Chapter 15

15

DAYS WITHOUT SHARA: 24

This must be what a hangover feels like.

Chloe presses her aching forehead to her locker door, wondering if this is the work of gas station corn dogs or a Shara-related migraine. She wasn’t even out that late—Rory dropped her off at her car before ten, and she was in bed by ten thirty—but she spent half the night reciting Shara’s notes to her bedroom ceiling like Arya Stark with bangs.

She’s throwing back the last can from her emergency espresso stash when she hears the heralding clangs of Georgia’s water bottle against the nearby lockers.

“There you are,” Georgia says, slightly out of breath. “You weren’t in the parking lot. I was afraid I wouldn’t find you before first hour to put everything together.”

Chloe’s stomach does a horrible swoop as Georgia unzips her bag and holds out her hand.

The last three pages of the French essay. Twenty percent of their final grade. Due today.

“Georgia, I—”

“I know, you specifically said no fun colors,” Georgia says, holding up the file folder, which is magenta. “But it’s the last file folder of my high school career, okay?”

“No, Geo.” Chloe feels like she’s going to throw up or cry or cry so much she throws up. “I forgot.”

Georgia freezes. “What do you mean you forgot?”

“I mean I don’t have it,” Chloe says. “I didn’t do it.” She’s never not done an assignment in her life. She was going to stay up late and do it after the theater party. She had it in her planner and everything—but then Shara—

“Please tell me you’re joking,” Georgia says.

“I’ll—I’ll skip first hour and go to the library and write it right now,” Chloe says, already switching into efficiency mode, half of her panicked thoughts diverting into French. Je suis absolutely screwed. “I’ll have it by fifth hour—”

“Forget it,” Georgia snaps, and she gathers her folder and water bottle and jangles angrily off.

“Geo!” Chloe jogs to catch up, shouldering an onlooking freshman out of her path. Up close, Georgia’s face is flushed, her thick eyebrows making an annoyed V. “Don’t be mad at me! I’m gonna fix it!”

“It doesn’t matter, Chloe.”

“Of course it matters,” Chloe says. “I’m not gonna mess up my GPA, or yours.”

Georgia groans and sidesteps her, pulling off into an empty classroom. Chloe follows.

“I don’t care about my stupid GPA, and nobody’s going to care about yours after we graduate,” Georgia points out. “You know that, right?”

“It’s important to me,” Chloe says.

“Well, it’d be nice if I was important to you,” Georgia spits out.

“What?”Chloe stares at her. “Of course you’re important to me! What are you talking about?”

“I’ve been begging you to help me with this project, and every time you blow me off for Smith and Rory and the rest of your new friends.”

Seriously? That’s what this is about?

“That’s been happening for like, four weeks.”

“Yeah, the four most important weeks of our life so far!” Georgia says hotly. “You think I don’t know you were at a party with Smith when you were supposed to be at our last movie night of senior year? You think I can’t figure out where you are when you skip lunch with us? We spent four years talking about our senior cast party, and you left before it was even over! We were supposed to do this together.”

A hundred things jump up Chloe’s throat. Arguments, defenses, the image of Georgia in a powder-blue tux. A memory of two fourteen-year-old girls on a living room rug reading Tolkien out loud with all the accents. She swallows all of them.

“You’re gonna leave for New York and forget about me,” Georgia says, quieter now.

“You’re gonna be right there next to me the whole time,” Chloe insists.

“No, I’m not.”

“Of course you are.”

“No,” Georgia says again. “I’m not.”

Above their heads, the bell rings. A terrible little voice in the back of Chloe’s mind says she should wrap this up soon if she wants to finish the essay.

“What are you saying?”

Georgia bites her lip. “I can’t go to NYU.”

“We talked about the financial aid thing—”

“I’m going to Auburn.”

No.

The plan has always been Chloe and Georgia and NYU. There’s never been another plan. There’s certainly never been a plan that involves—

“Auburn? As in forty-minutes-from-here Auburn?”

