Chapter 20

20

DAYS UNTIL GRADUATION: 8

Chloe crashes into the admin office’s glass door like a dive-bombing pigeon.

When she throws it open, she doesn’t hear it smash into the opposite wall or the alarmed squawk of the receptionist. She doesn’t see anything but Georgia, sitting on one of the hideous carpeted chairs, waiting to be called back.

Their eyes lock, and Georgia’s expression cycles from shock to confusion to anger and back in less than a second, before best friend mind-meld kicks in, and she mouths, “Isengard.”

It’s not too late, then.

Chloe keeps running straight to the principal’s office, where Wheeler stops with his hand over the number pad of his desk phone, the receiver still pinned between his ear and shoulder.

“Ms. Green,” he says, “if you want to meet with me, you can talk to Mrs.—”

“Georgia wasn’t the one kissing a girl in the B Building bathroom,” Chloe says, “it was me.”

Wheeler stares at her for a long second. He puts the receiver down.

“Is that right?” Wheeler asks.

“Yes,” she says, and for good measure adds, “sir.” Ew. Hated that.

Wheeler studies her face, which she schools into something she hopes is contrite.

“Do you want to explain why a student reported Georgia Neale to me?”

“It happens all the time,” Chloe says quickly. “We look alike, and we’re always with the same people and doing the same things, and since last fall we even have almost the same haircut, and lowerclassmen are idiots, but—but I swear, it was me. I mean, Georgia’s never broken a rule in her life, I’m the one who does that, so you can call my m—my parents instead and tell them what happened. But don’t punish Georgia for what I did.”

Wheeler contemplates this, leaning back in his tall leather chair with a creak.

“Sexually inappropriate conduct on campus is strictly against the Willowgrove student handbook,” Wheeler says. “Normally, something like this would be grounds for suspension. But at this point, that’d just be sending you on summer break early, wouldn’t it?”

Dread expands in a horrible bubble inside Chloe’s gut, like she’s ratcheting up to the big drop of a roller coaster. She knows where this is going.

“But when a wolf is after your flock, the shepherd has to make it clear that it’s not welcome,” Wheeler says. “Set a precedent. How about … a ban from the graduation ceremony?”

“Fine,” Chloe hears herself say.

“That means no walking across the stage, no awards, no cap and gown, no pictures with your little friends.” He pauses, folding his hands in front of him on the desk. “And, if you happen to get the grades for valedictorian, well … I hope you didn’t waste too much time working on a speech.”

It hurts. Of course it hurts.

But Georgia’s not ready for this, and that matters more. Every time she’s ever made an enemy of Wheeler will be worth it for this.

“I’m gonna ask you again, Chloe,” Wheeler says. “Are you sure it was you?”

Chloe swallows the burn in her throat and nods.

---

When she walks out to her car thirty minutes later, after a quick cry in the very bathroom where she’s supposed to have committed the unforgivable crime of kissing a girl, Georgia is sitting against the front driver’s side tire.

She remembers now, all the unfinished sentences of the last month. Georgia tried to tell her about Auburn. Maybe she was trying to tell her about Summer too.

“Are you okay?” Chloe asks.

Georgia sniffs and nods. “Are you?”

Chloe shrugs and holds out a hand. “Taco Bell?”

Georgia nods again, letting Chloe pull her up. “Taco Bell.”

They walk into Belltower with two heavy bags of burritos and wave goodbye to Georgia’s dad as he passes the night shift off to Georgia. If Chloe had been paying closer attention, she could have seen the signs. Georgia’s been managing the store as much as her parents for the last six months. Of course she can’t leave.

They climb up the ladder to the loft and settle amid the rare books, on the patchy rug that once sat in the living room of Georgia’s house until her parents got a new one and recycled it for the store.

“Remember when I got my license,” Chloe says, punching her straw out of its wrapper, “and I picked you up from your house, and we got Taco Bell and then went to Walmart and just walked around for an hour? Didn’t you get fifteen flavors of Laffy Taffy?”

“It was Airheads.”

