Chapter 14

14

DAYS WITHOUT SHARA: STILL 22

Rory pulls up outside the gym ten minutes after Chloe texts the group chat. When Smith slides into the passenger seat, his lipstick has been wiped off, but the rest of his makeup is still there. Chloe watches from the back seat as Rory stares at him across the console.

“Don’t say anything,” Smith says, the glitter around his eyes shimmering in the dashboard light.

“I—I wasn’t going to,” Rory says. “I like it.”

He puts the car in drive without another word.

Chloe tells them about the elevator and the nail polish note and then sits silently and waits for their reaction. Maybe it’ll be a breakdown this time, or one of them will cry, or Rory will pull over to write the next great sad-boy anthem. Surely, if she’s at her wit’s undeniable end, they must be too.

Instead, Smith tips his head back and laughs.

“I don’t know what I expected,” Rory says, and then he’s laughing too.

“What about this is funny?” Chloe demands.

“The whole thing,” Smith says, shaking his head. “Like, I have to laugh.”

“But she—”

“Do you wanna go get some snacks?” Rory asks.

“Damn,” Smith says, “yeah, I do.”

“But—” Chloe starts.

“Chloe,” Smith says, “there’s nothing we can do about it tonight.”

She opens her mouth to argue, but then Rory is pulling into a gas station and she’s the only one left in the car, fuming in her ill-fitting suit.

She glares out the window as Smith and Rory elbow each other toward the glass doors, which are emblazoned with a giant, peeling picture of a 99-cent corn dog. Shara could be anywhere, and they’re getting corn dogs.

She sighs, opens her door, and yells, “Get some mustard!”

---

They drive, and they drive, out of town and up the hills until they reach a dirt road toward Lake Martin. The trees spread out and vanish into the dark the closer they get to the water, until the damp dusk opens all around them.

Rory parks on a cliff fringed with dense greenery and big, round rocks, and when he kills the headlights, Chloe can see over the edge into the distance, down to the sparkling water and the green and red dots of boat lights. The afternoon’s rain left the ground soft and damp, the mossy trees dripping with leftover rainwater. Everything out here is green, green, green.

They climb up onto the hood of the car, Rory in the middle, and Smith passes out warm foil packets of corn dogs. Rory opens his and takes a deep whiff.

“You ever notice that greasy gas station food is like, the greatest smell in the world?” he says.

“Disagree,” Chloe says. “The greatest smell in the world is when your mom brings home fresh cilantro from the grocery store and you stick your face in the bag and take the biggest huff of your life.”

Rory wrinkles his nose. “Ew.”

“Oh, you’re a cilantro hater,” Chloe says.

“He’s a hater in general,” Smith says. He glances over at Rory with a wink, like he’s making sure Rory knows it’s a joke. Chloe watches the moment bounce between them.

“Whatever,” Rory says. “What do you think the best smell is, then?”

Smith considers it, swallows a bite of corn dog, and confidently declares, “My mom’s chicken and gravy.”

“Oh, man,” Rory moans. “Chicken and gravy. I miss my dad’s. I haven’t had it since I saw him for Christmas.”

“You should come over next time my mom cooks it,” Smith says.

Rory misses the straw for his ICEE but gets it on the second try. “You know what else smells amazing? Sharpies. Like, a fresh one, when it’s juicy.”

Chloe lets out a laugh. “Did you just say juicy?”

“You gonna tell me a brand-new Sharpie isn’t juicy?”

“Orange juice,” Smith says. “That’s the best smell. Or like, your hands after you peel an orange.”

“Lilacs,” Chloe blurts without thinking. She waits for Smith or Rory to react, but if either realize she’s talking about Shara, they don’t say. Cheeks pink, she hurries to add, “Or a really old book.”

“Taco Bell nacho cheese.”

“Sage.”

“A standardized test booklet when you break the seal on it.”

“That smell triggers my fight or flight,” Rory says. “Pine-Sol.”

Smith just laughs, but Chloe asks, “What? Why?”

“When I was a kid,” Rory says, “I’d go stay over with my cousins on my dad’s side in Texas, and every Saturday morning my aunt would get up early and start cleaning the whole house. Loud as shit, always woke us up, but we’d all lay there pretending to sleep so we wouldn’t have to help until she came and made us. So now that smell just makes me think of being in a sleeping bag on my cousin’s floor, listening to my other cousin fake snoring and trying not to laugh so I wouldn’t have to roll socks.”

Smith, who’s still laughing, says, “Wait, I got it. Friday afternoon in late October, after school lets out but before we start warming up for the game, when it feels like we’re the only ones on campus and nobody can tell us what to do, and they’re starting up the grills behind the concession stand, and somebody’s burning leaves a mile away. Charcoal and burgers and smoke and wet grass and that little bit of nerves. That’s the best smell in the world.”

Chloe sighs, chomping into her corn dog. “God, to live in the mind of a jock.”

“Sorry I’m not motorboating an encyclopedia from 1927.”

“Okay,” Chloe concedes, “but what about the worst smell in the world?”

“Definitely the bio lab on frog dissection week.” Smith shivers. “So glad it flooded the week I was supposed to do mine.”

“Because of the smell?” Chloe asks.

“Because I feel bad doing all that to a frog,” Smith says. “Like, I don’t know how he died! What if he had a family? What if he had like, dreams? What if he never got to finishBreaking Bad?”

“Smith,” Chloe says. “It’s just a frog.”

“Don’t get him started on frogs—” Rory says, like she’s prying open a tomb Rory’s tried to keep shut since middle school, but it’s too late. Smith has gotten started on frogs.

“It’s messed up!” Smith says, eyes wide, gesturing so emphatically he nearly backhands his ICEE into the bushes. “All frogs do is eat bugs that we hate and mind their business. They don’t deserve all that. They’re literally just vibing.”

