Chapter 10

10

DAYS SINCE SHARA LEFT: 12

DAYS UNTIL GRADUATION: 29

Rory is terrible at pretending to study.

“Can you at least like, look at a note card?” Chloe mutters across the study tables. They’ve been sitting ten careful feet apart for an hour and a half now, trying to look like two casual classmates who happen to both be spending their after-school time in the library and are certainly not going to abscond into the HVAC system as soon as the opportunity arises.

Rory scratches the back of his head and ignores her. He’s got his black Converse propped up on the nearest chair and a small tape recorder on the table in front of him. Chloe suspects he thinks it makes him look cool and alt and analog, but she’s seen that exact recorder on the Urban Outfitters website for $90, and he’s listening to it with $200 AirPods.

Chloeat least has her AP European History notes out. If Ms. Dunbury sniffs them out before they get a chance to put their plan in motion, it’ll be Rory’s fault, not hers.

She closes her eyes and pinches the bridge of her nose, imagining Shara somewhere far away, in a corset, surrounded by cake. Gotta stay focused. The guillotine won’t drop itself.

At long last, Ms. Dunbury retreats from the front desk into the library office, and Chloe hears the pops of a fork stabbing through plastic and the beeps of a microwave. A Lean Cuisine, definitely. That gives them three minutes.

“Hey,” she hisses at Rory. When he doesn’t respond, she stands and plucks out one of his AirPods. “Let’s go.”

They gather up their bags and slip silently to the back of the stacks, to the AC vent in the ceiling over the nonfiction section. She passes her backpack to Rory, and while he’s hiding their stuff among the musty throw pillows of a reading corner, she pushes a cart of returns up to the shelf below the vent.

When she looks over at Rory, he’s stripping off his uniform polo.

“Whoa, what are you doing?”

“The less uneven parts of your clothing to get caught on something up there, the better,” Rory tells her, now in his undershirt. “I’ve watched a lot of YouTube videos about this, okay? Trust me.”

Chloe groans but doesn’t waste time arguing—she whips her oxford off and chucks it at Rory, who crams it alongside their stash and then gets down to business.

She’s never seen Rory do anything with urgency before, so it’s kind of incredible to watch him spring into his element like a cat burglar. He levers himself off the book cart with one foot and scales the shelves the rest of the way up in one fluid second, and then he’s soundlessly popping the vent off and pushing it upward into the ceiling before Chloe has finished straightening out her undershirt.

“You gotta go in first,” he whispers to her, hopping down.

“What? No, you have to go first and pull me up.”

“Chloe, look. I didn’t ever want it to come to this, but we have to be honest with each other.” He closes his eyes gravely. “You can lift more than me. It makes more sense for you to help me up.”

“Oh,” Chloe says. “Okay.”

Feeling quite pleased with herself, she follows the same route Rory did up to the opening in the ceiling, silently apologizing to the sanctity of libraries and to Millard Fillmore when she kicks his biography. She sticks her head into the dark hole, hooks her elbows over the ledge, and pushes off the bookshelf with both feet. It takes a helpful nudge from Rory, but she makes it.

The air duct is … well, an air duct. It’s not nearly as well-lit as they always are in movies, just a long, dim, narrow metal box, like a coffin made of space blankets. The library vent seems to be at the end of a short branch off the main trunk, because a few feet ahead, a slightly wider duct intersects with this one and stretches perpendicularly into the darkness.

Chloe is very completely inside the ceiling of the school. Like, she is up there. No arguing with that.

“Shara fucking Wheeler,” she mutters, as she twists around on her stomach until she can see Rory below.

But when Rory tries to use the cart for a boost, some ancient, rusted screw decides to give up the ghost, and the entire top shelf breaks off with a grinding, metallic crash.

Two dozen hardcovers avalanche to the floor, clattering against one another and smashing open with pulpy slaps against the bookcases. Across the library, there’s the sound of the office door being thrown open, followed by the portentous stomp of Ms. Dunbury’s orthopedic sneakers.