“That’s right. And I bought a Super Soaker.”

“We were drunk on power.”

“God, that was the best day,” Chloe says with a sigh. “Why is the freedom to wander around Walmart unsupervised so intoxicating?”

“I don’t know, man.” Georgia laughs.

Chloe laughs too, and then she says, “I’m sorry,” at the exact same moment Georgia says, “Thank you.”

Chloe puts down her drink.

“You first.”

“I just—” Georgia starts. “You really jumped on the gay grenade for me today. Thank you.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Chloe says. “I’m … I’m sorry I wasn’t around, and that I stole the key, and that I lied to you, and that I got so caught up in my own stuff that I let it make me a crappy friend. And for the French essay.” She exhales. It really is a long list. “And I’m really, really sorry I didn’t apologize to you until now. I would jump on a gay grenade for you every day of my life, and it sucks that I wasn’t acting like it.”

“I know you would,” Georgia says. She pokes at her nachos and continues. “And I—I know I could have brought up how I was feeling earlier instead of blowing up at you.”

“I kind of deserved to be blown up at.”

Georgia makes a serious face. “Still.”

“Well,” Chloe says, “if our relationship is gonna be long distance, we have to promise that we’re gonna be better at communication, okay?”

“You’re not still mad at me about Auburn?”

“I was never mad at you about Auburn,” Chloe says. “Did you think I was mad at you about Auburn?”

Georgia shrugs. “Kind of.”

“I wasn’t mad at you,” Chloe says. “It’s just that … I’m kind of terrified of doing this without you. And I’m worried about you doing this without me. And I think sometimes when I’m scared it comes out like angry.”

“Yeah, you do that.”

Chloe winces. “Sorry. I need to work on that.”

“It’s okay,” Georgia says. “I mean, I’m scared too. But I love you, and we’re both gonna figure it out.”

“I love you too,” Chloe says.

It’s not easy for Chloe to say stuff like that. But everything’s easy with Georgia.

She picks her drink back up and says, “Now. Can I ask you something?”

Georgia nods.

“How and when did you start dating Summer Collins?”

Georgia covers her face with both hands.

“Oh my God.”

“The blushing!” Chloe gasps theatrically. “She’s gay, Your Honor!”

“You’re so embarrassing,” Georgia groans. “You remember in tenth grade, when I had to do that geometry project with her? I’ve had a crush on her since then. She was kind of like, the girl who made me realize I liked girls.”

“You never told me!”

“I feel like I did mention that she was pretty before, but that always inevitably became a conversation about how she was friends with Shara, and how Shara was the worst.”

Chloe winces again. “Okay. Fair. Continue.”

Georgia returns to her nachos, fighting a smile. “I never deleted her number after the project. I always hoped somehow she would like, feel me staring at her contact page and get a random urge to text me. And then we’d talk, and we’d fall in love and move to the mountains together and learn how to raise sheep or something.”

“And is that what happened?”

“No, what happened was that you started hanging around with Smith, and she texted to ask if I knew what was going on, and then we started talking, and it was great—like, really, really great—and we talked about our families and how much we didn’t want to leave them to go to college even though we have a lot of things we want to do, and we figured out we’re both going to Auburn … and then she asked if I wanted to get Sonic with her, and she bought me tater tots, and then … I kissed her.”

Chloe gasps. “You kissed her?”

Georgia’s grinning fully now. “I did.”

“Oh my God!” Chloe punches the air. “What did she do?”

“She was like, ‘What happens if I buy you a bacon cheeseburger?’”

“Ohhhh my Gooooood.”

She hears about how Summer is majoring in premed and likes banana milkshakes and fantasy novels, how Summer and Ace have finally made up, how Summer’s buying tickets to Hangout Fest because Paramore is playing and they both love beach camping and Hayley Williams, how Georgia is the first girl she’s ever kissed but she has a gay older sister and she’s known she was bi since last year. Chloe gets how they work together, actually, now that she thinks about it. Two smart girls who wear practical shoes and don’t really care about high school bullshit. They’re probably going to be the only people at Hangout to actually pack an appropriate amount of water.

