Chapter 16

16

DAYS WITHOUT SHARA: 27

Anchor Bay Marina is nearly silent, blue under a cloudless night sky with only the sounds of water lapping at the shore and the broad hulls of fancy boats. Wooden piers separate twenty individual slips, wrapping in a U shape around a squat boathouse that’s closed for the night. Shara’s white Jeep is tucked neatly into the back corner of the parking lot. Chloe’s insides turn to jet fuel at the sight.

From the shore, she can’t see where the Wheelers’ boat should be, so she starts at the slip with the number one painted in faded white on a pylon and counts down the pier.

Slip 2, slip 3, slip 4.

Slip 7, 8, 9.

Slip 12, 13, 14—she rounds the corner—

In the weeks since Shara left, she’s always looked the same in Chloe’s mind: frozen in her ball gown, her hair spilling over her shoulders like sunlight and her lips stained a soft, berry red, remote and unreachable under a sparkling country club chandelier.

Now, waiting under the moon in the fifteenth slip, Shara looks like she tumbled right out of Chloe’s memory. Mostly because, for some infernal reason, she’s still wearing her prom dress.

She’s sitting on the front of the sailboat like the smug figurehead of a voyaging ship, almond-pink tulle fanning out behind her on the deck and frothing over the sides of the bow.

Shara in the flesh. Not a line on a card or a picture in Smith’s locker or a memory nipping at the back of Chloe’s neck, but actual Shara, with her pointy nose and elegant shoulders and annoyingly innocent facial expression.

Chloe feels, more so than usual, like she might explode.

And then Shara opens her mouth and says, “I had a feeling you’d show up.”

Yeah, explode. A full-on spontaneous combustion. Five million tiny, angry little Chloes raining down over the Anchor Bay Marina, all giving Shara the finger.

Now that she’s standing in front of the boat, she can see that Shara doesn’t look exactly like she did on prom night. Her face is scrubbed clean, her lips their natural pink. Her hair is tied up on top of her head with a scrunchie.

To Chloe’s immense displeasure, her first thought is of the silk scrunchie on Shara’s bathroom counter. This is her first time seeing Shara with her hair up. What a stupid thing to realize.

“I have to say,” Chloe says, taking a step forward until the toes of her sneakers are hanging over the edge of the pier, “this is a little anticlimactic.”

Shara raises an eyebrow. “What were you expecting?”

“Don’t get me wrong. I’m not surprised you’re just some boring bitch on a boat,” Chloe clarifies, “but I guess part of me was still holding out for a plot twist. Is there a dead body in an ice chest around here somewhere?”

“You’re the one who came all the way here to see some boring bitch on a boat,” Shara says.

“I did,” Chloe confirms. Her mouth feels unpleasantly dry. Shara’s exposed collarbones seem very confrontational. “So I can tell everyone where you’ve been.”

Shara stands, lifting her dress as she turns away. She’s not wearing any shoes, just socks with bumblebees on them. Sucks that bumblebees are going to be ruined for Chloe forever now.

“That’s not what you’re gonna do right now, though, is it?”

Chloe glares at the back of her head one more time for posterity. “You don’t know what I’m gonna do.”

“Sure,” Shara says, and then she opens a white door in the center of the boat and disappears down a set of steps.

Chloe stands there, watching Shara’s dress trail behind her until it whips out of sight.

“I’m not getting on your stupid boat!” she yells into the empty night.

The stairs down into the cabin are a total death trap, which seems fitting. The first compartment is crammed with bins of equipment, bundles of rope, and a minuscule kitchenette. There’s a tiny gas range, the kind her mom takes on camping trips, and a wide piece of wood on top as a makeshift countertop. Clif Bars, boxes of mac and cheese, plastic containers of trail mix, and a bag of clementines are arranged in a neat row like Shara’s highlighters on Chloe’s first day of school.

She wonders if Shara is always like this, or if she laid everything out because she knew Chloe was coming soon.

Ahead, the cabin opens into a small imitation of a room, two benches around a bolted-down table. A rose-gold MacBook rests next to a bag of individually wrapped chocolates and a notebook open to tidy notes. Chloe’s been spending all her time chasing leads, and Shara’s been eating bonbons on a boat in a ball gown.

She’d admire it if it weren’t Shara, which means she has to hate it.

Shara’s kneeling on one of the benches with her skirt gathered in one hand, tucking a book into the built-in shelf behind it. The hem of her dress is gray with dirt, and when she turns to face Chloe again, Chloe sees popped stiches at the juncture of the bodice and the skirt.

“Have you actually been wearing that for four weeks?” Chloe asks her.

“Ew,” Shara says, sitting down. “Don’t be gross. I packed other clothes.”

She waves her hand toward the cabin entrance, and Chloe looks to her right and sees a small, tucked-away sleeping space. At the foot is Shara’s school bag and two folded piles of clothes.

“So you’re wearing that because…?” Chloe asks, pretending not to examine the soft tangle of underthings, the same ones missing from Shara’s dresser.

“Because I like to, sometimes,” Shara says. “It does get boring in here.”

