I Kissed Shara Wheeler(12)

“How do you know where Jake lives?”

“Benjy lives on his street,” Chloe says impatiently. “False Beach really isn’t that big. Anyway, I’m on my way to your house, and so is Smith.”

She can practically hear Rory’s eyes go wide over the phone. “Why?”

“Because I’m absolutely dying to play a few holes of golf,” she says. “I got my Shara note, obviously.”

“Where?”

“Don’t worry about it,” she snaps. She cuts a sharp left, waving off a guy in a truck who honks at her.

“Why do we have to meet at my house?”

“Because it’s equidistant from Belltower and Smith’s house,” Chloe says. “She gave me an email address. I think that thing from your note is the password. Now can you please call the front gate for me? My car is a piece of crap and the mall cops are gonna be suspicious.”

“Okay, okay, Jesus, I’ll meet you there.”

She hangs up and chucks her phone into the empty passenger seat.

She can’t believe Shara didn’t give her a puzzle of her own to solve. Smith got a secret code, and Rory got a hint about the open window, but Chloe didn’t even get a chance to prove she’s smarter than whatever stupid riddle Shara could come up with for her. Her note was literally handed to her. It’s insulting.

She’ll come back to what was actually in the letter later, and the small silver key she found in the envelope. What the hell could it even be a key to?

When she parks outside Rory’s house, hers is the only car on the street. Smith is leaning against the mailbox, staring across the driveway at Shara’s house like she might pop out of the bushes any second. Rory arrives next, annoyed and surly in some kind of vintage ’80s convertible in cherry red.

“Are your parents home?” she asks him.

He brushes past her to unlock the door. “Does it matter?”

“I mean, I’m not the one who’d have to explain this to them.”

Rory shrugs. “My mom and stepdad are in Italy for the week.”

“Casual,” Smith comments under his breath.

Rory’s house is nice, technically. Like an HGTV special on all the different ways to interpret beige. It reminds her of shopping for houses with her moms and walking into an open house where everything had been staged so obviously that you could tell no one actually lived there. But this is a lived-in version, complete with a wedding picture above the fireplace: two smiling middle-aged white people and a bored kid that could be Rory from five years ago.

“Where’s your computer?” Chloe asks.

Rory glares at her from beside a vase of artificial hay. “In my room.”

“Okay.”

She’s halfway to the second floor before she hears Smith behind her, followed finally by Rory. Upstairs, she doesn’t need to guess Rory’s bedroom door—there’s one with a stolen stop sign affixed to it, and Rory’s friends are known for their pastimes of leaning moodily against brick walls and low-level vandalism. She lets herself in.

If all the color has been drained out of the rest of the house, Rory’s room is where it went. The shelves are stuffed with action figures, the double bed covered in a deep-purple bedspread and discarded flannels, the walls plastered with prints of weird abstract art. Beside a tower of red Vans sneaker boxes, there’s a Leon Bridges tour poster and a turntable on a cabinet spilling vinyl records onto the carpet. She recognizes a few of the sleeves from the music curriculum her mama enforced growing up: Prince, Jimi Hendrix, B. B. King.

Under a dogwood-shaded window, there’s a desk with a silver MacBook and an analog tape recorder with a pile of color-coded tapes, surrounded by a scattering of guitar picks and coiled guitar string. All the actual guitars are up a ladder in a lofted sitting area full of bean bags—and damn, those are a lot of really expensive guitars. One entire wall is painted with black chalkboard paint and covered in sketches and notes from friends. Chloe counts at least three different hand-drawn penises.

A bulletin board is hung over the dresser, bursting with photos and scraps and ticket stubs. She can see a shot of Rory laughing at a concert with a handsome salt-and-pepper-bearded Black man who must be his dad, and another with a college-aged guy sporting a Morehouse College sweatshirt, tied-up locs, and the exact same hazel eyes as Rory. There are a bunch of cards signed DAD, the kind of two-line note you include in a care package that says more than a letter could. It’s weird to see so many pictures of Rory smiling, especially when real-life Rory is scowling three feet away.

“How many street signs have you stolen?” Smith asks, eyeing the collection of metal in the corner by the desk.

“More than this. Jake has some at his house.” He must see judgment when he glances at Smith, because he rolls his eyes. “Chill. We only steal the signs of things named after some old racist. It’s not my fault that’s all of them here.”

“This is…” Smith says, craning his head to get a better look at the sparkly red Stratocaster up in the loft. “Dope.”

It is, admittedly, a cool room, the way Rory’s car is admittedly a cool car.

Rory leans against the ladder and shrugs. “Don’t sound so surprised.”

“I’m not surprised,” Smith says, immediately on the defensive, “I’m just saying.”