“I have one question though,” Chloe says. “Isn’t Summer like … kinda Jesus-y?”

Georgia shrugs. “She goes to church with her family, yeah, but not in the Willowgrove way. She has her own deal.” She glances at Chloe. “Don’t be judgmental.”

“I’m not! But is … is that weird for you?”

“Not really? I mean, I grew up believing too. The last few years I wasn’t so sure, but … I know that Summer’s church is more into Jesus the brown socialist than the whole eternal damnation thing. And her parents have actually been really chill about her sister, so that’s cool.”

Chloe feels her eyebrows go up. “I didn’t know that variety of Christian existed in Alabama.”

“That’s because you’re not from here,” Georgia points out. “All you’ve ever known of Alabama is Willowgrove.”

“I—”

Well. It’s true. Willowgrove is the first time she’s been around Christianity, and so to her, that’s what faith is: judgmental, sanctimonious hypocrites hiding hate behind Bible verses, twenty-four-karat crucifix necklaces, and charismatic white pastors with all the horrible secrets that money can protect.

She’s never been to a church cookout or met a practicing Christian who was also gay. She’s never even stepped inside a church where she felt safe. Maybe if she had—maybe if her mom hadn’t been burned so bad that she never brought Chloe near Jesus until she absolutely had to—she’d feel different. At this point, she doesn’t know if she ever will.

But she also knows that Alabama is more than Willowgrove. And if that’s true, maybe faith can mean more than Willowgrove too.

Downstairs, the front door jingles open.

“Georgia?”

In a beam of afternoon sun stands Summer, still in her khaki uniform shorts and a softball T-shirt.

“Up here,” Georgia calls out, standing up to lean over the railing of the loft. “Hey, Summer.”

“Oh my God, are you okay?” Summer says. “I was looking everywhere for you, and then Shara told me she sent Chloe after you—”

Georgia rounds on Chloe. “Shara sent you?”

Chloe grits her teeth. “Technically?”

“We’re gonna discuss that.”

“What happened?” Summer asks.

Georgia turns back to her. “Chloe took the fall for me. Wheeler banned her from graduation.”

“Are you serious?” Summer says. Chloe shrugs. “Man, that dude sucks.”

The front door opens again, and this time it’s Benjy in his Sonic polo and visor speeding into the shop. He skids into the nearest table of books, topples a display of mystery novels, and shouts up to the loft, “What happened?”

Summer turns to him and says, “Chloe took the fall for Georgia so Wheeler banned her from graduation.”

“What?” Benjy gasps. “Also, hi, Summer, lots for you to catch me up on, but—what? Can he do that?”

“Wheeler can do pretty much whatever he wants,” Summer says.

“But—isn’t the church board in charge of him? Has anybody told them?”

“I really don’t think the Willowgrove church board is going to be that upset about this,” Summer says grimly. “If anything, they’ll be into it.”

The door bangs open, and Ash storms in.

“What happened?” they demand.

“Wheeler banned Chloe from graduation because he thinks she was the one making out with girls in the bathroom,” Benjy tells them.

“What?”

BANG. The door, again, before it’s even all the way shut from Ash. It’s a good thing Georgia’s dad replaced the frame last year, though Smith Parker throwing the whole thing off the hinges would really have been the perfect end to this parade of dramatic entrances. Close behind him, Rory’s scowl is extra sour. Chloe sighs and volunteers to take her turn. “I—”

“We know what happened,” Rory interrupts.

Chloe stares. “How?”

“I texted Smith,” Summer says. “I just wasn’t expecting him to show up like, immediately.”

“Well,” Smith says. “When I’m pissed off, I go fast. You good, Summer?”

“I’m good,” Summer says. “Are you?”

“I just think it’s bullshit,” Smith blurts out. “I mean, Chloe doesn’t do half the stuff that some of the guys on the team do. She doesn’t even do half the stuff that the kids in the marching band do.” He pauses. “No offense, Chloe.”

Chloe frowns thoughtfully. “Tough, but fair.”

