I Kissed Shara Wheeler(97)
From Chloe’s side, Shara shades her eyes with her hand and watches.
“Well,” she says, white teeth glinting, “bless his heart.”
FROM THE BURN PILE
Note from Chloe’s mom to her on her first day of school Chloe,
I promise I will let you go wherever you want to go, as long as it makes you happy. I promise I will stand up for you against anyone who tries to make you feel small, but only if you ask me to. I know you prefer to take care of yourself, and I believe that you can.
Show them you’re not someone to fuck with.
All my love,
Mom
25
DAYS UNTIL FALL SEMESTER COMMENCES AT NYU: 100
The bonfire comes later.
One of Willowgrove’s oldest senior rites of passage is a bonfire in the cow pasture near campus the day after graduation, set up by the student body president and a few volunteers from the 4-H club. Everyone’s supposed to bring all their notebooks, leftover exams, homework packets, study guides, C-minus essays, and assorted high school debris they never want to see again, and burn it.
Of course, the Class of ’22—Willowgrove’s finest—doesn’t do things the way they’ve always been done. (And lately Brooklyn has been busy getting sunburnt in the spectator section of the skate park.) So, it’s not until four weeks after graduation that the bonfire finally happens.
For Chloe, it’s been four weeks of sneaking over Shara’s fence when her parents are meeting with their attorneys, jumping into Shara’s pool in her underwear, and high-fiving Smith when they show up at the country club at the same time.
She keeps Georgia company on her shifts at Belltower and gets poison ivy foraging with Ash and falls asleep on Benjy’s bedroom floor, but in between, it’s a Shara Wheeler highlight reel. Shara tucking herself into the window seat in Chloe’s bedroom. Shara making snarky comments about Chloe’s randomly assigned NYU roommate. Shara floating on her back in the lake. Shara waving to Rory from her bedroom window. Shara tentatively suggesting a double date with Georgia and Summer, if you think they’d like that, nothing fancy, it’s whatever, does Georgia like me, actually never mind. Shara pretending not to get mad when she comes in dead last on their mini-golf double date with Georgia and Summer.
Shara saying the word “girlfriend” for the first time on the hood of Chloe’s car, out on the cliffs by Lake Martin, under a parachute sky.
The bonfire is their first event as an official couple. Chloe spent seven hundred of the last forty-eight hours on FaceTime with Georgia, trying to find the right outfit for Unlikely Girlfriend of Renegade Prom Queen. In the end, she settles on a black overall dress over a striped tank and her coolest sunglasses.
When she picks Shara up, she’s in a tied-up white T-shirt and cutoff jean shorts, which is an effortlessly perfect outfit for Daughter of Principal Fired in Disgrace After Viral Local News Meltdown Video. Or maybe it’s just a perfect outfit in general.
“What?” Chloe says when Shara looks at her too long at a red light.
“Just this.” She pulls Chloe in by the back of her neck and kisses her hard over the console.
She pulls away as soon as the light turns green, settling back into her seat. Chloe tries to play it cool when she turns back to the road and hits the gas, but she has to press her knuckles to her lips to stop smiling.
Out in the cow pasture, the crowd is smaller than it usually is for this—probably because the text threads used for DIY graduation were the same ones used to organize it. There are a few new faces of seniors who walked across Willowgrove’s stage but still wanted to come with their friends, but mostly it’s the same crowd. Summer’s backed her truck into the clearing, and there’s a playlist blasting from her sound system as someone starts passing around marshmallows and sticks.
At the center of everything, a pile of logs towers higher than Chloe’s head, and as the sun starts to set, the first match drops.
Between rounds of Coke and Sonic Slushes and White Claws, everyone takes their turn throwing things into the fire. Smith, who showed up with Rory in a barely buttoned shirt and shorts, dumps a Winn-Dixie bag of old tests. Georgia torches her notebooks. Jake throws his whole backpack in. Brooklyn burns a single paper with a C circled in red at the top.
“You gonna burn anything?” Rory asks, sidling up next to Chloe.
“Yeah,” Chloe says. “I have some stuff.”
He shakes out his hair, watching Smith and Shara a short distance away. Shara’s already bought tickets to see him play when football season starts.
“You seem happy,” Rory says. “Or like, the Chloe version of that. You don’t seem like you’re actively plotting anyone’s murder.”
“Thanks,” Chloe says. By now, Rory knows she takes that type of thing as a compliment. “You seem happy too.”
“Yeah,” Rory says, septum ring glinting in the firelight. “Ready to hit the road.”
She saw him and Smith packing up the Beemer yesterday when she was sneaking into Shara’s yard. Smith’s off to College Station for preseason training soon, but before that, they’re road tripping up the coast to visit Rory’s older brother, then back down to Texas to drop some of his stuff off at his dad’s before he moves in. He’s thinking about applying to a community college in Dallas now that Smith has convinced him to start seeing someone for his dyslexia, but first he’s spending a year going to DIY shows and working on his music.