I Kissed Shara Wheeler(9)
(No, Chloe still hasn’t found her own note from Shara. Yes, she has checked everywhere, including the pocket of the oxford that was pressed up against Shara’s cotton polo when they kissed.)
Chloe drops the delicate chain back into the drawer and shuts it, glaring at the bathroom mirror. Why is she looking at the only person in town immune to Shara Wheeler?
“You are cursed with flawless judgment,” Chloe says to her reflection.
In her room, she kicks a stack of college admissions booklets aside to reach her backpack. The hunt for her Shara note will have to wait for a couple of hours. She’s got a date with her French 4 final project, a full essay about uprisings in France from 1789 to 1832, which is due in three weeks. Georgia’s her partner.
“Mom, Titania ate my underwear again,” Chloe says as she sweeps into the kitchen.
Chloe’s mom, who is still wearing her work coveralls and shoving something enormous into the freezer, grunts out, “Sounds like a problem for someone who leaves their underwear on the floor, not me.”
“That’s the third pair this month. Can I have some money to go to Target tomorrow?”
Titania, the house cat in question, is perched on top of the refrigerator and surveying them both like a tiny panty-eating lord. She’s tempestuous and vindictive and has been a part of the Green household almost as long as Chloe has. Chloe’s moms like to blame her for Chloe’s personality.
“Check the change jar,” she says.
Chloe sighs and begins counting out quarters.
“What is that?” she asks, watching her mom rearrange frozen vegetables to make room for the mysterious icy bundle. “Did you kill someone?”
“Your mother,” she says as she finally manages to cram the thing in, “has requested a Southern feast when she gets home from Portugal this weekend. A very specific one.” She pats the hunk of meat once and turns to Chloe, a bit of short, dark hair falling over her forehead. She used to have Chloe help her dye it blue, but she’s kept it natural since the move. “This, my child, is a turducken.”
“You lost me at turd,” Chloe says. “But continue.”
“It’s a chicken stuffed inside a duck stuffed inside a turkey.”
“Where did you even get that?”
“I know a guy.”
“That’s … upsetting.”
Her mom nods and shuts the freezer. “My wife is a woman of refinement.”
Because Chloe and her mom were both miserable about the move, her West Coast mama resolved to be aggressively positive about discovering the South. She bought a red Bama shirt to wear in her vegetable garden and a matching set of houndstooth luggage for her work trips abroad. She even put up a framed photo of Dolly Parton on the kitchen windowsill. It’s a whole thing.
But her favorite activity has been seeking out every possible Southern delicacy. Back home, the most Alabama thing about their kitchen was the pitcher of sweet tea Chloe’s mom always kept in the fridge. Now, her mama has insisted on learning how to fry chicken thighs and green tomatoes, sampled each item on the Bojangles menu, and become a regular at every soul-food joint in town.
And apparently, she’s going to make Chloe eat some kind of nightmare poultry matryoshka, which is even worse than when she roasted a chicken by shoving a can of Miller Lite up its ass.
“I’m gonna walk across that stage to get my diploma and keep walking until I hit a city with a Trader Joe’s,” Chloe says.
“Hey.” Her mom folds her arms as she peers across the kitchen at her. “Is this normal baseline Chloe curmudgeon behavior, or are you cranky because you miss your mama? Is one mom not good enough for you?”
Chloe shrugs it off, gathering up her purse and keys from the table by the back door under one of her mama’s abstract paintings of boobs. “I’m fine.”
“Or is it whatever has been making you act weird since last week?”
“I’m fine!” Chloe snaps. “You try wearing bikini bottoms as underwear and see how pleasant you are!”
“Okay. But, you know. If you need to talk about anything. Girls, boys, whatever. The end of senior year brings up a lot of emotions for everyone. I know you’re—”
“Bye!” Chloe calls as she breaks for the door. If she slams it fast enough, she’s sure the ghost of Shara can’t follow.
* * *
It takes fifteen minutes to drive to the center of False Beach from Chloe’s house, and absolutely nothing of consequence but a Dairy Queen is passed along the way.
What the locals call “downtown” is a single main street lined with historic redbrick buildings and two-story shops pressed up against one another with iron balconies and Southern small-town charm. It all leads up to a white courthouse, towering with cast-iron pillars and a wide town square at its feet, Civil War era. There used to be some ugly Confederate monument at the square’s center, but two summers ago someone pulled it down in the middle of the night and rolled it into Lake Martin, which is the only cool thing that’s ever happened in False Beach. Last year, the city council held a contest to choose a new town mascot and installed a bronze statue of the winner: a rearing deer with huge antlers named Bucky the Buck.
Chloe takes a left at the square and parks in front of Webster’s Ice Cream right as the bell tower chimes five o’clock in the evening.