I Kissed Shara Wheeler(61)
Because Shara came back for it. Ten minutes later, she watched Shara burst into the library, go straight for the trash can, and grow more and more panicked as she pulled out bits of paper and vending machine candy wrappers. She turned the whole thing upside down and shook it, then gave up. She never even realized Chloe was there.
And Chloe was there the next week at the gym lockers when Shara put on a tearful performance of realizing she must have lost it running laps around the football field in PE. The entire PE class went out to search through the turf on their hands and knees, and Shara stood there and let them. Chloe got grass stains, but it was worth it to know that Shara isn’t who everyone thinks she is.
She pulls the bag of cards out from under her bed, where it’s been since Georgia threw it at her. If she can solve this godforsaken puzzle, she can finally prove it to everyone: that she’s not a bad friend, that she’s not crazy, that she was right all along and Shara is a fake bitch who can’t handle her own secrets without making them everyone else’s problem. And then she’ll win, and everyone will have to forgive her.
She goes through the cards again and again, reading over Shara’s handwriting, which she’s come to know with a kind of intimacy that makes her want to lie down in the ditch behind her house and forget she ever knew there were girls like Shara Wheeler. There has to be an answer here. What could she be missing?
She’s fingering the pen strokes on the card from Dixon’s house when she feels it.
The key is there, where I am.
At the end of the line, the indentions in the paper feel different. She holds it up an inch from her nose and tilts it toward her bedside lamp until the light catches on the tiniest details. Now she sees it: little grooves under those last three words, like Shara laid a second sheet of paper over the card and dug in with a pen to leave the impression of nearly invisible lines. They underscore the last three words, setting them apart for emphasis. Where I am.
Where she is?
The key was taped to the back of the picture of Shara on her parents’ sailboat. It was where Shara’s image was, physically, in the office, but maybe it’s more than that—maybe the photo was meant to tell her where Shara actually, literally is.
Chloe’s sat in the chair opposite Principal Wheeler’s desk a hundred times, and she’s memorized every detail of that photo. The number 15 marking the slip. The sign in the background announcing Anchor Bay Marina. Shara, smiling, angelic.
“I’m gonna kill her,” Chloe says, and she reaches for her keys.
FROM THE BURN PILE
Written on a sheet of loose-leaf in the back of Chloe Green’s physics binder VALEDICTORIAN SPEECH: DRAFT #17
Hi, everyone. I’m Chloe Green. You may know me as the girl who always volunteers to do her presentation in front of the class first. I’m proud to say I’ve never been the girl who reminded the teacher we have homework, though I have thought about it more than once, because, I mean, I did do the homework, and it took me a whole hour, and I know my answers are right, and I deserve a 100% participation grade, but who cares? It’s fine.
You may also know me as the girl who beat Shara Wheeler for the prize of standing at this podium. I know most of you were probably rooting for her, but turns out, she doesn’t always get what she wants. By the way, her hair isn’t even that great. It’s just long. And I think—
Annotation from Chloe: Maybe slightly less personal???
16
DAYS WITHOUT SHARA: 27
Anchor Bay Marina is nearly silent, blue under a cloudless night sky with only the sounds of water lapping at the shore and the broad hulls of fancy boats. Wooden piers separate twenty individual slips, wrapping in a U shape around a squat boathouse that’s closed for the night. Shara’s white Jeep is tucked neatly into the back corner of the parking lot. Chloe’s insides turn to jet fuel at the sight.
From the shore, she can’t see where the Wheelers’ boat should be, so she starts at the slip with the number one painted in faded white on a pylon and counts down the pier.
Slip 2, slip 3, slip 4.
Slip 7, 8, 9.
Slip 12, 13, 14—she rounds the corner—
In the weeks since Shara left, she’s always looked the same in Chloe’s mind: frozen in her ball gown, her hair spilling over her shoulders like sunlight and her lips stained a soft, berry red, remote and unreachable under a sparkling country club chandelier.
Now, waiting under the moon in the fifteenth slip, Shara looks like she tumbled right out of Chloe’s memory. Mostly because, for some infernal reason, she’s still wearing her prom dress.
She’s sitting on the front of the sailboat like the smug figurehead of a voyaging ship, almond-pink tulle fanning out behind her on the deck and frothing over the sides of the bow.
Shara in the flesh. Not a line on a card or a picture in Smith’s locker or a memory nipping at the back of Chloe’s neck, but actual Shara, with her pointy nose and elegant shoulders and annoyingly innocent facial expression.
Chloe feels, more so than usual, like she might explode.
And then Shara opens her mouth and says, “I had a feeling you’d show up.”
Yeah, explode. A full-on spontaneous combustion. Five million tiny, angry little Chloes raining down over the Anchor Bay Marina, all giving Shara the finger.
Now that she’s standing in front of the boat, she can see that Shara doesn’t look exactly like she did on prom night. Her face is scrubbed clean, her lips their natural pink. Her hair is tied up on top of her head with a scrunchie.