Chapter 18

18

DAYS UNTIL GRADUATION: 13

DAYS SINCE SHARA CAME BACK: 1

Chloe is, as she often is, and as she has in fact been every single time she’s thought about Shara since she first saw her on that cursed billboard, fuming.

She was in control. She had all of Shara’s secrets. For exactly thirty-six hours, before Shara outplayed her. Again.

And now Shara’s coming back, and Chloe’s behind on her studying in three different classes because she’s been wasting all her time and energy trying to win a rigged game.

It’s Monday morning, and she’s not waiting for Shara. She’s sitting alone on the hood of her car in the student lot because Georgia still isn’t speaking to her, because of Shara, and neither are the rest of her friends, because of Shara, so she’s going over her AP Lit study guide by herself, and she’s definitely not waiting to see Shara’s white Jeep pull in for the first time in a month.

It’s not Shara’s white Jeep, but Rory’s red BMW that purrs into the lot.

He’s got the top down, Jimi Hendrix screaming out of the speakers, and Shara in the passenger seat.

Chloe’s notecards hit the concrete.

Rory, the absolute traitor, is at the wheel in a pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses. All Chloe can do is gape as he pulls into the spot next to her and throws it in park. Gaping is all anyone’s doing, actually—a ripple of shock that starts at the edge of the courtyard, where Emma Grace Baker drops her vanilla bean frap all over her Superstars.

Shara opens the door and steps out.

Her skirt’s hiked up at least three inches above regulation length. Her face is bare. And her hair—the trademark Shara Wheeler wavy blond waterfall—has been chopped off just above her shoulders in a jagged line, like she did it herself with a pair of kitchen scissors over the bathroom sink, and dyed a shade of hot pink expressly forbidden by the Willowgrove dress code. When she runs a hand through it, her fingers are dye-stained.

“Hi,” she says to Chloe over the sound of the guitars.

“Hi,” Chloe says back.

They stay there. Chloe’s brain is stuck replaying the last minute of Shara’s livestream. The defiant tilt of Shara’s jaw as she spoke, the burn of her eyes. I wanted to know she was looking at me. Here Chloe is, looking.

Finally, stiffly, Shara says, “Didn’t want to miss any exams.”

She turns and walks away, and like always, the whole world bends around Shara Wheeler. Everything goes slow motion. Obnoxious freshmen shut up. Marching band couples stop groping each other. April smacks Jake so hard that he expels a surreptitious vape cloud. Mrs. Sherman’s overlined mouth goes so thin, it disappears. A football hits Ace in the side of the head and bounces away, completely forgotten.

Chloe watches Shara’s skirt swish in perfect time to the music still blasting out of Rory’s car and feels like she’s losing her mind.

She rounds on Rory. “Really? ‘Purple Haze’?”

He shrugs. “It’s a good song.”

“Why are you driving her around?”

“Her parents took the steering wheel off her car, so she came next door and asked me for a ride. We talked. It’s chill.”

“It’s chill? After everything she put you through, it’s chill? I thought you weren’t in love with her anymore.”

“I’m not,” he says. He slides his sunglasses down his nose and raises an eyebrow. “In fact, I think we might both be gay.”

The only scene Chloe’s imagination can supply at that moment is her own hand slamming down on a big red button to nuke herself and the entire campus from orbit.

“Useless.” She scoops up her study materials and storms off to her first exam. “Useless!”

---

“Did you hear Shara’s back?”

“I heard she faked getting into all those schools.”

“You didn’t hear that, she told you,” Chloe mutters, shoving through the crowd toward her exam. Just like the first Monday after Shara left, it’s impossible to go anywhere on campus without hearing her name.

“I heard she stole a boat and sailed to Mexico and back by herself.”

“I heard Smith dumped her.”

“Really? ’Cause I heard she dumped him because she’s a lesb—”

A siren blasts through the morning buzz, sending students ducking for cover with their hands over their ears. In the center of the hall stands Principal Wheeler, holding a megaphone and visibly out of breath.

“Willowgrove students!” he shouts into the megaphone. “If you are not a senior, there is no reason for you not to be in your first hour classrooms, in your seat, ready for your morning prayer and announcements! If you are a senior, you should be reporting to your first exam! This is not a disco! You are not on summer vacation yet! If I see any students in this hallway in two minutes when the homeroom bell rings, you will be in detention this afternoon! I repeat, detention! Let’s go!”

He lowers the bullhorn as everyone scatters, and then he turns and finds himself facing Chloe.

He looks absolutely awful. Hair askew, shirt buttoned wrong, dark circles under his eyes, all in all like a man who had a terrible weekend and is now having a terrible Monday. She wonders, briefly, how pissed he must have been when he checked Shara’s bedroom this morning and discovered that his bundle of Christly joy had vanished again with nothing left behind but tumbleweeds of hacked-off blond hair. Now he’s stuck running through the hallways with a bullhorn, trying to keep the stock value of the Wheeler name from dropping any lower.

He raises the bullhorn and says, over a squawk of feedback, “You too, Miss Green.”

She does not say, “I kissed your daughter, twice,” but she thinks it. She thinks it hard.

