Chapter 13

13

DAYS WITHOUT SHARA: 22

DAYS UNTIL GRADUATION: 21

Shara ghosts the doc for the rest of the weekend after finding out Chloe read the letter, and Chloe knows her theory is correct: Shara is in love with her.

How embarrassing for Shara.

All these years, Shara’s been sitting in her room, brushing her hair in front of her vanity mirror and thinking about how Chloe could be unraveled. Shara, Shara actual Wheeler, is obsessed with her. Willowgrove’s perfect little daughter of Christ wants the weird queer girl with too much eyeliner.

Even if Chloe doesn’t want Shara back, she does want to be a sharp-beaked little bird making a nest in that pretty head. If the next note is anything like the last, she needs it. Like, for entertainment purposes.

At least she has an idea of how to get it.

“The theater end-of-year party is tonight,” Chloe says on Monday when she catches Smith at his locker. She doesn’t remember when she learned Smith Parker’s locker number by heart, but she adds it to the list of ways Shara has derailed her life in a matter of weeks.

“Okay,” Smith says.

“Brooklyn’s coming, and she’s supposed to be taking pictures for the yearbook, so she’ll have her camera there, and we can check the memory card for the club photos,” Chloe goes on. “Everyone who did Phantom is invited, including Ace, so all you have to do is convince him he should actually show up—”

“He’s going.”

“That’s the spirit. Show him who’s boss.”

“No, I mean he already told me he’s going.”

Chloe blinks. “What?”

“Yeah, I think he’s looking forward to it. He bought a new shirt.”

“I—uh, okay. Well, then, you can just figure out an excuse to come with him. And then when Brooklyn’s doing the senior number, you can get to her camera.”

Smith sighs.

“We’re close, Smith,” Chloe reminds him. “You deserve answers. We all do.”

Smith chews on his thumbnail. “Okay. I’ll be there.”

---

“Let’s go, let’s go, the seven-layer dip ain’t gettin’ any fresher,” Mr. Truman says as he waves students into the gym like the emcee at the Kit Kat Club. “No, Taelynn, it’s fine that your mom didn’t put lime juice on the avocados like I told her last time and now they’re already brown— Hi, Chloe, you have a fire in your eyes tonight and I hope it’s for theater.”

“It’s definitely for something,” she says.

“Great, no further questions.”

Chloe has been looking forward to her senior theater party since freshman year, when she sat wide-eyed on the floor of the gym watching the senior leads from that year’s spring musical (who were basically celebrities to her at fourteen). The self-appointed keeper of tradition, Mr. Truman invented an iconic Willowgrove theater ritual when he played Conrad in Bye Bye Birdie in ’96 and performed the entire closing number as Rosie at the end-of-year party. It’s evolved over the years; now, as custom dictates, it’s Chloe and Benjy’s turn to swap roles and lead the seniors in an over-the-top, genderbent performance of the titular number.

Benjy, who takes nothing more seriously than an opportunity to commit to a bit, waylays her by the folding table of two-liter sodas and snacks.

“You’re like, thirty minutes late,” he says. “Did you get the blocking notes I sent you? Do you know your lyrics?”

“Benjy, I have known the words to this song since I was in utero,” she says. She mentally flips through the contents of her emails—she’s sure she skimmed Benjy’s plan for the number, but it’s been mostly overwritten in her mind by Shara in her Google Docs.

She wants to be here, in this moment, doing this thing she’s been dreaming of her whole high school career. But she’s also here because she needs to know where to follow Shara next.

She forces her hands to reach for a cupcake instead of her phone. “Did you bake these?”

“Please,” he says. “As if I have time. I— Wait. What is Ace doing here?”

He’s looking over her shoulder at the entrance to the gym, where Ace has appeared in all his lumbering glory.

“He was Phantom,” Chloe reminds him. “He got an invite.”

