Chapter 21

21

DAYS UNTIL GRADUATION: 6

There are five school days after finals but before graduation, when the rest of the student body is reviewing for exams, but the seniors are expected to show up to school every day to do nothing. Allegedly, it’s a requirement that was created in the 2000s after one senior class used the time to execute a senior prank so elaborate the entire gym floor had to be replaced. Now, they have to be supervised.

Like Dead Week, this weird in-between week has a nickname, created by past Willowgrove seniors and handed down through the years. Chloe hates it.

“I’m not calling it that,” Chloe says on Monday morning, on the breezeway outside C Building. “It’s gross.”

“But it makes so much sense,” Benjy says. “It’s a pointless space between two important things.”

Ash spreads their hands in front of them like a marquee and says, “Taint Week.”

Chloe sighs. “Somehow this feels like Ace’s fault.”

She pushes the stairwell door open, but before she can reach the next set of doors, Dixon Wells comes bursting out of them. Georgia throws a soccer-mom arm in front of Chloe’s chest before they smash into each other.

Dixon is red-faced and swearing, his Logan Paul hair flying in every direction, and he bolts past them down the stairs and out of sight.

“Not too late to stop being a dick, Dixon!” Georgia calls after him.

“Geo,” Chloe says. “That was spicy.”

Georgia shrugs, catching the door on the backswing. “Somebody has to tell him.”

Benjy steps into the hallway first, then stops so suddenly Ash and Chloe pile up behind him.

“Jesus wept,” he says.

The entire hallway is crammed with students and white as a blizzard. Every locker, every bulletin board, every classroom door—all plastered with paper. Half the student body is there, passing sheets around and pulling folded pieces out of their locker vents and trampling them underfoot. Every page seems to be covered in different configurations of small, black type.

Overhead, the morning bell goes off, but nobody cares.

Chloe rips a page off the nearest bulletin board.

We can certainly make that arrangement for your son, it says, and as for the amount, $15K seems a bit low. What you’re asking would involve a lot of logistical support on our end to make sure this is done right, and the school doesn’t lose its status as a test center …

“Oh my God,” Georgia says, crowded against her shoulder. “No way. No way. Are these—?”

“Wheeler’s?” Chloe asks. “Is he actually talking about an—?”

“Admissions scam?”

“Isn’t that—?”

“A federal crime? Yeah, uh, I’m pretty sure it is.”

Chloe sets off down the hall in a frenzy, snatching up every page she can.

The papers are copies of emails, hundreds and hundreds of emails between Wheeler and parents of students. Payoffs and bribes and under-the-table deals to boost the scores of kids taking the ACT at Willowgrove.

She knew Mackenzie couldn’t have made a 29.

Now she knows what Wheeler’s been spending hours on in his office after everyone else goes home for the night. And why Wheeler wouldn’t want the police involved after Shara ran away, and why he was so threatened by people trying to dig into his family— Wait.

Was Shara involved?

She grabs another page, and another, skimming as fast as she can.

—balance owed—

—answer key—

—my daughter—

There.

We need to discuss discretion. There’s no need to keep your child looped in if his participation isn’t required. My daughter still has no idea I had Carol raise her final grade last year, and that’s for the best. If they feel they’ve earned this, they’re motivated to keep working hard and stay out of trouble.

She scans back up to the sender to make sure she read what she thinks she did.

It’s from Wheeler, and he’s talking about Shara’s grade in Ms. Rodkey’s class last year. The class in which she edged Chloe out by a single percentage point.

“Holy shit,” Chloe whispers.

He just admitted to having Shara’s grades changed.

Which means Shara is disqualified from—

“I think,” she says, staring at the paper so hard, her vision goes blurry, “I think I won valedictorian.”

---

By lunch, every single student at Willowgrove has at least one page of Principal Wheeler’s emails, which definitively prove that he conspired with the richest parents at Willowgrove to scam their kids into college in exchange for a lot of money and a higher ACT score average to lure in new students.

