I Kissed Shara Wheeler, page 29
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.
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.
There’s something horribly romantic about it, she thinks: Smith Parker broadcast across television screens in burgundy and white, taping up his hands, touching his fingers to his lips and raising them to the sky, and Rory in the bathroom of some grungy concert venue, watching the game on his phone and writing lyrics about someone who runs and runs and runs.
Benjy’s still going to Tuscaloosa in the fall, and Ash is packing up for Rhode Island. Last week, Georgia finally scored a cheap car from Craigslist, and Chloe helped her practice the drive to Auburn and back. Ace is going to Ole Miss, Brooklyn’s going to Yale, Jake’s going to UA Birmingham, April is going to UNO.
She takes a slow lap around the fire, trying to see everyone. It’s strange to know she’ll never see some of them again, and some will stay in her life long after her moms have donated the last of her uniforms to Goodwill. She lets Ace squeeze her into his continent of a chest and promises to sneak him a video of the first Broadway show she sees. She screams along to a song with Smith. She links arms with Georgia to dance and sends up her only prayer of the past four years: May they always come back to each other.
Finally, she circles back to Shara. She’s sitting in the grass near the fire, watching Ash and Ace argue the ideal level of marshmallow doneness while she roasts her own.
Chloe feels that familiar tug into another world, one where Shara’s a siren disrupting a long voyage or a princess with secret letters tucked into her chemise. But the thing she unfurls in her mind is Shara, just like this, but two years from now.
Shara with her hair growing out but still pink, driving them across the desert to California, yelling complaints about the water pressure from a cheap motel shower. Fighting over books, over who stole whose sweater, fighting for real the way she knows they will and furiously reconciling in the back of Chloe’s car. Smooth legs tangled up with hers, perfectly buffed nails scraping her shoulders. Georgia texting Shara jokes that Chloe doesn’t get, her mom showing Shara how to check her oil, Chloe’s life mixed up with Shara’s until everything tastes like vanilla and mint.
And she imagines herself from Shara’s point of view. Her fingers on a lecture hall desk, a MetroCard in her wallet, her shoes up on the fountain’s edge in Washington Square Park. Her laugh in profile and a swish of dark hair as she leads Shara by the hand through an NYU dorm for a weekend visit. Sleeping two in a twin and eating french fries on the floor, working at this thing between them that only they really understand.
Difficult, frustrating, razor-sharp, feather-soft Shara, leaving lilacs on her pillow in the morning.
She doesn’t really know if she’ll get to have any of that. Shara hasn’t decided what’s next yet. There’s still time for her to enroll for the spring semester at Bama, the only school her parents will agree to pay for, but it would come with a lot of strings. Shara hates strings.
When they’re alone, she talks about applying for student loans and running away to study in France or Italy or China, or riding the Trans-Siberian Railroad, or going on The Bachelor so she can live on Instagram sponcon. Once, she half joked she might find whatever crappy waitressing job she can in New York and sleep on Chloe’s couch. She’ll figure it out. She’s the smartest person Chloe knows. She has time.
And, at least until the end of the summer, she has Chloe. That much Chloe knows for sure.
She sits down at Shara’s side and drops her bag onto the ground between them. Shara’s preoccupied with a smoldering marshmallow.
“I have a question for you,” she says.
“No, I didn’t mean to burn it,” Shara says. “I’m not perfect.”
She laughs, reaching into her purse. “Actually, I was going to ask if you think I should burn these.”
Shara glances over, and there in Chloe’s hand are her cards. Some are worn down at the edges from being carried around. One has a matcha stain on it. All of them are monogrammed pink artifacts of a Shara who would rather tear her own life apart than tell the truth, even to herself.
Chloe’s grown attached to them, to be honest, but this isn’t a game anymore. Feels weird to keep the pieces.
Shara says, “Burn ’em.”
So Chloe does.
Under the curl of smoke, Shara reaches over and smears melted marshmallow down the length of Chloe’s nose.
“Ah!” Chloe gasps while Shara laughs. “Why!”
Shara grins an extremely self-satisfied grin, which is something Chloe is still getting used to. Shara has so many more expressions than she did before. It’s like she’s unlocked Shara Premium.
“Because it’s funny.”
“I hate you!”