“What are y’all doing back there?”

“Shit,” Rory hisses.

“Oh my God,” Chloe gasps. She’s going to be ripped straight out of the ceiling and into a permanent suspension. She glances at the grate resting inside the duct, wondering if she can drag it over fast enough to seal herself in.

But when she looks back down, she sees Rory, knee-deep in books and visibly calculating a hundred ways he could still outrun the law, and she stops.

“Come on,” she whispers, extending her arm down to Rory. “You can make it.”

She doesn’t know if it’s true—the library’s not that big—but she can’t leave an enemy of the Willowgrove Code of Conduct behind.

“Heyyyy, Ms. Dunbury!” says a sudden, jovial voice from what sounds like the library entrance. “How’s my favorite librarian doing this fine afternoon?”

Rory exhales. “Smith.”

“Mr. Parker! What are you doing here?”

“Just finished training. Gotta stay in shape for the fall, you know what I’m saying? I was stopping by my locker when I saw the library was still open and I thought, ‘Man, when’s the last time I checked on my girl Debbie?’”

Ms. Dunbury giggles. A diversion. Damn, he’s good.

“What is he doing?” Rory mumbles to himself.

“Saving your ass,” Chloe hisses. She waves her hand at him. “Let’s go!”

With a parting glance at Smith and a shake of his head, Rory scales the bookcase in one breath and grabs hold of Chloe’s arm with the next. Together, they haul him up into the duct, and as soon as his last foot is in, he crawls over Chloe to pop the vent back into place.

They’re both momentarily silent, piled on top of each other, illuminated only by thin slats of light through the vent.

“Oh my gosh, you have so much to carry,” Smith says. “Can I help you?”

“Oh, I couldn’t ask you to—”

“With all due respect, Ms. Dunbury, what is the point of these protein shakes I drink if I can’t carry some books?”

“Oh, you’re an angel,” Ms. Dunbury says, predictably melting. The microwave dings, forgotten. “I see why Shara’s so sweet on you.”

“Ha, yeah.”

“How is she, by the way? I heard she’s off taking care of her sick aunt. That’s our Shara, isn’t it?”

“Uh-huh,” Smith says. “Got your keys? Great, let’s go.”

The doors close, and half a second later, Chloe can barely make out the click of the automatic lock.

“Was that incredibly convenient timing,” Chloe says, squinting at Rory in the dark as he clambers off of her, “or did you tell him what we were doing?”

“I may have stopped by his locker after seventh hour and mentioned that some of us were actually going to be trying to find his girlfriend after school today.”

“You know what,” Chloe says, “it worked out for me, so, can’t complain.”

They take stock of their surroundings: the tunnels extending in different directions, the specks of light from vents, the low whoosh of air.

“Do you hear that?” Rory asks.

Chloe listens: a muffled, faint sound of music playing, echoing down the ducts to their left.

“Sounds like it’s coming from the admin office.”

“No,” Rory says, pointing right, “the office is that way.”

“No, that way is the chem lab.” She points left. “This way is the office.”

“But—but we’re—it’s—”

She points more emphatically. “That way.”

Rory grumbles but crawls to the left, and Chloe follows. After about ten feet, the duct splits off to the right, and Rory takes the fork and keeps crawling toward the noise. Another few yards, and he reaches another vent and peeks through it.

“We’re over the hall,” he says, his quiet voice reverberating back to her. “You were right. The office should be straight ahead.”

“Told you.”

“Shut up,” Rory says. The music’s getting louder the farther they crawl. “That sounds like—”

… straight up, what did you hope to learn about here …

“It’s Matchbox Twenty,” Chloe confirms. Someone is in the admin offices, burning the midnight oil to the greatest of late ’90s top-40 rock. As long as Wheeler’s office door is shut, they shouldn’t have a problem. “Keep going.”

