Chapter 23

23

DAYS SINCE CHLOE CLIMBED THROUGH SHARA’S WINDOW (THE SECOND TIME): 0

They jump the fence and take off running.

Shara’s fast when she wants to be, which Chloe probably should have expected. They clear Rory’s yard in seconds. As soon as they’re around the corner, Shara grabs her hand, and Chloe nearly shouts a laugh at the feeling of Shara’s fingers between hers. This is really happening, huh?

The dolphin fountain is overflowing now, spilling laundry suds all over the pristine grass and puddling around Chloe’s tires.

“Where are we going?” Shara asks her.

“My house!” Chloe says, out of breath. “My moms have pottery class in Birmingham on Monday nights.”

“Okay,” Shara says. She releases Chloe’s hand, breaking for the driver’s side. “Throw me the keys.”

“It’s my car,” Chloe points out.

Shara flips her hair over her shoulder, like that’s irrelevant. “I’m fast.”

She’s never considered “getaway driving” as one of Shara’s skills, but she has to admit, Shara’s been good at everything else she’s tried to do so far. She loops around to the passenger side and tosses the keys over the hood.

“Don’t wreck it or it’s my ass.”

Shara catches the keys in one hand and rolls her eyes. “I’m a great driver.”

And then she’s sliding into the driver seat, stealing the sunglasses out of Chloe’s cup holder and putting them on.

It takes half a minute for Shara to turn Chloe’s hand-me-down Camry into a music video. She rolls the windows down and takes the right turn out of the country club toward Chloe’s house without asking for directions, and she’s right—she is a good driver. She stays perfectly between the lines. One hand on the wheel, pink hair flying, knees apart under her church dress. They pass a car with a missing headlight, and Shara slaps the ceiling.

Chloe wonders how a month away turned Shara into this, but when Shara shoots her a look over the top of her sunglasses, she remembers that Shara’s always been this person. This is what I’ve been trying to tell you, she wrote on a card stuck under an auditorium seat. Shara’s not nice. Shara’s so many more important things than nice.

Then they get to Chloe’s house, and there Shara is, standing in Chloe’s kitchen, next to Chloe’s mama’s boob painting. Titania winds around her ankles before slinking out of the kitchen.

They’re alone. This is real.

Chloe realizes that she’s never actually been the one to kiss Shara first. She doesn’t know how to do it.

“Do you—” Chloe says. One of the crystal wind chimes is turning in the window, and the light falls across Shara’s face in a Botticelli swipe from cheek to jaw. “Do you, um, want something to drink?”

“Do y’all have sweet tea?” Shara asks.

Chloe beams a telepathic thank-you to her mom. “I do, actually.”

She pours two glasses. She even gets Shara a straw and a little paper cocktail napkin out of the junk drawer.

“Well, aren’t you a nice Southern hostess,” Shara says, watching Chloe add ice cubes to her glass. Chloe glances up and finds her smirking.

When Shara looks at her like that, all airy and sly, it makes Chloe think of the first time her mama brought home an icebox pie. It was strawberries and cream, her mom’s favorite, and the whole thing seemed to be a feat of mechanical physics. It didn’t make sense how the strawberries held effortlessly together when you sliced it, or how the cloud of meringue sat weightless on top. She remembers studying the layers from the side and having the inexplicable thought, This is a Shara Wheeler kind of pretty.

God. Shall I compare thee to an icebox pie? Couldn’t be gayer if she tried.

“I’m so stupid,” Chloe realizes out loud.

“No, you’re not,” Shara says. “You’re very smart. That’s our whole thing.”

“But you—this—ugh,” Chloe says. “It’s so—obvious. How come I didn’t figure it out sooner?”

“Took me a while too,” Shara says, and Chloe pushes the sweet tea out of the way and kisses the smirk off her lips.

They leave the glasses sweating on the counter and drift to Chloe’s bedroom, where Shara spends ten minutes touching everything. She examines the framed photos on the dresser and desk and scrutinizes the skincare products on the bathroom counter and flips through the NYU brochures.

“I don’t understand why anyone needs this many editions of Anne of Green Gables,” Shara says, thumbing the green spine of the ’90s edition Chloe inherited from her mama, and Chloe rolls her eyes and sits on the bed.

“You’re so nosy,” Chloe says, as if she minds.

“At least I didn’t break into your house to do this,” Shara says, “unlike some people I could mention.”

She gives Chloe that look again, and Chloe groans.

