Chapter 19

19

DAYS UNTIL GRADUATION: 9

It takes half an hour to edit her Euro history notecards down to the ones with potential for erotic subtext. Peninsula War? No. Corn laws? Absolutely not. Enlightened despot? Probably how Shara sees herself, but no. Would be really helpful if European history were less horrifying. She’s going to have to lean hard on the religious stuff.

She’s so absorbed in deciding whether Francis Bacon could possibly be sexy that she almost misses the sound of Shara entering through the side door of the library.

Her table is one of the secluded ones set aside from the main study area, so she has about a second and a half before Shara spots her. All at once, she kicks her backpack off the seat next to her, shoves her notes out of the way, flips her hair, straightens her shoulders, and, for the final touch, hooks her ankle around the empty chair and drags it a foot closer.

By the time she feels Shara’s eyes on her, she’s posed serenely over her notes with her face angled to catch the overhead fluorescents from the most flattering possible direction.

She hears Shara’s sneakers pause on the carpet, then the soft pat-pat-pat of her approach, and Shara says from beside the table, “You know, if you wanted me to meet you here, you could have asked.”

“Oh, hi, Shara,” Chloe says, blinking up at her in fake surprise.

“You didn’t have to drag Brooklyn into it,” Shara says. “That girl is one Scantron bubble away from a nervous breakdown.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Chloe says, “but if you’re in the mood to confront some stuff, there are a couple of other places you could start.”

Shara bites her lip. “What’s your last exam?”

“Don’t you know?” Chloe asks.

Shara’s lip turns creamy white under her teeth, then strawberry red when she releases it. She sits in the empty chair and begins unzipping her backpack, close enough that Chloe can smell lilacs for the first time since the sailboat. She tries not to get too lost in the memory of Shara screaming and splashing around in a wet cloud of pink tulle. Seriously, top five Chloe moment.

“European history,” Shara finally concedes.

“And yours is Chem II,” Chloe says. Shara blinks, like she really thought Chloe was stupid enough not to have learned her schedule too. “Have you gotten any better at limiting reactant problems since sophomore year, or do you want some help?”

Shara sets her binder down on the table. “Have you figured out the difference between Prussia and Germany yet, or should I call your flashcards out for you?”

“Actually,” Chloe says, smiling. If this is how it feels to have a plan go perfectly, she sees why Shara likes them so much. “That would be really helpful.”

And so, because refusing would mean accepting the alternative—a deliberate and meaningful conversation about her feelings—Shara opens her hand and accepts Chloe’s stack of notecards.

Chloe, of course, already has them memorized. She props her chin on her hand and gazes into Shara’s flushed face as she recites the answers effortlessly.

“The Institutes of Christian Religion,” Shara asks.

“Written by John Calvin, 1536. Says the Bible is the only source of Christian doctrine and that there are only two sacraments: baptism and communion.”

“Defenestration of Prague.”

“1618,” Chloe says. “Protestants threw a bunch of Catholic officials out of a castle window in Bohemia. Started the Thirty Years War.”

Shara glances up from the card.

“Do you know the officials’ names?”

An obvious maneuver.

“Count Jaroslav Bořita of Martinice, Count Vilem Slavata of Chlum, Adam II von Sternberg, and Matthew Leopold Popel Lobkowitz,” Chloe rattles off.

Shara, looking deeply put out, moves on to the next one. “Regicide.”

“The killing of a king,” Chloe says. “Or queen.”

“Lucrezia Borgia.”

“1480 to 1519. One of the most famous women of the Renaissance. Super hot. Blonde. Amazing hair. Smart, educated, accomplished, lots of politically strategic marriages, rumored to enjoy poisoning people. Often used in power plays by her father, Pope Alexander VI.”

Over the top of the card, Shara searches Chloe’s face for something. Chloe offers her another innocent smile.

“Keep going,” she says. “You’re doing great.”

Shara clenches her jaw and flips to the next card.

“Botticelli.”

“1444 to 1510. Leading painter of the Florentine Renaissance, sponsored by the Medici family, best known for Primavera, 1482, and The Birth of Venus, mid-1480s. Very distinctive style.”

“In what way?”

The trapdoor. Shara just stepped right on top of it. Chloe pulls the lever.

“Well,” Chloe says, “it was kind of about what his idea of beauty was. Especially women—he always painted women sort of flowing through space. Girls with an effortless sort of elegance, like they’re weightless and solid at the same time. Do you know what I mean?”

Shara swallows and nods.

“And then like, this line.” And here is where she does it: she reaches over and almost touches the hinge of Shara’s jaw with her fingertip, skimming the length of her jawline to her chin. Shara holds absolutely still. “He would have painted it with a strong edge, because he liked really dramatic, defined contours.”

She sits back and, before Shara has a chance to recover, tips her head to the side and casually pushes her collar aside, as if it were an accident.

It’s kind of funny, she has to admit. She’s a waif flouncing around Dracula’s candlelit manor with her neck out, sighing, “Ohhhh noooo, look at my poor exposed and vulnerable arteries, wouldn’t it be absolutely tragic if someone were to come along and slurp them?”

