Chapter 17

17

DAYS UNTIL GRADUATION: 15

Chloe wakes up late the next morning to a text from Smith that says, hey, do you like MarioKart? Which, (a) why and (b) now she feels guilty for yelling at him the other day and (c) yikes, she has to tell Smith she kissed his girlfriend again. Double guilty.

She should be happy. She won. After all this time rearranging her life around Shara’s game like a Saw knockoff, she finally has the power. She has Shara’s secrets and Shara’s heart. She can expose Shara’s big fat Harvard lie to the whole school if she wants to. Shara’s probably mildewing on her boat right now, looking soggily, tragically beautiful and wondering if she’ll ever have a chance to kiss Chloe again, and Chloe should be satisfied knowing the answer is no.

Needs time to sink in. That’s all.

The house is empty and smells like butter and syrup, which means her moms have had an early morning and are outside doing their little weekend projects. She slips on her mama’s Birkenstocks and heads out to the garage.

“Morning, coconut,” her mama calls out from a lawn chair. The garage door is open to the boiling morning, and her mama is sipping sweet tea in bikini bottoms and Chloe’s T-shirt from a fourth-grade field trip to the San Diego Zoo, cropped under the boobs. “You missed breakfast. We made pancakes.”

Chloe nods at the Bluetooth speaker at her feet, which is playing Pavarotti. “Rigoletto, act two?”

“Act one,” she replies with a wink. Pavarotti always reminds Chloe of being a kid, swanning around the apartment in one of her mom’s performance gowns like a contessa. “You feeling better? After last night?”

At first, she wonders how on earth her mama knows about Shara, before she remembers her meltdown in the kitchen. It’s been a long twenty-four hours. A long month, really.

“Yeah,” Chloe says. “I’m fine. Right now everything is … a lot.”

Her mom, who has been banging around the undercarriage of her truck with a wrench, rolls out and looks up at Chloe from her creeper.

“Yeah,” she says, wiping sweat off her brow and leaving behind a streak of grease. “Willowgrove gets to you sometimes.”

Chloe frowns, shoulders tensing automatically. “That’s not what it is.”

“You sure? I got all morning if you wanna talk,” her mom says, sitting up. “I lived through it, remember?”

“I’m fine,” she says again, looking for an out. “I—I gotta go study though. Gonna meet up with some people from bio. Okay?”

“Okay, but come home for dinner!” her mama calls as she heads for her car. “I finally figured out fried green tomatoes! Finals-week feast!”

“Okay,” Chloe agrees, avoiding her mom’s eyes before she asks any more questions. Thank God she left her backpack in her car last night. Clean getaway.

She’s restless all the way to Smith’s house, jiggling her toes on the gas pedal and speeding through the yellows. She has to make this quick—she really does have to study—but she’s also wired on seven hundred different emotions, none of which she’s particularly eager to express to anyone.

When the front door opens, the person behind it is a tall girl Chloe hasn’t seen before. She’s holding a Switch and appears to be in the middle of a heated Smash battle.

“Hi, is Smith home?” Chloe asks, peering past the girl’s shoulder at the small living room with crosses on the wall and a floral sofa set. This must be Smith’s sister, Jas.

“Who are you?” she says without looking up.

“I’m Chloe. From school.”

Jas’s Mewtwo Final Smashes someone’s Piranha Plant. “Okay, Chloe From School. Smith didn’t say anything about a girl coming over.”

“Mind your business, Jas,” says a laughing voice, and then Smith is behind her, looking surprised in a sleeveless shirt and soft-looking gray shorts. She hasn’t noticed until now that his hair’s gotten a little longer.

He shoves the side of Jas’s head with one palm and says, “Go away. And don’t forget to plug that shit in when you’re done. I got MarioKart with Rory tonight.”

“You’re such an asshole,” she says back.

“Mom, Jas called me an asshole!” Smith yells.

“Jasmine Parker!”

“You suck,” Jas says, glaring, and then she disappears as Smith laughs into his fist.

“I’m gonna miss that girl next year,” Smith says.

“Is that why you texted me about MarioKart?” Chloe says. “Because of Rory?”

Smith shrugs. “I was gonna invite you.”

“You two can hang out on the weekend without a Chloe buffer,” Chloe points out.

“I know, it’s just … been a while,” Smith mumbles. “Anyway, what’s up? You look weird.”