“Yeah, but he wasn’t supposed to come. He’s not supposed to act like any of us exist,” Benjy says, his expression going pointy and sour. “I planned our entire number around him not coming. What, are we gonna have two Christines? Like a bunch of idiots? And he’s going to screw it up because this whole thing is a joke to him.”

Chloe touches his shoulder in what she hopes is a calming way. She’s usually the one getting calmed down, so she’s not quite sure she’s doing it right. Hand goes like this?

“Okay, don’t tell anyone I told you this, but it turns out Ace Torres is like … actually really into musical theater.”

“What are you talking about?” Benjy snaps. “He was messing up his lines all the way up to tech week. I don’t know if he ever even read the script or just memorized the movie.”

“I know,” Chloe says. Even she can’t believe she’s saying this. “But I think that was because he was nervous. He practiced for weeks before tryouts.”

“He told you this? Since you’re friends with Smith Parker now, for some reason? Who is…” He frowns as Smith materializes behind Ace, looking decidedly awkward. “… Also here?”

“It’s a long story,” Chloe says. “But … please don’t kill me … I think Ace may have actually…” She retracts into her shoulders like a turtle. “Deserved the part?”

Benjy looks at her like she’s been replaced with a clone. “Chloe.”

“I’m not saying you didn’t!” Chloe immediately clarifies. “Or that he deserved it more! But he’s … he’s not as bad as we thought he was. You should ask him what his favorite Sondheim is.”

He’s still glaring, but he at least doesn’t seem like he might jump her. “You’ve changed.”

“Don’t be so dramatic.”

“We’re literally at a theater party right now.”

“Okay, everyone!” Mr. Truman yells, rolling a rack of tragic-looking secondhand gowns and tuxedo jackets into the gym. “Costumes! Makeup!”

“I’ll ask,” Benjy says. “But for the record, there is a wrong answer.”

“I know there is,” Chloe says, and she races him to the racks.

---

The gym connects to a back hallway, where two locker rooms sit across from the choir room, and once everyone finishes fighting for costumes, they disperse to get changed. It takes about five seconds for the girls’ locker room to transform into a near-perfect re-creation of the night Phantom closed. Makeup kits exploding over benches, someone pulling out a Bluetooth speaker and putting on the soundtrack, bobby pins somehow already everywhere. Three junior girls commandeer the sinks, climbing up to sit inside the bowls with their sneakers braced against the mirror to do their contour up close.

When Chloe tries to explain what she loves so much about high school theater, even though she’ll probably never set foot on another stage after graduation, she always ends up at this: the chaos of backstage. Sitting on the dressing room floor in a sweaty wig cap eating a box of McNuggets someone’s mom dropped off, accidentally catching a glimpse of a cute lead’s underwear when they’re quick-changing behind a towel in the wings, ranking the smelliest character shoes in the chorus, and the delirious, unsupervised hours between the morning and evening shows on a Saturday.

So much of Chloe’s life at Willowgrove is spent in absolute control to compensate for being different, but not here, not in this glittering shitshow.

“What color did you get?” Chloe asks Georgia, eyeing her own tux with extreme skepticism.

Georgia holds up hers, a shade of powder blue that looks right out of Hairspray. “Brought my great-uncle’s prom tux from home. Knew it would come in handy someday.”

“You genius,” Chloe says. “Mine looks like somebody died in it.”

Brooklyn brushes by, fussily tying her hair back. Her tux is draped over her arm, and it’s one of those camo monstrosities that are distressingly common in Alabama. “At least you didn’t get the Shotgun Wedding Special.”

Chloe retreats to a corner to pull on her tux, which also affords her the opportunity to check her phone without anyone asking her about it. Still nothing new from Shara.

“Did you see that Ace actually came?” she overhears one of the senior girls from the chorus say to another.

“No way. Really?”

“Yeah, and he brought Smith Parker with him.”

“Oh my God.”

They sound skeptical but not hostile, so Chloe kicks aside a confusing twinge of protectiveness. Since when did she start looking after jocks?

