I Kissed Shara Wheeler(16)
Freshman year, she adjusted to Willowgrove by making problems on purpose, but nobody showed up to her GSA meeting, and she got suspended for bringing free condoms to school in protest of the abstinence-only sex ed policy. The lesson she learned: Nobody at Willowgrove actually wants anything to change, not even her own friends, who are all wonderful and queer and absolutely dead set on not coming out until after graduation. If she couldn’t even change their minds, it wasn’t worth jeopardizing her chances at college with an expulsion.
So, since then, she’s settled for breaking dress code: platforms taller than one inch, socks that end above the knee but below the hem of her skirt, pentagrams embroidered into the collars of her oxfords, dark lipstick. Last year, Ash got famous on TikTok for making earrings out of everything they could find, and now Chloe has a full rotation of gummy worms and hot sauce packets and preserved fruit slices to dangle from her earlobes. Just enough to push back.
It’s a track record that made it too easy to get Mrs. Sherman to report her this morning. When a beautiful, blond small-town princess disappears, surely a full-scale FBI manhunt led by Wheeler himself must follow. Screw the cards, screw the key—the fastest shortcut to Shara is to know what they know, and the fastest way to do that is to get herself into the principal’s office.
On the way, she pops into the bathroom by the chem lab to check her reflection.
Sophomore year, she stopped here before chem every day to tidy up her makeup and shake out her hair. She was stuck with Shara as a lab partner fall semester, and random classmates were always coming up to their lab table with pathetic excuses—like, no, Tanner, Shara doesn’t have time to help you with step five. Chloe started touching up before class in self-defense.
Sophomore year was also the one time it appeared possible that she and Shara could be friends.
It was second semester, after Shara and Smith got together. They weren’t lab partners anymore, but Chloe still sat behind Shara in precalc. It wasn’t her all-time best subject—she really had to work for her ninety-eight average. One day, she got a test back with her answer to a conic sections problem crossed out in red. Shara turned around and confided that she’d missed the same one.
The next day, Shara asked if she’d had a hard time with the homework, and then Chloe became the person Shara talked to in the few minutes before class. For the first time, she got a glimpse of what other people must see when they look at Shara. It was easy to look into those round, innocent eyes and infer kindness when there was nothing else there.
Until a Friday morning, when they were supposed to be reviewing their own midterm study guides and Shara asked, “Do you get number seven?”
She scanned the problem—a question about finding the length of the latus rectum of a parabola, which was exactly the concept she’d spent an hour the night before trying to nail.
“You, um,” she said, “you have to find the equation of directix first.”
“Are you sure?” Shara said. “Can you show me?”
Shara leaned over Chloe’s scratch sheet with her pencil, hair falling over her shoulder, and she followed Chloe’s suggestions until she started doing something backward and Chloe grabbed her wrist to stop her.
Her thumb pressed into the soft flesh on the inside of Shara’s wrist, just below the palm. She could feel Shara’s pulse racing.
Shara shook her off, but it was enough for Chloe to figure out what was going on. She was lying. She’d known since freshman year that Shara was a liar, but in a few weeks, she’d managed to forget.
Chloe looked up from the paper and said, “You already know how to do this, don’t you?”
When Shara met her eyes, their faces were inches apart. She didn’t flinch. “Do you?”
“Of course I do.”
“Then show me.” Shara’s face was smooth and unreadable, except for the incremental raise of her left eyebrow, which said, prove it.
That’s what the popular kids at Willowgrove do: They pretend to be your friend for a chance to make you look stupid. She must have noticed what Chloe was struggling with and decided to rub it in her face.
Chloe snatched the paper out from under Shara’s hands and told her to figure it out herself, and that was the end of that.
Now, Chloe finishes straightening her collar and heads to the principal’s office.
She winks at the receptionist, Mrs. Bailey, as she signs in. Mrs. Bailey shakes her head in that familiar way, like, what a shame that such a brilliant student can’t also be a nice, polite, straight young lady.
What’s the point? They have Shara for that.
“Wheeler, man, you already know what’s up,” a gratingly familiar voice says from the short hall that connects the principal’s office to reception. “But hey, I’ll talk to you later, okay?”
Out strolls the poster boy for thick-necked, hot-ugly football players: prom king Dixon Wells. He flashes a flirtatious smile at Mrs. Bailey. Why are popular guys allowed to wander around during class like they’re friends with all the teachers?
“See you later, my lady love.”
“Oh, stop it, Dixon,” she says in a high-pitched voice that suggests she doesn’t want him to stop at all. She turns to Chloe and drops her voice an octave. “You can go on back, sweetie.”
Chloe takes her seat in Mr. Wheeler’s office, a small room with all the trappings of a Good Old Alabama Boy: mounted trout, wraparound Oakley sunglasses with camo Croakies on the bookshelf, photos of himself as a Willowgrove senior in his football uniform. He was quarterback of the Wolves’ first state champ team, and it’s still his proudest accomplishment twenty-five years later. That and telling teenagers they’re going to hell.