Fullepub 
Chapter 12
12
DAYS WITHOUT SHARA: 17
DAYS UNTIL GRADUATION: 26
The bleachers note changes things.
Smith and Rory, who heretofore were both operating under the impression that they could win Shara if they made it to the end of the trail, really seem to be struggling with the idea that the princess in the tower might be more of a dragon. They stop sniping at each other and start exchanging a lot of morose looks while Chloe does all the work on the clues. She practically has to drag them to the next one.
As for Chloe … well, it’s not that Chloe forgets how to think about anything other than Shara Wheeler. But nothing else seems half as interesting, which isn’t her fault. Honestly, maybe other things should try harder.
“Are you coming tonight, Chloe?” Ash asks.
Chloe blinks, startled out of thought. She looks up at Ash two seats over on the choir risers, holding different sizes of fishing lures up to Benjy’s earlobes to test out which one they want to make into earrings while he begrudgingly sits still.
“What?” Chloe asks.
“Me, Georgia, foraging in the park by Winn-Dixie,” Ash says. “Georgia got that book about mushroom identification? I told you about it last week and you said you’d think about it?”
“Oh,” Chloe says. She honestly can’t quite remember that conversation, but she pretends she does. “Yeah, I can’t. I have too much homework.”
Georgia squints at Chloe over her lunch, and Chloe feels bad. She does. But there’s only one thing she wants to do right now. She promises herself that she’ll find time to hang out with Georgia over the weekend.
The rest of the week brings three more clues, one each day. Each one contains a new revelation, some evil deed Shara’s kept locked away. Chloe rips a sheet of graph paper from a notebook and makes a table to track them from memory.
Every single card is another pink shot of satisfaction. She collects them in the makeup pouch at the bottom of her locker like it’s a crime scene evidence bag, cataloging all the things she suspected Shara was—dishonest and calculating and fake—and a million others she never could have otherwise proven. Vindictive. Destructive. Mean. An absolute wrecking ball bitch, swinging in silence from a divertingly beautiful crane.
Location
Pertinent contents
Shara’s desk
Password to burner email
2
Smith’s locker
Instructions to check drafts
3
Taco Bell drive-thru
Burner email address, implicit threat that she can predict my every move
4
Inside the choir piano (note: stolen key included)
Stayed up all night to memorize scene from Midsummer so I wouldn’t humiliate her in front of whole class
5
Dixon’s house
Planned to break up with Smith
6
Wheeler’s office
Blackmailed Dixon to cooperate, backstabbed him anyway
7
Auditorium (first row, under seat)
Cast a hex upon me during Sunday matinee, broke up Ace and Summer
8
Football stadium (under bleachers)
Used Smith to make Rory jealous on purpose because she thought it would be fun
9
Chem lab (chemical storage closet)
Manipulated student council secretary to rig homecoming court vote so she would lose in upset to Emma Grace Baker because she was “worried about overexposure”
10
Rory’s roof (tied to a rock)
Faked flu on National Signing Day so she wouldn’t have to be in Smith’s livestream
11
Shara’s gym locker
Spent last summer at home reading with phone on airplane mode while everyone thought she was on mission trip to Nicaragua
So Chloe is gaining momentum, and Smith and Rory are losing it. Morale is at a record low in the “I Kissed Shara Wheeler” group chat.
“Okay, the last note says there are directions to the next one in a club photo one of us took with her for the yearbook,” Chloe says, dropping her tray on the table at the Taco Bell near school. “It has to be the National Honor Society photo she took with me. That’s the only extracurricular any of us have in common with her. I just don’t know how to get access to it.”
Smith braces a hand against his forehead and contemplates his life, as well as his taco order, which he hasn’t yet settled upon.
“So … this isn’t even a clue to find the next note,” Smith says. “It’s a clue to find another clue to find the next note.”
“Come on, chin up,” Chloe says. “We gotta be almost there. I have a feeling she made this one harder because it’s the last one.”
“I don’t know how much more I want to know,” Smith says as Rory drops an overloaded tray on the table.
Chloe rolls her eyes and unwraps her quesadilla. “God, you guys are so boring. We’re putting together like, the psychological profile of someone who is either going to be the president of the United States or a full-on serial killer.”
Rory begins separating burritos and tacos from his pile of food and setting them down in front of Smith, who finally tears his attention away from the menu.
“What’s this?” he asks.
“I got you food.”
Smith raises his eyebrows. “What did you get me?”
“I don’t know,” Rory mumbles, “whatever you usually get.”
“You remembered?”