Once she’s buttoned up, she makes her way back to the full-length mirror. It could certainly fit better, but the dark gray doesn’t look as funeral home as she feared it might on her, and honestly, that’s kind of a vibe for Phantom anyway. She tugs on her sleeves, swishing her cape—some purple crushed velvet abomination that her mom unearthed from an old Halloween costume—and scrutinizing her reflection. It could be worse.

Over her shoulder, a stall door squeaks open, and Georgia emerges in her powder-blue tux.

“Does it look okay?” she asks. “Ash helped me take it in a little.”

Chloe turns around to look at her and gasps.

The pants have been hemmed and tapered into cigarette pants that end right at the top of her Vans, and she’s rolled the sleeves of the jacket up to her elbows. Her short hair is shoved back and messy, which makes her look at least three years older.

“Geo,” she says, “you look so fucking cool.”

She blushes. “Really?”

“You look like Kristen Stewart at the Oscars.”

“Kristen Stewart?” she repeats, blushing harder.

She steps up to the mirror and turns left and right, checking her jawline in the reflection, then smooths out her lapels with visible coolness.

“Can you—um—” She turns to Chloe, who’s still holding her phone. “Can you take a picture and send it to me?”

She eyes Georgia. She’s not really a selfie person, or a posting photos of things that aren’t dogs or books on her Instagram person. “Who are you sending it to?”

“Nobody,” she insists. “I just want to have it.”

Chloe shrugs and lines up the shot: Georgia with her hands in her pockets, one hip cocked, looking effortless and confident and honestly pretty hot.

Right before she hits the button, an email notification pops up at the top of the screen: SW edited your document.

Shara, back within reach.

“Chloe?” Georgia says.

“Sorry, sorry!” Chloe snaps the shot quickly. “Here, I’ll send it to you.”

She fires off the photo to Georgia, and then ducks into a stall and opens up the doc. It takes ages, since the locker rooms are basically a dead zone for cell service, so she climbs up on the toilet seat to boost her signal.

Under the last thing she wrote, new words finally appear.

Well, what did you think of the letter?

She slaps her phone against her chest and stares up at the water-stained ceiling, screams and laughter and music and gossip fading out under the deafening volume of Shara’s nerve.

I think you made your point pretty clearly, she types, thumbs jabbing at the keyboard. Shara’s cursor is waiting for her response. Though I’m surprised you actually showed your hand.

Shara types back immediately.

You figured it out, then. I knew I wasn’t overestimating you.

Chloe rolls her eyes. Of course Shara wants to play it cool, like she didn’t write a whole letter about how she’s in love with Chloe and then disappear when Chloe read it. Shara Wheeler, always running away and pretending it was all part of her plan.

What I can’t figure out is why you had to do it like this, Chloe types. Seems like a lot of work for something you could have done from your desk in Mrs. Farley’s class. I’ve been right here the whole time.

This time, Shara takes longer to start typing. Chloe stares at her cursor and imagines her on the other side of it, tucking her long hair behind her ear and frowning down at the keyboard.

That’s the problem, Shara types. I was too close to realize that you’re special. Took a while to figure out how to get you where I want you.

“Chloe!”

Chloe startles so hard, her foot almost goes straight into the toilet.

“Yeah!” she shouts back, jumping down. Her voice comes out strangled, so she clears her throat before she opens the door. “What’s up?”

Georgia’s waiting for her on the other side of the door with a fistful of lipsticks and a quizzical brow. “Do you have a minute?”

“Yeah, of course,” she says.

“I need to—”

“Bring those to Ash?” Chloe says, pulling the lipsticks out of her hand. “Got it.”

“Wait—”

“I know,” Chloe calls over her shoulder, already at the door. “No direct application! I’ll tell them to use a brush.”

---

In the choir room, Ash has set up an approximation of the makeup station they had for Phantom. They’re a bit of a legend within the theater program for being a wizard with a Morphe brush. They transformed Ace’s face into a complete horror show for Phantom with nothing but liquid latex, wet Kleenex, and a YouTube tutorial in unsubtitled Russian.

