I Kissed Shara Wheeler(91)

“So, you don’t regret anything?”

“I don’t know. There’s still this part of me that thinks I’ve ruined my whole life. But there’s another part of me that thinks ruining my life sounds kind of nice.” She pauses to think. Chloe can admit it now: She loves watching Shara think. “I could have done better by Smith and Rory. That’s the one thing. But I already knew they both deserved better than me.”

“You’re not—”

“I wasn’t fishing for a compliment,” Shara says. “I’m not bad. I’m bad for them.”

Chloe bites her lip. “And for me?”

Shara turns her head so that they’re inches apart on the pillow, nose to nose, eyelashes almost brushing.

“How’d you say it?” she says. “You were the only one it could be.”

Warmth bubbles up from the pit of her stomach. Her mouth pops open to speak, but nothing comes out.

“Why do you look so surprised?” Shara says irritably. “You’re like, the girl.”

“What girl?”

“The girl,” Shara says. “You know everyone is scared of Chloe Green, right?”

“Yeah, because I’m a bitch.”

“That,” Shara says, smiling when Chloe pulls a face, “and also because you showed up one day from California and did whatever you wanted. Nobody at Willowgrove knows what to do with that. I sure didn’t.”

Shara thinks she’s The Girl? But Shara’s The Girl. What do you say when The Girl tells you that you’re The Girl to her?

Before she can guess, the front door rattles open.

“Chloe?” her mom’s voice calls from across the house. “You home?”

Shara jolts upright.

“I thought they had pottery class?”

“They do!”

The house is small enough that even if both her moms stopped to drop their shoes and bags at the door, at least one of them should be to the living room by now. Shara jumps out of bed, and Chloe shouts out a preemptive, “Hey! You got back fast!”

“Yeah,” says her mama. “The last part of the class was bisque firing. What kind of amateurs do they think we are? We figured we might as well come home for dinner— Oh!”

Her mama freezes in the doorway.

The scene: Chloe, wedging herself into the doorway, smiling through smudged makeup. Shara, near the desk, Mrs. Dalloway upside down in her hands like she’s in Chloe’s room to discuss Virginia Woolf and nothing else. Her mama in clay-splattered chambray, buffering.

Chloe’s mom appears over her mama’s shoulder and says, without a moment’s hesitation, “Oh, hi! You’re Wheeler’s kid, aren’t you?”

“We were studying,” Chloe says.

“Finals were last week, Chlo,” her mom points out.

“I should go,” Shara says.

“You don’t have a car,” Chloe reminds her.

“Tell you what,” Chloe’s mom announces in that broad voice she has when she’s about to recalibrate an entire situation. “I got the stuff to make spaghetti and a half gallon of strawberry ice cream from Webster’s in the freezer. Why don’t you stay for dinner, and Chloe can drive you home after?”

“Mom,” Chloe hisses. It’s way too early for Shara to experience her mama’s weird hemp tea or the bad DeNiro impression her mom does when she cooks Italian.

But to Chloe’s surprise and horror, Shara says, “Okay.”

And the next thing Chloe knows, Shara’s helping with the sides while her mom whips up a quick red sauce and Chloe boils the pasta, and they’re all pretending it’s normal and not absolutely the most bizarre thing that’s happened in Chloe’s entire life.

My moms walked in on me and Shara hooking up and convinced her to stay for dinner and now Shara is making garlic bread and my mom is telling her about how I punched a mall Santa when I was five, she texts Georgia.

“Top five Chloe moment,” her mom concludes.

Georgia immediately texts back, SLDJFASDLAFAKLSAS NO followed by, SHARA??? FINALLY????? HOW??????? in rapid succession. And then, summer is losing her mind rn.

What happens next is her fault. While she’s occupied with her phone, she misses her chance to intervene when Shara asks her mom, “How did y’all meet?”

“No, Shara, don’t—” Chloe attempts, but her mom has already dramatically put down her wooden spoon.

“The year was 1997,” she says.

“Oh God,” Chloe moans.

“I was a bright-eyed, nineteen-year-old ingenue fresh out of Alabama, bartending to pay my way through trade school, and there was this waitress, Jess, and she was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen in my entire life. Perfect button nose. Killer smile. Eyes like a forest at night, like something you want to wander into—”

“Mom, please.”

“—and I’d never been in love before, but I saw her in her little apron, and I felt what I had been waiting my whole life to feel. And it only took me six months to work up the nerve to ask her on a date.”

“And then she tried to kiss me at the end of the night and found out I didn’t realize it was a date,” her mama interjects.

“And so we got to have a second first date, and we’ve been living life like every day is our first date ever since.”