At that precise moment, a massive bullfrog lands on the hood of the car with a heavy thump.

“Oh my God, look!” Smith says as Chloe screams and Rory jerks away from Smith’s new amphibious friend. “He heard me talking about frogs, and he came to see what’s up!” He reaches down and pets the frog’s back with one finger. “What’s good, cuz?”

“Don’t touch it!” Chloe says, shrill and horrified. “You don’t know where it’s been.”

Smith snorts at her. “Man, you’re really not from down here, huh?”

The frog hops away into the grass beside the car before disappearing behind a rock.

“Wait,” Smith calls, clambering down to his feet, “come back!”

Smith follows the frog’s flight plan into the night, corn dog in hand.

“Aaaand now he’s gonna befriend a frog,” Rory says, smiling like he can’t believe it.

He settles his shoulders against the windshield and watches Smith’s silhouette disappear into the moonlit greenery. There’s no trace of Shara’s mystery on his face, only a contemplative look as his laugh fades into the sounds of wind on water and scurrying little creatures in the mud.

But when Chloe leans back next to him and looks up at the stars, she’s still thinking about Shara, somewhere under the same big sky like a gym-class parachute. The elevator, the pink script. Tonight was the first time she’s been back to the place they kissed.

If asked, Chloe would insist she hasn’t been avoiding the elevator. There are other shortcuts to French class, obviously. She’d never reconstruct her campus routes around what was supposed to be a straight girl playing some cruel joke on her. She doesn’t even think about that kiss.

What she has thought about is how, if she hadn’t left a French assignment in her car, she wouldn’t have had to dash to the parking lot between classes, and she might have gotten to the elevator two minutes earlier and missed Shara entirely. If she’d hit the “close door” button faster, they’d have shut in Shara’s face. It seemed so accidental, such a stupid, fleeting chance that she and Shara wound up on the same elevator at all.

But, of course, it wasn’t chance. It was planned: Chloe’s usual path to fifth hour, soft fingers around Chloe’s wrist, vanilla and mint lip gloss. She didn’t just get kissed—there was a second when she lost the plot completely and did some embarrassingly desperate leaning—but the circumstances of the leaning only happened because Shara planned them. Because Shara wanted it to happen.

If she’d known all this then, she wouldn’t have let herself get left on an elevator. She would have yanked Shara back through the doors and made her fucking deal with it.

She turns to Rory.

“Can I ask you something?”

He nods, still watching the bushes rustle in the distance.

“Are you really not pissed at Shara?”

Rory blinks a few times, like he doesn’t understand the question at first.

“To be honest?” he finally says. “It feels like … like I’m relieved she let me off the hook.”

“Seriously?” Chloe asks, incredulous. “Haven’t you liked her for like, years?”

“I guess,” Rory says. “It’s more that … there’s never been another girl I thought about?”

Chloe crumples up her empty corn dog packet, then takes her cape off and shoves it behind her head as a makeshift pillow. “Can’t relate.”

After a long pause, Rory says, “I, um. I keep thinking about that, actually. The fact that it’s only ever been Shara. You think that means something?”

Chloe furrows her brow at the sky.

“Like what? That you’re meant for each other?”

In her periphery, Rory is shaking his head. “No, like … like maybe I talked myself into her, because when I looked at her and Smith together, I was so jealous, and she seemed like the right place to put it.”

“She’s not a place,” Chloe points out. “Or an idea. She’s a person.”

“Yeah,” Rory says. “But an idea can’t want you back. And I’m starting to think that was kind of the whole point.”

He glances away, and Chloe follows the line of his gaze across the clearing and down to the cliff’s edge, where Smith is still rummaging through the underbrush, and of all idiotic memories, the thing that springs to mind is Ace at a party shouting about Mr. Brightside: He never says which one he’s jealous of.

She thinks of Georgia tearing a magazine picture into pieces and chewing her bottom lip on the way to chapel. She thinks of her mom’s jars of hair dye gathering dust in the bathroom cabinet, and of Mr. Truman filling a cart with bridesmaid dresses at Goodwill. She pictures Rory, raised by Willowgrove since kindergarten, sitting at his bedroom window as Shara and Smith kiss good night, feeling an anxious, shivery type of envy and cramming it into a shape that doesn’t mean something’s wrong with him.

Damn. Okay.

It’s hard for her to wrap her brain around it sometimes—the idea that for most people from here, the stuff she hears in Bible class is reality. Who would she be if she hadn’t been raised by two moms and a small army of gay middle-aged Californians? What if Willowgrove had always been her whole world, and the people in charge of it, who left their classroom door unlocked for her and cracked jokes with her like they saw her as a person, told her gently but firmly that she was wrong? That there was something inside of her—even if she hadn’t named it yet—that needed to be fixed?

“You know,” Chloe says. She keeps her voice low, her tone noncommittal. “It would be okay. If you didn’t like Shara. If you didn’t like girls at all.” She lets the words settle between them, clinging to the shiny hood of Rory’s car like the first drops of rain before a storm. Rory doesn’t say anything, but he doesn’t scoff or shrug it off or make a sarcastic joke. He keeps staring off into the trees, and after a few long seconds, he lets out a breath.

“Shit,” he says.

“Yeah,” Chloe agrees.

It’s not fair, she thinks. Here she is, on a cliff in a thrifted suit with a glittery quarterback and the human embodiment of repressed homoerotic angst, and none of them have ever had the luxury of running away from what they are. Neither has Georgia, or Benjy, or her mom, or Mr. Truman, or Ash. Any of them.

Maybe it’s hard to be Shara and love a girl. But why should she get to run? Why shouldn’t she have to go through hell too?

Why should this be over because Shara said so?