I Kissed Shara Wheeler(96)
“A lot of high school is about figuring out what matters to you and what doesn’t. For some of us, popularity matters. For others, it’s grades or dating or extracurriculars or our parents’ opinions or all of the above. Sometimes, it’s a question of whether anything that happens in these four years matters at all. And it does, but not in the way a lot of people think.
“High school matters because it shapes how we see the world when we enter it. We carry the hurt with us, the confirmed fears, the insecurities people used against us. But we also carry the moment when someone gave us a chance, even though they didn’t have to.”
She glances up at Georgia.
“The moment we watched a friend make a choice that we didn’t understand at first because they’re brave in a different way.”
She finds Mr. Truman in the crowd, sweating rings in his dress shirt.
“The moment a teacher told us they believed in us.”
Benjy and Ash both smile back when she looks at them.
“The moment we told someone who we are and they accepted us without question.”
In the front row, Smith and Rory are easy to find.
“The moment we fell in love for the first time.”
She drops her eyes back to her paper.
“Most of the things we’re feeling right now are things we’re feeling for the first time. We’re learning what it means to feel them. What we can mean to one another. Of course that matters. And this, here, right now—even if nothing changes, even if all we can do today is prove that we exist, and that we’re not alone—I think it matters a whole fucking lot.”
She flips the page over. Almost done.
She takes one last look out at the crowd, and she thinks that this can be what it means—even only in part—to be from Alabama.
It’s her mom welcoming every one of her friends into their house without hesitation, Georgia hiking out to the cliffs to read a book from Belltower, Smith with flowers in his hair and Rory yanking down street signs, the stars above the lake and midnight drives, hand-painted signs and improvised spaces in parking lots. All the things that people can make False Beach into.
None of the people she loves in this town are separate from it. Benjy grew up on Dolly Parton. Ash named themself after Alabama ash trees.
And Shara—Shara’s an Alabama girl no matter what color she dyes her hair, and she’s always been an Alabama girl, every second she was breathing down Chloe’s neck. An Alabama girl outsmarted her with Shakespeare. An Alabama girl kissed her life into chaos.
She used to imagine lying to her future NYU classmates, telling them she never left California. Now she imagines telling them this.
“So, that’s the main thing I wanted to say,” Chloe goes on. “I also want to say thank you to a few people. To my friends, Georgia, Benjy, Ash—thank you for being my place here when I didn’t have anywhere else.
“To Smith and Rory, I will never stop feeling lucky to have gotten to know you.”
The last line on the page says, To Shara, but that’s all. She never could figure out what to say.
“And to the girl who kissed me,” she says, “I have done some of the best work of my life because of you. And I know you have done some of the best work of your life because of me. I don’t know a better way to explain what love means to two people like us.”
* * *
After the diplomas, while everyone’s squeezing together for photos and Chloe’s moms are busy wrangling her friends for a group shot, after the news crews have gotten their footage but before they’ve finished packing their cameras and big spongy microphones, Smith sidles up between Chloe and Shara.
“I got a question,” he says.
“Flowers still looking great,” Chloe says promptly.
“Appreciated,” he says. “What exactly is the church board planning to do about your dad, Shara?”
Shara sighs and shrugs. “I think they’re trying to throw enough money around to make it go away. They hired a legal team to shut down anybody who tries to post about it anywhere, and the only cop I’ve seen around my house is Mackenzie Harris’s dad, so.”
“So, in other words,” Smith says. He squints into the sun, eyes flashing gold. “If something’s gonna happen, the story has to get out of False Beach.”
“I guess so,” Shara says.
“All right,” Smith says as he leaves them, “I’m gonna go win somebody a broadcast journalism award.”
Smith Parker is always, always a quarterback. He’s a strategist. He plans five steps ahead. So, he’s subtle about swaggering up to a camera guy and slapping palms like they’re old friends. It looks natural when he leans in and says something to the guy that Chloe can’t hear, finishing off with a smile. Nobody would ever know what he’s done. Certainly not whoever updates his ESPN profile.
It takes another minute for the cameraman to whip around, grab his reporter, and yank her into the van.
They peel out of the dealership, cutting a U-turn in the middle of the highway to screech into the Willowgrove parking lot, gunning straight for the auditorium.
The nearest reporter, one from Birmingham, turns to his crew and says, “Pack y’all’s shit up now.”
When the auditorium doors swing open and grads come streaming out of the building, the crews are waiting. Principal Wheeler steps out of the air conditioning and directly into a mob of microphones.