I Kissed Shara Wheeler(55)

“Lilacs,” Chloe blurts without thinking. She waits for Smith or Rory to react, but if either realize she’s talking about Shara, they don’t say. Cheeks pink, she hurries to add, “Or a really old book.”

“Taco Bell nacho cheese.”

“Sage.”

“A standardized test booklet when you break the seal on it.”

“That smell triggers my fight or flight,” Rory says. “Pine-Sol.”

Smith just laughs, but Chloe asks, “What? Why?”

“When I was a kid,” Rory says, “I’d go stay over with my cousins on my dad’s side in Texas, and every Saturday morning my aunt would get up early and start cleaning the whole house. Loud as shit, always woke us up, but we’d all lay there pretending to sleep so we wouldn’t have to help until she came and made us. So now that smell just makes me think of being in a sleeping bag on my cousin’s floor, listening to my other cousin fake snoring and trying not to laugh so I wouldn’t have to roll socks.”

Smith, who’s still laughing, says, “Wait, I got it. Friday afternoon in late October, after school lets out but before we start warming up for the game, when it feels like we’re the only ones on campus and nobody can tell us what to do, and they’re starting up the grills behind the concession stand, and somebody’s burning leaves a mile away. Charcoal and burgers and smoke and wet grass and that little bit of nerves. That’s the best smell in the world.”

Chloe sighs, chomping into her corn dog. “God, to live in the mind of a jock.”

“Sorry I’m not motorboating an encyclopedia from 1927.”

“Okay,” Chloe concedes, “but what about the worst smell in the world?”

“Definitely the bio lab on frog dissection week.” Smith shivers. “So glad it flooded the week I was supposed to do mine.”

“Because of the smell?” Chloe asks.

“Because I feel bad doing all that to a frog,” Smith says. “Like, I don’t know how he died! What if he had a family? What if he had like, dreams? What if he never got to finish Breaking Bad?”

“Smith,” Chloe says. “It’s just a frog.”

“Don’t get him started on frogs—” Rory says, like she’s prying open a tomb Rory’s tried to keep shut since middle school, but it’s too late. Smith has gotten started on frogs.

“It’s messed up!” Smith says, eyes wide, gesturing so emphatically he nearly backhands his ICEE into the bushes. “All frogs do is eat bugs that we hate and mind their business. They don’t deserve all that. They’re literally just vibing.”

At that precise moment, a massive bullfrog lands on the hood of the car with a heavy thump.

“Oh my God, look!” Smith says as Chloe screams and Rory jerks away from Smith’s new amphibious friend. “He heard me talking about frogs, and he came to see what’s up!” He reaches down and pets the frog’s back with one finger. “What’s good, cuz?”

“Don’t touch it!” Chloe says, shrill and horrified. “You don’t know where it’s been.”

Smith snorts at her. “Man, you’re really not from down here, huh?”

The frog hops away into the grass beside the car before disappearing behind a rock.

“Wait,” Smith calls, clambering down to his feet, “come back!”

Smith follows the frog’s flight plan into the night, corn dog in hand.

“Aaaand now he’s gonna befriend a frog,” Rory says, smiling like he can’t believe it.

He settles his shoulders against the windshield and watches Smith’s silhouette disappear into the moonlit greenery. There’s no trace of Shara’s mystery on his face, only a contemplative look as his laugh fades into the sounds of wind on water and scurrying little creatures in the mud.

But when Chloe leans back next to him and looks up at the stars, she’s still thinking about Shara, somewhere under the same big sky like a gym-class parachute. The elevator, the pink script. Tonight was the first time she’s been back to the place they kissed.

If asked, Chloe would insist she hasn’t been avoiding the elevator. There are other shortcuts to French class, obviously. She’d never reconstruct her campus routes around what was supposed to be a straight girl playing some cruel joke on her. She doesn’t even think about that kiss.

What she has thought about is how, if she hadn’t left a French assignment in her car, she wouldn’t have had to dash to the parking lot between classes, and she might have gotten to the elevator two minutes earlier and missed Shara entirely. If she’d hit the “close door” button faster, they’d have shut in Shara’s face. It seemed so accidental, such a stupid, fleeting chance that she and Shara wound up on the same elevator at all.

But, of course, it wasn’t chance. It was planned: Chloe’s usual path to fifth hour, soft fingers around Chloe’s wrist, vanilla and mint lip gloss. She didn’t just get kissed—there was a second when she lost the plot completely and did some embarrassingly desperate leaning—but the circumstances of the leaning only happened because Shara planned them. Because Shara wanted it to happen.

If she’d known all this then, she wouldn’t have let herself get left on an elevator. She would have yanked Shara back through the doors and made her fucking deal with it.