“You know how else you could break the monotony of living on a boat?” Chloe says. She finally looks at Shara. The distance between them is tight, but she still manages to seem far away. “Not running away to live on a boat.”

“That would actually be the most boring thing I could possibly do,” she counters.

“Do you think this is cute?”

“I think it’s fun. And kinda funny.” She pulls the bag of chocolates toward her and takes one out, then looks at Chloe and tilts her head to the side. She sticks her bottom lip out in a pout. “You look mad.”

“Of course I’m mad. You wasted a whole month of my life on your demented scavenger hunt that wasn’t even going anywhere, while you’ve been luxuriating on a yacht like an oil baron—”

“This isn’t a yacht,” Shara says. “It’s under thirty-five feet.”

For some reason, that’s the thing that finally makes Chloe snap.

“God, you’re such an obnoxious narcissist, I don’t even feel bad that you’re in love with me.”

Shara freezes, the foil wrapper of the chocolate still under her fingernail. Chloe gets a whole second of pure gratification before she says, “What? No. What?”

“You’re in love with me,” Chloe repeats. “That’s what this whole thing is about. You ran away because you’re in love with me and you don’t want to deal with the consequences. Like, it’s pathetic how much you’re in love with me.”

“Oh my God,” Shara says, and then she actually laughs. “Is that what you think?”

“You—” Chloe says. Shara’s bluffing. She has to be bluffing. “You literally told me in the Mansfield Park letter.”

“Chloe, oh my God. Read it again. I told you what I was going to do. My plan was to make you obsessed with me,” she says. She finally gets the chocolate unwrapped and throws it in her mouth. “Oh, this is so disappointing. I thought you had figured out what this was really about, but you fell for it.”

Chloe rewinds their Google Doc. Was she—were they having two completely different conversations?

“No. No way. That doesn’t make any sense. Why would you want me to—to be obsessed with you?”

It’s time for the kick in the teeth—the flat reminder that this is the exact type of joke that straight girls like Shara inflict on girls like Chloe who have the misfortune of being queer in their line of sight.

But what Shara says is, “I didn’t get in to Harvard.”

It’s such an abrupt and obvious lie that Chloe can’t even respond. Shara getting accepted early to Harvard is the biggest part of the Shara mythos, the crowning achievement that proved she really was going to go out into the world and make False Beach proud.

“Bullshit,” Chloe says finally.

“I didn’t get in,” Shara says again. She swallows her chocolate and folds her arms across her pink bodice. Her collarbones have taken on an air of the tragic now. She looks … like she might be telling the truth. “I bombed my interview. They rejected me. I haven’t told anyone, not even my parents.”

“But—but what does that have to do with kissing me, or the clues, or anything?”

“I told you,” Shara says. She looks up at Chloe, face impassive. “Did I do too good of a job with that letter? Did you forget everything else in it? Come on, what is the one thing we both want, that I’ve been trying to figure out how to get since you showed up at Willowgrove?”

Chloe skims to the top of the letter in her mind, before all the stuff about making Chloe fall in love with her, to—

“You mean valedictorian?”

Shara smiles a pageant smile.

“This whole thing was pretty distracting, right?” Shara says. “I turned in my assignments for the last nine weeks ahead of time, but you’ve probably missed a couple deadlines, right? Dropped a percentage point or two?”

“You did this to—to sabotage my chances at valedictorian?”

Shara rolls her eyes. “Like you wouldn’t have done the same thing if you’d thought of it.”

“Why?” is all Chloe can say. “Why do you need it that bad?”

“Because it’s all I have left.”

“Are you kidding me?” she nearly yells. “You have everything. You—you have a town full of people who are obsessed with you, a boyfriend who loves you, a hot guy next door who would do anything for you, rich parents who can give you whatever you want, a million people lining up to kiss the ground you walk on—what else do you need?”

Shara lets her finish before she says calmly, “You know my parents have a security camera on this stupid pier? And they think I don’t know they have a tracker on my car, but I do. They’ve known where I was the entire time I’ve been gone. I thought it would be funny, to see how long I could do this before they came after me, but the joke’s on me. They’re doing what they do every time I have the nerve to do or say or think something they don’t like: pretending it’s not happening until it goes away.”

It’s probably a play for sympathy, but Chloe’s fists unclench a fraction of an inch.

“What about Smith, then?” she asks. “And Rory? What do they have to do with valedictorian?”

“Chloe. You’re smarter than this.”

“Stop screwing with me and answer the question, Shara.”

Shara pauses, reaching for another chocolate. She doesn’t unwrap this one. It rolls around in her palm as she thinks about what she’s going to say. “You’ve seen the way they look at each other, haven’t you?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Smith didn’t have any interest in me until he found out Rory moved in next door. Then, all of a sudden, he was asking me to homecoming, and he seemed all right, so I thought I’d give him a chance. But when he came to pick me up, I swear Rory almost fell off his roof when they saw each other, and I got it. I knew what I was to them. You weren’t around in eighth grade, but I saw what they were like together.” Shara’s still rolling the chocolate around in her hand, letting it go soft at the edges from her body heat. “They both think they love me, but I’m not the one they’re here for.”