“The store’s not doing great, and college is expensive, even with financial aid,” Georgia explains. She looks away, glaring at a splotch of ink on the desk next to her. “My parents can’t afford to keep anyone on staff anymore, but they can’t do it by themselves. So I’m gonna stay home and help with the store and go to Auburn.”

“Since when?”

“I decided last month.”

“When were you going to tell me?”

“I’ve been trying to tell you for weeks! But every time I try to talk to you, you’re busy or distracted or hanging out with other people, and I’m—”

“Georgia, you cannot spend your life in False Beach.”

“God, you’re still not even listening to me! Has it ever occurred to you that I might not completely hate this place?”

“We literally shit on this place every single day of our lives.”

“No, you do,” Georgia says. “Yeah, there’s a lot about this place that sucks, but it’s where I’m from. And honestly, sometimes I’m sick of you acting like you’re so much better than it, like your family’s not from here too.”

“But you want to get out. You’ve spent the last four years telling me how much you want to get out.”

Georgia turns away, wringing her hands. “What I want is … I want to fall in love. I want to have a big, dramatic, ridiculous love story, like a period piece, and my love interest is played by Saoirse Ronan and I get to wear a fancy corset. I want to write books about the way that feels. And I don’t know if I’ll ever have any of that here, but I know what I’ll lose if I leave.”

“So you’re staying?”

Georgia nods, still not looking at her. “I can’t let Belltower close.”

“You really think you can be happy here? Do you want to ask my mom how that’s going for her?”

“I know, she left. A lot of people do. And that’s okay! I get it! Everybody has to do what they have to do. But if everyone like us leaves False Beach, it’s never gonna change. Someone has to stay.”

“But why does it have to be you?”

Georgia finally lifts her eyes. “Because I can take it.”

“That’s insane, Georgia,” Chloe says, throwing her hands up. “And what am I supposed to do? Go to New York by myself?”

“I don’t know, Chloe, you seem fine without me.”

I’m not, she wants to scream. I won’t be.

“Fine,” Chloe says instead. She breaks for the door, swiping at her eyes. “See you in French.”

---

She skips first and second hour, stumbles through third and fourth, and brings her half of the essay to French, where Georgia takes it wordlessly and passes it up to Madame Clark. They don’t talk for the rest of class, and when the bell rings for lunch, Georgia flounces out with Ash, and Chloe stomps off toward the gym.

Maybe she messed up, but it wasn’t completely her fault. If she tracks Shara down, she can prove it.

Up in Rory’s live oak tree, Jake and April are splitting a party-size cardboard tray of nachos, which is balanced so precariously on the bough between them that Chloe makes a point not to stand under it.

“Hey,” Chloe says, gripping the straps of her backpack.

“Hey,” Jake says through a mouthful. “You want a taco?”

“What?” Chloe says, but April has already reached into the plastic Taco Bell bag dangling from a branch and lobbed a soft taco at Chloe’s head. It smacks her gently in the cheek and falls into her hands. “Um. Thanks. Where’s Rory?”

Jake points with his vape pen—one branch up, on the other side of the tree, there’s Rory. And next to him, perched more gracefully than should be possible for someone his size, is Smith.

“Oh,” Chloe says.

She drops her backpack on the sprawling roots, shoves the taco into her oxford pocket, and starts climbing.

“Since when do you eat lunch here, Smith?” Chloe calls up to him. Across the courtyard, Mackenzie and Dixon and the others are still on their same bench.

Smith shrugs. “It’s almost graduation. I mean, look at Ace.”

He points, and she looks: Ace has wandered away from his usual spot and is having an animated conversation with one of the junior theater girls. Summer’s nowhere to be seen either, she realizes.

She shakes her head and pulls herself up higher.

“Okay,” she says, “about what Shara wrote on the elevator— I already told you. I think it means there’s a clue in one of the notes that explains where she is, and we’re supposed to figure it out and meet her there.”

Rory swallows a bite of burrito and nods slowly. “Uh-huh.”

“We should go back over the cards,” she goes on. “Do y’all wanna do it now or meet up after seventh hour?”

Rory and Smith exchange a look, like they’ve recovered whatever unspoken language they must have developed when they were thirteen, which is nice for them and incredibly inconvenient for Chloe.