“Georgia wanted me to bring these to you,” Chloe says, dropping the lipsticks in Ash’s lap.

“Oh, really?” Ash says. “That’s nice of her.”

Most of the guys are still changing, but Ace is sitting cross-legged on a riser with a full contour and green eyeshadow. Nearby, Smith is watching raptly.

“You look cool, Ace,” Chloe says.

“Thanks,” he preens. “You do too. The cape is dope.”

“You’re a good sport,” she says, half-distracted, already pulling out her phone.

“I let Mackenzie put lipstick on me when we borrowed cheerleader uniforms for the homecoming pep rally, but this is like, so much cooler,” Ace says.

“Hold still, I’m almost done,” Ash says.

“Oops.” Ace freezes, and when he speaks again, it’s through his teeth and a locked jaw. “Sorry.”

In the doc on Chloe’s phone, Shara hasn’t typed anything else. Chloe lets the last four words settle in her stomach. Where I want you.

She types back carefully, Where is that? And then hides her phone before Smith can catch on.

When she looks up at Smith, though, he’s not paying attention to her at all. He’s still watching Ash put the final flourish on Ace’s eye makeup.

“Okay,” Ash says, putting down their brush. “You can go change now.”

“Thanks, Ash, you’re so cool,” Ace says, and he gets up and lumbers out, leaving Ash blinking owlishly after him.

“Do you think, um,” Smith says, “do you think you could put some on me?”

Ash turns, and now Smith is the one getting blinked at.

“But you weren’t in the spring musical.”

“I know,” he says. He touches his hair, then the side of his face. “But it looks fun.”

Ash considers it and shrugs. “Okay.”

Smith scoots into Ace’s spot, and Ash examines his face from a few angles before picking out a handful of pigments from their kit.

“Are you gonna do a costume?” Chloe asks Ash. “I think all that’s left on the rack is probably way too big for you. You’ll have no shape.”

“That works for me,” Ash says. “My ideal body is no body at all.”

Chloe snorts. “Just a head floating above a sexy void.”

“That’s so gender of me,” Ash says, beginning to chisel out Smith’s cheekbones. Another buzz from her phone. Another edit to the doc.

Exactly where you are, Shara has written. There’s a pause, and on a new line, she adds, If you know what this is about, why are you still talking to me?

It takes her nearly a full minute to decide what to say. Smith and Ash are talking quietly, but she’s not taking any of it in. It’s like Shara is sitting right here on the chair next to her, reflected beside her in the big mirror on the back wall, watching Chloe’s mouth for the next thing she’ll say.

Because I still don’t know where you are,she finally types.

Shara responds, The next one should get you there.

And then what?

“I’m really sorry if this is a stupid question,” Smith says to Ash, “and you don’t have to answer it, but … the thing you said about gender. Can you explain the whole nonbinary thing to me?”

Thatfinally pulls Chloe back to the present. Ash’s brush pauses over Smith’s half-glittery eyelid.

It hasn’t exactly been a smooth coming-out process for Ash, or even really much of a coming out at all. Their parents don’t know, and the Willowgrove faculty would probably go into collective cardiac arrest if a student asked for their deadname to be dropped from class rosters. But last year, one of their TikToks about weird earrings went viral, and everyone in school saw their pronouns in their bio, so that was pretty much it.

Chloe can see them doing the same math she did with Smith at Dixon’s party, but under his long lashes, Smith’s eyes are warm and curious. A faint memory returns to Chloe: Smith, shoving hair ties and concealer toward the back of his locker.

“When you first started at Willowgrove, back in middle school, you had to tell all your teachers to call you Smith, right?” Ash asks. Their brush starts moving again. “Because it’s not your first name?”

“Yeah. It’s my middle name. Mom’s last name before she got married.”

The answer surprises Chloe. She arrived at Willowgrove after Smith, so she always assumed Smith was his first name.

“What’s your first name, then?”

“William.”

“Your parents named you Will Smith?” Chloe interjects.