Rory scowls. “They don’t have the Grande Soft Taco anymore, so I got you two soft tacos and a side of nacho cheese. You just have to make it yourself. Or whatever.”
“Oh. Did you get—?”
“A spork?”
“Yeah.”
“Obviously.” Rory dedicates himself to picking apart his nachos.
“You want me to Venmo you?”
“It’s fine.”
“Oh,” Smith says. Rory looks up in time to watch Smith’s smile break out across his face. It’s really something to see, Smith’s smile. It comes out of nowhere and hits like an earthquake, absolute and devastating. “Thanks, man.”
“You’re welcome,” Rory says, blinking like he’s looking into the sun.
“Wow,” Chloe observes. “A friendship reforged.”
Rory’s scowl immediately returns. “Fuck off, Chloe.”
But Smith hums happily as he unwraps the first taco, and the curl of Rory’s lip softens.
Meanwhile, Chloe digs through Shara’s entire Instagram feed yet again for anything she might have missed. She doesn’t find any new leads, only small surprises that amount to nothing. An unfamiliar angle that exposes a birthmark on the top of Shara’s shoulder. A well-camouflaged line from a Mary Oliver poem in a caption. There’s this one photo of Shara sitting next to Summer on a pier, both wearing sunglasses and smiling wide, and when Chloe zooms in, she can see the faint outline of a book in the tan on Shara’s stomach, like she fell asleep reading in the sun. All pieces of the puzzle, but none that complete it.
She checks the Google Doc she sent to Shara’s burner a dozen times a day, but it never changes. Always Chloe’s same three words, awaiting Shara’s answer. The most recent editing date at the top of the page will sometimes change, but no words ever materialize.
Still, she’s gaining ground. She’s got all these clues, these secrets. She knows she’s closing in.
If Shara were an SAT question, she’d be one of those confusing logic puzzles. Critical reasoning with no obvious answers to rule out. Simple, straightforward words arranged in a strange, winding order, something to get lost inside until you realize you’re way behind on time and you’re going to have to bubble in C for the last four problems.
If Shara leaves town on the highway traveling west at sixty miles per hour, and Chloe spends the next three weeks chasing after her, at what speed will Shara be traveling when they collide?
Time never moves correctly during the last few weeks of school, but especially not at the end of senior year. They’re standing before the end of school uniforms and major works data sheets and asking permission to pee, and everything feels exhausted and giddy. The spiritual frequency of the entire senior class is two in the morning at IHOP after the spring musical’s last show.
It seems impossible that Shara was standing across a dance floor in her pink gown only a couple of weekends ago.
By the same messed-up laws of time, it feels like ages since she last saw Georgia outside of school when she drives to Belltower with Starbucks late Saturday afternoon, even though it’s only been a few days.
Georgia’s at the front desk sorting through a box of literary fiction, and she gladly accepts the iced coffee Chloe hands her.
“Anything good this week?” Chloe asks.
“Not unless you’re into marriage dramas about straight white people who can’t stop having affairs,” Georgia says.
“I’m good,” Chloe says. “Let me know if you have any horny monsters though.”
“You know I’m always on horny monster watch for you,” Georgia says. She glances around, making sure they’re alone before she adds, lower, “And lesbians with swords.”
It’s not as simple for Georgia as it is for Chloe, being queer. Georgia isn’t sure how her parents will take it, much less her entire extended Southern Baptist family. The first time she came over to Chloe’s, she stood across the room staring at Chloe’s moms making dinner together for so long that Chloe worried she might be homophobic. It wasn’t until later, when they were on her bedroom floor cutting pictures out of magazines to stick to their notebooks, that Georgia quietly mentioned she’d never seen a married lesbian couple in real life, and Chloe figured out what was going on.
Chloe leans in to help unpack the box.
“Where’ve you been all week?” Georgia asks. “We were supposed to work on the French paper on Thursday.”
Chloe winces. “Crap. Were we?”
“We were,” Georgia says. “I went ahead and wrote the first three pages.”
“I got the last three, then,” Chloe says. “I promise.”
Georgia nods. “Okay.”
“And I promise I’ll make it up to you one day when I’m a hotshot editor and you’re my most prized author and we’re taking the literary world by storm.”
“All right, all right.”
“And I promise to give you more than your share of space in our fridge next year,” Chloe says. “You can store foraged mushrooms to your heart’s content.”
Georgia fusses with the barrette holding back her hair.
“Yeah. Um, there’s actually something I wanted to talk to you about,” Georgia says.
“Hm?”
