I Kissed Shara Wheeler(93)
I think a lot about the movie Tremors, starring Kevin Bacon. It’s about a bunch of rednecks fighting giant sandworms in the desert. In the first twenty minutes, Kevin Bacon finds some guy’s hard hat on the ground full of brains, because the director needs the viewer to see the brains, and Kevin Bacon has to be the one who sees it because he’s the star of the movie. But in the real world, if you happened to see somebody’s brains by accident, it would mess you up. The whole movie would be about the fact that you saw somebody’s brains.
By the time the average Willowgrove student is my age, that feeling you felt when you saw or heard something really bad might not be such a big deal anymore. It’s just finding the brains. It’s the bad thing that had to happen to move the plot forward. You’re so busy shooting sandworms with an elephant gun that you’re not even thinking about the brains, even though they’re what scared you enough to go get an elephant gun in the first place. But when you’re in high school—when you’re only twenty minutes into the movie—the brains are everything.
Whenever I think about God’s plan for my life, I think it’s to keep some kids from seeing the brains. Or at least showing them something in the desert that isn’t brains. A cool cactus, maybe. I don’t know. Metaphors are hard. I’m not the literature teacher.
24
DAYS WITH SHARA (OFFICIALLY): 5
DAYS WITH SHARA (EMOTIONALLY): 1,363
DAYS UNTIL GRADUATION: 0
“You are not wearing a flannel to graduation,” Chloe says.
Rory pulls a face at her and the black dress shirt she’s holding up, unearthed from the depths of his closet.
“It’s a protest graduation,” Rory says. “Why does it matter what I wear?”
“Because Smith is gonna want to take photos, and you’re gonna be mad if you look stupid in them.”
He sighs, then snatches the shirt out of her hands. “Fine.”
“You should wear it with that chain you like,” says Shara’s voice.
She’s in Rory’s window, where the morning glows around her through the flowering dogwood and crepe myrtles, and under her burgundy graduation gown she’s wearing the same simple white sundress she wore in Chloe’s bed. Chloe can’t believe she’s dating someone who comes with her own reel of cinematic entrances.
(They are dating, right? They haven’t technically had the conversation, but trying to ruin someone’s life because you’re too attracted to them has to count.)
“Hi,” Chloe says.
“Hi,” Shara says, and then she looks at Chloe in that intense way she does, taking in her burgundy lipstick and the green dress she picked out carefully from a secondhand store in Birmingham. Pink blooms in her cheeks.
“Jesus, are you done checking her out?” Rory says.
Chloe’s jaw drops. “That’s what that is?”
“Shut up, Rory,” Shara says, pretending to fight it when Chloe pulls her in to her side.
All of their respective friends are scattered this morning. Benjy’s at home explaining to his parents why exactly he’s not attending his own graduation ceremony, and Ash had to pick up a last-minute shift at the paint-your-own-pottery studio where they sometimes work on summer break. Georgia and Summer are already at the dealership helping Summer’s parents, as evidenced by the seventeen nervous meeting-the-parents-who-kinda-know-but-don’t-know texts Chloe’s fielded this morning. April, Jake, and Ace are all probably still asleep, which leaves—
“Oh damn, it’s a party,” Smith says from Rory’s bedroom door.
Maybe it should feel weird for the four of them to stand in the same room like this, but it’s not. It’s just … funny, like how it’s funny now that Shara lived on a boat for a month or that Rory and Smith ever thought they were competing for Shara’s attention and not each other’s. High school is over, and everything is ridiculous.
Rory hands Smith a white dogwood blossom and says, “I got you these. I thought you might like to wear one or something.”
“Is that why you were on the roof this morning?” Shara says. “I was wondering.”
“They’re fresher if you get them off the tree than the ground, okay?” Rory mumbles.
“I love them,” Smith says, grinning as he takes it. “Thank you.”
He spends a minute fussing in the mirror on Rory’s closet door, trying to get the flower and cap to work together with his hair. He’s been growing it out for a month now, and it’s grown fast into short, dense curls.
“Hang on,” Shara says. “I have an idea.”
Smith lets her take his cap from him, and she produces a few hairpins from her dress pocket. She folds the elastic under and passes him the pins, pointing out the most strategic places for him to pin it into his hair.
“There,” she says, plucking up one of the flowers from the desk and tucking it behind his ear.
Smith turns to examine himself in the mirror again. He tilts his head from side to side, and then he catches Shara’s eye over his shoulder in the reflection and grins. She smiles back.
“Needs more flowers,” he concludes.
“More flowers,” Rory repeats with a nod before climbing dutifully out of the window.
He returns with two fresh handfuls of dogwood and crepe myrtle blossoms in white and pale pink, and Smith carefully twists them through his hair until it looks like there’s a garden growing straight out of his scalp. At his request, Chloe smudges a hint of gold eyeliner around the corners of his eyes. By the time they’re done, he looks like a god of the forest in white Air Forces.