I Kissed Shara Wheeler(63)

“Chloe, oh my God. Read it again. I told you what I was going to do. My plan was to make you obsessed with me,” she says. She finally gets the chocolate unwrapped and throws it in her mouth. “Oh, this is so disappointing. I thought you had figured out what this was really about, but you fell for it.”

Chloe rewinds their Google Doc. Was she—were they having two completely different conversations?

“No. No way. That doesn’t make any sense. Why would you want me to—to be obsessed with you?”

It’s time for the kick in the teeth—the flat reminder that this is the exact type of joke that straight girls like Shara inflict on girls like Chloe who have the misfortune of being queer in their line of sight.

But what Shara says is, “I didn’t get in to Harvard.”

It’s such an abrupt and obvious lie that Chloe can’t even respond. Shara getting accepted early to Harvard is the biggest part of the Shara mythos, the crowning achievement that proved she really was going to go out into the world and make False Beach proud.

“Bullshit,” Chloe says finally.

“I didn’t get in,” Shara says again. She swallows her chocolate and folds her arms across her pink bodice. Her collarbones have taken on an air of the tragic now. She looks … like she might be telling the truth. “I bombed my interview. They rejected me. I haven’t told anyone, not even my parents.”

“But—but what does that have to do with kissing me, or the clues, or anything?”

“I told you,” Shara says. She looks up at Chloe, face impassive. “Did I do too good of a job with that letter? Did you forget everything else in it? Come on, what is the one thing we both want, that I’ve been trying to figure out how to get since you showed up at Willowgrove?”

Chloe skims to the top of the letter in her mind, before all the stuff about making Chloe fall in love with her, to—

“You mean valedictorian?”

Shara smiles a pageant smile.

“This whole thing was pretty distracting, right?” Shara says. “I turned in my assignments for the last nine weeks ahead of time, but you’ve probably missed a couple deadlines, right? Dropped a percentage point or two?”

“You did this to—to sabotage my chances at valedictorian?”

Shara rolls her eyes. “Like you wouldn’t have done the same thing if you’d thought of it.”

“Why?” is all Chloe can say. “Why do you need it that bad?”

“Because it’s all I have left.”

“Are you kidding me?” she nearly yells. “You have everything. You—you have a town full of people who are obsessed with you, a boyfriend who loves you, a hot guy next door who would do anything for you, rich parents who can give you whatever you want, a million people lining up to kiss the ground you walk on—what else do you need?”

Shara lets her finish before she says calmly, “You know my parents have a security camera on this stupid pier? And they think I don’t know they have a tracker on my car, but I do. They’ve known where I was the entire time I’ve been gone. I thought it would be funny, to see how long I could do this before they came after me, but the joke’s on me. They’re doing what they do every time I have the nerve to do or say or think something they don’t like: pretending it’s not happening until it goes away.”

It’s probably a play for sympathy, but Chloe’s fists unclench a fraction of an inch.

“What about Smith, then?” she asks. “And Rory? What do they have to do with valedictorian?”

“Chloe. You’re smarter than this.”

“Stop screwing with me and answer the question, Shara.”

Shara pauses, reaching for another chocolate. She doesn’t unwrap this one. It rolls around in her palm as she thinks about what she’s going to say. “You’ve seen the way they look at each other, haven’t you?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Smith didn’t have any interest in me until he found out Rory moved in next door. Then, all of a sudden, he was asking me to homecoming, and he seemed all right, so I thought I’d give him a chance. But when he came to pick me up, I swear Rory almost fell off his roof when they saw each other, and I got it. I knew what I was to them. You weren’t around in eighth grade, but I saw what they were like together.” Shara’s still rolling the chocolate around in her hand, letting it go soft at the edges from her body heat. “They both think they love me, but I’m not the one they’re here for.”

The bleachers note. Shara said she kissed Smith to make Rory jealous, but if she knew how he felt—

She never said which of them he was supposed to be jealous of.

“Everybody wants to use me for something, Chloe,” Shara says. “At least with them, there was something in it for me too.”

“Like what?”

“Social capital and entertainment, mainly. But I’m bored, and high school’s almost over, so I thought I’d point them at each other and see what happens.” She drops the chocolate unceremoniously back into the bag. “And I knew the three of you would keep each other on the trail, so I wrapped everything up together. Two birds and all. Nice and neat.”

“Smith would never use anyone like that,” Chloe says. “You broke his heart.”