Chapter 2

2

DAYS SINCE SHARA WHEELER LEFT: 2

DAYS UNTIL GRADUATION: 41

The first thing Chloe saw when her moms’ Subaru crossed into False Beach city limits was Shara Wheeler’s face.

That’s not just what it felt like—although it does seem like Shara Wheeler is everywhere, all the time. It was literally looming forty feet wide over the interstate between a Waffle House and a Winn-Dixie under a swampy gray sky: a pretty blond girl with a pretty smile, holding a stack of textbooks and a protractor.

JESUS LOVES GEOMETRY!the billboard declared, which struck Chloe as a bit of a bold claim. A CHRIST-CENTERED EDUCATION AT WILLOWGROVE CHRISTIAN ACADEMY!

There are a total of five high schools in False Beach, and Willowgrove is the only one with a decent AP program and a theater department with the budget to do Phantom. As a fourteen-year-old literary nerd neck-deep in a goth phase, those seemed like the most important things a high school education could offer her. Her mom went to Willowgrove back in the ’90s, and she tried to warn her what it was like, but Chloe was insistent. If this was her only option, she could put up with the Jesus stuff.

“What kind of name is False Beach?” Chloe asked her mom for the five thousandth miserable time that day as they glided under Shara’s billboard. It was a question she’d been asking since her mom first told her the name of her hometown.

“It’s a beach but it’s not,” her mom answered, same as always, and her other mom flipped a page in The Canterbury Tales, and they kept driving out of the California sunset and into the buttcrack of Alabama.

False Beach sits on the wide banks of Lake Martin, which gives the slight illusion that it might be a beach town like Gulf Shores or Mobile down on the coast, but it’s not. It’s four hours inland from the Gulf of Mexico, closer to Atlanta than to Pensacola, nearly smack in the center of the state. The lakeshore isn’t even sandy, because the lake isn’t a real lake. It’s a reservoir made in the 1920s, surrounded by marshy banks and woods and cliffs.

It’s just a town by some water where nothing interesting ever happens. And, in what Chloe has learned is the nature of small towns, when one thing does happen, everyone knows about it. Which means by Monday morning, all anyone wants to talk about is where Shara could have gone.

Frankly, it’s not that different from every other day at Willowgrove. Here, Shara Wheeler is like Helen of Troy, if she were famous for being both beautiful and too tragically, terribly brilliant for her small town, or Regina George, if her brand was logging double the school-mandated volunteer service hours.

Shara Wheeler’s so pretty. Shara Wheeler’s so smart. Shara Wheeler has never been mean to anyone in her life. Shara Wheeler has the voice of an angel, actually, but she’s never auditioned for a spring musical because she doesn’t want to take the spotlight away from students who need it more. Shara Wheeler is the football team’s good luck charm, and if she misses a game, they’re doomed. Last year, there was a whole movement of freshman girls eyelash-gluing their own Cupid’s bows to re- create Shara’s signature naturally full, upturned upper lip. It’s a miracle nobody has put her likeness on like, the side of a butter container yet.

Today:

“I heard nobody’s seen her since prom night.”

“I heard Smith broke up with her and she lost it.”

“I heard she ran away to build houses for the homeless.”

“I heard she’s secretly pregnant and her parents sent her away until she gives birth so nobody finds out.”

“That’s literally a plotline from Riverdale, idiot,” Benjy calls after a passing sophomore. He sighs and carefully lays his folded Sonic uniform polo for his after-school shift at the bottom of his locker.

Chloe scowls at the mirror on her locker door. Annoying that her life should also have to revolve around Shara Wheeler right now.

“You good, Chloe?” Benjy asks.

“Of course I’m good,” Chloe says, straightening her shiny silver collar pins. Georgia describes her interpretation of the uniform as “doing the most.” Chloe describes it as “please let me feel one sweet hit of individuality before it’s squeezed out of me by lunch.” It’s whatever. “Why wouldn’t I be good?”

“Because you only did one eye.”

“What?” She checks her reflection again. Left eye: expertly executed eyeliner wing in Blackest Black. Right eye: naked as a newborn baby. “Oh my God.”

She whips a liner pen out of the emergency makeup pouch in her locker. It’s been in there so long, she has to scribble on the back of her hand to get it going. She never thought she’d need it.