Right. “Can we talk?”

Smith nods. “You wanna come in?”

Chloe leaves her shoes at the door and follows Smith through the living room and down a short hall lined with framed photos: Smith in his football uniform with the national championship trophy, Smith’s parents smiling on a cruise ship, his two youngest siblings in matching Easter outfits, Jas on stage with a microphone.

Smith’s room is at the end of the hall, the pull-up bar in the doorway effectively a nameplate declaring it his. It’s small and messy, but in a cozy way, not in the grimy way that Dixon’s room was messy. The walls are citrus yellow, and there’s an aloe plant on the dresser and final exam study guides scattered across the desk. A pile of books sits on the windowsill between a half-peeled orange and a scuffed football helmet, and the twin-size bed is covered in pillows. The Bluetooth speaker on the nightstand is playing Frank Ocean quietly. Half-hidden behind it, there’s a bottle of silver nail polish.

She’s barely been there for three seconds when a pretty middle-aged woman with Smith’s exact same eyes and curl pattern appears at the doorway.

“Smith,” she says, “who’s this?”

“This is Chloe, Mom,” Smith says. “She’s my friend from school. She was in the play with Ace.”

“Just a friend?”

“Yes, Mom,” Smith says, sounding mortified.

His mom nods, looking Chloe over. “There’s brisket in the kitchen,” she announces. She leaves with a point over her shoulder at Smith’s bedroom door, sing-songing, “Door stays open!”

“Sorry,” Smith says. “I’m not technically supposed to have girls in here, but they’re starting to give up now that I’m almost in college. Also, you should probably take her up on that brisket, my dad smoked it this morning and it’s amaz—”

“I saw Shara last night.”

Smith stops.

He doesn’t react at first, just looks at her for a long second like he’s trying to figure out if she’s joking. Then, satisfied that she isn’t, he pulls out the desk chair and sits on a pile of discarded hoodies.

“I figured out where she was, and I went by myself,” Chloe tells him. “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I know I should have told you, but I was—I was so mad at her—”

“Chloe,” Smith says finally, holding up a hand. There’s a speck of glitter on his thumbnail, like he painted it and then scraped it off. “It’s fine. Did she tell you why she left?”

“She said she did all this because she lied about getting in to Harvard, and because she wanted to distract me so she could win valedictorian,” Chloe rattles off. “And to force you and Rory to talk to each other, because she thinks you’re only dating her because of him.”

Smith doubles over, forehead to knees, and Chloe thinks he’s taking the news hard until she hears him laugh out, “Oh, thank you, Jesus.”

“What?”

Smith straightens up again, still laughing. He swipes a hand across his forehead. “I thought I was gonna have to tell her myself. Whew.”

There’s no way. She saw Smith’s call log after Shara disappeared. He couldn’t have faked caring that much. “You—what are you saying? She was right?”

“It’s,” Smith says, sobering with a wince, “complicated.”

“I defended you!”

“Look, it only started that way!” he insists. “It was … okay, so, freshman year, I went to a party at Dixon’s house and found out Rory had moved in next door to Shara. And he didn’t want to talk to me at school, but I realized I could still stay close to him, and I wanted to know he was okay. I was worried about him. The last few months we were friends, we talked a lot about how he was afraid his dad would have to move, and how his brother wouldn’t be able to drive us around introducing us to music anymore because he was going to college. I knew it had to be rough for him. So I—I asked Shara to homecoming, so I could go over to her house and see him.”

“You spent twenty dollars on carnations for that?”

“I wasn’t sure she’d say yes,” Smith says. “It was only supposed to be homecoming, I swear, but then I liked her. Like, as a person. She was cool, and I could be myself around her. And everyone liked us together, and it worked for both of us, and I felt so guilty about how it started, but it was too late to tell her the truth. And every time I said I loved her, I meant it, just, you know. Not like that. And I tried to forget about the Rory thing and be a good boyfriend, but he was—he was always there, and I couldn’t think about her because I was thinking about him—”

“Oh my God,” Chloe gasps, “you are in love with him.”

Smith’s eyes go wide. “Is that what Shara said? Am I—Does he—?”

“Uh-uh.” Chloe holds both hands up to ward him off. “I am not getting involved with that side of this love quadrilateral. Go back to the story.”