Ash ignores her. “And when did you start going by Smith?”

“When I was a little kid.”

“Why don’t you go by William?”

Smith shrugs. “I don’t know. It just doesn’t feel right. Like, Smith feels like my name, but William doesn’t.”

“How do you know you’re not a William?”

“I don’t know. I just … do.”

“Okay, so,” Ash says. “That’s how I felt about being a girl. When I was a kid, I thought I didn’t like girly things, but then I got older and realized that I liked some girly things, but I hated that liking them made people think I was a girl, because on some level I always knew I wasn’t one. So then I thought maybe I was actually a boy, because I wanted to be feminine the way boys can be feminine, but then I’d look at other boys and I wasn’t one of them either. I knew I wasn’t a girl, and I wasn’t a boy. Like if someone yelled your first name at you. You might answer to it, but it wouldn’t feel right, because that’s not you.”

“So, wait—why did you cut your hair, if you don’t want to be a guy?”

Chloe winces, but Ash seems unbothered. “Because I’m still not a girl, so I don’t like it when someone takes one look at me and automatically shoves me into the girl category in their brain. The hair helps.”

“Okay, but I feel like that too, and I’m not nonbinary.”

There’s the slightest change in Ash’s face. “What do you mean?”

“Like … I like my body, because it’s fast and strong and good at football. But it also has to be a dude’s body, because I play football. So like, maybe sometimes I wish it was smaller or softer or … different … but I don’t really have a choice. And I can wear stuff like my letterman jacket and feel better because I could be shaped like anything under that, and I can imagine that maybe I’m not shaped like a dude sometimes. But that’s not the same thing as what you’re talking about, right?”

“Are there … times you don’t want to be a dude?”

Smith’s eyes are closed so Ash can keep working, but his eyebrows furrow above them. “Does it matter? I’d have to be a guy no matter what.”

“You know … if being a guy feels like something you have to do, like it’s an obligation or something…” Ash says carefully. “Maybe think about that.”

Smith looks like he might have another question, but the choir room door flies open, and a dozen lowerclassmen come tumbling in, ready to have their makeup topped off by Ash’s glitter stash.

“An orderly line would be appreciated,” Ash yells over the burst of noise, and Smith glances over their shoulder to check his face in the mirror wall. Chloe sees him smile before she leaves.

---

“If this thing makes me break out from your leftover face juices, I’m gonna murder you,” Chloe says, tugging at the mask covering one side of her face.

“I have great skin,” Ace says. “Which you should remember from all the times you kissed me.”

“I try not to think about that,” Chloe says.

Ace’s dress is a beaded floral confection that is straining dangerously across his chest and ends about four inches above his ankles. He looks like he’s halfway into a werewolf transformation, and he is having a spectacular time. Chloe found him surrounded by chorus members, yelling the punch line of some joke she can’t begin to imagine. He’s a little sweaty, but he’s got the spirit.

“I love kissing people,” Ace says. “It’s like, a hobby of mine. I would describe myself as a make-out hobbyist.”

“That’s nice,” Chloe says, checking her phone.

“I’ve kissed like, all my homies.”

Chloe glances up. “Even Smith?”

“Especially Smith.” Ace grins, wide and ringed with lipstick, and then he catches sight of something over Chloe’s shoulder and his eyes go wide. “Speaking of, holy shit.”

She turns, and over the heads of dragged-out, cupcake-cramming theater kids, there’s Smith.

His lips are lined in dark purple, fading into a soft lavender at the center. His cheeks are hollowed out with shadow and the bones dusted up top with iridescent highlighter that makes them glow sharp and high on his face. And his lids are glossy, his lower lash line dotted with big flecks of glitter. Chloe can’t help staring, not because he looks strange, but because he looks … natural. It’s a subtle drag, and it suits his face like he put it on himself. Something about his shoulders looks lighter.

He spots Chloe across the crowd and smiles a nervous smile, and the glitter under his eyes catches the grimy light from the overheads and turns it to stardust.