“What?” she demands.

“Chloe,” Rory says. “If she wanted us to know, we would.”

“But maybe we do,” Chloe insists, “and we haven’t realized it yet.”

Another silent look between Smith and Rory.

“What?” she says again. “Are you actually giving up?”

“Look,” Smith says. “I care about Shara. A lot. But I’m tired. And I’m starting to wonder if she ever wanted us to catch her at all. Like, maybe this whole thing was one big goodbye.”

She shakes her head. “Rory?”

“I don’t know what else we have to go on,” he says. “Kinda feels like a dead end.”

A dead end?

“Well, I might lose all my friends over this, and finals are next week, which means if she’s not back by then, she won’t even be eligible for valedictorian, which means my salutatorian will be Drew Taylor, which is just embarrassing,” Chloe snaps. “He has a YouTube channel about why girls at Willowgrove are sluts for taking birth control pills. He doesn’t deserve to come second to me.”

“But you still win,” Smith points out. “Isn’t that enough?”

“No! It’s not! Not if she lets me win!”

She jumps down, landing untidily on her feet and storming off toward sixth hour, spiking the uneaten taco from her pocket into the first trash can she passes.

She didn’t ask for any of this. But she’s going to finish it, even if she has to do it alone.

---

Georgia takes one look at Chloe outside her house and says, “You’re kidding.”

“Hang on.” Chloe sticks her foot in the door so it can’t be slammed in her face. “Please, listen for a second.”

“All I do is listen to you, Chloe. That’s the whole problem.”

“If you just let me show you what’s been up with me, it’ll all make sense. I promise.”

Chloe went straight to Belltower after school, but Georgia wasn’t there, which is why she’s standing on this tiny front porch with her makeup pouch, trying to prove that Shara’s the one who ruined everything, not her.

“Fine.” Georgia crosses her arms. “What’s in the bag?”

“You remember how Shara kissed me?”

It takes a moment for the outrage to dawn on Georgia’s face.

“Shara Wheeler?” Georgia says, eyes wide. “This is about Shara Wheeler?”

“Stay with me. Shara kissed me, and then she ran away, and then she left me that note. The one I got in the Taco Bell drive-thru.”

“Uh-huh.”

She unzips the bag and hands it to Georgia.

“She left notes for Rory and Smith too,” Chloe says as Georgia starts pulling out pink card after pink card. “With clues in them, all leading to another clue, and another, and another. And they’re in these ridiculous places. I’m telling you, Georgia, it’s been a full-time job finding them, that’s why I’ve been spending so much time with Smith and Rory. I had to go to that Dixon party because she hid one there, and then I had to break into the principal’s office to get one out of her dad’s filing cabinet—I mean, it’s like, unbelievable. And every clue has a note from her, and every single one proves that I was right about her. I mean, she’s evil—”

Georgia stops shuffling the cards.

“Hang on,” Georgia interrupts. “You said you broke into the office? How?”

“I had a key,” Chloe answers automatically.

“To the office?”

“Not exactly.”

Georgia’s eyes narrow. “When was this?”

“I don’t know, like two weeks ago.”

“Two weeks ago,” Georgia says slowly, “as in, when I let you borrow my library key?”

Uh-oh.

“I—I made sure I didn’t get caught,” she backpedals.

“Do you have any idea how much trouble you could have gotten me in?” Georgia demands. Her face is going red in patches the way it does when she’s really heartbroken. “You lied to me! You could have gotten me suspended!”

“I wouldn’t have let that happen!”

Georgia throws the pouch back at her.

“Go home, Chloe.”

“No—”

“You don’t get to decide everything!” Georgia says. “I decided you’re leaving! So, leave!”

She kicks Chloe’s foot out of the way, curses under her breath when her socked toes connect with Chloe’s shoe, and slams the door.

“Geo!” Chloe yells at the wood.

“Bye!” Georgia’s voice shouts from the other side. “Go away!”

“Georgia!”

“Don’t text me either!”

She calls Georgia’s name one more time, but there’s no answer.

---

Chloe spends the rest of Dead Week alone, nose-down in study guides, both hands a highlighter bloodbath.

