I Kissed Shara Wheeler(27)

“But you’re here,” Smith says. “You came to this party even though you’d obviously rather be anywhere else. You decided to look for her.”

Chloe’s fingers tighten on the steering wheel. “Just because I’m queer doesn’t mean I’m in love with every beautiful girl who pays attention to me.”

“I didn’t say you were in love with her.”

“It was implied.”

“So you think she’s beautiful?”

“A mole would think she’s beautiful, Smith. That’s not an indicator of anything except that I have a pulse.”

They’re pulling into Smith’s neighborhood now. He doesn’t live in the country club like Shara or Rory or most of the popular kids—he lives one subdivision over from Chloe, one of fifty identical houses in a development that, according to her mom, didn’t exist ten years ago. False Beach is like that: country clubs, trailer parks, and retired cow pastures outfitted with cookie-cutter houses that still smell like fresh paint.

She glances over at Smith, expecting to catch another amused smile, but Smith looks thoughtful. “For the record, you being gay wasn’t what made me think you were in love with her.”

“I’m not gay.” She bristles. “I’m bisexual. That’s a thing.”

“I know it’s a thing,” Smith says doggedly. “I just didn’t realize you were.”

“Well, I am.”

“Okay, cool.”

A pause. Smith waits.

“And I’m not in love with her,” Chloe grinds out. “She’s the only person in this school who can keep up with me, which is … unexpected. She surprises me. Okay?”

“Yeah,” Smith says. “She can be surprising.”

Chloe puts the car in park in front of Smith’s house and admits, “And she’s hot.”

“Yeah, she’s hot.”

“Why does she smell like—”

“Lilacs?”

“Dude,” she groans, and Smith laughs. “Is this weird?”

He thinks about it. “I feel like … it should be, but it’s not?”

A muscle in Smith’s jaw flexes before relaxing into its smooth right angle. Usually the only people in False Beach who are this cool about her being queer are other queer people.

Hm.

“How do you think Rory would answer that question?” Smith asks.

“I don’t know,” Chloe says. “You should ask him.”

Smith reaches out and boops the dashboard lucky cat on the nose with one finger.

“Maybe.”

“What’s the deal with you and him, anyway?”

Smith shrugs. “He’s in love with my girlfriend. I feel like the deal is pretty obvious.”

“To be honest, you don’t really strike me as the jealous type,” Chloe points out. “Like, you seem fine with me.”

“It’s different with Rory.”

“Because he’s a guy?”

“Because Rory used to be my best friend.”

Chloe’s head whips around.

“What? When?”

“Back in middle school,” Smith says, still focused on the lucky cat’s waving paw, “when I first started at Willowgrove. We had the same homeroom, and we clicked, I guess. Him and Summer were the first two friends I made. And then I joined JV football, and Rory decided he was too cool to be friends with a dumb jock or whatever, and we kind of drifted. We haven’t really talked since. It sucked.”

“Does Shara know? About the two of you?”

“She was there the whole time,” Smith says. “Rory’s always had a crush on her. And he’s still pissed that I’m dating her, even though all that stuff was a million years ago. Like, you should have seen his face the first time he looked out his window and saw me picking Shara up for a date.”

“But she picked you,” Chloe says. “Why does it matter?”

“It’s hard to explain,” Smith says. His brow pinches. “I haven’t talked to him since we were fourteen, but I haven’t been able to get rid of him either. It’s like he was always gonna come back to mess things up for me, and now he has.”

The whole thing sounds kind of dramatic to Chloe, until she remembers the feeling in her gut the first time she saw Shara, like the universe had dropped a personalized time bomb into first-hour world history. Maybe some people are supposed to hate each other.

“I guess that’s fair,” she says.

Something settles into the air between them, an unsteady truce. They have almost nothing in common outside the fact that they’ve both kissed Shara Wheeler, unless there’s something else.

After he climbs out the passenger side, Chloe rolls down the window and yells, “Hey!”

Smith pauses on the curb. “What?”

“You forgot this,” she says, shrugging out of his jacket and holding it toward him. He leans back through the window and takes it. “Card’s in the pocket.”

“Thanks,” he says.

“Congrats on being the only member of the football team I would save in a fire.”

Smith folds the jacket over his arm and laughs. It’s a warm sound, like sunbaked earth under bare feet. She doesn’t have to wonder what Shara sees in him. It’s objectively obvious.