“Right,” Smith says, shaking his head. Chloe is definitely not attending Smith and Rory’s emotionally fraught MarioKart session tonight. “Anyway, next thing I knew, it’d been like, two and half years and Shara was my best friend other than Ace, and I realized she deserved to know before we decided what to do after graduation. So I told myself I was gonna come clean after prom, but then she dipped. And the worst part is, I was relieved, because it meant I could put the conversation off a little longer. That’s why I didn’t say anything after the note from Dixon’s house.”

Chloe tries to catch up. “What about the note from Dixon’s house?”

“She told me where she was in that note,” Smith says, rubbing the back of his neck. “The G in ‘Graduation’ was capitalized.”

It takes a second for the memory to snap into focus: the name on the back of Wheeler’s sailboat. Graduation.

Chloe, who’s still processing the revelation that Smith and Shara have been in the Willowgrove version of a lavender marriage since sophomore homecoming, tries not to scream when she says, “You’ve known where she was since Dixon’s party?”

“I know! I know! I’m an asshole!” Smith says. “You think I don’t feel like shit? I feel like shit! But the longer it went on, the longer I didn’t have to talk to her.”

“But…” Chloe presses her fingers to her temples. “But she knew you’d figure that out. Why would she tell you so early?”

“I think,” Smith says, “she wanted to give me the option to end the whole thing, but she trusted I’d let her do what she had to do first. We’ve always kind of gotten each other like that. Like, even with all of the stuff I’ve found out about her since she left, I still think that part was always true.”

“So, you … you let me and Rory run around like idiots for weeks. We went in the air ducts, Smith. The air ducts.”

“I told you, I’m not proud of it. Of any of it. But … I don’t know, Chloe. I kinda did want to let her do her thing,” Smith tells her. “And not just because I didn’t want to have the conversation, or because I felt guilty, or because I was starting to wonder who she even was. And not because it meant Rory was talking to me again for the first time since we were fourteen, though that was … definitely part of it.”

Chloe shakes her head. “What other possible reason is there?”

Smith considers the question, folding his hand under his chin.

“The other day, after the theater party and the lake,” Smith says, “I came home when everyone was asleep and pulled flowers out of my dad’s garden. And I sat in front of my mirror and put them in my hair. Just to see how it would look. And it looked dope. So I thought about what Ash said, and some stuff I talked to Summer about, and what I’m supposed to look like and act like to play football, and what actually feels like me, and the way Shara used to look at me sometimes … I mean, yeah. Shara’s done shitty things. That sucks. But at the same time, if you’re not what Willowgrove wants you to be, and if your family believes certain stuff, it can make you kind of crazy. You know what I mean?”

The words “not what Willowgrove wants you to be” send Chloe’s brain tumbling noisily away like Georgia’s water bottle when she dropped it down the C Building stairs. Her ears start ringing.

Why does everyone keep bringing that up?

“I, uh. Okay. I actually have to go.” She turns for the door, then pauses. “Um. Not because of you. You’re doing great, with all the, um. Identity stuff. Also, pronouns?”

Smith bites his lip. He looks like he might smile. “Same for now.”

“Okay, cool,” Chloe says. “Um. Talk more later?”

She hasn’t even told him about the kiss, but she has to go. She has to.

Maybe this was how Shara felt when she ran.

---

She doesn’t know where to drive. She can’t call Georgia. She’s too restless to go home, too full of Smith’s words, too afraid everything will catch up to her the second she stops moving.

It’s not until she pulls up to the curb that she realizes she automatically followed all the turns and back roads to the empty lot.

When they moved to False Beach, her grandma was still living in the house Chloe’s mom grew up in—a double-wide trailer on a stretch of road near the edge of town, out toward Lake Martin. Chloe remembers the smell of cigarettes and cinnamon air freshener, the hand-knit green and orange afghan on the armchair where her grandma would sit and watch tiny Chloe read Redwall during her few childhood trips to Alabama. Her grandma was mostly conservative, but a dogged commitment to Southern hospitality meant she was kind to everyone if they were her neighbor or her company. She didn’t speak to Chloe’s mom for three years after she came out as a lesbian, but when she heard about the engagement, she showed up in LA with a case of beers as an olive branch and her old wedding dress in a carry-on.

After the cancer, Chloe spent a week between sophomore and junior year in the trailer with her mama, boxing up old photos and putting furniture up on Craigslist so her mom didn’t have to see everything empty. Then they sold the trailer and had it hauled off, and now all that’s left is an empty plot of land with a faded FOR SALE sign stuck in the overgrown weeds.