“And like,” Smith goes on, “if that kid had seen Summer, she’d be banned from graduation too. And Summer’s never broken a rule in her life, and I know that because I haven’t either, because we can’t, because me and her have to be perfect to stay on everyone’s good side, so there’s no room for anything. There’s no room to be anything except this one specific version of yourself that Willowgrove likes, and—and it’s so blatantly fucked up. All of it. And Wheeler doesn’t even try to pretend it’s not, because he knows nobody is ever gonna step to him.” Smith is on a roll now, striding over the books Benjy spilled to pace the front of the store. “Like, my little brother likes football too, and he knows the same way I know that Willowgrove is where you go to get into the SEC, but what if he comes here and he likes boys, or finds out he’s not a boy, or whatever—I’m not gonna let them do this to him too. It’s fucked up. It’s fucked up how they make us feel about ourselves, and we put up with it because we don’t think there’s anything we can do about it. We put up with it for so long that we don’t even know who we are, only what they want us to be. And I don’t want to put up with it anymore.”

It’s the first time she’s ever seen Smith lose his temper. This must be how he lights up the field in overtime. He’s incandescent.

“When my sister left for college,” Summer says, “she told people about Willowgrove, and they couldn’t believe it. I mean, even sometimes my church friends can’t believe it. Like, it’s not like this everywhere. It doesn’t have to be like this here.”

Chloe ducks down to the loft ladder. “It really doesn’t,” she agrees.

“I wanna do something,” Smith says. “But I…”

He doesn’t finish the sentence, but they all know the rest of it. Rebellion is not exactly a luxury Smith Parker gets to have.

“I’m down,” says Rory, jaw set. “I vote we steal the Bucky the Buck statue out of the square and drop it on Wheeler’s car.”

“That’s,” Smith says, “not exactly what I had in mind.”

“Why? It’s not that hard to take a statue down. All you need is a truck and some chains.”

Benjy asks, “How do you know?”

“Who do you think threw the Jefferson Davis statue in Lake Martin in the first place?”

Ash pokes their head out from behind Benjy. “That was you?”

“For legal reasons, I’m joking.”

“What if people outside of False Beach knew about what it’s like at Willowgrove?” Summer says. “What if we could put Wheeler on blast somehow? Maybe the church board doesn’t care now, but we could—we could put the pressure on them. Make them change things to save their reputation. There’s nothing they hate more than bad PR.”

“It’d have to be big enough that the church board can’t ignore it,” Georgia says. She thinks for a long second. “What if none of us go to graduation?”

“Like a boycott?” Benjy asks.

“That’s a better idea,” Summer says, “but I think it would make Wheeler way too happy if none of us showed. Kinda his dream ceremony.”

“What if,” Chloe says, wheels turning, “instead of just a boycott, we do like, a protest graduation? Like, we host it ourselves, and we won’t have diplomas or anything, but we can still have a graduation.”

“That could work,” Summer says. “We could have it at my dad’s dealership, at the same time as the regular ceremony. It’s right across from Willowgrove, so everyone will see us.”

“We can make signs,” Ash suggests.

“We can call the TV news people,” Benjy adds.

“We need more people though,” Georgia points out. “If we’re actually gonna make a statement.”

“Bet,” Smith says, and he pulls out his phone.

The way Willowgrove has always worked, from what Chloe has seen and heard, is that there are enough students comfortable with the way things are to create the feeling that you’re the only one who doesn’t belong. It can be hard, when all the rules claim to be good and moral and godly, to feel like you can challenge them without admitting something bad and wrong about yourself. And if you can get past that, it’s a free-fall into small-town gossip, and you never come out the other side with all your best intentions intact.

But that’s a world where Willowgrove royalty doesn’t call you on the phone to say you’re not the only one, after all.

The first person to turn up is Ace, wearing sunglasses and declaring himself ready to join whatever cause Smith is joining. Then come April and Jake, who may not care much about graduation but do care about doing things that piss the administration off.

