I Kissed Shara Wheeler(42)

This is what I’ ve been trying to tell you.

XOXO

S

P. S.

Rory, I haven’t forgotten about you. Sometimes I think about last fall, when you had detention and the game got called for rain . Did you think I didn’ t know you were watching?

Before Chloe has a chance to react to what Shara wrote about her, Ace saunters up the aisle, chugging Mountain Blast.

Smith folds the card shut and says to him, “Summer caught you with Shara?”

Ace chokes.

“Oop,” Rory says. He hops up on the edge of the stage to watch the show.

Ace wipes a dribble of fluorescent blue from his chin. “She—she told you that?”

“She wrote it,” Smith says. He holds up the card. “In here.”

“I—it wasn’t like that—”

“Then what was it like?”

If this were two weeks ago, Chloe would be worried she might have a jock-versus-jock Thunderdome deathmatch on her hands. But she’s gotten to know both of them a bit since then, and they’re two of the least confrontational people she’s ever met—especially Smith. Once, when she was looking for him after school, she found him in the bio lab, poking around at the bean sprouts. Another time, he saw her with a book of poems and told her his mom was a spoken-word poet back in the ’90s, and that she gave him a Danez Smith collection for his birthday.

So yeah, this is more likely to end in tears, which might be worse.

“I mean, Summer did, technically, break up with me because of Shara, but—”

“Man, if you’ve been pretending to help me all this time when you—”

Ace holds up both hands in front of his chest. “She was helping me practice for spring musical auditions, okay?”

What.

“What?” Chloe interjects.

“What?” Smith asks, eyebrows near his hairline.

“It’s—it’s stupid.” Ace sinks down into one of the folding seats, running a hand through his floppy hair. “But I’ve always wanted to try out for spring musical. Always. But it scared the shit out of me, because like, what if I wasn’t any good? Or what if I was good, and Dixon and them roasted me for being into showtunes until graduation? And then it was senior year, and it was my last chance, and Truman was doing rehearsals before auditions, and I almost went to one, but I kept thinking, what if I don’t get the part? What if I don’t even get cast, or they make me like, a tree, and then everyone knows I really wanted it but I wasn’t good enough? But I remembered that Shara used to play piano in the talent show when we were kids, so I asked if she could help me with the sheet music. And we started meeting up at my house after school to work on my audition song.”

He looks up at Smith and raises his hands helplessly, letting them drop back into his lap. “That was it, I swear.”

Never, not in all the evenings after school blocking scenes with Ace in the choir room, not even when she had to practice kissing his big mouth, did it occur to Chloe that Ace didn’t audition as a joke.

Smith looks skeptical.

“You’re telling me Summer dumped you over that?”

“No, Summer dumped me because I blew off a date to practice, and when she came by my house that night, she saw Shara coming out of the front door and freaked out.”

Smith shakes his head, incredulous. “Why didn’t you just tell her what y’all were doing?”

“Because Shara said if I ever told anyone she helped me with the music, she’d report me to her dad for smoking weed.”

“Okay, now that I don’t understand,” Chloe butts in. “Shara loves it when people know she’s done a good deed.”

“I don’t know,” Ace says. “But she was dead serious. I believed her. And like, Summer is so dope, but I can’t get expelled right before I graduate. I’ll lose my scholarship.”

“So,” Smith says. He crosses back toward Ace, his hip brushing Rory’s knees as he passes. Rory absently reaches down to touch his own knee as he watches. “You … you tried to pull a High School Musical, basically.”

“Yeah.”

“And Shara blackmailed you for it.”

“Wouldn’t be the first person she’s blackmailed,” Rory points out.

Smith rubs both palms over the back of his head.

“You could have told me before you asked Shara for help,” he says finally, softly. “My sister could have helped you. You know she’s good at that stuff. And I know everyone else we know has to be all no-homo about everything, but I kinda thought I’d made it clear we’re not like that. I mean, I showed you my Sailor Moon collection.”

“I know.”

“I told you I shared clothes with my sister until I was thirteen.”

Chloe leans in. “Quick question: necessity or preference?”

“It’s not like that,” Ace says, ignoring her. “You’re the only one I didn’t think would judge me. I was afraid of being bad.”

“Well, you’re not. You were pretty fucking great, actually.”

Ace grins at that, wide as ever, and he’s on a beach in Tahiti again, all palm trees and coconuts with tiny umbrellas. Chloe doesn’t know how he does it.

“Thanks.”