I Kissed Shara Wheeler(75)

“Jesus Christ.” Chloe sighs.

“So that’s what’s been up with you,” her mom says. “You got a thing for a Christian girl.”

“I don’t—”

“Look, I can’t blame you—all those girls walking around with Jesus right over their boobs? Always seemed like entrapment to me when I was your age.” She pats Chloe on the head. “Are you pretending to go to church now so you can date somebody’s nice wholesome daughter?”

“It’s not like that,” Chloe insists. Her mama is already singing “Papa Don’t Preach” under her breath. Chloe unclasps the necklace and gathers the chain in her hand. “See? Still the heathen you raised.”

“You’re always perfect,” her mom says, pressing a kiss to her hair. “Tell me her name later. You need dinner?”

“I’m good,” she says, reaching into the freezer for a few Uncrustables. “I’ll eat while I study.”

In her room, she spreads her notes across her bed and checks for anything she still needs to go over. She’s about to start on the Bolsheviks when the motion-activated floodlights outside her window snap on.

She squints at her drawn blinds and wishes Titania luck escorting every last cricket off this mortal plane, but then she hears it: a faint metallic scrape at her windowpane. The sound of someone removing the screen.

She doesn’t know how she knows, but she does.

She jumps out of bed and pulls the blinds up and there, kneeling outside her bedroom, nose inches from the glass, is Shara.

She’s lost her uniform top since this afternoon, down to only her skirt and a white cotton undershirt under the glare of the floodlights. For one wild and gorgeous second, Chloe thinks she’s here to do what she couldn’t in the library. She thinks Shara is finally going to climb into Chloe’s life and make this real.

Then she looks down at Shara’s hand and sees the pink card.

For a moment, they’re locked in a freeze-frame. Chloe imagines a movie camera spinning around them, from behind Shara’s shoulders to Shara’s stunned profile to the card’s sweet, flowery monogram, into Chloe’s bedroom under the whirr of the ceiling fan to the hot gasp she sucks in through her teeth, finishing on the blood that slams into Chloe’s cheeks as she exhales, “No.”

She throws the window open and leaps through it so fast, she doesn’t even touch the sill. One second, she’s in her room, and the next, her entire body is outside the house and her ass and head and all four limbs are flying at Shara like a rampaging lemur on National Geographic, snarling and tumbling into the grass, the screen cartwheeling off into the night as Shara screams and rolls. Both of them scream and roll, kicking and thrashing until they crash sideways into the giant air conditioning unit on the side of the house, which is absolutely roaring, because in Alabama it’s eighty-five degrees even at night—Chloe’s elbow connects with something that might be a nose—Shara’s fingernails are sharp—Shara throws her shoulder into Chloe’s chest, flipping her onto her back—

“Stop!” Shara shrieks.

“I’m not doing this again!” Chloe screeches. She rips up a handful of grass and flings it in Shara’s face, and while Shara’s sputtering and spitting, Chloe wrestles her way back on top.

“Just take it!” Shara growls, wrenching her arm out from between them and holding up the card, which is crumpled in her fist now.

“No!”

“Take it!”

“You can’t make mmmmf—!”

Shara, apparently short on options, crams the card into Chloe’s mouth.

Chloe recoils, choking it out onto the grass—the cardstock slices the corner of her mouth, which is perfect, really, what is Shara if not a papercut in the mouth corner of Chloe’s existence—and with a feral sort of yowl, she bites Shara’s finger.

“Ow!”

“What is wrong with you?” Chloe yells. She jams her thumb into the vulnerable inside of Shara’s thigh, and Shara relents for the duration of another “ow!,” long enough for Chloe to climb up onto her knees. With one hand, she pins the first wrist she can grab to Shara’s stomach, and then—also short on options—she straddles Shara around the waist to hold her down.

Shara stops moving.

“Are you running away again?” Chloe demands. She’s out of breath, her heart sledgehammering through her chest.

“I—” Shara starts. Above her head, her free hand falls limp on the lawn, palm open to the sky. “No, I—I wrote you a card.”

“Oh my God, why can’t you act like a normal human person?” Chloe says. “Why can’t you do one thing that’s not some fucking emotional manipulation gesture from fifteen million miles away? I’m not doing this with you anymore! All I have done for the past month is try to figure out who the hell you are, but I don’t even think you know!”

“Chloe—”

“Do you think love is just someone arranging their entire life around whatever you want?” she continues, ignoring Shara, whose face is as pink as her hair. “Do you have any idea what you even mean when you say you want me? No, you fucking don’t, because if you did, if it actually meant something to you, if it wasn’t about how much you get off on someone being obsessed with you, if you were actually willing to confront anything about yourself or sacrifice anything that actually matters to you, you wouldn’t be sticking notes on my window when I’m not looking! You would have kissed me when you had your chance in the library today!”