Two seniors descend upon him, whisking him into the party, and Chloe wonders if Shara ever imagined this as one of the outcomes of her plan.

In her hand, her phone buzzes. Shara’s reply: Then I guess it’s your turn to surprise me.

Soon, someone kills half the lights, and someone else cues up the backing track on the sound system, and the seniors shuffle into their places. The lowerclassmen pile on top of one another on gym mats with plastic cups of Sprite and smears of lipstick on their chins, and Mr. Truman climbs atop a row of bleachers with his phone horizontal, ready to film the whole thing so the seniors can have it for posterity. She notices Brooklyn handing her camera off to a sophomore before she joins the rest of them, and she makes eye contact with Smith, who nods. He shouldn’t have any trouble sweet-talking it away from her, not looking like that.

“Don’t screw this up for us,” Benjy hisses to Ace in the final second of anticipatory silence.

Chloe tucks her phone into her suit jacket and shakes out her cape. For the last time in her high school career, it’s curtain call.

Inexplicably, she kind of wishes Shara were in the front row again.

The organs start blasting, and Chloe steps to the center of the floor and sings.

---

“Did you get it?” Chloe asks Smith the second the performance is done.

“Yeah,” he says, “but I’m not sure what it means.”

He shows her a picture on his phone of the back of Brooklyn’s camera, where the National Honor Society photo is zoomed in on Shara. Seniors get the privilege of doing their extracurricular photos with silly concepts and gags, so instead of a posed group shot, it’s a dozen of the grade’s highest GPA holders in Mrs. Farley’s room, surrounded by the classroom stash of board games.

She remembers taking this photo. She’s on the left side of the frame with Georgia, pretending to fight over a game of Uno. Brooklyn’s sitting primly in front of Connect Four, while Drew Taylor makes a show of studying a chess board. Shara’s at a desk across the room, alone, her elbow propped up on the board game SORRY!.

In the picture, Shara’s holding something in her hand. Chloe zooms in on Smith’s phone screen, squinting to make out the details.

It’s the SORRY card, the one that tells you to send an opponent back to the starting space on the board.

“Back to start…” Chloe mumbles.

All of this started with three kisses: Chloe, Smith, Rory. They’ve been to Dixon’s house, where Shara last kissed Smith, and the roof where she kissed Rory. The only place left, the only kiss they haven’t revisited, is Chloe’s.

She passes the phone back to a confused Smith. “I know where to go.”

Cape flying, she barrels out the back door of the gym and past the choir room, down the hallway full of spare lockers and closets, around the corner, and through the open door where the back of A Building connects to the elementary classrooms on the first floor of B Building.

Walls of crayon-colored pictures of beach balls and construction paper wishes for a happy summer break blur out in a muted rainbow—a stray teacher’s aide yells something after her—and then she skids to a stop at the faculty elevator. It opens as soon as she calls.

Inside, nothing looks out of place. She checks behind the handrail before hiking up her suit pants and climbing on top of it to check the light fixture on the ceiling. It’s not until the doors slide shut that she sees it.

There’s a smear of pink nail polish on the lip of the inner doors, right where they meet.

Freshman year, when she got the campus tour from Georgia, she learned the secret of this elevator. If you stop it between floors and pry the inner doors apart, the inside of the outer doors is covered in thirty-six years of Willowgrove student graffiti. She and Georgia left their initials in Sharpie.

She jams the button for the top floor, counts the seconds, and on “two” she yanks the emergency stop.

When she wrenches the inner doors apart, the message is three feet tall and just as wide. It must have been here, hidden and still drying, when Shara pulled her close and kissed her.

On top of hundreds of signatures and lewd scrawls, there’s a heart painted in pink nail polish. And inside it, Shara’s daubed four cursive words.

I already told you .

Chloe checks three times to make sure she’s read it right.

No postscript. No clue. No more confessions. Not even a direction to look next.

It’s the end of the trail. This is where it was always leading: nowhere.