I Kissed Shara Wheeler(29)
“Yeah,” her mom says as she dumps everything on the couch. “Aren’t you gonna watch Tom Hanks put an adorable indie bookstore out of business with us?”
And God, she missed her mama, she really did.
But … Shara.
“I have a huge paper due on Monday,” she says.
Her mama pouts. “Why did I raise you to be so responsible? I was supposed to raise you to be an anarchist.”
She shrugs. “Dropped the ball, I guess.”
Down the hall, she flips on her light and flops onto the bed.
If she were in her old room, she’d know what to do about Shara. It was easier to think there.
She loved the apartment in LA. It was right on the edge of the city, a three-bedroom on the fourth floor, and she still has the layout committed to memory. The single bathroom, the hall closet Titania liked to hide inside, the pink wingback chair in the living room. To the left of the kitchen sink, there was an antique hutch her moms salvaged from an estate sale and painted mint green. Her room had a sliding glass door to a tiny balcony and views of the skyline. When she was ten, her moms finally let her have the key to it, and she never felt as cool and adult as she did while reading books on a beach towel on her own private balcony all summer long.
The house here in False Beach is only slightly bigger than the apartment, but it feels too big, somehow. She misses hearing her neighbor’s daily routines through the walls and getting sweet tea from the kitchen without losing the Bluetooth connection between her headphones and her laptop. She misses her old room, the lavender-yellow-green layers of paint as she got older and the spot on the closet door where she stuck a Legend of Korra poster and never got the tape off. It’s hard to learn everything you know about life in the same room and then pack everything up one day and never see it again.
They’ve tried to make her new room as Chloe as it can be. They painted the walls green and strung up lights around the ceiling, and above the metal bars of her headboard, they hung a giant framed print of her favorite taco truck from their old neighborhood. There’s no balcony, only a window facing the sideyard next to the AC unit, but her mom built a wooden bench the width of the sill so Chloe could read in the sun.
It still doesn’t feel like home though. After her grandma died sophomore year, Chloe hoped they’d go back, but there was her grandma’s house to sort through and sell, and the estate to settle, and then it was too late to finish high school somewhere else.
Titania hops up on the bed, and Chloe pats her between the ears.
One of the things her moms say Chloe inherited from Titania is the way they both need something to scratch at, a place to dull their claws so they don’t tear the house apart. That’s something Willowgrove has on the hippie schools she went to in California: a chance for her to compete.
It’s why she can’t stop poking around the place where Shara’s supposed to be. As long as they’ve both been at Willowgrove, Chloe finally had someone to fight for dominance, and that gave some kind of reason to life here. It’s not like Shara is that important; it’s just that, without her, Chloe’s not sure what the point of anything is.
Her friends, she recalls suddenly. That’s the point of her life here. Georgia and Benjy and Ash, her friends she was supposed to spend Friday night with before Shara got in the way.
She rolls over, picks up her phone, and FaceTimes Georgia.
“’Sup,” Georgia answers after two rings.
“Geoooo,” Chloe says back.
The shot is backdropped by the overstuffed shelves of Belltower. Georgia’s wearing her favorite T-shirt, an off-white tee with a picture of Smokey Bear surrounded by woodland creatures and the slogan Be careful, there are babes in the forest, and she’s chugging from her emotional support water bottle. The store must have gotten a shipment of new releases—that’s the only reason she’d go in when the shop’s closed on Sundays.
“You know, I’m really glad you landed on your gay aesthetic,” Chloe tells her. “Aspiring park ranger looks great on you.”
“Thanks,” she says. “I don’t know why it took me so long. I guess I didn’t realize being a Girl Scout and being gay could be the same thing.”
“Remember your ‘Hey Mamas’ phase,” Chloe says.
“Please, that was like, one week,” Georgia groans.
In the year since Georgia first told Chloe she liked girls, she’s cycled through a half dozen different lesbian aesthetics trying to figure out which one was her. First was tying her hair up and wearing Nike sports bras and researching face exercises to sharpen her jawline, then it was high femme red lipstick and drawn-on tattoos, next were ripped jeans and thrifted leather jackets, and exactly once, she considered cutting off her hair entirely and trying out for the soccer team. In the end, Chloe’s mom gifted Georgia a carabiner for her seventeenth birthday, and she chopped off her hair above her shoulders and it all came together.
“Where have you been?” Georgia asks. “I texted you like, three times last night to see if you were coming to Ash’s for movie night.”
Chloe winces.
“My mama came home from Portugal today,” she says. “My mom’s been going nuts cleaning the house. She roasted an actual turducken. It’s a whole thing. How was the movie?”
“We got sidetracked doing a mozzarella stick tasting.”