She glances over Georgia’s shoulder, at the shelves behind her. The Austen section, specifically, where Shara must have stopped a few weeks ago when she came in to buy Emma.
Wait. Why would Shara come here, of all places, to buy a book?
“I’ve been—um, what are you doing?” Georgia calls after her, but Chloe’s already across the room and at the shelf, opening an illustrated edition of Pride & Prejudice. She should have ransacked the whole Austen selection as soon as Georgia told her the story.
“I just realized I—” Shara must have seen Georgia reading Austen at school and figured that if she bought a book by the same author, Georgia would mention it to Chloe. She pulls Persuasion next, but there’s nothing inside either cover except book smell. “I think I left something in one of these books.”
“What?” Georgia says, putting down the hardback she’s holding. “Why?”
“I, um, was gonna buy it but I changed my mind,” Chloe lies, shaking out Northanger Abbey to no avail.
“You don’t remember which one?” Georgia asks, audibly perplexed.
The last one Chloe tries is a hardcover of Mansfield Park, and there, tucked into the front flap, is a pink card. And inside the card is a piece of loose-leaf, folded three times.
“Found it!” she says, tucking both into her pocket before Georgia can see. “But, oh, crap, I just remembered I’m—I’m supposed to be doing puzzle night with my moms, so sorry, gotta go!”
She’s out the door and in her car before the entry bell finishes jingling behind her.
Parked in the driveway at home, she reads the letter for the third time. It’s by far the longest one Shara’s left behind, and it’s addressed only to Chloe. She can’t stop touching the pen strokes on the paper.
Hi, Chloe,
Nice one. I was a little worried the book would get sold before you found this, but I figuredMansfield Parkwas a safe bet. And let’s be honest … the books aren’t exactly flying off the shelves here.
Anyway . Would you be surprised if I told you I asked Mr. Davis to make us lab partners in chem?
What if I told you that I pretended my shoe was untied so I could wait outside Mrs. Farley’s room until I saw you walk in on the first day of school this year? What if I told you the truth, which is that I made sure to brush three fingers across the top right corner of your desk before I took the seat in front of you, and I sat there for an hour trying to picture the look on your face when I did it?
What if I told you that, in the three years of English classes we had together before that one, I would sit across the room from you and think about all the ways I could ruin your perfect record? I tried reporting you for uniform violations, but that never seemed to stick. Sometimes I’d picture breaking into my dad’s officeand figuring out a way to change all your 99s to 89s. Sometimes I’d dream up a whole conspiracy to frame you for plagiarism. I even thought about slashing your tires the night before the AP exam (not my most Christlike moment, I’ ll admit).
Sometimes, when I was feeling especially creative, I would imagine how I could make you fall in love with me. As soon as I knew you liked girls, I saw my way in. I could drag my fingertip along the curve of your jaw, I could almost kiss you in the library. I could break your heart so exquisitely, you’d forget you ever cared about winning. It’s always been so easy, making people love me. I was sure I could do it to you.
I tried, sophomore year. You remember precalc? I pretended not to understand something because I knew you didn’ t either. It was supposed to get me close enough to you to bring out every trick I know. But you figured me out. You’re not like anyone else. The same tricks don’ t work on you .
I think that’s where this started to go wrong for me . There are things that don’ t make sense about me. I don’ t know if I belong here . How can that be possible, to feel estranged from a place where everyone loves you? To owe your life to a place and still want to run? I’ ve been trying and trying to figure out what it is about me that makes me feel this way and why it feels so deep and so big that it must be most of me, the skin stretching between my knuckles and across my shoulders and then the bones under them too.
Knowing that I couldn’ t have you if I wantedto—that stings almost the same . It’s almost the same feeling. They’re right beside each other. What do they have in common?
I’d prefer if you kept this one to yourself,
S
When Chloe was in sixth grade, she won the California state spelling bee.
It wasn’t easy—not because she had any trouble spelling, but because her school didn’t believe in “creating a competitive environment for students.” At nine, she came home with a stern note for forcing her friends into an underground fight club of timed math quizzes during unstructured play time. They were not going to be pitting kids against one another in the spelling bee qualifier rounds.
But she saw the previous year’s winner on the local news and refused to let it go until her moms had figured out how to get her independently qualified and she had crushed every other eleven-year-old in the state with the final word, “dipsomaniac.”
The moment she set foot on Willowgrove’s campus, she signed up for the Quiz Bowl team. She joined the French Club on the promise that there would be tests at the convention and started quietly tracking the highest grades in each of her classes, and she discovered that her only real competition was Shara.
