing catch her as she slipped out of Paul’s grasp. She was falling—
falling
—out of the window and off the tower.

This is not happening,
Chloe thought.
This is not the way I end.

She heard the already-muffled screams of her friends getting fainter, farther and farther away. Something would save her, right?

Her head hit last.

The pain was unbearable, bone crushing and nauseating—the sharp shards of a hundred needles being forced through her as her body compacted itself on the ground.

Everything went black, and Chloe waited to die.

Two

She was surrounded
by darkness.

Strange noises, padding footsteps, and the occasional scream echoed and died in strange ways, like she was in a vast cavern riddled with tunnels and caves. Somewhere ahead and far below her, like she was standing at the edge of a cliff, was an indistinct halo of hazy light. It rippled unpleasantly. She started to back away from it. Then something growled behind her and shoved her hard.

Chloe pitched forward toward the light and into empty space.

This was it. This was
death.

“Chloe?
Chloe?”

That was odd. God sounded kind of annoying. Kind of whiny.

“Oh my God, she’s—”

“Call 911!”

“There’s no way she could have survived that fall—”

“GET OUT OF MY WAY!”

Chloe felt like she was spinning, her weight being forced back into her skin.

“You
stupid shithead
!”

That was Amy. That was
definitely
Amy.

“We should call her mom. …”

“What do we say? That Chloe is … that Chloe’s
dead?”

“Don’t say that! It’s not true!”

Chloe opened her eyes.

“Oh my God—Chloe …?”

Paul and Amy were leaning over her. Tears and streaky lightning bolts of black makeup ran down Amy’s cheeks, and her light blue eyes were wide and rimmed with red.

“You’re a-alive?” Paul asked, face white with awe. “There’s no way you could have—“He put a hand behind her head, feeling her neck and skull. When he pulled it back, there was only a little blood on his finger.

“You—you didn’t—oh my God, it’s … a … miracle …,” Amy said slowly.

“Can you move?” Paul asked quietly.

Chloe sat up. It was the hardest thing she could ever remember doing, like pushing herself through a million pounds of dirt. Her head swam, and for a moment there was two of everything, four flat gingerbread friends in front of her. She coughed, then began puking. She tried to lean to the side but couldn’t control her body.

After she finished heaving, Chloe noticed that Paul and Amy were touching her, holding her shoulders. She could just barely feel their hands; sensation slowly crept back over her skin.

“You
should
be dead,” said Paul. “There is no. Way. You could have survived that fall.”

She was struck by what he said; it seemed true. Yet here she was, alive. Just like that. Why was she so unsurprised?

“Help me up,” Chloe said, trying not to notice the confused and frightened looks on her friends’ faces. They helped Chloe lean forward, then slowly rise on shaky legs. She pointed her toes and bent her knees. They worked. Barely.

“Holy shit,” said Paul, unable to think of anything else to say.

“We should get you to a hospital,” Amy suggested.

“No,” Chloe answered, faster than she meant.

“Are you
insane?”
Paul demanded. “Just because you’re not dead doesn’t mean you don’t have a concussion or something. … You can’t just fall two hundred feet and walk away without something happening.”

Chloe didn’t like the way her friends were looking at her. Shouldn’t they be overjoyed? Thrilled that she wasn’t dead? Instead they were looking at her like she was a ghost. “Yeah. We’re going. No arguments,” Amy said, stubbornly setting her pointy chin.

She and Paul helped Chloe up, one at each shoulder.
My devil and my angel,
Chloe thought ironically.
Well, my
nerd and my wanna-be outsider.
Her head pounded, and she wanted nothing more than some aspirin.

And time alone to
think.

She managed to get time to think in the emergency room, though she wasn’t exactly alone. After Amy made a big hysterical deal about her
friend
and the
accident
she’d had, the reception nurse took one look at the healthyseeming girl and relegated the three of them to the waiting room, behind a line of homeless people with visible damage: broken arms, scraped-up faces, oozing sores.

Paul took over filling out the contact information and paperwork, but after an hour of playing Guess the Symptom in her head, Chloe finally lost it.

“Look, why don’t we just get out of here,” she hissed. “I’m
fine.”

“As if,” Paul said, reaching for a three-month-old
Vogue.

“Don’t touch that,” Amy said, smacking his hand down. “Germs.” Then she turned to Chloe. “You fell like a million feet onto your
head
Chlo.”

Another half hour passed. They watched the muted news flitting by incomprehensibly overhead, stories about Iraq and Wall Street and some girl’s body found in an alley.

Finally, at four o’clock, the staff was ready to let in the girl with no visible injuries. The reception nurse put up her hand when Amy and Paul tried to follow.

“Only family,” she said.

Amy turned to Chloe, wrinkling her freckled nose and smiling. It was a “cute” look that Chloe knew she had practiced in front of the mirror for hours, but it just didn’t work with her friend’s regal nose. “You’ll be okay, I promise.”