After what feels like days dragging herself along sheet metal on her stomach, trying to keep her shoes from banging around and pretending nothing small and leggy could possibly crawl up her skirt, listening to the distant music switch from Matchbox Twenty to Hootie & the Blowfish, they take a left into another duct and reach the next vent. Rory checks it.

“Admin reception. Almost there.”

The closer they get, the more details Chloe adds to her fantasy of dropping into Wheeler’s office like a jewel thief, somersaulting through lasers, maybe having a French accent. She wonders if Shara has any idea how far Chloe would go to beat her. Maybe that’s why Shara hid a card here in the first place—to see if Chloe had the brains and the nerve to find a way.

Nice try, Shara. If there’s one thing Chloe’s good at, it’s tests.

“Fuck,” Rory curses suddenly.

“What?”

“Shhhhh.”

He’s peering down through the vent. It sounds like they’re right over the source of the music.

Rory scrubs a dusty hand over his face and whispers, “Well, the good news is, we found the right vent.”

“It’s Wheeler, isn’t it?” Chloe guesses. “He’s working late.”

“Yeah.” Hootie & the Blowfish fades out, and they both hold their breath until Matchbox Twenty picks back up. It’s really not a very creative playlist. “At least we have a sound buffer.”

“God, why is he still here? What is he doing? There’s no way his job is that hard. All he does is cut the arts budget and misinterpret the Bible. How many hours can that possibly take?”

Gingerly, Rory wriggles his phone out of his back pocket and starts a call. “April. We— Yeah, the ducts are everything we thought they would be. Yeah, it’s just like Die Hard. Yeah—uh, but you guys are gonna have to chill in the car. It might be a while.”

It’s been two and a half hours. One-hundred and fifty minutes of lying in a dusty air duct over the administrative offices, listening to the Spin Doctors. Chloe texted her moms that she’d be out late studying with Georgia, but she probably should have sent them her final farewell, because she’s definitely going to die here.

They’ve scooted back far enough in the duct system to find an intersection where they could lie head-to-head instead of feet-to-face, suffering in silence under the glow of Rory’s phone flashlight.

“Rory, if you show me that dead mouse again, I swear to God I’m gonna make you eat it.”

“Not that,” Rory says. “This.”

He puts his thumb and forefinger inside his nose, and for one hideous second she thinks he’s about to show her something his sinus cavity created, until a shiny piece of silver catches the light from his phone. He’s flipped down a hidden septum barbell.

“You have a secret nose piercing?”

“I told you it was cool,” he says. “April did it.”

“Don’t you have like, money? You could pay a professional who won’t give you a staph infection.”

“That would totally kill the vibe,” Rory says. “And my stepdad has money, not me.”

“So he’s the one who buys all your nice guitars?” Chloe asks, remembering Rory’s collection of glittering Strats. “I grew up around musicians. I know what those things cost.”

“My mom buys guitars for me because she knows I like them, and she feels bad for making me move into the country club so she could marry some douchebag lawyer and ditch me for trips to Cancun. My dad calls them ‘guilt-tars,’ which I also hate, but I like my dad.”

“Ah,” Chloe says. From this angle, the phone light catches on his curls in the places where he’s bleached them, and she imagines him huddled in the bathroom with April and Jake and a bleach kit the same way she and her friends gathered around the sink to help Ash cut off all their hair. “Okay. Well, the piercing is cool.”

“Thanks.”

“You should wear it to school.”

“I wear it to school every day.”

“I meant visibly.”

Rory shrugs, his shoulders sliding up and down the sheet metal. “Yeah, I don’t know. If you’re gonna break rules, I don’t really see the point in dress code violations. Low-hanging fruit. Draws too much attention. Doesn’t even inconvenience anyone that bad.”

Chloe frowns. “Feeling subtweeted right now.”

“Why do you do it, then?”