“Anyway,” Benjy says, picking their conversation back up. “I told Georgia that we have to do movie night at her place this week because Ash wants to watch that Labyrinth movie your mom mentioned, and if my dad walks in and sees David Bowie’s junk in white spandex, he is going to have some questions that I’m not interested in answering. So, we’re—” He breaks off. “Um. Why is Rory Heron coming over here?”

A tiny figure appears over Chloe’s shoulder in the mirror, right under the blunt edge of her bob but growing closer: Rory, looking deeply affronted at having to set foot on campus before third hour.

“I owe him money for a class gift for Madame Clark,” Chloe lies quickly, finishing off her wing and capping the pen.

“Have fun,” Benjy says, and then he’s off to first hour.

Chloe shuts her locker and turns to face Rory. “Glad I don’t have to go back to the country club.”

Rory blinks. “You know your whole deal is like … exhausting, right?”

“Thank you,” she says. “Come on.”

She picks her way through the morning crowd to the physics lab, zeroing in on the one around whom every other football player seems to orbit. Smith Parker: Shara’s boyfriend, quarterback, victim of a tragic first-name last-name, last-name first-name situation.

She remembers the day Smith and Shara got together. Homecoming week junior year, when the entire school was consumed by the bizarre Southern ritual of paying a dollar for the student council to send your crush carnations. Chloe was forced to be Shara’s lab partner in AP Chem that year, and Shara had crossed out Chloe’s chemical formula to write her own—Chloe’s was right—when two dozen carnations were dumped all over their lab notes. Every single one was from Smith to Shara, and they’ve been a Willowgrove power couple ever since, which, honestly? Carnations aren’t even that nice of a flower.

As far as Chloe is concerned, Smith isn’t much better than the other football d-bags, all of whom she’s obligated to dislike on principle. When most of last year’s tuition went to stadium renovations and the cheerleading coach is teaching civics, Willowgrove’s priorities are pretty obvious. Every game Smith wins yanks more cash out of arts programs, the only place for students with actual talent.

Up close, Smith Parker is … not quite as huge as Chloe thought. He’s more tapered than bulky, more like a dancer than a football player. He’s one of the few athletes Chloe considers good-looking instead of thick-necked hot-ugly: high cheekbones, striking brown eyes with sharp inner corners and arched brows, dark brown skin that somehow remains clear during football season. He’s tall, even taller than Rory. Did he grow somehow since before prom? Has he always been this square-jawed and triangle-shaped? He’s like an SAT geometry problem.

“Smith,” she says. He doesn’t respond at first, still yelling down the hall at one of his teammates—and, really, football season ended four months ago, can they find another personality trait?—so she tries again. “Smith!”

When he finally looks, it occurs to her that Smith Parker may not even know who she is. He definitely at least knows her as that weird queer girl from LA with two lesbian moms, like everyone else does, but does he know who she is? Her reputation for leading the Quiz Bowl team with an iron fist could be meaningless to him. Has Shara told him that Chloe is her only rightful academic nemesis?

“What’s up?” Smith says. He glances beside her to Rory, who is retracting into his uniform sweatshirt, and does a little chin nod.

Chloe purses her lips. “Can we talk to you for a second?”

Smith looks over his shoulder to where Ace Torres is at the door to the physics lab, slapping palms with yet another football guy. It’s common knowledge at Willowgrove that first-hour senior physics is dumbed down and graded on an extreme curve to help student athletes keep their GPAs up.

“I really gotta get to class,” he says.

Chloe releases a hiss. “It’s Football Physics.”

“I know,” Smith says, “but—”

“And it’s the last month of school,” Chloe points out. “Nobody cares if anyone’s late, least of all you.”

“Look, I had a long weekend,” Smith says, turning to her. This time, she can see heaviness around his eyes. She wonders how he spent his Sunday—probably cow tipping with the boys or something. “Can y’all just—”

Rory blurts out, “I kissed Shara.”

Smith freezes. Rory freezes. Untipped cows on the edge of town freeze.

When Smith speaks again, his voice is low. “What?”

“I mean, uh,” Rory says. It’s almost funny, the way all his class-cutting, shoe-gazing edginess shrinks into nothing. Boys are so embarrassing. “She, uh—before she left, we, um—”

“He kissed Shara. And so did I,” Chloe says, stepping up like the Spartacus of people who have kissed Smith Parker’s girlfriend. “I mean, she kissed me, if we’re being specific. But I kissed her back.”

