I Kissed Shara Wheeler(71)

He raises the bullhorn and says, over a squawk of feedback, “You too, Miss Green.”

She does not say, “I kissed your daughter, twice,” but she thinks it. She thinks it hard.

Instead, she smiles and salutes and marches off to her AP Lit exam.

Shara’s already in her desk when Chloe gets to Mrs. Farley’s classroom. The rest of the class is leaning across aisles and whispering behind stacks of notecards, and every last one of them is staring at the girl on the front row with the pink hair.

Before, when everyone in a room was staring at Shara, it made her more powerful, like the moon refracting sunlight. Now, if she notices it at all, she doesn’t let on. Her eyes are straight ahead, fixed on her neat line of pens and pencils.

She doesn’t look up when Chloe sits behind her, but her posture straightens slightly.

Mrs. Farley doesn’t say anything to Shara when she passes out the exam booklets. Not a dress code notice, not a demand for a doctor’s note for the month of class she missed, not even a disapproving look. Must be nice to be the principal’s daughter. If Chloe said a bunch of gay stuff on Instagram Live and then showed up at school with pink hair and a too-short skirt, she’d be catapulted out of the building and probably into the dumpsters behind the cafeteria.

At least she finishes her exam before Shara does. She slides her papers smugly onto Mrs. Farley’s desk, and that’s it—her very last English exam of high school.

When she turns around and sees Shara in the front row, head down, diligently writing her essay, she remembers Shara’s letter: three fingers on Chloe’s desk the first day of class. She remembers that moment, how she sat there with her nerves sparking and watched Shara pull sharpened pencils from a pencil case out of her backpack, which was also annoying, somehow—always a thing inside a thing inside a thing with Shara.

So, on the way back to her seat, she leans in and touches the corner of Shara’s desk with three intentional fingertips, light and short enough that anyone else could mistake it for an accident.

But Shara’s not anyone else. Her chin snaps upward, and she looks from Chloe’s hand to Chloe’s face, pen frozen on the paper, a piece of streaky pink hair falling across the top of her nose.

The way her eyes flash at Chloe … it’s not surprise. It’s not confusion. It’s bright, heady expectation, like she knew it was only a matter of time until this happened. Like she’s been waiting since she sat down for Chloe to come up there and kiss her.

And that’s when it clicks. Shara still thinks she gets whatever she wants whenever she decides she wants it. She thinks, because she got a makeover and stopped denying her crush, Chloe’s going to fall into her lap. As if Chloe is going to be like everyone else Shara’s ever met and make it easy.

She still has something on Shara: herself. She can make Shara chase her. She can be smart about it—let her think she might have a chance and then give her the first bottom-of-the-heart rejection of her entire charmed life. Chloe’s spent four years trying to keep one thing out of Shara’s hands. Now she can be that.

Really, Shara’s original plan to break Chloe’s heart wasn’t a bad one. Shame to let it go to waste.

She gives Shara a small, tight smile and slides into her seat.



* * *



Chloe’s plan for the rest of finals week is simple: One, make herself available to Shara. Two, do things that she knows Shara will be into based on past behavior. Nothing that would count as actual pursuit, but like, horny little traps. Three, lay it on so thick that Shara has to try something. Four, rejection, gratification, glory.

Shara pretty much does step one for her. The next few days, she seems to have suddenly developed a habit of being everywhere Chloe is. Chloe goes to ask her calc teacher a question, and Shara is waiting outside the classroom. Chloe unlocks her car, and Shara is two parking spaces over, pretending to be interested in Ace’s tire pressure. Chloe hovers at the edge of the courtyard, watching her friends share a carton of Sonic tots and wondering if Ash ever finished their portfolio, and suddenly Shara is perched on the nearest flowerbox with her color-coded binder of study guides.

Chloe can only imagine Shara’s strategy is similar. She’s making herself available to Chloe, under the mistaken impression that Chloe hasn’t yet fainted into her arms simply due to lack of opportunity.

She can use this.

When she stops at her locker for an emergency coffee, there Shara is, leaning against the next locker, trying to open a granola bar.

The choppy pink hair does look unfairly good on her. Against her defined features and her long lashes, it makes her look like a comic book character.

“How do you think you did on the calc exam?” Shara asks.

“Oh, you know,” Chloe says. She swallows a mouthful, then holds Shara’s gaze as she innocently swipes the side of her thumb across her bottom lip, the way she would if she were a girl in one of Georgia’s Regency novels. Shara’s fingers go stiff around the wrapper. “Pretty well. Implicit derivatives are actually pretty easy once you get the hang of them.”

“No,” Shara disagrees, staring at her mouth, “they’re not.”

“Hm. Maybe it’s just me, then,” Chloe says. “What about you?”

“What about me?”

“The exam,” Chloe says. “How do you think you did?”