“I guess because … I already know people are going to be staring at me, and that teachers are going to find some reason to punish me, so at least this way I control why.”

“Fair enough.”

“Also, I look fucking cool. And the dress code is stupid.”

Rory smirks. “I’m with you on the last part, at least.”

“And…” Chloe goes on. “I mean, it’s probably also that I can’t really break any bigger rules than that, because then I’d actually be risking valedictorian, and I can’t risk that.”

“Aren’t you kind of risking it right now?” Rory asks, gesturing with one hand to their whole insane situation.

“This is different,” Chloe insists. “Nobody’s ever gonna know we did this. And we’re doing it so I can find Shara before grades are finalized and make her come back. I didn’t work my ass off for the last four years not to see her face when she loses.”

“Jesus,” Rory says. “Is that really the only reason you’re doing this? Valedictorian?”

“Better than trying to get in her pants.”

“That’s—” Rory blinks a few times, like she’s managed to unsettle him. “That’s not how I see Shara.”

“Then how?”

He considers the question, then rolls over onto his side and says, “What was middle school like for you?”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

He smirks. “Humor me.”

“Okay,” she says. “Um, grew five inches, started taking high school English, briefly got into cosplay. Best friend was this girl named Priya who taught me how to do my eyeliner, but we haven’t really kept in touch. Told my moms I was bi when I was thirteen and they weren’t even surprised. Realized I was weird but that I kinda liked it.”

“Yeah,” Rory says. “So, for me, it sucked ass. My parents split up. I had no friends. I was this awkward, ugly kid who liked poetry but hated reading it, so I got really into music instead, but I couldn’t read guitar tabs either so I had to learn from YouTube, and then I had double jaw surgery in eighth grade to fix my underbite, and I was the only Black kid in the grade other than Summer, who was way too cool to hang out with me. I was roasted every day of my life. Dixon Wells used to call me Snore-y Rory because I had really bad asthma and sometimes I would breathe weird during tests.”

“His name literally has the word ‘dicks’ in it,” Chloe says, “and that’s the best he could come up with?”

“I know,” says Rory, whose face in profile is such a work of art that she should have guessed someone designed it on purpose. “So, seventh grade, Smith shows up. Said my Naruto backpack was cool. He was my first best friend, or whatever—my only friend, unless you count my older brother. He’d help me with my homework and with writing down my songs, and I was like, maybe high school won’t totally wreck my shit. But then he ditched me, and everything sucked again. My dad took a job in Texas, and my brother left for college, and my mom got remarried so we had to move—but when I looked out the window of my new room, I saw a girl next door reading a book, and it was Shara fucking Wheeler.”

“And you thought she was going to solve all your problems,” Chloe guesses.

“You don’t get it, Chloe. Shara has been the ultimate girl since I was in kindergarten. And that’s not my opinion—literally everyone I’ve ever met thinks Shara Wheeler is the ultimate.”

Chloe grinds her molars together. “I’m well aware.”

“What I’m saying is, everyone said she was the dream girl, so I grew up believing it,” Rory explains. “She’s the only girl I’ve ever thought about. Like, it had to be her. So, I thought if Shara Wheeler ever looked over the fence and noticed me, if that was all I had going for me, it would be enough. Because it would be her.”

She does kind of understand what he means. If Willowgrove is the whole world, and every person in it sees themself as the main character of their own story, and Shara is the mandatory leading girl, she’s either the love interest or the antagonist. Chloe made her choice. Rory made his.

“But then,” Rory goes on, “I got my braces off, and I realized I could use a tape recorder to keep track of my songs, and my face finally figured its shit out, and I made a couple friends, so I got over it. Or thought I did. Until this one night, when Smith pulled up to Shara’s house with her in the passenger seat. I wasn’t trying to look. I was sitting at my desk, working on a song. But that little ceiling light in his car caught my eye, and when I looked, it was like they were inside a snow globe or something. And they kissed, and I—it felt like someone had punched me in the stomach. And it all came back.”