Smith stares at her face, then at Rory’s, then Chloe’s again.

“Y’all think this is funny?” he asks. “Because it’s not.”

“It’s a little funny,” Chloe notes.

“It’s not a joke,” Rory insists.

If Smith knows anything about Willowgrove’s lower social ranks, he should know that Chloe and Rory have never so much as shared eye contact in the hallway, much less a conspiracy to prank the quarterback. The entire ecosystem of Willowgrove depends on rigid divisions between each social stratum. Smith has to know she wouldn’t be upsetting the natural order if she didn’t absolutely have to.

A muscle in Smith’s jaw twitches.

“Well, that pretty much sucks to hear,” Smith says. “Why’re you telling me?”

“Because we need to talk,” Rory attempts. “All of us.”

Chloe takes a more direct approach. “Rory, show him the note.”

“What note?” Smith says.

Rory grumbles but swings his backpack around and unzips it. It’s covered in Thrasher patches and pretentious buttons and contains precisely zero schoolbooks.

“She left us that,” Chloe says when he gives Smith the card. “Do you know what the last part means?”

Smith stares at it for a long minute, then he folds it closed and calmly hands it back.

“You like her, don’t you?” Smith says to Rory. “Still?”

Chloe glances between them, at the pinched set of Smith’s mouth and the unhappy crease between Rory’s thick eyebrows. She doesn’t usually credit too many complicated feelings to teenage boys, but there’s definitely some kind of messed-up history there. The Shara Vortex.

“Kind of,” Rory says, in the voice of a boy who climbed through Shara’s bedroom window the day before.

Smith nods with grim satisfaction and turns to Chloe.

“What about you?”

Chloe blinks and lowers her voice. “I barely even know her. I have no idea why she kissed me. I just want to beat her to valedictorian.”

Smith considers that and nods again. Chloe is starting to suspect she doesn’t get jocks at all.

“I don’t know what peach means,” Smith says, “but the numbers are my locker combination.”

It at least smells better than the other football players’ lockers, but it’s crammed with textbooks and overstuffed notebooks and more books than he could possibly have to read for a regular English class. There is also a surprising number of cosmetics: tubes of moisturizer, hair ties, dark brown concealer, pomegranate lip balm. He shoves those behind a box of Little Debbie oatmeal pies.

“Really, dude?” Chloe says, nodding to the pies.

Smith shrugs. “Gotta keep my calorie intake up.”

As Smith searches the mess, Chloe stares at the picture on his locker door. It’s Smith and Shara at the homecoming dance last fall, him in a generic button-down-and-dress-pants combo, her in that dress.

Chloe didn’t go to homecoming, but she saw Shara’s dress on Instagram like everyone else alive. It was only a blue silk slip with a modest neckline, but it stuck to her like water, and she wasn’t wearing a bra. For a whole week, nobody at school would shut up about it. BBC News at 9, the headlines: GOD’S FAVORITE DAUGHTER SHOWS ONE HINT OF NIP.

She glances over at Rory to see if he’s looking at the same thing, but he’s focused on Smith, who’s yanked something out from behind his Gatorade stash.

“Hold up,” Smith says. “I didn’t put this in here.”

It’s a bag of candy, and there’s a second card from Shara’s stationery tied neatly to it with a pink ribbon. Smith’s name is written on the envelope.

“Peach rings?” Chloe asks.

“She always gives a pack to the cheerleaders who make my game day treat bag,” Smith says. “They’re my favorite.”

“Still?” Rory says.

Smith glares. “What?”

“Peach rings are just kinda middle school,” Rory says with a shrug.

“Are you gonna open it or what?” Chloe butts in.

Smith sighs and pulls the card out, and Chloe skims it over his shoulder before he has a chance to pull it away.

Smith,

I think that, maybe, the problem is that I don’t know how to tell you the truth. Maybe that’s why I had to do this. I don’t know how to tell you, but maybe I can show you.

I promise I’m okay. Don’t be too mad about the kisses. It wasn’t their fault.

XOXO

Shara

P.S. You’re not done with the P.S. from the last one yet. Make sure Rory holds on to it. Shouldn’t be hard.

