I Kissed Shara Wheeler(76)

She doesn’t realize how long they’ve been stuck there, motionless on the lawn, until the floodlights automatically switch off. Suddenly, she’s looking down at Shara beneath her body in the lavender wash of the moonlight, feeling the rise and fall of Shara’s breaths between her thighs.

Shara’s unpinned hand is still loose above her head. It’s just lying there, surrendered, wide open. Chloe is absolutely sick to death of waiting for her to use it.

“I told everyone,” Shara says.

“Tell me.”

“Chloe. Read the card.”

“No!” Chloe snaps. “Say it to my face! Do this for real! Ask me on a date like everyone who has ever liked someone in the history of the universe!”

She gives Shara ten entire seconds to respond, but she doesn’t. She stares up at Chloe, eyes wide, lips parted around nothing.

She releases Shara’s wrist and jerks to her feet.

In her head, she’s cast Shara in the role of a million different beautiful women laid low: Marie Antoinette in pastel silks, Lucrezia Borgia dripping poison, vampire queens and girls in space. Now, standing over her, she doesn’t see any of them. She sees a girl with a kitchen-scissor haircut in a yard in the suburbs.

A month ago, she stood like this outside Shara’s house and refused to believe Shara was gone, because she knew the myth was a lie. That there was nothing extraordinary about Shara Wheeler.

This is the real tragedy: Everything extraordinary about her is trapped behind the myth.

“I have to study,” Chloe says. “Go home, Shara.”



* * *



On her way out of her last exam, Chloe hears a new rumor.

One junior tells another that some total narc of a sophomore walked in on two girls making out in the B Building bathroom. Five lockers down, two guys from the baseball team are muttering about how the girls got reported to Principal Wheeler, and he’s going to suspend them.

She’s hovering at the water fountain near the exit, trying to catch the name of the snitch she’s going to make her new mortal enemy, when one of the double doors opens.

“There you are,” Shara says when she sees Chloe, as if she hasn’t known Chloe’s exact whereabouts for months. She’s backlit in the doorway with afternoon sun, a hot breeze swirling her hair around her face in rose gold.

Chloe groans. Shara cinematic-ass Wheeler.

“I told you to—”

Shara cuts her off: “It was Georgia.”

Chloe’s stomach twists. Georgia’s name out of Shara’s mouth can’t possibly mean anything good.

“What? What was Georgia?”

“One of the girls from the B Building bathroom,” Shara says. “I thought you should know.”

“Georgia? With who?”

“Summer,” Shara says, “but they only saw Georgia, so she’s the only one who got reported.”

“Summer Collins? They— Since when?”

“I don’t know, nobody told me either,” Shara says. “Summer hasn’t exactly been dying to talk to me lately.”

Chloe doesn’t have time to react to that.

“Where’s Georgia now?”

“The office,” Shara says. “My dad’s gonna call her parents.”

Shara steps back, holding the door open. Her eyes are wide, eyebrows set in a dire arch. She’s still catching her breath—she must have sprinted all the way across campus.

“There’s time if you run,” she says.

Chloe runs.





FROM THE BURN PILE


Passed notes between Georgia and Summer Found on the back of the instructions for their geometry project, for which they received a 95/100

Where do you want to meet after school to work on the project? I think Ms. Johnson’s room should be open and she’s chill

I’m supposed to go to work right after school, tomorrow?

Softball practice:(I could come to your job maybe? Where do you work?

Yeah that’s fine! I work at Belltower Books

YOU WORK THERE??? that’s so cool

it’s no big deal haha, my parents own it!

You do see how that’s cooler, right? OK, I’ll meet you there.





20


DAYS UNTIL GRADUATION: 8


Chloe crashes into the admin office’s glass door like a dive-bombing pigeon.

When she throws it open, she doesn’t hear it smash into the opposite wall or the alarmed squawk of the receptionist. She doesn’t see anything but Georgia, sitting on one of the hideous carpeted chairs, waiting to be called back.

Their eyes lock, and Georgia’s expression cycles from shock to confusion to anger and back in less than a second, before best friend mind-meld kicks in, and she mouths, “Isengard.”

It’s not too late, then.

Chloe keeps running straight to the principal’s office, where Wheeler stops with his hand over the number pad of his desk phone, the receiver still pinned between his ear and shoulder.

“Ms. Green,” he says, “if you want to meet with me, you can talk to Mrs.—”

“Georgia wasn’t the one kissing a girl in the B Building bathroom,” Chloe says, “it was me.”

Wheeler stares at her for a long second. He puts the receiver down.