For some reason, she’s reminded of her first memory of Shara and Smith together: a pile of carnations on the lab table, Shara holding one to the tip of her nose and breathing in deep while Chloe tried to finish the experiment on her own.

“Is that what you write songs about?” Chloe asks. “Shara?”

“Sometimes,” Rory admits in a low voice. “Sometimes they’re about like, being jealous or sad or afraid something’s wrong with you. Or whatever.”

Chloe never really thought Rory was that serious about music, because he doesn’t act very serious about anything, but the lilt of his voice when he talks about songwriting reminds her of Benjy talking about a new piece he’s learned. Maybe she should introduce them sometime.

“That sounds cool,” she says.

Rory smiles softly, shyly. Chloe smiles back.

She thinks of what he said about his dad and remembers the bulletin board in his room.

“You and your dad,” she says. “You’re close?”

“Yeah,” Rory says, still smiling. “He’s really fucking cool. He’s a museum curator.”

“Why didn’t you just go with him when he moved?”

“My parents were afraid my grades would get even worse if I switched schools. So Mom got school months and Dad got summers.”

“That must have been hard.”

“Yeah, well,” Rory says. “Life sucks sometimes.”

She tries to transpose awkward middle school Rory over the one she knows. Must have been one hell of a shock for Smith when his ex–best friend showed up hot on the first day of freshman year—

The music from Wheeler’s office cuts out.

They listen to the muffled noises below: a pause, then a door opening and closing, then another farther away. Ten seconds. Twenty seconds. Nothing.

“I think he left,” Chloe whispers.

“Move it, Green,” Rory says, and he takes off down the duct.

Over Wheeler’s office, Rory pulls the vent up and lowers himself out feetfirst, narrowly avoiding the keyboard and papers as he drops onto the desk. Wheeler’s left the overhead light off, but the desk lamp is still on, so Chloe has to squint to see where to land when she jumps down behind him.

They split up, Chloe pacing the perimeter of the office while Rory opens each drawer of the desk. Chloe recites the clue in her head: The key is there, where I am.

Where isn’t Shara? Even in Chloe’s first visits here, the Shara of it all was suffocating, like a Bath & Body Works candle in a sickly sweet scent that someone left burning too long. She’d sit in the chair opposite the desk getting lectured and wonder, is this where Shara hides between the final bell and National Honor Society? When Shara was a kid, did she crawl under her dad’s desk, absorbing the essence of Willowgrove through the gray carpet? This is another episode of, Has Shara picked up that book? Touched that stapler? Printed a major works data sheet on that printer?

She’s checking the bookshelf when she notices, wedged between two different memoirs of Republican senators, something pink.

It’s not with the records, but it’s definitely one of Shara’s cards.

She glances over her shoulder—Rory’s occupied with the contents of the desk drawers.

She can have this one to herself for a second. Just her and Shara.

She slides it out.

Mom & Dad,

I’m fine. If you want to find me, I’m sure you can.

S

This must be the card Chloe saw that morning she got herself called in. One line. Two sentences, twelve words. That’s all Shara left for her parents. If it were Chloe, she’d get about fifteen minutes out before her moms pulled up in the truck and dragged her to Webster’s for sundaes and group therapy.

She slips the card back into its spot on the shelf and turns to the desk, where Rory is checking under the blotter.

“Anything?” Chloe asks him.

“No key,” Rory says.

And then Chloe’s eyes land on the picture.

The framed photo of Shara and her parents on their sailboat, the one that’s always bothered her because it faces out, for the benefit of visitors instead of the actual dad sitting at the desk.

Where I am.

Chloe snatches up the frame and flips it around, and there it is: a small key, taped to the back of the frame, under the hinge of the stand so it’s invisible from the desk chair. Shara hid it right in front of her dad’s face.

“I got it.”