Chloe kills the engine and walks out into the tall grass. The ground is wet from recent rain, though it always seems to be wet this close to the lake. She takes off her sandals and lets her toes touch the cool earth, feeling it give slightly under her weight, taking account of her.

Chloe Green was born in California. Her mom’s egg, her mama’s body, California soil. She grew up in a house full of Obama coffee mugs and Tibetan singing bowls and unofficial aunts who played cello in their living room after dinner parties. Before they moved here, she never felt anything about Alabama, and she certainly never imagined it could make her feel anything about herself.

But Alabama is in her, no matter how much she pretends it’s not.

According to the introductory course Georgia gave Chloe on her first day at Willowgrove, there has been exactly one person who came out as gay while still a student in the thirty-six years since the school was founded.

There are a lot of versions of the story, because many people who graduate Willowgrove never fully escape the gravitational pull of its gossip. When Georgia first told it, she didn’t know the girl’s name, only that she graduated in the late ’90s and came out as a lesbian in front of the whole grade on the senior retreat when everyone was sharing personal testimonies. Another rendition is that this mythical lesbian came to school with her hair dyed blue and got suspended for trying to recruit girls to her satanic sex cult. In a different version, she got busted for having a stash of Playboy magazines in her locker and is now married to a Florida senator.

But Chloe knows the real story, because that girl’s name was Valerie Green.

She knows for a fact that her mom put a blue streak in her hair with bleach and Kool-Aid and told three friends from woodshop that she liked girls, and that, when the secret got out, the Willowgrove rumor factory stamped out a hundred iterations like candy bars. There were meetings with the guidance counselor and the principal and the pastor, in which she was encouraged to finish high school somewhere else until she assured them that none of the rumors were true, and then months of everyone talking about it anyway. It was the main reason she ran west as soon as she could and didn’t come back until she had to.

Chloe’s mom told her all of this before the move.

“You can go wherever you want to go,” her mom said, stroking her hair as they sat in a pile of moving boxes. “We’ll find the money. But I want to protect you.”

“I’ll be fine, Mom,” Chloe said confidently. “Besides, there’s no way it’s the same now as it was like, twenty years ago.”

She told herself it didn’t get to her. She knew who she was. Her moms love her, her friends love her, she knows who she is, and she’s never bought into the bullshit notion that people like her are made wrong, not for a second. It’s an unpleasant sting when a teacher tells her to stop trying to use Bible verses to prove that the love between her moms can’t be wrong because it says right there that God is love and all love is of God, but—no. No, as long as she can go home at the end of the day and see the two women who raised her sitting on either side of the kitchen table, she knows it’s not true.

But that’s not accounting for the time in between.

That’s not accounting for Mackenzie Harris refusing to change in front of her in the locker room, or the teachers who give her As but never use her work as an example for the class, or the shitty jokes about her moms. That’s not accounting for Wheeler’s vendetta against her or the way it sometimes feels like everyone’s just finished laughing about her when she walks into a room. There’s the initial sting, and there’s the moment she walks through the door of her house and feels it fade, but there’s all this time in between when she’s furiously maintaining her GPA and stomping through the hallways and breaking small rules to feel like she’s done something to deserve the way people look at her.

She was so sure if she didn’t believe any of it, it couldn’t hurt her.

Was Shara right? Has she really been afraid this whole time? That rage between her ribs, the thing clawing out of the muscle of her heart—what if it’s always been fear, waiting in her marrow, cut loose the first day of freshman year?

What if Willowgrove got to her after all?

---

At 2 p.m. on Sunday afternoon, Chloe’s phone lights up on her nightstand. She holds her place in her AP Bio study guide with her finger and checks it.

shara.wheeler has started an Instagram Live.

No way. Absolutely no way is she going to look. She won. She’s done.

One second passes, and another.

She throws her notes to the foot of the bed and reaches for her phone.

The video is an empty shot of the cabin of Shara’s parents’ sailboat, exactly the way Chloe remembers it: the bunk, the stairs, the pink toothbrush in a cup by the miniature sink. She watches the number at the corner of the screen go higher and higher: 37 viewers, 61 viewers, 112, 249 and counting. Familiar names start popping up with messages. Summer Collins types out a string of question marks. Tyler Miller asks if he missed it already. April Butcher sends a series of skeptical emojis wearing monocles.

