I Kissed Shara Wheeler(21)
“What are you saying?” Chloe asks.
“I’m saying that if I ask to come over to look for something Shara left there, he’s probably gonna be a dick about it and want to know what it is, and if he finds out my girlfriend cheated on me with both of you, he’s definitely gonna be a dick about it.”
Chloe takes a second to think about that one. Shara may have dragged them into this, but she doesn’t deserve for the school’s most unapologetic d-bag to know she kissed a girl. Even if Chloe doesn’t care about Smith’s reputation, she does care about that. Like, in a general moral sense.
“Okay,” Chloe says. “So, how else can we get into Dixon’s house?”
“He’s throwing a party tomorrow night,” Smith says. “I’ll look for it then.”
“You need help,” Rory says. “Dixon lives across the golf course from me. I’ve seen his house. It’s basically a small country.”
“You could—well, one of you could come with me. Two might be pushing it. He gets weird about people he doesn’t know showing up. If we want to keep this to ourselves, only one of you can come.”
“She wrote it on my note,” Chloe says quickly. “I’ll go.”
FROM THE BURN PILE
Found in the back of Chloe’s sophomore chemistry notebook
VALEDICTORIAN SPEECH: DRAFT #3
Good morning, friends, family, faculty, and my fellow graduating class of Willowgrove Christian Academy 2022. I’m Chloe Green, and I’m so honored to be representing our class as valedictorian. It was a tough fight to the top, and I’m thankful to each of you whose hard work encouraged me to work that much harder.
Unlike almost every member of this graduating class, I didn’t grow up here in False Beach. I grew up in southern California, near an actual beach. Moving here for high school is the first time I’ve lived among so many people who care this deeply about college football, who have never in their lives eaten a sushi roll, who believe bootcut jeans are still acceptable to wear in public. In fact, from the moment I arrived at Willowgrove, I was confident that I would spend the next four years of my high school career counting the days until I could escape this place, which has the spiritual aura of a Mountain Dew bottle filled with dip spit in the tour bus cupholder of a Christian rock Lynyrd Skynyrd cover band
Annotation from Georgia:
It’s a graduation, not a roast. Consider making a list of things you actually like about False Beach, if possible.
6
DAYS SINCE SHARA LEFT: 6
DAYS UNTIL GRADUATION: 37
The last thing Chloe wants to do, definitely at this moment and maybe ever for the rest of her life, is spend her Friday night watching Dixon Wells slobber all over a beer bong with Shara Wheeler’s boyfriend.
It’s not that she doesn’t enjoy parties, or large groups of screaming people, or Saturday nights that get a little sloppy. It’s very well-documented by Benjy’s Snapchat stories that she enjoys all those things. She even once almost got French-kissed by Tucker Price from the Quiz Bowl team in his parents’ saltwater jacuzzi. Straight A’s and being capable of having fun are not mutually exclusive.
But a party full of the type of people popular at Willowgrove is not Chloe’s idea of fun, especially when it’s hosted by Dixon Wells. Dixon is a particular variety of affable jerk prevalent in Alabama: the type who insists it’s okay for him to make offensive jokes because he’s not actually racist/sexist/homophobic/transphobic/whatever so he doesn’t actually mean them, but aren’t the jokes so funny? Dark humor. Of course, the student body voted him prom king over Smith, who seems boring but at least decent.
Dixon’s house has one of those curved driveways out front like it should have valet service. Cars Chloe recognizes from the school parking lot line the street: Jeep, Jeep, Jeep, Range Rover, Jeep, jacked-up truck, jacked-up truck, jacked-up truck. She slots her hand-me-down Camry in behind an F-150 with a lift kit that belongs in the Australian outback.
I’m here, she texts Smith.
She waits five minutes, then another five, but Smith doesn’t text back. Fantastic. She can hear the party raging in the backyard, but she doesn’t want to walk in alone.
She can do this. She’s wearing her heaviest ankle boots, the black ones with the big rubber treads and the three-inch heels. Benjy calls them her mankiller boots. She can do anything in her mankiller boots.
She closes her eyes and reels through a dozen alternate, fearless versions of Chloe, landing on an image of herself as a ruthless queen with a million yards of bloodred velvet pooling around her, stomping around a palace with a vial of poison and incredible hair. That’ll do.
She opens the door, plants her mankiller boots in the Wellses’ impeccably groomed front lawn, and immediately gets her heel trapped in a patch of mud.
She yanks herself loose and, only slightly pink in the face, stomps off.
The backyard is enormous, with a massive trampoline and a redbrick outdoor kitchen with a marble island and a gas grill that probably cost more than a semester at Willowgrove, which isn’t cheap. Even the grass looks expensive. Nobody seems to be wearing actual clothing, only soggy T-shirts or swimsuits or cut-off shorts. She feels overdressed by having shoes on.
She peers across the wide pool full of screaming girls in bikinis on linebacker shoulders, trying to pick Smith out of the crowd.