Maybe she doesn’t need her friends, who seem perfectly fine joking around in the parking lot before school without her, or Rory and Smith, or anyone. Maybe this is good practice for life after high school, when she’ll have to rely on herself for everything. Only Chloe, eating lunch by herself in the library with Shara’s cards and a mountain of exams. She has plenty to focus on. Willowgrove likes to consolidate AP exams and senior finals into the same week of early May, so next week is going to be hell, even if the finals for her AP classes are all perfunctory take-home exams that double as reviews for the real tests.

It’s fine. Good, actually, since she’s slipped in a couple of classes the past month, so she needs to catch up now. She can handle it. And she has nothing to feel bad about. All she’s been doing is what she’s had to do.

Shara’s the one who Gone Girl’d herself because she’s in love with Chloe. How is Chloe the crazy one?

The week ends—her last real week of school—and it’s fine. She can handle it.

Valedictorian and her friends and Willowgrove and Shara and the whole world. She can handle it.

“I can handle it!” she snaps when her mama tries to pull a jar of chili oil out of her hands in the kitchen on Friday night. She’s been struggling to open it for five minutes. She just wants to make some cup noodles and disappear into her room until Monday.

“Well, hello,” says her mama, putting her hands on her hips in the way she does that says, We’re going to talk about this now.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she says immediately.

“Okay,” her mama says. “Val!”

“Yeah?” her mom yells from the living room.

“Chloe is very angry about something and says she doesn’t want to talk about it!”

“Please don’t—” Chloe attempts.

“Oh, fun,” says her mom, and then she’s joining them in the kitchen, tucking a screwdriver into the kangaroo pocket over her overalls.

“I said I don’t want to talk about it,” Chloe insists.

Her mama nudges her onto one of the stools at the kitchen counter, and the two of them stand across from her with arms folded and calm, expectant looks. Maybe Chloe should feel comforted by this, but all she really feels is the anger bubbling hot in her chest, blurring her vision at the corners.

She knows neither of her moms will let it drop until she says something, so she sighs and opens her mouth to give them the stupid, infuriating details of her stupid, infuriating life—Georgia’s cold shoulder, Shara, AP exams, finals, Shara, the thought of having to go to New York and start a new life all by herself when she was supposed to have her best friend in the entire world alongside her, every last thing about Shara Wheeler—

Nobody is more surprised than Chloe to hear her own voice say hoarsely, “Is there something wrong with me?”

Her mama flinches at the words, shaking her head. “Of course there’s not.”

“Okay, but,” Chloe grinds out. She doesn’t feel in control of her mouth anymore. Her voice comes out nauseatingly raw. “Are you sure? Like, am I a bad person?”

Her moms exchange a look.

“Where’s this coming from?” her mom asks.

“I—I just need to know.”

“You take care of yourself, and that’s important,” her mom says. “And you don’t hurt anyone.”

“But I do hurt people,” Chloe insists.

“Do you do it on purpose?”

“No.”

“Okay, then, you’re human.”

“But Georgia said I don’t care about her, and I’m—if I’m so mean that my best friend doesn’t even know I care about her, then—then what’s wrong with me?”

“There’s nothing wrong with you. You’re just you.”

“I’m not a nice person,” she says.

“Chloe,” her mom says, “your mama and I decided long before you were born that we would let you be whoever you are, no matter who that is.”

“And if who you are is a snarling little Pomeranian with eyes like fire, then that’s who you are, darling,” her mama adds.

“Jess,” her mom hisses. “What she means is that nice and kind are not the same thing. Plenty of people aren’t nice at all, but they’re kind. And that’s what matters.”

“Sometimes,” Chloe blurts out, squeezing her temples between both hands, “sometimes it feels like I’m gonna explode, like everything I’m feeling is the first time anyone’s felt it, ever, in the history of the universe, and then I get so angry when people don’t understand that I’m walking around feeling like this and still doing everything I’m supposed to do and making As and getting into NYU and putting up with all of the Willowgrove bullshit. I—I can’t even explain how I feel, and it feels wrong to say it without the right words, so I don’t say it at all, but then nobody knows, and I’m mad that nobody knows, even though I don’t even want them to know.”

