I Kissed Shara Wheeler(79)

“Oh my God, are you okay?” Summer says. “I was looking everywhere for you, and then Shara told me she sent Chloe after you—”

Georgia rounds on Chloe. “Shara sent you?”

Chloe grits her teeth. “Technically?”

“We’re gonna discuss that.”

“What happened?” Summer asks.

Georgia turns back to her. “Chloe took the fall for me. Wheeler banned her from graduation.”

“Are you serious?” Summer says. Chloe shrugs. “Man, that dude sucks.”

The front door opens again, and this time it’s Benjy in his Sonic polo and visor speeding into the shop. He skids into the nearest table of books, topples a display of mystery novels, and shouts up to the loft, “What happened?”

Summer turns to him and says, “Chloe took the fall for Georgia so Wheeler banned her from graduation.”

“What?” Benjy gasps. “Also, hi, Summer, lots for you to catch me up on, but—what? Can he do that?”

“Wheeler can do pretty much whatever he wants,” Summer says.

“But—isn’t the church board in charge of him? Has anybody told them?”

“I really don’t think the Willowgrove church board is going to be that upset about this,” Summer says grimly. “If anything, they’ll be into it.”

The door bangs open, and Ash storms in.

“What happened?” they demand.

“Wheeler banned Chloe from graduation because he thinks she was the one making out with girls in the bathroom,” Benjy tells them.

“What?”

BANG. The door, again, before it’s even all the way shut from Ash. It’s a good thing Georgia’s dad replaced the frame last year, though Smith Parker throwing the whole thing off the hinges would really have been the perfect end to this parade of dramatic entrances. Close behind him, Rory’s scowl is extra sour. Chloe sighs and volunteers to take her turn. “I—”

“We know what happened,” Rory interrupts.

Chloe stares. “How?”

“I texted Smith,” Summer says. “I just wasn’t expecting him to show up like, immediately.”

“Well,” Smith says. “When I’m pissed off, I go fast. You good, Summer?”

“I’m good,” Summer says. “Are you?”

“I just think it’s bullshit,” Smith blurts out. “I mean, Chloe doesn’t do half the stuff that some of the guys on the team do. She doesn’t even do half the stuff that the kids in the marching band do.” He pauses. “No offense, Chloe.”

Chloe frowns thoughtfully. “Tough, but fair.”

“And like,” Smith goes on, “if that kid had seen Summer, she’d be banned from graduation too. And Summer’s never broken a rule in her life, and I know that because I haven’t either, because we can’t, because me and her have to be perfect to stay on everyone’s good side, so there’s no room for anything. There’s no room to be anything except this one specific version of yourself that Willowgrove likes, and—and it’s so blatantly fucked up. All of it. And Wheeler doesn’t even try to pretend it’s not, because he knows nobody is ever gonna step to him.” Smith is on a roll now, striding over the books Benjy spilled to pace the front of the store. “Like, my little brother likes football too, and he knows the same way I know that Willowgrove is where you go to get into the SEC, but what if he comes here and he likes boys, or finds out he’s not a boy, or whatever—I’m not gonna let them do this to him too. It’s fucked up. It’s fucked up how they make us feel about ourselves, and we put up with it because we don’t think there’s anything we can do about it. We put up with it for so long that we don’t even know who we are, only what they want us to be. And I don’t want to put up with it anymore.”

It’s the first time she’s ever seen Smith lose his temper. This must be how he lights up the field in overtime. He’s incandescent.

“When my sister left for college,” Summer says, “she told people about Willowgrove, and they couldn’t believe it. I mean, even sometimes my church friends can’t believe it. Like, it’s not like this everywhere. It doesn’t have to be like this here.”

Chloe ducks down to the loft ladder. “It really doesn’t,” she agrees.

“I wanna do something,” Smith says. “But I…”

He doesn’t finish the sentence, but they all know the rest of it. Rebellion is not exactly a luxury Smith Parker gets to have.

“I’m down,” says Rory, jaw set. “I vote we steal the Bucky the Buck statue out of the square and drop it on Wheeler’s car.”

“That’s,” Smith says, “not exactly what I had in mind.”

“Why? It’s not that hard to take a statue down. All you need is a truck and some chains.”

Benjy asks, “How do you know?”

“Who do you think threw the Jefferson Davis statue in Lake Martin in the first place?”

Ash pokes their head out from behind Benjy. “That was you?”

“For legal reasons, I’m joking.”

“What if people outside of False Beach knew about what it’s like at Willowgrove?” Summer says. “What if we could put Wheeler on blast somehow? Maybe the church board doesn’t care now, but we could—we could put the pressure on them. Make them change things to save their reputation. There’s nothing they hate more than bad PR.”