It works. Shara’s gaze goes directly where she wants it to, right to the opening of Chloe’s oxford, where the secret weapon is resting below the dip between her collarbones. Shara’s silver crucifix necklace.

“Is that—” Shara whispers. “Where did you get that?”

“What, this?” Chloe glances down, raising her eyebrows. “I found it in the trash, actually. Crazy, right? Why, does it mean something to you?”

It’s yours, Shara. Tell me it’s yours. Own up to something for once in your life.

“I have no idea how to answer that question,” Shara says quietly, as if she’s not sure whether to direct it at Chloe or herself or God.

“Are you sure?” Chloe asks.

Something warm ghosts over Chloe’s skin.

On the table, on top of Chloe’s piles of notes, Shara carefully, slowly, gently slips the smallest finger of her left hand into the space between the first two of Chloe’s right.

This is it. Shara’s going to look at her and say, “Oh, that’s my necklace, you were right all along, you know me better than I know myself, all I did was lie until you,” and then Chloe will say, “duh,” and Shara will continue, “put your arms around me, you hot genius,” and Chloe will let Shara kiss her, and together they’ll dip into a quiet corner of the stacks so Shara can kiss her in the fiction section, M through R, and she’ll touch the side of Shara’s neck under her hair—

No. Wait. Not the plan.

She’s going to let Shara lean in to kiss her, and then, when Shara’s hanging there in that breath before their lips touch, she’ll wince and say, “Oh, this is awkward, but I’m not really into you like that.”

She drags her eyes from their hands to Shara’s beautiful, anxious face, which is closer than it was seconds ago. She’s looking at Chloe’s throat, at Chloe’s mouth when she angles it to mirror Shara’s.

Come on,Chloe thinks. Just say it’s yours. Do something.

Shara’s lips part.

“I—”

She drops Chloe’s notecards and pushes her chair out, sweeping her binder and bag into her arms.

“I have to go,” she says. “Rory’s giving me a ride home, and he— I’m supposed to meet him—”

Without another word, she whirls around and leaves the library as fast as she did that afternoon with Midsummer.

She follows her mom’s eyes to the opening of her shirt. Crap. She forgot to take Shara’s crucifix off.

“Oh, um. I found it?”

Her mom looks skeptical. “That looks like it cost a couple grand, Chloe. Why are you wearing it?”

“I—okay, well, it’s—” No way around this one, really. “It’s … about a girl. It’s her necklace, and I was trying to mess with her, so I kind of, uh. Wore it in front of her.”

Her mama coos from the kitchen table, “Sounds like how I used to wear your mom’s welding apron around the house when I was in the mood.”

“Jesus Christ.” Chloe sighs.

“So that’s what’s been up with you,” her mom says. “You got a thing for a Christian girl.”

“I don’t—”

“Look, I can’t blame you—all those girls walking around with Jesus right over their boobs? Always seemed like entrapment to me when I was your age.” She pats Chloe on the head. “Are you pretending to go to church now so you can date somebody’s nice wholesome daughter?”

“It’s not like that,” Chloe insists. Her mama is already singing “Papa Don’t Preach” under her breath. Chloe unclasps the necklace and gathers the chain in her hand. “See? Still the heathen you raised.”

“You’re always perfect,” her mom says, pressing a kiss to her hair. “Tell me her name later. You need dinner?”

“I’m good,” she says, reaching into the freezer for a few Uncrustables. “I’ll eat while I study.”

In her room, she spreads her notes across her bed and checks for anything she still needs to go over. She’s about to start on the Bolsheviks when the motion-activated floodlights outside her window snap on.

She squints at her drawn blinds and wishes Titania luck escorting every last cricket off this mortal plane, but then she hears it: a faint metallic scrape at her windowpane. The sound of someone removing the screen.

She doesn’t know how she knows, but she does.

She jumps out of bed and pulls the blinds up and there, kneeling outside her bedroom, nose inches from the glass, is Shara.

She’s lost her uniform top since this afternoon, down to only her skirt and a white cotton undershirt under the glare of the floodlights. For one wild and gorgeous second, Chloe thinks she’s here to do what she couldn’t in the library. She thinks Shara is finally going to climb into Chloe’s life and make this real.

Then she looks down at Shara’s hand and sees the pink card.

For a moment, they’re locked in a freeze-frame. Chloe imagines a movie camera spinning around them, from behind Shara’s shoulders to Shara’s stunned profile to the card’s sweet, flowery monogram, into Chloe’s bedroom under the whirr of the ceiling fan to the hot gasp she sucks in through her teeth, finishing on the blood that slams into Chloe’s cheeks as she exhales, “No.”

She throws the window open and leaps through it so fast, she doesn’t even touch the sill. One second, she’s in her room, and the next, her entire body is outside the house and her ass and head and all four limbs are flying at Shara like a rampaging lemur on National Geographic, snarling and tumbling into the grass, the screen cartwheeling off into the night as Shara screams and rolls. Both of them scream and roll, kicking and thrashing until they crash sideways into the giant air conditioning unit on the side of the house, which is absolutely roaring, because in Alabama it’s eighty-five degrees even at night—Chloe’s elbow connects with something that might be a nose—Shara’s fingernails are sharp—Shara throws her shoulder into Chloe’s chest, flipping her onto her back—

“Stop!” Shara shrieks.