This letter is finally, finally proof that Shara has always seen her the same way. They’re equals. That’s what she’s thinking as she drags her fingertip down the crease of the paper.
But she’s also thinking about Shara researching how Georgia’s dad is the owner of Belltower. That Chloe likes to spend her afternoons there with the books.
Did she figure out Chloe’s plans that weekend so she could come by the shop when Chloe wasn’t tucked into a corner with Little Women? Did she check the street for Chloe’s car? How many times did she write the note out before she settled on the exact loops in Chloe’s name? Did she sit on her ivory quilt and plan a whole day around creating this moment, right now, Chloe sitting here with this letter, thinking about Shara thinking about her?
It feels even more intimate than the Shakespeare passage in the piano. Willowgrove is where Shara is—was—every day, but Belltower is Chloe’s. Shara doesn’t have a key. She had to walk through the doorway that Chloe repainted last summer and make polite small talk with Chloe’s best friend.
She thinks about the ends of Shara’s hair brushing her desk in precalc and the flutter of a pulse under her fingers. If Shara was really in control of that play, if that was all it meant to her, why was her heart beating so fast?
The deeper she gets into this, the more she pictures the hours Shara spent on it. On Smith and Rory too, yes, but Chloe’s the one who got a whole letter on loose-leaf paper addressed only to her. There’s no clue leading to or from this one. Her kiss was the one Shara bought brand-new lip gloss for.
The postscripts on the cards always allude to something that only one of the three of them can translate, but when she lines them up next to one another, something doesn’t match. The clues for Smith and Rory usually reference a specific memory, but the clues for Chloe reference art. Not just any art—books found at Belltower, Shakespeare, Phantom. She specifically picked Chloe’s favorite things, wrote riddles in Chloe’s own language, and hid them in Chloe’s favorite places. Like Chloe is special.
She wonders.
What if this is why Shara wants Chloe to know who she is?
What if that kiss on the elevator was more than the first phase of a plan?
What if Shara’s more than an evil shitbird? What if Shara is an evil shitbird who’s in love with her?
“Chloe, thank God you’re here,” her mama says when she finally stumbles inside. She holds up one of the thousand puzzle pieces spread across the kitchen table. “Would you describe this color as honey or amber?”
“It’s yellow,” she says.
“Thank you!” her mom says. “It goes in the yellow pile!”
“But the yellow pile has five subsections, Val.”
“You’re making this way harder than it needs to be, Jess.”
Thankful for the cover of distraction, Chloe slips off to her room. She snatches her laptop off her desk, balancing it on one hand while she unzips her skirt and shimmies it to the floor. She’s so desperate for one more piece of Shara, her whole body feels itchy. Her Google Doc is instantly open, and—
There, at the top of the page, in small gray letters: Last edit was seconds ago.
When her eyes fly to the space under her three words, Where are you?, there’s a green cursor holding steady. She hovers over it until the name of the person editing the document pops up: SW.
Shara’s there. Shara’s in the doc right now. For the first time since prom, they’re in the same place at the same time.
Chloe’s foot gets caught in her skirt, and she yelps and topples sideways to the carpet.
When she recovers her laptop from the floor, the cursor is gone—wherever Shara is, she must have realized Chloe had logged on and closed the window as fast as she could. There’s nothing new in the document, only the same blank stretch where Shara’s cursor vanished. But the timestamp at the top still says the last edit was seconds ago. She was so close.
But—wait. There shouldn’t be anywhere for Shara’s cursor to rest if there’s nothing below Chloe’s words.
Crumpled at the foot of her bed in her underwear, Chloe hits the command button with her thumb and the A key with her middle finger to highlight everything on the page.
Shara typed in white text. Invisible ink.
Beneath Where are you? she’s written a single line.
Come on. There are a million more interesting questions you could ask.
“You bitch,” Chloe exhales, and she types out, Fine. Why did you leave?
A pause. Chloe finally kicks her skirt off her ankles and holds her breath. Then a little SW appears in a bubble at the top of the document. Shara must have edit notifications on for the doc—God, why didn’t Chloe think of that?
Another sentence unfolds across the page, in black this time.
I don’t think you actually want me to make it that easy.And then, What are you thinking about right now?
You, she types out automatically, before remembering Shara can see it and hastily adding, ’re running out of time to come back. AP tests and finals are next week.
She waits.
Thanks for reminding me, Shara types. What’s the last note you found?
It was a letter, actually, Chloe types. The one you left me at Belltower and asked me not to show anyone.
A second passes, and another, and then Shara’s cursor disappears.