“To know what?” her mom asks gently.

“That—” Chloe says, but it sticks in her throat. “That it’s hard. That I have to be like this, because it’s all so fucking hard.”

“I know,” her mama says. “It’s enough to get through it though.”

“No, it’s not,” Chloe says, shoving away from the counter. “It’s not.”

---

Her moms try to drag her with them to Olive Garden for dinner, but Chloe finds the idea so depressing that she shouts through her bedroom door for them to go without her. Once she hears their car pull out, she rolls out of bed and trudges into her bathroom.

The silver chain is in the same place she left it, and she takes it out and holds it in the palm of her hand. It’s a necklace, with a thin, ornate charm: a diamond-studded crucifix.

Cross necklaces are a status symbol at Willowgrove. If your parents can afford to buy you a dainty diamond crucifix before you get your learner’s permit, you’re somebody. Chloe’s moms couldn’t afford to get her one even if she wanted it.

Every popular girl who ever made Chloe feel like a freak had one gleaming from the opening of her uniform polo.

Shara had one until halfway through freshman year.

Chloe had been sentenced to writing lines from the Bible in after-school detention, and she was avoiding it. She stopped in the empty library and hid behind a shelf in case anybody came looking for her.

That’s where she saw Shara, staring at the wastepaper basket near the study tables.

She watched Shara hesitate briefly, biting one of her buffed pink nails with shiny white teeth before she swept her hair over one shoulder and unclasped the chain at the nape of her neck. She dropped it in the trash can, and she left.

Looking back, Chloe can’t completely recall deciding to fish the necklace out. She’d overheard her moms the night before, arguing in low voices on the back porch about the cost of Chloe’s tuition when they thought she’d gone to bed. Maybe she took it with some half-formed idea of pawning it like they do on the A&E shows her mama likes to watch. But she’s never once thought about selling it.

Because Shara came back for it. Ten minutes later, she watched Shara burst into the library, go straight for the trash can, and grow more and more panicked as she pulled out bits of paper and vending machine candy wrappers. She turned the whole thing upside down and shook it, then gave up. She never even realized Chloe was there.

And Chloe was there the next week at the gym lockers when Shara put on a tearful performance of realizing she must have lost it running laps around the football field in PE. The entire PE class went out to search through the turf on their hands and knees, and Shara stood there and let them. Chloe got grass stains, but it was worth it to know that Shara isn’t who everyone thinks she is.

She pulls the bag of cards out from under her bed, where it’s been since Georgia threw it at her. If she can solve this godforsaken puzzle, she can finally prove it to everyone: that she’s not a bad friend, that she’s not crazy, that she was right all along and Shara is a fake bitch who can’t handle her own secrets without making them everyone else’s problem. And then she’ll win, and everyone will have to forgive her.

She goes through the cards again and again, reading over Shara’s handwriting, which she’s come to know with a kind of intimacy that makes her want to lie down in the ditch behind her house and forget she ever knew there were girls like Shara Wheeler. There has to be an answer here. What could she be missing?

She’s fingering the pen strokes on the card from Dixon’s house when she feels it.

The key is there, where I am.

At the end of the line, the indentions in the paper feel different. She holds it up an inch from her nose and tilts it toward her bedside lamp until the light catches on the tiniest details. Now she sees it: little grooves under those last three words, like Shara laid a second sheet of paper over the card and dug in with a pen to leave the impression of nearly invisible lines. They underscore the last three words, setting them apart for emphasis. Where I am.

Where she is?

The key was taped to the back of the picture of Shara on her parents’ sailboat. It was where Shara’s image was, physically, in the office, but maybe it’s more than that—maybe the photo was meant to tell her where Shara actually, literally is.

Chloe’s sat in the chair opposite Principal Wheeler’s desk a hundred times, and she’s memorized every detail of that photo. The number 15 marking the slip. The sign in the background announcing Anchor Bay Marina. Shara, smiling, angelic.

“I’m gonna kill her,” Chloe says, and she reaches for her keys.