I Kissed Shara Wheeler(58)

“But you want to get out. You’ve spent the last four years telling me how much you want to get out.”

Georgia turns away, wringing her hands. “What I want is … I want to fall in love. I want to have a big, dramatic, ridiculous love story, like a period piece, and my love interest is played by Saoirse Ronan and I get to wear a fancy corset. I want to write books about the way that feels. And I don’t know if I’ll ever have any of that here, but I know what I’ll lose if I leave.”

“So you’re staying?”

Georgia nods, still not looking at her. “I can’t let Belltower close.”

“You really think you can be happy here? Do you want to ask my mom how that’s going for her?”

“I know, she left. A lot of people do. And that’s okay! I get it! Everybody has to do what they have to do. But if everyone like us leaves False Beach, it’s never gonna change. Someone has to stay.”

“But why does it have to be you?”

Georgia finally lifts her eyes. “Because I can take it.”

“That’s insane, Georgia,” Chloe says, throwing her hands up. “And what am I supposed to do? Go to New York by myself?”

“I don’t know, Chloe, you seem fine without me.”

I’m not, she wants to scream. I won’t be.

“Fine,” Chloe says instead. She breaks for the door, swiping at her eyes. “See you in French.”



* * *



She skips first and second hour, stumbles through third and fourth, and brings her half of the essay to French, where Georgia takes it wordlessly and passes it up to Madame Clark. They don’t talk for the rest of class, and when the bell rings for lunch, Georgia flounces out with Ash, and Chloe stomps off toward the gym.

Maybe she messed up, but it wasn’t completely her fault. If she tracks Shara down, she can prove it.

Up in Rory’s live oak tree, Jake and April are splitting a party-size cardboard tray of nachos, which is balanced so precariously on the bough between them that Chloe makes a point not to stand under it.

“Hey,” Chloe says, gripping the straps of her backpack.

“Hey,” Jake says through a mouthful. “You want a taco?”

“What?” Chloe says, but April has already reached into the plastic Taco Bell bag dangling from a branch and lobbed a soft taco at Chloe’s head. It smacks her gently in the cheek and falls into her hands. “Um. Thanks. Where’s Rory?”

Jake points with his vape pen—one branch up, on the other side of the tree, there’s Rory. And next to him, perched more gracefully than should be possible for someone his size, is Smith.

“Oh,” Chloe says.

She drops her backpack on the sprawling roots, shoves the taco into her oxford pocket, and starts climbing.

“Since when do you eat lunch here, Smith?” Chloe calls up to him. Across the courtyard, Mackenzie and Dixon and the others are still on their same bench.

Smith shrugs. “It’s almost graduation. I mean, look at Ace.”

He points, and she looks: Ace has wandered away from his usual spot and is having an animated conversation with one of the junior theater girls. Summer’s nowhere to be seen either, she realizes.

She shakes her head and pulls herself up higher.

“Okay,” she says, “about what Shara wrote on the elevator— I already told you. I think it means there’s a clue in one of the notes that explains where she is, and we’re supposed to figure it out and meet her there.”

Rory swallows a bite of burrito and nods slowly. “Uh-huh.”

“We should go back over the cards,” she goes on. “Do y’all wanna do it now or meet up after seventh hour?”

Rory and Smith exchange a look, like they’ve recovered whatever unspoken language they must have developed when they were thirteen, which is nice for them and incredibly inconvenient for Chloe.

“What?” she demands.

“Chloe,” Rory says. “If she wanted us to know, we would.”

“But maybe we do,” Chloe insists, “and we haven’t realized it yet.”

Another silent look between Smith and Rory.

“What?” she says again. “Are you actually giving up?”

“Look,” Smith says. “I care about Shara. A lot. But I’m tired. And I’m starting to wonder if she ever wanted us to catch her at all. Like, maybe this whole thing was one big goodbye.”

She shakes her head. “Rory?”

“I don’t know what else we have to go on,” he says. “Kinda feels like a dead end.”

A dead end?

“Well, I might lose all my friends over this, and finals are next week, which means if she’s not back by then, she won’t even be eligible for valedictorian, which means my salutatorian will be Drew Taylor, which is just embarrassing,” Chloe snaps. “He has a YouTube channel about why girls at Willowgrove are sluts for taking birth control pills. He doesn’t deserve to come second to me.”

“But you still win,” Smith points out. “Isn’t that enough?”

“No! It’s not! Not if she lets me win!”

She jumps down, landing untidily on her feet and storming off toward sixth hour, spiking the uneaten taco from her pocket into the first trash can she passes.