After that: Ash’s friends from art club, guys on the drumline with April, friends of the girl who got expelled for sending nudes, girls who filled out the chorus in Phantom, Summer’s softball teammates, kids from Chloe’s Quiz Bowl group who are still slightly afraid of her. Brooklyn Bennett, the world’s leading fan of rules, charges in like an angry Chihuahua.

“I am the student body president,” she says to the first person she sees, who is a nonplussed April with a sucker stick in the corner of her mouth. “If you’re going to stage a protest, you have to loop me in.”

April removes her sucker with a pop and points it at Brooklyn. “Why, so you can narc on us?”

“So I can organize it.”

From there, it’s a steady stream of people busting through the front door of Belltower like the cavalry: baseball players, stoners, victims of runaway rumors, weebs, Tyler Miller flanked by a band contingent, including clarinet girls who Chloe always kind of suspected might be a little gay (she’s heard plenty rumors about the back of the band bus). Within half an hour, at least four dozen seniors have gathered inside Belltower like a makeshift rally, nearly a third of the graduating class. Some even bring along lowerclassmen friends and siblings.

All of them are talking over one another, comparing notes on the gossip they’ve heard about what happened today, about times they got detention for talking about sex in sex ed or arguing in Bible class or putting a Bernie Sanders sticker on their locker.

Chloe stands next to the front counter between Georgia and Ash, trying to take in what exactly is happening. All she ever wanted was to launch a revolution at Willowgrove. Somehow, it looks like her graduation ban may have done it by accident.

Summer turns to Georgia.

“Is it okay if I stand on the counter?”

Georgia nods, her eyes big cartoon hearts. “Let me help you up.”

“Hey, y’all!” Summer yells over the crowd once Georgia has boosted her up. “Let’s talk plans!”

---

Summer calls her dad, then sweet-talks the butcher across the square into giving her a roll of paper while Georgia digs pencils and paint out of Belltower’s back storage room. Ash gathers it all at the center of the floor and gets to work designing a banner to hang up at their ceremony, big enough to be read from across the two-lane highway: CHANGE THE RULES AT WILLOWGROVE. On a second roll of paper, Summer and Chloe dictate their demands while Ash writes them down. Chloe picks the first one: FIRE PRINCIPAL WHEELER.

It turns out Brooklyn has the number for a Tuscaloosa News editor because of course she interned there last summer, so they give her the number for a False Beach TV news reporter, and within five minutes, she’s contacted every local news team in central Alabama. The story: a contingent of Willowgrove Christian Academy students are boycotting their own graduation ceremony in protest of the school’s code of conduct, and also, yes, they are speaking to the student body president, thank you very much.

In one corner, Benjy rounds up April and Rory to discuss a plan for procession music. In another, Jake and Ash are painting shapes on each other’s faces. In between, they all travel in shifts to Webster’s next door, where Ace stubbornly insists on paying for Chloe’s double scoop of strawberry with sprinkles and marshmallows. He claims that it’s the Southern gentlemanly thing to do when you’ve kissed someone, even if it was months ago in character as an opera phantom. He passes Chloe her cone and then takes an ungentlemanly lick of Smith’s scoop of butter pecan.

Jake pulls out a Bluetooth speaker and puts on a shockingly good playlist, and the whole thing becomes a sort of haphazard rally-meets-party. Chloe looks around Belltower, and she sees things she’s never seen before. A softball girl hitting it off with a clarinet girl. Benjy asking Ace how big his biceps are. Brooklyn clumsily talking to April, who sits on a table in front of her looking deeply amused and poking Brooklyn’s knee with the toe of her sneaker. There’s something in the air, like a collective release of tension.

She passes a sponge to Ash and says, “This is nuts, huh?”

Ash nods. They’ve already got paint splattered up the side of their neck, matting tufts of ginger hair together. “The coolest.”

“Where did all of this come from?” she says. “Like, has everyone secretly been waiting for a chance to overthrow Wheeler? I definitely thought it was only us.”

“Yeah, it seems that way sometimes,” Ash says. “You know what it reminds me of?”

“What?”

“MMORPGs.”