Instead, she smiles and salutes and marches off to her AP Lit exam.

Shara’s already in her desk when Chloe gets to Mrs. Farley’s classroom. The rest of the class is leaning across aisles and whispering behind stacks of notecards, and every last one of them is staring at the girl on the front row with the pink hair.

Before, when everyone in a room was staring at Shara, it made her more powerful, like the moon refracting sunlight. Now, if she notices it at all, she doesn’t let on. Her eyes are straight ahead, fixed on her neat line of pens and pencils.

She doesn’t look up when Chloe sits behind her, but her posture straightens slightly.

Mrs. Farley doesn’t say anything to Shara when she passes out the exam booklets. Not a dress code notice, not a demand for a doctor’s note for the month of class she missed, not even a disapproving look. Must be nice to be the principal’s daughter. If Chloe said a bunch of gay stuff on Instagram Live and then showed up at school with pink hair and a too-short skirt, she’d be catapulted out of the building and probably into the dumpsters behind the cafeteria.

At least she finishes her exam before Shara does. She slides her papers smugly onto Mrs. Farley’s desk, and that’s it—her very last English exam of high school.

When she turns around and sees Shara in the front row, head down, diligently writing her essay, she remembers Shara’s letter: three fingers on Chloe’s desk the first day of class. She remembers that moment, how she sat there with her nerves sparking and watched Shara pull sharpened pencils from a pencil case out of her backpack, which was also annoying, somehow—always a thing inside a thing inside a thing with Shara.

So, on the way back to her seat, she leans in and touches the corner of Shara’s desk with three intentional fingertips, light and short enough that anyone else could mistake it for an accident.

But Shara’s not anyone else. Her chin snaps upward, and she looks from Chloe’s hand to Chloe’s face, pen frozen on the paper, a piece of streaky pink hair falling across the top of her nose.

The way her eyes flash at Chloe … it’s not surprise. It’s not confusion. It’s bright, heady expectation, like she knew it was only a matter of time until this happened. Like she’s been waiting since she sat down for Chloe to come up there and kiss her.

And that’s when it clicks. Shara still thinks she gets whatever she wants whenever she decides she wants it. She thinks, because she got a makeover and stopped denying her crush, Chloe’s going to fall into her lap. As if Chloe is going to be like everyone else Shara’s ever met and make it easy.

She still has something on Shara: herself. She can make Shara chase her. She can be smart about it—let her think she might have a chance and then give her the first bottom-of-the-heart rejection of her entire charmed life. Chloe’s spent four years trying to keep one thing out of Shara’s hands. Now she can be that.

Really, Shara’s original plan to break Chloe’s heart wasn’t a bad one. Shame to let it go to waste.

She gives Shara a small, tight smile and slides into her seat.

---

Chloe’s plan for the rest of finals week is simple: One, make herself available to Shara. Two, do things that she knows Shara will be into based on past behavior. Nothing that would count as actual pursuit, but like, horny little traps. Three, lay it on so thick that Shara has to try something. Four, rejection, gratification, glory.

Shara pretty much does step one for her. The next few days, she seems to have suddenly developed a habit of being everywhere Chloe is. Chloe goes to ask her calc teacher a question, and Shara is waiting outside the classroom. Chloe unlocks her car, and Shara is two parking spaces over, pretending to be interested in Ace’s tire pressure. Chloe hovers at the edge of the courtyard, watching her friends share a carton of Sonic tots and wondering if Ash ever finished their portfolio, and suddenly Shara is perched on the nearest flowerbox with her color-coded binder of study guides.

Chloe can only imagine Shara’s strategy is similar. She’s making herself available to Chloe, under the mistaken impression that Chloe hasn’t yet fainted into her arms simply due to lack of opportunity.

She can use this.

When she stops at her locker for an emergency coffee, there Shara is, leaning against the next locker, trying to open a granola bar.

The choppy pink hair does look unfairly good on her. Against her defined features and her long lashes, it makes her look like a comic book character.

“How do you think you did on the calc exam?” Shara asks.

“Oh, you know,” Chloe says. She swallows a mouthful, then holds Shara’s gaze as she innocently swipes the side of her thumb across her bottom lip, the way she would if she were a girl in one of Georgia’s Regency novels. Shara’s fingers go stiff around the wrapper. “Pretty well. Implicit derivatives are actually pretty easy once you get the hang of them.”

“No,” Shara disagrees, staring at her mouth, “they’re not.”

“Hm. Maybe it’s just me, then,” Chloe says. “What about you?”

“What about me?”

“The exam,” Chloe says. “How do you think you did?”

“Oh. Fine.”

“Better than me?” Chloe asks.

One corner of Shara’s mouth tucks in. “Maybe.”

“Wanna make a bet?” Chloe says.

“What would I win?”

“You tell me,” Chloe says. “I’m sure you could come up with something of mine that you want.”

Shara finally succeeds in ripping her granola bar open.

“Yeah,” Shara says in an explosion of granola crumbs, “probably.”

And then she storms off.

That’s new. Not the running away part—that’s Shara’s thing—but the indignant way she looked at Chloe before she did it, like Chloe had betrayed her, somehow. Like Chloe’s done a crime to her, and the crime is “not taking her top off.”

