I Kissed Shara Wheeler(56)
She turns to Rory.
“Can I ask you something?”
He nods, still watching the bushes rustle in the distance.
“Are you really not pissed at Shara?”
Rory blinks a few times, like he doesn’t understand the question at first.
“To be honest?” he finally says. “It feels like … like I’m relieved she let me off the hook.”
“Seriously?” Chloe asks, incredulous. “Haven’t you liked her for like, years?”
“I guess,” Rory says. “It’s more that … there’s never been another girl I thought about?”
Chloe crumples up her empty corn dog packet, then takes her cape off and shoves it behind her head as a makeshift pillow. “Can’t relate.”
After a long pause, Rory says, “I, um. I keep thinking about that, actually. The fact that it’s only ever been Shara. You think that means something?”
Chloe furrows her brow at the sky.
“Like what? That you’re meant for each other?”
In her periphery, Rory is shaking his head. “No, like … like maybe I talked myself into her, because when I looked at her and Smith together, I was so jealous, and she seemed like the right place to put it.”
“She’s not a place,” Chloe points out. “Or an idea. She’s a person.”
“Yeah,” Rory says. “But an idea can’t want you back. And I’m starting to think that was kind of the whole point.”
He glances away, and Chloe follows the line of his gaze across the clearing and down to the cliff’s edge, where Smith is still rummaging through the underbrush, and of all idiotic memories, the thing that springs to mind is Ace at a party shouting about Mr. Brightside: He never says which one he’s jealous of.
She thinks of Georgia tearing a magazine picture into pieces and chewing her bottom lip on the way to chapel. She thinks of her mom’s jars of hair dye gathering dust in the bathroom cabinet, and of Mr. Truman filling a cart with bridesmaid dresses at Goodwill. She pictures Rory, raised by Willowgrove since kindergarten, sitting at his bedroom window as Shara and Smith kiss good night, feeling an anxious, shivery type of envy and cramming it into a shape that doesn’t mean something’s wrong with him.
Damn. Okay.
It’s hard for her to wrap her brain around it sometimes—the idea that for most people from here, the stuff she hears in Bible class is reality. Who would she be if she hadn’t been raised by two moms and a small army of gay middle-aged Californians? What if Willowgrove had always been her whole world, and the people in charge of it, who left their classroom door unlocked for her and cracked jokes with her like they saw her as a person, told her gently but firmly that she was wrong? That there was something inside of her—even if she hadn’t named it yet—that needed to be fixed?
“You know,” Chloe says. She keeps her voice low, her tone noncommittal. “It would be okay. If you didn’t like Shara. If you didn’t like girls at all.” She lets the words settle between them, clinging to the shiny hood of Rory’s car like the first drops of rain before a storm. Rory doesn’t say anything, but he doesn’t scoff or shrug it off or make a sarcastic joke. He keeps staring off into the trees, and after a few long seconds, he lets out a breath.
“Shit,” he says.
“Yeah,” Chloe agrees.
It’s not fair, she thinks. Here she is, on a cliff in a thrifted suit with a glittery quarterback and the human embodiment of repressed homoerotic angst, and none of them have ever had the luxury of running away from what they are. Neither has Georgia, or Benjy, or her mom, or Mr. Truman, or Ash. Any of them.
Maybe it’s hard to be Shara and love a girl. But why should she get to run? Why shouldn’t she have to go through hell too?
Why should this be over because Shara said so?
FROM THE BURN PILE
Personal essay exercise: Smith Parker Prompt: What is a moment in your life that you felt truly yourself?
When I was a kid, my mom used to tell me I was infinite the way the Holy Spirit was infinite. She’d say, “There’s no beginning or end to your heart. That means you can be anything.” She’d say there was God in that, and that expansion was godly.
I still feel endless sometimes. Like I might have what she saw in me, but in different ways. I feel like there are different sides of me, like I could be anyone and touch anyone and love like that kind of Holy Ghost love—everywhere and everyone. Most of my friends act like they know exactly who and what they are, like there’s only one answer, but to me, that feels like putting a beginning and end on something that’s not supposed to have either.
I went to a party with a bunch of people I didn’t know, and someone put stars around my eyes, and I noticed stuff about my face I never noticed before. I saw myself in the rearview mirror of a person I’ve loved since I was thirteen, and I felt endless. Like, Holy Spirit endless. Maybe that’s what it means to feel like myself.
15
DAYS WITHOUT SHARA: 24
This must be what a hangover feels like.
Chloe presses her aching forehead to her locker door, wondering if this is the work of gas station corn dogs or a Shara-related migraine. She wasn’t even out that late—Rory dropped her off at her car before ten, and she was in bed by ten thirty—but she spent half the night reciting Shara’s notes to her bedroom ceiling like Arya Stark with bangs.