Ah. A classic Ash tangent. Chloe can’t wait to see where this one goes. “Say more.”

“So, everyone is running around the same world doing the same quests, but all of them are on different timelines and at different points in the story,” Ash says. “Like you could meet up with a friend, and at the exact same point on the map at the exact same time, you might be able to see a character that they can’t see, because that character’s already dead at the point of the game where your friend is playing.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Or maybe you’re on a mission to save a villager from a bunch of giant squirrels in the forest outside town, but nobody else can see that villager, because they’re not on that mission.” Ash looks up from their work to smile at Chloe. “It’s not that they choose to let the villager get mauled by squirrels. It’s just that they’re on a whole different quest.”

“So, to be clear,” Chloe says, “the giant squirrels are high school trauma.”

“Yes,” Ash says simply. “Now, can you bring this glitter to Georgia?”

Chloe takes the can of glitter Ash presses to her hands and stands up.

She looks around for Georgia, but instead she sees Smith helping a junior get an ice cream stain out of her shirt. Two band kids strategizing how they’re going to explain this to their parents. Summer smiling like she’s at a pep rally. People who never talk in class.

There must be a lot of giant squirrels she can’t see, she realizes.

Shame is a way of life here. It’s stocked in the vending machines, stuck like gum under the desks, spoken in the morning devotionals. She knows now that there’s a bit of it in her. It was an easy choice not to go back in the closet when she got here, but if she’d grown up here, she might never have come out at all. She might be a completely different person. There’s so much to it here, so much that nobody tells anyone about.

So, if she’s the only one in the class of ’22 who’s really out for now, if her existence can provide cover for half her graduating class to stand up for something without saying things about themselves they can’t yet say, that’s enough. That’s plenty.

“So,” Benjy says when Chloe finds Georgia next to him, “I know things have been crazy, but I just wanted to say: Oh my God, Shara Wheeler is in love with you, and Georgia has been secretly dating a member of the homecoming court. Like, what is going on? Also, when do I get a hot person?”

“I saw you flirting with Ace,” Chloe counters.

“Yeah, he’s like, Dodge Truck Month–level straight,” Benjy says dismissively. “I’m not wasting my time.”

“Benjy, come lie down over here and let me trace you,” Ash calls over.

“Why?”

“It’s art.”

Benjy sighs but trots off.

“Yeah, uh,” Georgia says in a low voice, looking up from her paint. “At what point are we going to talk about the Shara situation?”

Chloe concentrates on dipping her paintbrush. “What about it?”

“Mainly, why you’re not currently making out with her.”

“Why,” Chloe says, nearly upsetting the can and ruining the whole banner, “would I be doing that?”

“What, am I supposed to pretend the girl she was talking about in her Live wasn’t you? Even Benjy put that together, and he’s not the fastest on the uptake.”

“I mean, yeah,” Chloe confirms begrudgingly, “but I’m not going to date her just because she announced that she likes me.”

“So, you’re saying you don’t like her.”

“Why would I like her? She’s not a good person!”

“Should I remind you of the several occasions on which you have testified that you think she’s hot?” Georgia says. “Or maybe I should go get the Monster Fucker Collection from behind the desk? It kind of sounds like she’s the megabitch of your dreams.”

Being known the way Georgia knows her is really annoying sometimes.

“Okay, fine, I’m attracted to her,” Chloe concedes, “but I’m not going to date her. In fact, I am refusing to date her, as a power move.”

“Chloe, I love you, but that is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. You’re still doing things based on what she wants, not because it’s what you want. That’s like, the opposite of a power move.”

“I feel like we’re losing track of the point,” Chloe says, refusing to respond to that, “which is: She’s not a good person!”

She shoots a hand out and grabs one of Rory’s ankles as he passes.

“Can I help you?” Rory says, frowning down at her.

“Tell Georgia that I’m right, that Shara isn’t a good person.”

Rory contemplates this, then sits between them. He’s eating a cup of mocha chip ice cream with a tiny pink plastic spoon, and when she looks at him, she realizes he’s flipped his septum barbell down.

