I Kissed Shara Wheeler(84)
You’re five years back, you’re wrong, you’re right
You’re impossible to me
I’ve been up here waiting for you
Maybe I should have guessed
Give us five more and it’s still true
You’ll always be my best
R. H.
21
DAYS UNTIL GRADUATION: 6
There are five school days after finals but before graduation, when the rest of the student body is reviewing for exams, but the seniors are expected to show up to school every day to do nothing. Allegedly, it’s a requirement that was created in the 2000s after one senior class used the time to execute a senior prank so elaborate the entire gym floor had to be replaced. Now, they have to be supervised.
Like Dead Week, this weird in-between week has a nickname, created by past Willowgrove seniors and handed down through the years. Chloe hates it.
“I’m not calling it that,” Chloe says on Monday morning, on the breezeway outside C Building. “It’s gross.”
“But it makes so much sense,” Benjy says. “It’s a pointless space between two important things.”
Ash spreads their hands in front of them like a marquee and says, “Taint Week.”
Chloe sighs. “Somehow this feels like Ace’s fault.”
She pushes the stairwell door open, but before she can reach the next set of doors, Dixon Wells comes bursting out of them. Georgia throws a soccer-mom arm in front of Chloe’s chest before they smash into each other.
Dixon is red-faced and swearing, his Logan Paul hair flying in every direction, and he bolts past them down the stairs and out of sight.
“Not too late to stop being a dick, Dixon!” Georgia calls after him.
“Geo,” Chloe says. “That was spicy.”
Georgia shrugs, catching the door on the backswing. “Somebody has to tell him.”
Benjy steps into the hallway first, then stops so suddenly Ash and Chloe pile up behind him.
“Jesus wept,” he says.
The entire hallway is crammed with students and white as a blizzard. Every locker, every bulletin board, every classroom door—all plastered with paper. Half the student body is there, passing sheets around and pulling folded pieces out of their locker vents and trampling them underfoot. Every page seems to be covered in different configurations of small, black type.
Overhead, the morning bell goes off, but nobody cares.
Chloe rips a page off the nearest bulletin board.
We can certainly make that arrangement for your son, it says, and as for the amount, $15K seems a bit low. What you’re asking would involve a lot of logistical support on our end to make sure this is done right, and the school doesn’t lose its status as a test center …
“Oh my God,” Georgia says, crowded against her shoulder. “No way. No way. Are these—?”
“Wheeler’s?” Chloe asks. “Is he actually talking about an—?”
“Admissions scam?”
“Isn’t that—?”
“A federal crime? Yeah, uh, I’m pretty sure it is.”
Chloe sets off down the hall in a frenzy, snatching up every page she can.
The papers are copies of emails, hundreds and hundreds of emails between Wheeler and parents of students. Payoffs and bribes and under-the-table deals to boost the scores of kids taking the ACT at Willowgrove.
She knew Mackenzie couldn’t have made a 29.
Now she knows what Wheeler’s been spending hours on in his office after everyone else goes home for the night. And why Wheeler wouldn’t want the police involved after Shara ran away, and why he was so threatened by people trying to dig into his family— Wait.
Was Shara involved?
She grabs another page, and another, skimming as fast as she can.
—balance owed—
—answer key—
—my daughter—
There.
We need to discuss discretion. There’s no need to keep your child looped in if his participation isn’t required. My daughter still has no idea I had Carol raise her final grade last year, and that’s for the best. If they feel they’ve earned this, they’re motivated to keep working hard and stay out of trouble.
She scans back up to the sender to make sure she read what she thinks she did.
It’s from Wheeler, and he’s talking about Shara’s grade in Ms. Rodkey’s class last year. The class in which she edged Chloe out by a single percentage point.
“Holy shit,” Chloe whispers.
He just admitted to having Shara’s grades changed.
Which means Shara is disqualified from—
“I think,” she says, staring at the paper so hard, her vision goes blurry, “I think I won valedictorian.”
* * *
By lunch, every single student at Willowgrove has at least one page of Principal Wheeler’s emails, which definitively prove that he conspired with the richest parents at Willowgrove to scam their kids into college in exchange for a lot of money and a higher ACT score average to lure in new students.
Dixon, whose dad paid at least $30,000 total to have a proctor look the other way while an Auburn senior with a fake ID took the test under Dixon’s name, has ghosted completely. Mackenzie was spotted melting down in the bathroom, swearing to everyone within earshot that she had no idea her parents paid to have her answers switched with someone else’s. Rumor has it Emma Grace told her that if she wanted people to believe things she says, she shouldn’t have lied about giving her best friend’s crush a handjob at her birthday party.