“Can’t believe it took you four whole years to finally say that to my face,” Shara says, settling back on her elbows.
“I can only say it because I don’t mean it anymore,” Chloe counters. She turns onto her side so she can lean over Shara and smear the marshmallow into the sleeve of her shirt.
“I think—ugh, gross—I think you still mean it a little bit,” Shara says, squirming away as Chloe tries to pin her down. “That’s what makes this work.”
Shara gives up the fight and lays her head down against the grass. Chloe could swear the sunset shifts on the horizon from powder blue to coral pink, the exact color of Shara’s cheeks and lips and hair, and of her sugar-sticky palm, which lies open on the ground above her head.
They’ve never hated each other, not really. It’s more like recognition. Shara tilts her chin up to the sky, narrowing her eyes even as she starts to smile, and Chloe sees someone just as stubborn and intense and strange as she is, snapping exactly into place. The thing Chloe likes more than anything else: a correct answer.
One delirious summer doesn’t feel like nearly enough time for this.
Technically, though, eighteen years isn’t a lot of time either.
Chloe covers Shara’s hand with her own. She laces their fingers together and squeezes, and then she kisses Shara into the grass.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I feel inclined to begin this by saying that I am not Chloe Green, and Chloe Green is not me. I grew up in and around environments much like False Beach and Willowgrove, which made writing this book quite the emotional roller coaster, but Chloe’s story is by no means autobiographical. To be honest, I didn’t know enough about myself or the world at eighteen to be a Chloe. I think I would describe myself as an Ace sun, Georgia moon, Chloe rising.
I wrote this book for the Chloes of the world, but also the Smiths and Rorys and Georgias and Benjys and, yes, even the Sharas. I know intimately that the Bible Belt contains some of the best, warmest, weirdest, queerest kids you’ll ever meet, whether or not they even know that last part yet. If you’re one of those kids, I wanted this book to exist for you. I think if it had existed for me back then, a lot of things in my life would have been different. I wanted to write a book to show you that you’re not alone.
(And also that you deserve ridiculous, over-the-top high school rom-coms about teenagers like you, just like the straight kids have! Don’t let anyone try to convince you otherwise!)
I have a tremendously long list of people to thank for making this book possible, but I’ll try to keep it brief this time. Sara Megibow, my absolute superstar of an agent, who is as tireless and patient as she is great at her job, and who approaches every conversation with the kind of humanity we desperately need in this business. Vicki Lame, my editor, who allows me to follow my gut to so many strange and wonderful places. My assistant, Abby Rauscher, who literally keeps me sane. The team at Wednesday who put so much work into this book, including Meghan Harrington, Devan Norman, Alexis Neuville, Brant Janeway, Erica Martirano, Jeremy Haiting, Christa Désir, Melanie Sanders, and Vanessa Aguirre. Christina Tucker and Matthew Broberg-Moffitt, my authenticity readers. Kerri Resnick, who masterminded the cover, and Allison Reimold, who captured Shara’s likeness and nightmare vibe.
I also have to thank all my friends who graciously and generously read early drafts or talked through plot ideas or did writing sprints or simply told me they thought what I was working on sounded interesting—you literally kept me going. There were times when the only thing that pushed me to my word count was the thought of getting to share an excerpt at the end of the day. You know who you are. Thanks especially to Anna Prendella, who gave such sharp, illuminating, extensive, and frankly feral feedback throughout the revising process that she should be canonized.
To Sasha (New York Times bestselling author Sasha Peyton Smith!!! No, I’ll never shut up about it.), thank you for your bottomless well of patience, for Margaritaville, and for always being down for a Plot Problems FaceTime call. Can’t wait to do this together forever. I was definitely your dad in a past life.
To Kris, for all those months of 2020 when it was just you, me, the pets, this manuscript, and never-ending terror holed up in Brooklyn’s most cursed fourth-floor walkup, thank you. You are my fiercest supporter, and I genuinely don’t know how I would do this without you. I love you a stupid amount. Keep leaving hair ties all over my apartment.
To my family, with my whole heart: Thank you, I love you. I would be nowhere without y’all.
To every reader who has stuck with me since day one, and every reader who is beginning with this book, thank you endlessly for giving me the opportunity to keep doing this.
