I Kissed Shara Wheeler(95)
“We did something very cool,” she says. Gently, she rearranges a piece of Chloe’s bangs. Chloe scrunches her nose and puts it back. “Your mother is very hot and daring. I want you to know that.”
Her mom finally slides the remaining box up to the tailgate and opens it.
“Mom,” Chloe gasps when she sees what’s inside.
The box contains two dozen thick, burgundy leather envelopes, each one embossed with the Willowgrove crest in white. Her mom takes out the topmost folder and opens it.
It winds her to finally see it in real life. The fancy gothic font, the shiny gold seal, the ridiculous, beautiful full name her moms picked out for her.
This certifies that Chloe Andromeda Green has satisfactorily completed the course prescribed by the Alabama State Board of Education for the accredited high schools—
“This is why y’all asked for the names of everyone who was coming today?” Chloe demands. “I thought Mama was going to make personalized cookies again.”
“Oh, I did,” she says, producing a Tupperware of frosted sugar cookies. “The diplomas were Jack’s idea. Helped to have a list though.”
Chloe looks over at Mr. Truman, who’s huffing and puffing as Shara helps him set the box of diplomas down on the stage, and back to her moms.
“I love you so much,” Chloe says, folding herself into her mom’s arms.
“I love you too, coconut,” her mom says thickly in her ear. “I’m so proud of you.”
“Don’t make me cry,” Chloe says. “I spent forever on my eyeliner.”
Her mom sniffs. “God, you are your mother’s child.”
“Hold that for one more second,” her mama says. “I almost got a good picture.”
“Mama, stooooop.”
* * *
After Rory shreds “Pomp and Circumstance” on his Flying V, before Mr. Truman starts handing out diplomas, he leans into the microphone.
“I’d like to—” A squawk of feedback. “Lord in heaven. I’d like to invite someone up to say a few words. The valedictorian of Willowgrove Christian Academy’s class of 2022: Chloe Green.”
A sound rushes up to her ears, and it takes her a second to identify it: a round of applause. She’s had a lot of fantasies of this moment, but this isn’t part of most of them. She always expected everyone to sort of tolerate her at the podium. But when she looks around, Georgia is whooping through cupped hands, and Smith is pounding his feet against the ground, and somewhere in the back, her moms are blasting an air horn.
She turns to her left, to Shara, who’s looking at her like she did on the bow of that sailboat, like the logic of the world all comes down to Chloe being there and she’d be disappointed to see anyone else.
“Make it a good one,” Shara says, and she pushes Chloe to her feet.
From the makeshift stage, Chloe can see it all. April and Jake with their feet up on the chairs in front of them, Brooklyn fussing with the tassel on her cap, Ash’s glue-and-glitter-decorated mortarboard flashing in the sun, Summer fanning herself with a paper plate, Smith’s and Rory’s shoulders pressed together in the front row, the TV cameras, her moms huddled by the news vans with Summer’s parents.
She reaches into the neck of her gown and pulls a sweaty sheet of loose-leaf paper out of her bra. Last night, around midnight, she finally figured out what she wanted to say and scribbled it down in the nearest notebook she could find.
“Hi, guys,” she says into the mic. “I’m Chloe, obviously. Um. I’ve imagined this moment a lot. Pretty much every day, actually. I don’t even know how many drafts of this speech I’ve written, but I ended up scrapping them all. None of the old versions were right, because they were written for a different place with different people in it.
“A lot of those drafts were angry or had a lot of curse words or were just kind of mean, which I’m not really sorry for, because Willowgrove can be pretty mean, so I think it’s fair. But I’ve learned more about Willowgrove in the past month than I have in the past four years, and that’s not really the speech I want to make anymore.
“When I first moved to False Beach, I was pretty sure I was smarter and better than anyone in Alabama. I found my friends, and I decided those were the only people at Willowgrove worth my time. I was convinced that I knew, with absolute certainty, who did and did not deserve a chance. But then, about a month ago, someone kissed me.”
She looks out at the crowd, to where Shara’s smiling a soft smile under the Alabama sun. She sent Shara the speech last night for her notes, so she already knows most of what Chloe’s going to say. She even ghostwrote a line or two.
“It’s a long story—like, really long—but the short version is, that kiss brought people into my life who I’d never even spoken to before, and I discovered we had more in common than I ever would have guessed. I learned that there are jocks who love theater and stoners who know a lot more about the world than I do. I learned that a lot of us—a lot more than I thought—are doing whatever it takes to survive in a place that doesn’t feel like it wants us. I learned that survival is heavy on so many of us. And on a personal level, I realized I’d gotten so used to that weight, I stopped noticing how much of myself I’d dedicated to carrying it.