She rips the key off, and when she puts it into the lock of the filing cabinet, it’s a smooth slide. She twists, and there’s the satisfying, hollow thunk of the lock opening.

“Perfect, this is the senior drawer,” Chloe says to Rory, already thumbing through files. “If it’s here, it’s probably in your folder, but we should check mine and Smith’s too. Come help me.”

Rory finally closes the desk back up and comes to hover at the side of the cabinet, staring at the tabs on the files. “Um.”

Chloe glances up. “What, this is your thing. Don’t get shy now.”

“Not that,” Rory grouses. “I—the letters are really small.”

“What?” Chloe slides Smith’s file out, moving forward to the G–H section. “Do you need glasses?”

“No,” Rory says. “I just think you should do this part.”

She pauses, holding Rory’s file, which is thick from what must be fifty pages of detention slips and complaints from teachers about how he doesn’t try in class. She remembers the way Rory wordlessly handed her Shara’s card in his room instead of reading the password to her, and the different inks in his songbook, like it took him days of fits and starts with different pens to get it all down. The directions in the ducts, the tape recorder—

“Ohhhhh,” she says, realizing at once. “You’re dyslexic.”

Rory stares at her. “What?”

“No time, explain later.” She spots the correct label sticking out of the drawer and points to it. “Mine is that one, with the purple tab.”

He passes Chloe her file, and she spreads all three out on the desk. As expected, the card is in Rory’s. Picture-ready pink, sealed in its envelope and paperclipped to a middling progress report.

Chloe opens it, and this time, she reads Shara’s words out loud.

Hi Rory (and also Chloe, I’m assuming),

Glad to see you’ve gotten this far. By my estimation, it should have taken you about a week and a half from prom night, based on when Dixon’s next house partywas scheduled. Of course, that depends on if I’m right about Chloe being fast enough to find the note I left in the choir room before the party, but I know she is. And I know the card at Dixon’s house should have been exactly where I put it, because before I left, I texted him that if it was moved, I would tell Emma Grace and Mackenzie that he’s been feeling up both of them behind the other’s back.

And, well, I really do hope you’ve already found that one, because on Friday morning Emma Grace and Mackenzie are getting an anonymous Instagram message anyway. That’s one thing about me nobody knows: I don’t actually care about keeping my promises.

Keep going. You’re getting closer.

XOXO

S

P. S. I’ve heard you can take your heart back, but I don’t think you can. Up close, with the light in your eyes, all you can see is what’s right in front of you.

“She was blackmailing her own friends?” Chloe says as soon as she’s finished reading.

“I’m, uh, honestly more worried about how she predicted the exact day we’d be here,” Rory says.

“And sabotaging her friends’ relationships,” Chloe goes on. Vindication zips up her spine like a chill, and she can’t stop herself from smiling down at the card.

She knew there was a reason she didn’t like Shara, but she never had any concrete evidence against her, until now. And if this is the first piece, there could be more where it came from.

“I’m like, kind of starting to wonder if we should be … afraid of her?” Rory says.

Chloe ignores him, reading back over the postscript, zeroing in on the first line. She knows that phrase. But what does it—

From the front entrance of the offices, there’s the unmistakable sound of a door opening. The hum of a man’s voice carries through the walls, half-remembering the chorus of a Dave Matthews song.

“Oh my God.” Chloe is paralyzed on the spot. For the second time this evening, panic erupts in her chest like a Disneyland New Year’s Eve pyrotechnic show, whistles and flashes and sparklers spelling out YOU’RE SCREWED, CHLOE GREEN in the sky. “Ohmygod ohmygod ohmygod—”

Rory, who has already swept the files up off the desk and started cramming them back into the cabinet, whispers at her, “Don’t freak out.”

“What is he doing!” Chloe wheezes. “He should be home watching NCIS!”

“Chloe.”

“Oh my God, Smith was right, we shouldn’t have done this—”

“Chloe!” Rory says again, grabbing her shoulders. “The more you freak out, the more likely we are to get caught.” He gives her a little shake, and her anxious brain rattles unpleasantly. “Chill. This is the fun part.”