When the number hits 300—three-quarters of Willowgrove’s high school population—Shara steps into the frame and says, “Hi.”

Her hair’s up, and her face is bare. She’s wearing a baggy old T-shirt with a hole in the collar, tugged over on one side so that her collarbone pokes out. Again with the clavicles.

“Here’s the thing.” She sits and stares directly into the camera, chin up, eyes intent. Chloe’s seen her make the same face before she aces an exam. “I lied.”

Chloe feels herself lean closer to the screen.

“I lied about … a lot of stuff, actually. Pretty much everything. But let’s start with the college thing: I didn’t get in to Harvard. I mean, I almost did, but I absolutely tanked the interview.” She holds up a slip of paper with the Harvard seal. “This is my rejection letter. So, there’s that, but the other part of the lie is, I bombed the interview on purpose.”

What.

“What,” Chloe murmurs at her phone.

Shara pulls a shoebox into view—where did she hide that when Chloe was there?—and dumps it out on the table. Papers come cascading out, unsealed envelopes and rubber stamps.

“The truth is,” Shara goes on, “the more I thought about it—about walking into my first day of classes at Harvard, where half the people in the room would be just as smart as me, and the other half would be smarter—I couldn’t do it. I didn’t want to do it. But I’d already made sure everyone knew about Harvard, so I decided to fake it. And then, of course, my dad wouldn’t let me apply to only one school, so I sat at the kitchen table while he watched me apply to seventeen different colleges he picked out. Duke. Vanderbilt. Yale, Notre Dame, Rice—you get the picture. And when enough time had passed, I started faking acceptance letters too. Researched what they all looked like. Made a big deal out of getting the mail myself every day. I even bought a few welcome packets off eBay.” She shrugs, offering the camera a wry smile. “Look, nobody can say I don’t commit to something once I decide to do it, okay? It just wasn’t Harvard I was committing to. And focusing on all this meant I didn’t have time to think about what came after.”

She pushes the box offscreen, and Chloe sees her eyes dart down to the comments streaming in. She shakes her head slightly and goes on.

“To be honest, it was easy. I’ve been lying my whole life—though I prefer to think of it as adapting. Working. As far back as I can remember, everybody told me I was pretty, I was perfect, I was a legacy, so I decided to be that, because it made my parents like me better and it made me feel safe. I lied to my family, to my friends, to my boyfriend, to people I barely even know, and I did it all to make people fall in love with something I made instead of someone I actually had to be. I still don’t really get what’s supposed to be bad about that—I mean, I liked being prom queen. I chose it. It made everything easier. What’s wrong with doing what it takes to have an easier life? Why is it so bad to want to feel special, or loved, or accepted? High school feels like all there is sometimes, the whole world, and don’t we all want the whole world to revolve around us? Isn’t that what our parents say? Let me tell y’all, sometimes a pedestal is a very comfortable place to be, because at least up there nothing can hurt you.”

She pauses, swiping a piece of hair out of her face.

“But anyway,” she continues, “a couple months ago, when I saw the end of senior year coming, I decided to run away. I knew it was only a matter of time until people found out about Harvard if I stayed. I was gonna come back once everyone missed me, win valedictorian, and let that be the way y’all remembered me. I loved the picture in my head: Shara Wheeler, she had more important places to be, but she came back one last time to remind us she was the best. Nobody ever had to see all the pins holding the dress together, if you know what I mean.

“That was my plan. This wasn’t ever part of it, but that was back when I thought I knew what all of my lies were and why I had to tell them. It hadn’t really occurred to me that I was lying to myself too. I didn’t know that part until two nights ago, and that’s why I decided to tell y’all everything. I think maybe I needed so many secrets to keep this one locked up, and now that it’s not locked up anymore, I don’t need the rest.”

Shara lays her palms flat on the table, looking right into the camera so intently that Chloe wants to look away, but she can’t.

“The real reason I ran away isn’t a reason at all. It’s a person. I did all of this for her attention, and I told myself it was because I wanted to beat her, but really, I wanted to know she was looking at me. This part shouldn’t be a surprise to her—she figured it out before I did. I guess she already won something, huh?

“So, that’s the truth,” Shara concludes. “All of it. I’m done lying. And if you hate me now, fine. Only two weeks left. I can take it.

“See you on Monday.”