I Kissed Shara Wheeler(35)

“Hey,” she hisses at Rory. When he doesn’t respond, she stands and plucks out one of his AirPods. “Let’s go.”

They gather up their bags and slip silently to the back of the stacks, to the AC vent in the ceiling over the nonfiction section. She passes her backpack to Rory, and while he’s hiding their stuff among the musty throw pillows of a reading corner, she pushes a cart of returns up to the shelf below the vent.

When she looks over at Rory, he’s stripping off his uniform polo.

“Whoa, what are you doing?”

“The less uneven parts of your clothing to get caught on something up there, the better,” Rory tells her, now in his undershirt. “I’ve watched a lot of YouTube videos about this, okay? Trust me.”

Chloe groans but doesn’t waste time arguing—she whips her oxford off and chucks it at Rory, who crams it alongside their stash and then gets down to business.

She’s never seen Rory do anything with urgency before, so it’s kind of incredible to watch him spring into his element like a cat burglar. He levers himself off the book cart with one foot and scales the shelves the rest of the way up in one fluid second, and then he’s soundlessly popping the vent off and pushing it upward into the ceiling before Chloe has finished straightening out her undershirt.

“You gotta go in first,” he whispers to her, hopping down.

“What? No, you have to go first and pull me up.”

“Chloe, look. I didn’t ever want it to come to this, but we have to be honest with each other.” He closes his eyes gravely. “You can lift more than me. It makes more sense for you to help me up.”

“Oh,” Chloe says. “Okay.”

Feeling quite pleased with herself, she follows the same route Rory did up to the opening in the ceiling, silently apologizing to the sanctity of libraries and to Millard Fillmore when she kicks his biography. She sticks her head into the dark hole, hooks her elbows over the ledge, and pushes off the bookshelf with both feet. It takes a helpful nudge from Rory, but she makes it.

The air duct is … well, an air duct. It’s not nearly as well-lit as they always are in movies, just a long, dim, narrow metal box, like a coffin made of space blankets. The library vent seems to be at the end of a short branch off the main trunk, because a few feet ahead, a slightly wider duct intersects with this one and stretches perpendicularly into the darkness.

Chloe is very completely inside the ceiling of the school. Like, she is up there. No arguing with that.

“Shara fucking Wheeler,” she mutters, as she twists around on her stomach until she can see Rory below.

But when Rory tries to use the cart for a boost, some ancient, rusted screw decides to give up the ghost, and the entire top shelf breaks off with a grinding, metallic crash.

Two dozen hardcovers avalanche to the floor, clattering against one another and smashing open with pulpy slaps against the bookcases. Across the library, there’s the sound of the office door being thrown open, followed by the portentous stomp of Ms. Dunbury’s orthopedic sneakers.

“What are y’all doing back there?”

“Shit,” Rory hisses.

“Oh my God,” Chloe gasps. She’s going to be ripped straight out of the ceiling and into a permanent suspension. She glances at the grate resting inside the duct, wondering if she can drag it over fast enough to seal herself in.

But when she looks back down, she sees Rory, knee-deep in books and visibly calculating a hundred ways he could still outrun the law, and she stops.

“Come on,” she whispers, extending her arm down to Rory. “You can make it.”

She doesn’t know if it’s true—the library’s not that big—but she can’t leave an enemy of the Willowgrove Code of Conduct behind.

“Heyyyy, Ms. Dunbury!” says a sudden, jovial voice from what sounds like the library entrance. “How’s my favorite librarian doing this fine afternoon?”

Rory exhales. “Smith.”

“Mr. Parker! What are you doing here?”

“Just finished training. Gotta stay in shape for the fall, you know what I’m saying? I was stopping by my locker when I saw the library was still open and I thought, ‘Man, when’s the last time I checked on my girl Debbie?’”

Ms. Dunbury giggles. A diversion. Damn, he’s good.

“What is he doing?” Rory mumbles to himself.

“Saving your ass,” Chloe hisses. She waves her hand at him. “Let’s go!”

With a parting glance at Smith and a shake of his head, Rory scales the bookcase in one breath and grabs hold of Chloe’s arm with the next. Together, they haul him up into the duct, and as soon as his last foot is in, he crawls over Chloe to pop the vent back into place.

They’re both momentarily silent, piled on top of each other, illuminated only by thin slats of light through the vent.

“Oh my gosh, you have so much to carry,” Smith says. “Can I help you?”

“Oh, I couldn’t ask you to—”

“With all due respect, Ms. Dunbury, what is the point of these protein shakes I drink if I can’t carry some books?”

“Oh, you’re an angel,” Ms. Dunbury says, predictably melting. The microwave dings, forgotten. “I see why Shara’s so sweet on you.”

“Ha, yeah.”