I Kissed Shara Wheeler(68)
After the cancer, Chloe spent a week between sophomore and junior year in the trailer with her mama, boxing up old photos and putting furniture up on Craigslist so her mom didn’t have to see everything empty. Then they sold the trailer and had it hauled off, and now all that’s left is an empty plot of land with a faded FOR SALE sign stuck in the overgrown weeds.
Chloe kills the engine and walks out into the tall grass. The ground is wet from recent rain, though it always seems to be wet this close to the lake. She takes off her sandals and lets her toes touch the cool earth, feeling it give slightly under her weight, taking account of her.
Chloe Green was born in California. Her mom’s egg, her mama’s body, California soil. She grew up in a house full of Obama coffee mugs and Tibetan singing bowls and unofficial aunts who played cello in their living room after dinner parties. Before they moved here, she never felt anything about Alabama, and she certainly never imagined it could make her feel anything about herself.
But Alabama is in her, no matter how much she pretends it’s not.
According to the introductory course Georgia gave Chloe on her first day at Willowgrove, there has been exactly one person who came out as gay while still a student in the thirty-six years since the school was founded.
There are a lot of versions of the story, because many people who graduate Willowgrove never fully escape the gravitational pull of its gossip. When Georgia first told it, she didn’t know the girl’s name, only that she graduated in the late ’90s and came out as a lesbian in front of the whole grade on the senior retreat when everyone was sharing personal testimonies. Another rendition is that this mythical lesbian came to school with her hair dyed blue and got suspended for trying to recruit girls to her satanic sex cult. In a different version, she got busted for having a stash of Playboy magazines in her locker and is now married to a Florida senator.
But Chloe knows the real story, because that girl’s name was Valerie Green.
She knows for a fact that her mom put a blue streak in her hair with bleach and Kool-Aid and told three friends from woodshop that she liked girls, and that, when the secret got out, the Willowgrove rumor factory stamped out a hundred iterations like candy bars. There were meetings with the guidance counselor and the principal and the pastor, in which she was encouraged to finish high school somewhere else until she assured them that none of the rumors were true, and then months of everyone talking about it anyway. It was the main reason she ran west as soon as she could and didn’t come back until she had to.
Chloe’s mom told her all of this before the move.
“You can go wherever you want to go,” her mom said, stroking her hair as they sat in a pile of moving boxes. “We’ll find the money. But I want to protect you.”
“I’ll be fine, Mom,” Chloe said confidently. “Besides, there’s no way it’s the same now as it was like, twenty years ago.”
She told herself it didn’t get to her. She knew who she was. Her moms love her, her friends love her, she knows who she is, and she’s never bought into the bullshit notion that people like her are made wrong, not for a second. It’s an unpleasant sting when a teacher tells her to stop trying to use Bible verses to prove that the love between her moms can’t be wrong because it says right there that God is love and all love is of God, but—no. No, as long as she can go home at the end of the day and see the two women who raised her sitting on either side of the kitchen table, she knows it’s not true.
But that’s not accounting for the time in between.
That’s not accounting for Mackenzie Harris refusing to change in front of her in the locker room, or the teachers who give her As but never use her work as an example for the class, or the shitty jokes about her moms. That’s not accounting for Wheeler’s vendetta against her or the way it sometimes feels like everyone’s just finished laughing about her when she walks into a room. There’s the initial sting, and there’s the moment she walks through the door of her house and feels it fade, but there’s all this time in between when she’s furiously maintaining her GPA and stomping through the hallways and breaking small rules to feel like she’s done something to deserve the way people look at her.
She was so sure if she didn’t believe any of it, it couldn’t hurt her.
Was Shara right? Has she really been afraid this whole time? That rage between her ribs, the thing clawing out of the muscle of her heart—what if it’s always been fear, waiting in her marrow, cut loose the first day of freshman year?
What if Willowgrove got to her after all?
* * *
At 2 p.m. on Sunday afternoon, Chloe’s phone lights up on her nightstand. She holds her place in her AP Bio study guide with her finger and checks it.
shara.wheeler has started an Instagram Live.
No way. Absolutely no way is she going to look. She won. She’s done.
One second passes, and another.
She throws her notes to the foot of the bed and reaches for her phone.
The video is an empty shot of the cabin of Shara’s parents’ sailboat, exactly the way Chloe remembers it: the bunk, the stairs, the pink toothbrush in a cup by the miniature sink. She watches the number at the corner of the screen go higher and higher: 37 viewers, 61 viewers, 112, 249 and counting. Familiar names start popping up with messages. Summer Collins types out a string of question marks. Tyler Miller asks if he missed it already. April Butcher sends a series of skeptical emojis wearing monocles.