He’s got to be kidding. “The fun part?”

“We’ve all got our own ways to have fun in False Beach, right?” Rory pushes her up onto the desk. “You get horny for books—”

“Very reductive way to describe being interested in literature,” Chloe points out hysterically, reaching for the ceiling with numb hands. She can hear the jingle of keys in the hallway.

“—and I get away with shit,” Rory finishes. “So get up in that ceiling and get away with this.”

She closes her eyes, takes a huge breath like she’s jumping off a high dive, and heaves herself up through the vent hole. Rory’s right behind her, and he manages to catch the vent cover with the toe of his sneaker and push it back over the opening just as the office door opens below.

Wheeler pauses in the doorway, a Jack in the Box bag in his hand and a suspicious furrow creasing his forehead. Chloe’s insides are Pop Rocks.

He walks over to the desk and picks up the framed family photo, which Chloe left where it fell in her panic. He frowns, then licks his thumb and rubs a smudge off the glass in front of his own little photographic face before returning it to the desk, face out.

And then he sits down at his desk, takes out a burger, and turns the music back on.

“Let’s go,” Rory says to her.

She leads the way this time, retracing the route back to the library, down through the vent—Rory grabs their bags and shirts—over the pile of books they left behind and through the dark stacks, past the study tables, over the front desk, to the door of the library office.

“Turn around,” she says.

“What?” Rory asks. “Why?”

“The key’s in my bra. Don’t look.”

“I promise you, I do not care.”

“Just do it!”

“Fine,” he groans, doing a theatrical ninety-degree turn so Chloe can fish the key out from between her boobs.

With the door unlocked, they’re almost to sweet freedom. Rory texts April and Jake while Chloe unlatches the window and throws it open. The sun has gone down since they climbed through the first vent.

“You know what I just realized?” Chloe sticks her head out to estimate the distance between the sill and the tree. Not as close as it looked from the ground, but there’s a big, sturdy-looking branch a couple of feet below, and if she lands right, she should be able to shimmy down it to the trunk. “This is the second time you and I have thrown ourselves out a second-story window for Shara Wheeler.”

“She has that effect,” Rory says, and then he climbs over the sill and disappears into the night.

“Shit,” Chloe whispers after him.

She jumps, and after a lot of maneuvering and swearing and scrambling and scrapes on her arms from tree bark, they hit the ground running. They bank around the side of the building, cursing through a copse of thorny bushes, and break free to the ditch separating the faculty parking lot from the service road alongside it.

Jake’s car is waiting with the back door open. Chloe launches herself into the backseat full of Bojangles bags and energy drink cans with a crunchy, rattling crash. They take off before Rory’s even done pulling it shut behind him.

There are five electric seconds in which the only sounds are the roar of the engine and Chloe catching her breath, and then Rory releases a low whistle, and Jake laughs and cranks up the radio.

Chloe laughs too, loud and breathless, adrenaline blazing in her veins. Rory was right. She got away with it. It was one of the most terrifying things to ever happen to her, and it was fun.

Ten minutes out from school, Jake pulls into Sonic and tips the roller-skating waitress ten dollars for four slushes, and they take off again, speakers going tinny from the boom of the bass as April shoots her straw wrapper at Rory.

It’s not much—Chloe knows this. It’s just car windows rolled down, the blue-and-white glow of a Walmart in the distance, the smell of wet pavement under the tires, the hum of neon from a Dairy Queen, the same radio station as always blasting a rotation of the same fifteen songs. But she thinks she’s starting to understand what it means to be from here, because she could swear the bright red burn of artificial cherry is the best thing she’s ever tasted.

She leans out into the wind and tips her head back, opening her eyes to the stars, and thinks maybe everything in the world really can fit inside False Beach city limits.

Shara has that effect.