“Explain,” he says.

“I want you to tell Georgia about the things she’s done to you and Smith.”

“Which things?”

“See?” Chloe says, waving a hand at Georgia. “How about the time she faked sick on Smith’s signing day?”

“You mean because she knew she was going to break up with Smith,” Rory says, “and she didn’t want him to have to edit her out of the pictures?”

“She—” Chloe rewinds what Rory said. “When did she tell you that?”

“When I was helping dye her hair.”

“You—what? Why?”

“After she got back, she snuck out to my house because it was the only place she could go without her parents noticing, and she said she was afraid everyone was gonna be staring at her at school, so I found some old dye and told her we could give them something to stare at. I got the idea from what you told me about dress code violations, actually.”

“Okay,” Chloe presses, “but what about how she made you and Smith jealous of each other on purpose to make you hate each other even more?”

“That, uh. Wasn’t really what that resulted in.”

“She blackmailed Dixon.”

“Dixon sucks though.”

“She blackmailed Ace.”

He pauses, looking up from his ice cream. “Yeah, okay, that one does suck. She’s weird about people knowing what she actually cares about.”

“She ghosted her boyfriend of two years instead of breaking up with him like a normal person,” Chloe says.

Rory points his tiny spoon across the room, to where Smith and one of the theater girls are having an animated conversation. “I have finally decided that Smith and Shara’s relationship is none of my business.”

“She’s mean.”

“Sometimes,” Rory says, returning to her. “Sometimes you are too. I still think you’re cool though.”

Thatstrikes Chloe momentarily speechless. Rory shrugs, pats Chloe once on the shoulder, and rises to his feet.

“Okay,” Chloe says to Georgia once Rory is gone and Chloe remembers how to talk, “but surely Summer must still hate Shara. She broke Summer and Ace up for literally no reason.”

“Is that what Ace told you?”

Summer, who has apparently slipped behind them unnoticed under all the chatter and music, sits in the spot Rory vacated. She crosses her legs so her knee touches Georgia’s.

“He said that you freaked out when you caught her leaving his house,” Chloe tells her.

“Oh my God,” Summer says, rolling her eyes. “That is not what happened. I mean, I did get mad at him about that, because it was weird as hell, but I had been trying to break up with him for like, a week, and he kept dodging me.” She glances over to the picture book corner, where Ace has knocked over a display of novelty socks with one of his beefy shoulders. “He is just … way too chaotic for me. Total sweetheart, but a hot mess.”

Georgia nods, and Chloe realizes she must have already heard all of this. If she had actually talked to her about the Shara thing earlier, she could have understood so much more so much sooner.

“So,” Chloe says, “if that’s not what you fell out with Shara over, then what is?”

“I tried to come out to her,” Summer says, “and she freaked and jumped out of my car before I could finish. Like, a moving car. I thought she was a homophobe like her dad. Obviously, now I know what was up. One thing about that girl, she is gonna bail before anyone can make her think about being gay.”

Chloe finds herself struggling to argue with that.

“So, you’re not even mad at her for ghosting you when she ran away?” Chloe asks.

“No, I am,” Summer says, pushing her braids over her shoulder. “But she also helped save my girl today, so.”

Summer and Georgia slip away to chat about the call she had with her dad about using the dealership for the ceremony, but Chloe keeps sitting there.

She’s surrounded by a bunch of noisy, awkward, trying-their-best Alabama kids planning a protest against every instinct that Willowgrove has given them, and she’s thinking about Shara tearing across campus to catch Chloe before it was too late this afternoon. What would she do all that for, if not—

No. If Shara really cared about anyone but herself, she’d be here. She’d have stopped her dad herself instead of making Chloe do it. Maybe it was her last shot at getting Chloe out of her way. It worked, didn’t it?

She just doesn’t believe she’s wrong about Shara. She can’t. Everyone who matters is here. Shara isn’t.

This,Chloe thinks for the first time since she left California, this is where I belong.

