I Kissed Shara Wheeler(53)

“That’s nice,” Chloe says, checking her phone.

“I’ve kissed like, all my homies.”

Chloe glances up. “Even Smith?”

“Especially Smith.” Ace grins, wide and ringed with lipstick, and then he catches sight of something over Chloe’s shoulder and his eyes go wide. “Speaking of, holy shit.”

She turns, and over the heads of dragged-out, cupcake-cramming theater kids, there’s Smith.

His lips are lined in dark purple, fading into a soft lavender at the center. His cheeks are hollowed out with shadow and the bones dusted up top with iridescent highlighter that makes them glow sharp and high on his face. And his lids are glossy, his lower lash line dotted with big flecks of glitter. Chloe can’t help staring, not because he looks strange, but because he looks … natural. It’s a subtle drag, and it suits his face like he put it on himself. Something about his shoulders looks lighter.

He spots Chloe across the crowd and smiles a nervous smile, and the glitter under his eyes catches the grimy light from the overheads and turns it to stardust.

Two seniors descend upon him, whisking him into the party, and Chloe wonders if Shara ever imagined this as one of the outcomes of her plan.

In her hand, her phone buzzes. Shara’s reply: Then I guess it’s your turn to surprise me.

Soon, someone kills half the lights, and someone else cues up the backing track on the sound system, and the seniors shuffle into their places. The lowerclassmen pile on top of one another on gym mats with plastic cups of Sprite and smears of lipstick on their chins, and Mr. Truman climbs atop a row of bleachers with his phone horizontal, ready to film the whole thing so the seniors can have it for posterity. She notices Brooklyn handing her camera off to a sophomore before she joins the rest of them, and she makes eye contact with Smith, who nods. He shouldn’t have any trouble sweet-talking it away from her, not looking like that.

“Don’t screw this up for us,” Benjy hisses to Ace in the final second of anticipatory silence.

Chloe tucks her phone into her suit jacket and shakes out her cape. For the last time in her high school career, it’s curtain call.

Inexplicably, she kind of wishes Shara were in the front row again.

The organs start blasting, and Chloe steps to the center of the floor and sings.



* * *



“Did you get it?” Chloe asks Smith the second the performance is done.

“Yeah,” he says, “but I’m not sure what it means.”

He shows her a picture on his phone of the back of Brooklyn’s camera, where the National Honor Society photo is zoomed in on Shara. Seniors get the privilege of doing their extracurricular photos with silly concepts and gags, so instead of a posed group shot, it’s a dozen of the grade’s highest GPA holders in Mrs. Farley’s room, surrounded by the classroom stash of board games.

She remembers taking this photo. She’s on the left side of the frame with Georgia, pretending to fight over a game of Uno. Brooklyn’s sitting primly in front of Connect Four, while Drew Taylor makes a show of studying a chess board. Shara’s at a desk across the room, alone, her elbow propped up on the board game SORRY!.

In the picture, Shara’s holding something in her hand. Chloe zooms in on Smith’s phone screen, squinting to make out the details.

It’s the SORRY card, the one that tells you to send an opponent back to the starting space on the board.

“Back to start…” Chloe mumbles.

All of this started with three kisses: Chloe, Smith, Rory. They’ve been to Dixon’s house, where Shara last kissed Smith, and the roof where she kissed Rory. The only place left, the only kiss they haven’t revisited, is Chloe’s.

She passes the phone back to a confused Smith. “I know where to go.”

Cape flying, she barrels out the back door of the gym and past the choir room, down the hallway full of spare lockers and closets, around the corner, and through the open door where the back of A Building connects to the elementary classrooms on the first floor of B Building.

Walls of crayon-colored pictures of beach balls and construction paper wishes for a happy summer break blur out in a muted rainbow—a stray teacher’s aide yells something after her—and then she skids to a stop at the faculty elevator. It opens as soon as she calls.

Inside, nothing looks out of place. She checks behind the handrail before hiking up her suit pants and climbing on top of it to check the light fixture on the ceiling. It’s not until the doors slide shut that she sees it.

There’s a smear of pink nail polish on the lip of the inner doors, right where they meet.

Freshman year, when she got the campus tour from Georgia, she learned the secret of this elevator. If you stop it between floors and pry the inner doors apart, the inside of the outer doors is covered in thirty-six years of Willowgrove student graffiti. She and Georgia left their initials in Sharpie.

She jams the button for the top floor, counts the seconds, and on “two” she yanks the emergency stop.

When she wrenches the inner doors apart, the message is three feet tall and just as wide. It must have been here, hidden and still drying, when Shara pulled her close and kissed her.

On top of hundreds of signatures and lewd scrawls, there’s a heart painted in pink nail polish. And inside it, Shara’s daubed four cursive words.