Dixon, whose dad paid at least $30,000 total to have a proctor look the other way while an Auburn senior with a fake ID took the test under Dixon’s name, has ghosted completely. Mackenzie was spotted melting down in the bathroom, swearing to everyone within earshot that she had no idea her parents paid to have her answers switched with someone else’s. Rumor has it Emma Grace told her that if she wanted people to believe things she says, she shouldn’t have lied about giving her best friend’s crush a handjob at her birthday party.

And Shara—Shara never shows up to school at all. Chloe imagines her in the Wheeler mansion, handing her mom a cucumber water and a Xanax while they meet with the family attorney.

Could she really not have known?

At lunch, Ash asks, “Who do you think did it?”

The choir room is a lot more full than usual, since Georgia invited Summer and Benjy invited Ace, and Ash has somehow convinced Jake and April to stop by and watch them play Breath of the Wild on the Switch they snuck into school. On the top row of the risers, Rory and Smith are having an animated discussion about either poetry or Dragon Ball Z—it’s impossible to tell.

“My money’s on Brooklyn Bennett,” Benjy says. “Total Brooklyn move. Plus, she has means and motive.”

“Nah, it was that kid with the tube socks,” Summer says. “The walking YouTube algorithm. He’s obsessed with ACT scores and loves conspiracy theories.”

“Drew Taylor?” Ash says. “He doesn’t have the range.”

“What even happens now?” Georgia asks, reaching over to steal one of Summer’s Doritos.

Ace, who has been doing wall sits for five minutes straight, pauses mid-squat to say, “Dixon said his dad is going to handle it because he’s a lawyer. Are you allowed to be your own lawyer? Is that a thing?”

“Yes, that’s a thing, Ace,” Georgia says patiently.

In Willowgrove fashion, the well of gossip is bottomless. Apparently, Wheeler’s barricaded himself in his office and is only speaking to legal counsel, entirely ignoring the Willowgrove church board that runs the school and presides over the administration. Nobody knows if he’s going to get arrested or get fired or what. Cracks are forming in the Wheeler empire, and the craziest part is, nobody knows who put them there.

Chloe notices, though, as they scatter into the hall and toward sixth hour, that there’s one person who doesn’t look surprised at this news at all.

She cuts out of seventh hour early—no way in hell is Rory staying the whole day during Taint Week. In-Between Week. Whatever.

She catches him reversing out of his parking spot, and he has to slam on the brakes to stop his back bumper from taking Chloe out at the knees.

He sticks his head out the window. “Jesus Christ, Green!”

“Did you do it?” she asks him directly, coming around to his window. “Wheeler’s emails?”

“What?” he says. “No.”

She eyes him: one hand fidgeting on the steering wheel, elbow propped up a bit too casually on the console.

“I don’t believe you,” she says. “What aren’t you telling me?”

He sighs, dropping his head against the headrest.

“Do you know how I got this car?” he finally says.

Always with the cryptic questions. Rory is like a bag of right angles with a secret.

“We’ve been through this. Rhetorical questions only work if you don’t have to explain why you’re asking them.”

“Do you want me to tell you what I know or not?”

“Okay,” Chloe groans.

“So,” Rory goes on, “my stepdad gave it to me. He’s never given me a gift my whole life, but last year he springs this sweet-ass vintage convertible on me out of nowhere. Sus as fuck. So I went through his office when he wasn’t home, and I figured out that he bought the car off his brother in cash since all of his shit was about to get seized, because he got caught paying off the principal of his kid’s school for ACT answers.”

“Okay…”

“So, when we were in Wheeler’s office looking for Shara’s note,” Rory continues, “I saw some papers in the desk, and they looked kind of like what I saw in my stepdad’s office. So I took some pictures, and when Shara got back I … may have, uh, asked her to look at them to be sure.”