“I’m not doing this again!” Chloe screeches. She rips up a handful of grass and flings it in Shara’s face, and while Shara’s sputtering and spitting, Chloe wrestles her way back on top.

“Just take it!” Shara growls, wrenching her arm out from between them and holding up the card, which is crumpled in her fist now.

“No!”

“Take it!”

“You can’t make mmmmf—!”

Shara, apparently short on options, crams the card into Chloe’s mouth.

Chloe recoils, choking it out onto the grass—the cardstock slices the corner of her mouth, which is perfect, really, what is Shara if not a papercut in the mouth corner of Chloe’s existence—and with a feral sort of yowl, she bites Shara’s finger.

“Ow!”

“What is wrong with you?” Chloe yells. She jams her thumb into the vulnerable inside of Shara’s thigh, and Shara relents for the duration of another “ow!,” long enough for Chloe to climb up onto her knees. With one hand, she pins the first wrist she can grab to Shara’s stomach, and then—also short on options—she straddles Shara around the waist to hold her down.

Shara stops moving.

“Are you running away again?” Chloe demands. She’s out of breath, her heart sledgehammering through her chest.

“I—” Shara starts. Above her head, her free hand falls limp on the lawn, palm open to the sky. “No, I—I wrote you a card.”

“Oh my God, why can’t you act like a normal human person?” Chloe says. “Why can’t you do one thing that’s not some fucking emotional manipulation gesture from fifteen million miles away? I’m not doing this with you anymore! All I have done for the past month is try to figure out who the hell you are, but I don’t even think you know!”

“Chloe—”

“Do you think love is just someone arranging their entire life around whatever you want?” she continues, ignoring Shara, whose face is as pink as her hair. “Do you have any idea what you even mean when you say you want me? No, you fucking don’t, because if you did, if it actually meant something to you, if it wasn’t about how much you get off on someone being obsessed with you, if you were actually willing to confront anything about yourself or sacrifice anything that actually matters to you, you wouldn’t be sticking notes on my window when I’m not looking! You would have kissed me when you had your chance in the library today!”

She doesn’t realize how long they’ve been stuck there, motionless on the lawn, until the floodlights automatically switch off. Suddenly, she’s looking down at Shara beneath her body in the lavender wash of the moonlight, feeling the rise and fall of Shara’s breaths between her thighs.

Shara’s unpinned hand is still loose above her head. It’s just lying there, surrendered, wide open. Chloe is absolutely sick to death of waiting for her to use it.

“I told everyone,” Shara says.

“Tell me.”

“Chloe. Read the card.”

“No!” Chloe snaps. “Say it to my face! Do this for real! Ask me on a date like everyone who has ever liked someone in the history of the universe!”

She gives Shara ten entire seconds to respond, but she doesn’t. She stares up at Chloe, eyes wide, lips parted around nothing.

She releases Shara’s wrist and jerks to her feet.

In her head, she’s cast Shara in the role of a million different beautiful women laid low: Marie Antoinette in pastel silks, Lucrezia Borgia dripping poison, vampire queens and girls in space. Now, standing over her, she doesn’t see any of them. She sees a girl with a kitchen-scissor haircut in a yard in the suburbs.

A month ago, she stood like this outside Shara’s house and refused to believe Shara was gone, because she knew the myth was a lie. That there was nothing extraordinary about Shara Wheeler.

This is the real tragedy: Everything extraordinary about her is trapped behind the myth.

“I have to study,” Chloe says. “Go home, Shara.”

One junior tells another that some total narc of a sophomore walked in on two girls making out in the B Building bathroom. Five lockers down, two guys from the baseball team are muttering about how the girls got reported to Principal Wheeler, and he’s going to suspend them.

She’s hovering at the water fountain near the exit, trying to catch the name of the snitch she’s going to make her new mortal enemy, when one of the double doors opens.

“There you are,” Shara says when she sees Chloe, as if she hasn’t known Chloe’s exact whereabouts for months. She’s backlit in the doorway with afternoon sun, a hot breeze swirling her hair around her face in rose gold.

Chloe groans. Shara cinematic-ass Wheeler.

“I told you to—”

Shara cuts her off: “It was Georgia.”

Chloe’s stomach twists. Georgia’s name out of Shara’s mouth can’t possibly mean anything good.

“What? What was Georgia?”

“One of the girls from the B Building bathroom,” Shara says. “I thought you should know.”

“Georgia? With who?”

“Summer,” Shara says, “but they only saw Georgia, so she’s the only one who got reported.”

“Summer Collins? They— Since when?”

“I don’t know, nobody told me either,” Shara says. “Summer hasn’t exactly been dying to talk to me lately.”

Chloe doesn’t have time to react to that.

“Where’s Georgia now?”

“The office,” Shara says. “My dad’s gonna call her parents.”

Shara steps back, holding the door open. Her eyes are wide, eyebrows set in a dire arch. She’s still catching her breath—she must have sprinted all the way across campus.

“There’s time if you run,” she says.

Chloe runs.