The bleachers note. Shara said she kissed Smith to make Rory jealous, but if she knew how he felt—

She never said which of them he was supposed to be jealous of.

“Everybody wants to use me for something, Chloe,” Shara says. “At least with them, there was something in it for me too.”

“Like what?”

“Social capital and entertainment, mainly. But I’m bored, and high school’s almost over, so I thought I’d point them at each other and see what happens.” She drops the chocolate unceremoniously back into the bag. “And I knew the three of you would keep each other on the trail, so I wrapped everything up together. Two birds and all. Nice and neat.”

“Smith would never use anyone like that,” Chloe says. “You broke his heart.”

She cuts her eyes over, like Chloe shouldn’t have the right to say Smith’s name in front of her, which is pretty rich, all things considered.

“I was always gonna break his heart.”

“Why?”

“Because I can’t love him back.”

“Why not?” Chloe demands.

“I just can’t, okay?” Shara finally snaps. She swats a loose strand of hair away from her face. “You’re still not getting it. I can’t. I can’t be with Smith. I can’t be what everyone wants. I can’t go to Harvard. All I can do is win this one last thing, so that can be the way everyone remembers me, and they’ll never need to know about the rest. And you’re in my way, so I did what I had to. That’s all I care about.”

Chloe’s experienced enough theater to know a rehearsed line when she hears one.

“Tell yourself whatever you want,” Chloe says. “Won’t change the fact that you’re so scared of what people in some fucking nothing town think of you that it made you do all this.”

She whips around and stomps up the steps, emerging topside into the wet night. Shara comes bursting up after her.

“Maybe I am scared,” Shara yells at her back, “but not as scared as you are!”

Chloe rounds on her. There Shara is again, in her ridiculous Greek tragedy of a prom dress, her face sharp and hateful.

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“You know what I do? When I’m scared?” Shara asks. “I look at myself in the mirror and find something to fix. Like I’m the gardeners at the front of the club trimming rose bushes into the right shape. I moisturize my face and I condition my hair and I think about what I can say to exactly which person tomorrow to make them believe what I want them to about me. But you—you march into school every day like you know everything and you’re better than everyone, and that’s how I know you’re terrified. You have to decide that you’re so certain about everything, because uncertainty scares the shit out of you.”

“I cannot express how much none of this is about me,” Chloe says.

“You said it was about being scared of what people think,” Shara says. “I’m just saying, I’m not the only one.”

Chloe, who is out of patience for Shara’s maritime monologues on things she knows absolutely nothing about, takes a step toward her.

It’s then that Shara does something to betray her entire performance: she flinches backward, tripping on the dirty hem of her gown, stumbling until the small of her back hits the boat’s railing.

She’s afraid to let Chloe any closer. Because she knows what’ll happen. She knows what she’ll do.

Chloe was right. Shara wants her. She just doesn’t want to admit it.

Chloe takes another step. “You know, if this was really about valedictorian, there were easier ways. You could’ve had your dad kick me out, even. But that wouldn’t have gotten you what you really wanted, would it?”

Shara tries to pull off an eye roll, but behind her back, she’s fumbling for the railing with one hand. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Something hot curls around Chloe’s heart, but the words feel featherlight, cool, a soft breeze on sweat.

“You wanted to know I was looking at you,” she says. She’s almost close enough to touch her. “You liked it, didn’t you? You liked knowing I was thinking about you all the time.”

“I told you. I thought it was funny.”

“Maybe that’s what you told yourself,” Chloe says. “But deep down, somewhere under all this bullshit, you kissed me because you wanted to.”

“That’s not true,” Shara insists. “It didn’t mean anything.”

When Chloe leans in, she sees it: Shara’s gaze flickering to her lips.

“Then why do you want me to kiss you right now?”

“I don’t.”

“Okay,” Chloe says. “Then I won’t.”

She begins to turn away, but there’s that familiar feeling: Shara’s hand closing around her arm, pulling her in. Shara’s eyes are wide and green and furious, and a helpless, strangled sound crashes into the back of her bared teeth.

When she kisses Chloe this time, Chloe’s ready.

She knows exactly what she’s doing when she twists her fingers into the loose wisps of hair at the nape of Shara’s neck and kisses her back, hard. Her other hand grips the tulle where it fans out from Shara’s waist and holds Shara’s body up against hers like see, we’re a match, and it works—Shara sighs and lets go of the rail to slide her palm over Chloe’s cheek. The skin is cool from the metal; Chloe suppresses a shiver.

She doesn’t give herself time to think about the way Shara’s thumb brushes over her cheekbone or the way Shara’s lips feel against hers. Instead, she breaks off, abrupt enough that Shara’s left blinking and dazed, and God, finally Chloe isn’t the one doing the embarrassing leaning. She’s getting embarrassingly leaned at. Amazing. Top five Chloe moment.

“Told you,” Chloe says.

And with one solid shove, she pushes Shara—prom dress and all—over the railing and into Lake Martin.