I Kissed Shara Wheeler(10)

Belltower Books, so named because it sits inside the base of the tower, is pretty much the only place in False Beach worth being. It’s small, only two cramped rooms plus a third that requires a climb up a ladder and special permission, with books piled high on every available surface, like the floor, or the shelf above the toilet, or the top of a terrarium containing a fat iguana. Every hour on the hour, the bell in the tower echoes through the walls of the store, rattling all the way down to the front desk, where Georgia’s dad sits in his aviator glasses and listens to The Eagles.

She finds Georgia perched on the top of the ladder with a paperback, the bottom half of her uniform traded for rolled-up gray sweats and Tevas. The two of them look a lot alike—brown eyes, thick eyebrows, angular jaws—but Chloe’s aesthetic is more dark academia and Georgia’s is more backpacking granola baby butch. They even have almost the same short, dark hair, but Chloe has blunt, decisive bangs, while Georgia doesn’t care who sees her forehead.

Georgia is the kind of person who enters a room like she’s stepped inside it a thousand times, knows where everything is, including the exits, and isn’t worried that anything could have possibly changed since the last time she was there. She’s too tall to look small, too gentle to be imposing, too smart in ways that have nothing to do with chemical formulas or antiderivatives to care about her GPA. One time, in their creative writing elective, Chloe was assigned to describe a person with one word. She chose Georgia and described her as “sturdy,” like a tree, or a house.

It’s a miracle that someone like Georgia coalesced from the primordial ooze of Alabama. Life would be unbearable without her.

Chloe reaches up and taps twice on the side of Georgia’s ankle. “Whatcha readin’?”

Georgia flashes the cover without looking up from the page: Emma.

“Austen? Again?”

“Look.” Georgia sighs, apparently finished with the passage she was on. She never speaks when she’s mid-passage. “I tried one of those literary contemporaries Val suggested—”

“Please don’t call my mom Val.”

“—and the thing about books these days is, a lot of them are just not that good.”

“And yet you want to write a book these days.”

“The trick is,” Georgia says, shutting her book, “I will simply write a good one.”

“I don’t get the Austen thing with you,” Chloe says as Georgia slips between the rungs of the ladder to the shag rug below. “I always found Emma annoying.”

“The book or the character?”

“The character. The book is fine.”

Georgia leads the way to the front desk, announced by the echoing clangs of the water bottle she always carries as it collides with bookshelves and chairs. Georgia’s mom waves from across the store, headphones on as she does inventory.

“Why is Emma annoying?” Georgia asks.

“Because she’s manipulative,” Chloe says. “I don’t think she really makes up for everything she does to everyone else by the end.”

“The point of the book isn’t for her to make everything right. It’s for her to be interesting,” Georgia says, slipping behind the desk for her things. “And I think she is—she’s this girl trapped in the same place she was born, so bored with what she’s been given that she has to play around with people’s lives to entertain herself. It’s a good character.”

“Sure, okay.”

“Also, it’s romantic. ‘If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more.’ Best line in Austen’s entire body of work. And I’ve read them all, Chloe.”

“How many of them have you read?” Chloe deadpans.

“All of them.”

Chloe laughs, eyeing the books behind the counter.

“Anything new in the ol’ CMFC?”

While Georgia rereads Regency classics, Chloe’s favorite stories are the ones where the headstrong young woman on a cinematic journey to master her powers falls for the monster who’s been antagonizing her all along. Georgia knows this, so she curates a stack of books behind the counter for Chloe and adds to it every time they get something Chloe might like. She affectionately calls it Chloe’s Monster Fucker Collection.

“One,” Georgia says. She plucks a battered paperback off the top of the stack—one of those ’80s high fantasies with a loinclothed, mulleted elf on the cover. Her mama has a million. “Fairy princess on a heroic quest ravished by evil elf mercenary. Straight though.”

Chloe sighs. “Thanks, but I’m maxed out on male villains for the month,” she says.

“Thought so,” Georgia says. She chucks it toward a box of secondhand books to be shelved. “Still on the hunt for the megabitch of your dreams.”

“It doesn’t have to be an evil queen,” she says. “It’s just preferred.”

While she does like boys, she generally finds the traits of a compelling villain—arrogance, malice, an angsty backstory—tedious in a man. Like, what do hot guys with long dark hair even have to be that upset about? Get a clarifying shampoo and suck it up, Kylo Ren. So your rich parents sent you to magic camp and you didn’t make any friends. Big deal.

“If the girl’s going to end up with a dude who’s a monster,” Chloe says, “it needs to be—”