“But—why Shara? Why wouldn’t you give it to somebody who could actually do something about it?”

Rory waves a hand and jerks his chin at her in a sort of duh gesture. “Shara did do something about it.”

“She—” There is no possible way what Rory’s suggesting is true. “You think Shara threw her own dad—and herself—under the bus?”

“She was the only person I told,” Rory says with a shrug. “I didn’t even send her copies of the pictures, so I guess she got her hands on the originals. But I don’t care what happens to Wheeler, or anyone in those emails. You know I don’t give a shit about the ACT. I just thought Shara deserved to know.”

Once, Chloe considered herself better than people like Rory, who act like they’ve beaten the system by choosing not to care. But it’s obvious from the look on Rory’s face that he does care, in different ways about different things. Maybe pretending is its own high school survival strategy.

“But why would she do this?” Chloe asks.

“Why are we boycotting graduation?” Rory asks. “Same thing, different approach.”

He shrugs again and turns his music back up.

“Anyway,” Rory says, shifting out of park. “I got plans. Bye.”

He leaves Chloe standing in the parking lot, speechless.

---

All Chloe can do is get in her car and drive home.

At a red light, she thinks about how Shara could have taken what Rory gave her to the grave.

Shara could have let her dad keep terrorizing teenagers from the Willowgrove throne until he retired, and it would have been easy. Collect college tuition, have an expensive wedding to some guy in a camo tux, settle down for a long, comfortable life as the queen of False Beach, the heiress of the perfect family.

That’s what everyone expected of her. It’s certainly what Chloe expected.

But instead, Shara logged into her dad’s email and printed every receipt she could find. She plastered the school with them to make sure he couldn’t hide it. The church board may not care if the principal is a bigot, but it’ll be harder to make this go away.

She did it even though she knew she’d be taking herself down with him.

When Chloe gets home, she goes straight to her bedroom. She changes out of her uniform, and then reaches for her nightstand, where a creased, grass-stained pink card waits. She hasn’t opened it, but she couldn’t quite stop herself from salvaging it from the flowerbeds.

Chloe,

I threw it away because it meant too much to me . I hope you understand .

Yours,

Shara

P. S . As a graduation gift to you, I promise this is the last card you’ ll ever get from me. I’ ll leave you alone . Cross my heart.

She sits down on the bed.

Somewhere, glowing in Chloe’s mind, Shara is tearing apart a library trash can and telling her parents a lie about a broken clasp in PE class. She’s praying alone in an empty sanctuary. She’s drawing the blinds so nobody can see her faking sick while Smith is on TV. She’s shredding the sheet music she read for Ace while she uploads a stock photo of a mission trip that never happened. She’s covering her own tracks. She’s coming all the way to Chloe’s house to leave one last card, smoothing the tape onto the glass with her finger, letting her go.

Shara doesn’t throw things away because they mean nothing to her. She throws things away because they mean too much.

It’s a standardized logic and reasoning question: If it’s true that Shara did the terrible things in her notes, and it’s also true that Shara can only tell lies, then the terrible things must be only part of the story. The other part, still hiding behind all the smoke and mirrors and studied indifference, is somebody who cares. A lot, in a very specific way, about a few, select people and a few, select things.

If there’s one thing Chloe knows, it’s the danger of being yourself at Willowgrove, in False Beach. Everything she likes about herself is a liability here. You hide the things that matter most before anyone can use them against you.

That’s what Shara did. That’s what Shara does.

Finally, finally, she gets it.

Shara isn’t a monster inside of a beautiful girl, or a beautiful girl inside of a monster. She’s both, one inside of the other inside of the other.

And that truth—the whole truth of Shara—leaves no room to pretend anymore. Neither of them did all this for a title. That’s what Chloe was afraid of her friends seeing. That’s where the trail led. That’s why she couldn’t let it end.

“Oh my God,” Chloe says out loud. Her brain is overheating, probably. “I’m in love with a monster turducken.”