---

Around sunset, people start clearing out. The shop closes at nine on weeknights anyway, so Georgia shuts down the register while Summer rummages through the books behind the counter and Benjy and Ash discuss a Bojangles run.

“Has anyone seen my keys?” Chloe asks.

“Nope,” Benjy says.

“Did you check the loft?” Georgia asks. “Maybe you dropped them while we were eating.”

Chloe makes her way to the ladder at the back of the store and climbs up. Sure enough, there they are behind some antique bird guides.

As she reaches for them, she hears a familiar voice drift up from below.

“I told you,” Rory says. “There’s no point reading the manga when I can watch the show.”

She peeks over the railing and sees Smith and Rory, standing close together by the shelf of graphic novels. She hasn’t seen them in at least half an hour, so she assumed they had left when she wasn’t looking, but they must have slipped quietly into the stacks.

“Man, you’re missing out on so much though.”

She can’t see Rory roll his eyes, but she can basically hear it. “Whatever.”

Smith gives him a friendly shove, and they drift toward the space under the loft. Chloe’s moving for the ladder when she hears Smith say, “Can I ask you something?”

Rory’s voices wobbles slightly when he says, “Sure.”

“Did you really flood the bio lab on frog week?”

A pause. “When’d you figure it out?”

“Last week, at the lake.”

“It was dumb.” Rory sounds genuinely embarrassed. “I knew you didn’t even think about me anymore, but … I don’t know. You really didn’t want to dissect those frogs.”

Smith says seriously, “I never stopped thinking about you.”

Oh, shit.

Is this the moment?

She has to get out of here, fast—but when she glances down the ladder, she realizes they’ve moved to a spot that makes it impossible for her to leave without interrupting them.

Her friends are waiting for her up front, and she really doesn’t want to spectate on this, but it’s taken Smith and Rory so long to get to here. What if she kills it, and they never get there again?

“Do you know what this is?” Smith asks. His voice is a moonbeam in the low light at the back of the store. Chloe chances a peek—he’s pulled out a small leather Moleskine.

It looks identical to the songbook on Rory’s desk, the one Chloe got a glimpse of back when this all started.

If Smith starts reading love poems to Rory, she’ll never be able to look either of them in the eye again.

She squeezes her keys in her hand to stop them from jingling and shuts her eyes. For the rest of her life, she vows, she will simply insist that she didn’t see or hear anything.

“Is that—?” Rory starts. “It looks like the one you gave me.”

“I never really told you how I picked it out,” Smith says. There’s a faint creak, like he’s leaning back against a shelf. “My mom wanted to get you a shirt for your birthday, but I told her you liked writing songs and you couldn’t write lyrics down as fast as you could think them up. So she said my gift should be that I’d transcribe your songs if you sang them to me, and she let me get a pack of leather notebooks, and I gave one to you and kept the other one. I’ve never used mine, but I couldn’t get rid of it.”

“I still use mine,” Rory says.

“I know,” Smith says. “I saw it in your room.”

Rory’s smirk is audible when he says, “I guess I got attached to the aesthetic.”

“Stubborn ass.”

“Takes way longer without you though.”

A pause. Another creak of a shelf.

“Can I hear one sometime?” Smith asks. “One of your new songs?”

“That depends,” Rory says.

“Depends on what?”

And with all the courage in his noodle-y body, Rory says, “Depends if you don’t mind that they’re all about you.”

Chloe has to stop herself from pumping her fist like the end of The Breakfast Club.

It’s silent below, except for Summer talking to the iguana in the tank by the front of the store and Ash snapping their art kit back up. Then, after a few seconds, just long enough for a nervous first kiss, Smith laughs.

“Chloe!” Georgia calls out from the front of the store. “Let’s go! I gotta lock up!”

“Oh, shit,” Rory whispers, and there’s the shuffling sound of them hustling out of the shelves together, muffled laughter and light grunts from elbows thrown. She still can’t see them. They could be two lonely seventh graders with notebooks full of song lyrics, or they could be two almost-adults who haven’t laughed like this together in years.

“Coming!” Chloe calls. She can’t stop smiling.