“Oh,” she realizes out loud, “that’s fun.”

The next day, Chloe is punching in the number for a Three Musketeers and Shara’s reflection materializes next to hers in the vending machine glass.

“Are you growing your bangs out?” Shara asks. “They look different.”

Chloe sucks in a breath and turns to face her, relaxing her mouth into a soft smirk.

“I’ve been thinking about it, actually,” Chloe says. “I kind of want to grow it all out so I can put it up if I need to. You know how you need to put your hair up sometimes?”

“Uh-huh,” Shara says.

“Do you think I’d look good with long hair?” Chloe asks.

“I—” Shara begins. Her lip curls, and Chloe tamps down a laugh. “Sure. If you want.”

Shara huffs and leaves again.

That afternoon, in front of the mirrors in the girls’ bathroom, Chloe leans over the sink to fix the tip of her eyeliner wing while Shara perches on the next one.

“What brand of eyeliner do you use?” Shara asks.

“Why?” Chloe says, turning to her. “Do you want to try it?”

“Oh, that’s—”

“I can put it on for you,” Chloe says. “Come here.”

“I’m good, actually,” Shara says, jumping down. She tries to make a haughty exit, but her shoes squeak on the damp tile floor the whole way, which only seems to make her angrier.

When the door closes behind her, Chloe grins at her reflection.

She’s always thought of herself as somewhere to the left of hot. Pretty, probably, but in a Gucci-campaign, teeth-too-far-apart, eyes-too-big way. But this thing with Shara—a girl who grew up the kind of beautiful most people never even see in real life, the kind of gorgeous it almost hurts to look at—it’s like shimmering into new skin. Like being beamed into space and all her particles reassembling into someone who technically looks the same but is one version ahead of the last. She’s a scrappy galactic rebel, and Shara is a star, and she’s loading up a big-ass plasma cannon and leveling it right at Shara’s heart.

Like, how could that not be the best thing ever?

---

On Thursday afternoon, after her AP Bio exam, she emerges from the classroom to find Shara at Smith’s nearby locker.

It’s the first time Chloe has seen them together since Shara got back, which is … weird. She’s not sure what she expected—maybe Smith trying to fend her off with a chair like a lion tamer—but it certainly wasn’t the sense of quiet ease that hangs around them. They stand the way they’ve always stood, angled into each other like two stretching plants, even after everything. She says something inaudible to him, and he laughs that sun-warm laugh of his.

First Rory, now Smith? How does she get to drop back into their lives like nothing happened? Even if Smith does feel guilty for dating her under false pretenses, she still did everything else she did.

A dozen lockers down, Ash is cramming their art kit—basically a fishing tackle box of polymer clay and googly eyes—into their locker. They glance up, and Chloe almost raises a hand to wave, but Ash pulls a sad face and turns away.

Right. Chloe’s the only one who has to experience consequences for her actions. So far, at least.

She marches up to the locker two spots over from Smith’s, where Brooklyn Bennett is sifting wide-eyed through her stacks of rubber-banded notecards.

“Hi, Brooklyn,” she says, aggressively friendly. “What’s up?”

“About to have a mental breakdown, that’s what,” she says. Brooklyn launches into a long, itemized list of all the questions she thinks she got wrong on every one of her exams, and Chloe plasters on a sympathetic expression and tunes it out, listening instead to Shara and Smith’s conversation.

“… just started talking again,” Smith is saying quietly. “What if I mess this up, and he goes back to pretending I don’t exist?”

“Right,” Shara deadpans, “this whole time he’s been minding his business and not leering at you from his bedroom window.”

“I’m being serious, Shara,” Smith says. “I think this is my last chance.”

“I’m being serious,” Shara counters. “I don’t think you’re going to run out of chances there.”

Over their shoulders, Chloe can see the homecoming picture still stuck up on Smith’s locker door. The blue dress, Shara’s God-honoring nip shadows.

“I’m gonna go study in the library,” Chloe announces loudly.

“Uh,” Brooklyn says, startled. “Okay.”

“Yep,” she says. Two lockers down, she can detect the slight shift in Shara’s shoulders as she listens in. “Should be there all afternoon.”

“Okay,” Brooklyn says again. “Thanks?”

She leaves Brooklyn staring after her and books it to her locker. From the makeup pouch, the one she once used to hold Shara’s cards, she removes something she brought to school earlier this week. It’s an escalation, for sure. A real break-glass-in-case-of-emergency type of measure.

As much fun as she’s had watching Shara blush and scowl and stare at her with those big spangly eyes, as addictive as it is to be so sweet to her that it splits like a sucked peppermint into shards that cut, as much as she knows she could keep twisting this around her finger until the heat death of the universe and never get bored, it’s time. Somebody has to make Shara answer for something, and Chloe’s going to do it. Warm that space cannon up, baby.

She checks her bangs one last time in the plastic mirror on her locker door, between a note from her mom and a photo strip of her and Georgia at the movies. God, if Georgia knew about this, she’d be so stressed out. Benjy would be game, though, he loves a scheme, and Ash would—

She shuts her locker and takes off for the library.