P.P.S. Tell Chloe it’ll come to her.

“I have no idea what this is supposed to mean,” Smith says, lowering the card to his side. Rory tilts his head sideways to squint at the words.

“You don’t think she’s been like, Liam Neeson Taken, do you?” Chloe asks.

“No.”

“So, she would have left on purpose, then?”

“I guess.”

“Maybe she’s fleeing the scene of a crime? Maybe she killed someone.”

“Doubt it.”

Rory straightens up and cuts in: “Do you even care?”

Oof.

Smith pauses, then shuts his locker.

“Wanna try that again?”

“I mean, I don’t know,” Rory says. “Aren’t you gonna dump her for SEC groupies after graduation anyway? That’d make this pretty convenient for you.”

“Yikes.” Chloe exhales.

Smith bites down on the inside corner of his mouth, nodding slowly with his chin like Rory is an eighty-five-pound kicker on a visiting team. Then he pulls out his phone, unlocks it, and holds it out.

It’s open to his call log, and every single entry—ten calls in the last two hours alone—are the same. Shara, Shara, Shara, Shara, Shara.

“Me and Ace drove around every square mile of False Beach looking for her yesterday,” Smith says. “We checked everywhere she likes to go to see if maybe she was at the Cinemark on Houghton or Sonic or the park with all the magnolia trees by the Dick’s Sporting Goods, and she wasn’t at any of them. I was out there for hours. So, yeah. I care.”

The look on Rory’s face is a blinking cursor at the top of a blank Word document, so Chloe takes the opening.

“Then you need us,” she tells Smith. “Obviously this is … some kind of puzzle Shara set up for us, and we all have a piece of it. Once we solve it, we’ll know where she is.”

Smith finally breaks his glare at Rory to look at her.

“Where’s your piece?”

“I’m working on it,” Chloe grouses. “But there’s no point in finding it if we can’t all agree we’re in this together.”

Smith’s attention snaps back to Rory. “You’re cool with that?”

“Look, I don’t want to give a shit about this, but I do,” Rory says, having finally recovered. “If Shara keeps mentioning the three of us, it probably means we’re all supposed to be here, so like, whatever. I’ll do it.”

“So will I,” Chloe says. “Which means if you want to know where your girlfriend is, you gotta get over the fact that she kissed us. Like, quickly.”

All around them, the rest of Willowgrove is filtering into first hour, and every single one of them takes a second to stare as they pass. Chloe Green, the one who scored a 35 on the ACT. Smith Parker, the saint who led Willowgrove to the state champ title two years in a row. And Rory Heron, best known for flooding the bio lab on purpose. The three of them occupying the same spot is ripping a hole in the Willowgrove space-time continuum.

Smith is visibly doing some mental calculations. It’s obvious he and Rory would rather do just about anything than spend another second in each other’s company, which means Chloe’s life is about to be a nonstop tornado of egos, but she can deal with it as long as they get her to a fair victory. Like Willowgrove, it’s a necessary evil.

“I’m in, I guess,” Smith says. He glances sidelong at Chloe. “I get what Shara meant about you.”

Chloe blinks. “What did she say about me?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“Fine,” Chloe says, definitely worrying about it. “If there’s anything we need to know, like if she said or did anything unusual lately, you should tell me.”

“Us,” Rory corrects her.

“Us,” Chloe agrees.

“The only thing lately,” Smith says finally, “was that she kept saying she couldn’t hang out because she had homework. She does that a lot, but it was like, a lot of homework. So, I guess … maybe she was doing something else.”

“Did she seem … unhappy?” Chloe asks.

“It’s hard to tell with Shara sometimes,” Smith says. “Sometimes, she just like, dips. Like she won’t respond to texts for a whole weekend, or she’ll put her phone on airplane mode, no explanation, and two days later it’s like nothing happened.”

“And what do you do?” Rory asks. “When she dips?”

“I never had to do anything before,” Smith says. “She always came back.”

Group Chat Including Chloe Green, Smith Parker, and Rory Heron

sending this to create the chat. please don’t reply unless you have new SW info.

Smith

ok

Smith I literally said not to reply.

Smith

sorry

Chloe changed the name of the chat to “I Kissed Shara Wheeler”

Rory

Smith

hell no

Smith deleted the name of the chat

idk why you’re mad when it’s factually accurate