“Rory.”

“Smith, actually.”

“Whatever,” Chloe says. “Can you come back over here?”

Shara’s face goes serious.

“I’m, um,” she says. She looks at Chloe on the bed. “I’m gonna need to take it slow.”

“That’s fine.”

“I’m not saving myself for marriage or anything, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Shara adds, so defensive that it sounds like a lie. “I’m just not ready for the other stuff.”

Chloe’s brow furrows. “I wasn’t planning on doing any other stuff?”

“You weren’t like … expecting that?”

“Did you think I was?”

Shara looks away, shrugging. “Kind of.”

The answer startles a laugh out of her before she can cover her mouth, and Shara’s instantly glaring.

“Sorry, sorry!” Chloe says. “But, Shara, you’ve known me for four years. When have I ever given you the impression that I’m getting laid? I’ve never even dated anyone.”

Shara folds her arms unhappily. “Yeah, but you’re from LA and your moms probably actually explained stuff to you. And you’re so … confident.”

“Okay, well,” Chloe says, beginning to count off on her fingers. “One, you can’t tell anyone I said this, but being from LA does not mean I’m cool or know anything about anything. Two.” She holds up a second finger. “Yes, my moms did explain different kinds of sex to me, but it was such an embarrassing conversation that I don’t even remember most of it. And three.” A final finger. “If I seem confident, it’s because I have to. You, of all people, know what I mean.”

Shara considers this, then edges toward the bed.

“Okay,” she says. Her knees brush against Chloe’s, white eyelet lace skimming skin.

Chloe takes Shara’s hand and lays it against the side of her neck, and Shara’s palm presses into her skin.

“Don’t be nervous,” Chloe says. “Just like, pretend I’m the AP Calc test.”

Shara’s glare flickers back. “I should have let you fall out the window.”

“I have scratch paper,” Chloe says, “you can check my desk—”

Shara’s hand drops from Chloe’s neck to her shoulder, and then she’s pushing Chloe down on the bed and kissing her, one hand pinning her to the mattress and the other on her waist. It’s the first time Shara’s kissed her with both intent and confidence, and it’s about as thorough and heart-stopping as can be expected of a perfectionist with a competitive streak.

Chloe’s never been kissed on a bed before. It’s her first time feeling the corner of a throw pillow wedged under her head while the mattress springs push her back up into someone else’s body. She’s never kissed anybody like this.

She’s glad it’s Shara. Nobody else would have felt important enough.

---

“You know,” Chloe says, “there’s a lot we still need to talk about.”

Shara props herself up on a pillow. “Like what?”

They’ve made out for—well, Chloe doesn’t know how long. It felt like a long time. There’s a faint red mark blooming on Shara’s neck, which is probably the coolest thing Chloe has ever seen in her life.

“Do you want to start with the way you full-on staged your own disappearance to sabotage my academic career,” Chloe says, “or would you rather discuss how you may have sent your dad to federal prison?”

“He has a very expensive lawyer,” Shara says. “He’ll be fine.”

“Okay, so the first one, then.”

Shara sighs, ducking her head into her own shoulder so her hair falls across her face. “I don’t know what else you want me to say, Chloe. Do you really want me to apologize?”

“It’s more that I want to know how you feel about it now.”

“I feel … less confused,” Shara says slowly. “This has all been real informative.”

“So, you don’t regret anything?”

“I don’t know. There’s still this part of me that thinks I’ve ruined my whole life. But there’s another part of me that thinks ruining my life sounds kind of nice.” She pauses to think. Chloe can admit it now: She loves watching Shara think. “I could have done better by Smith and Rory. That’s the one thing. But I already knew they both deserved better than me.”

“You’re not—”

“I wasn’t fishing for a compliment,” Shara says. “I’m not bad. I’m bad for them.”

Chloe bites her lip. “And for me?”

Shara turns her head so that they’re inches apart on the pillow, nose to nose, eyelashes almost brushing.

“How’d you say it?” she says. “You were the only one it could be.”

Warmth bubbles up from the pit of her stomach. Her mouth pops open to speak, but nothing comes out.

“Why do you look so surprised?” Shara says irritably. “You’re like, the girl.”

“What girl?”

“The girl,” Shara says. “You know everyone is scared of Chloe Green, right?”

“Yeah, because I’m a bitch.”

“That,” Shara says, smiling when Chloe pulls a face, “and also because you showed up one day from California and did whatever you wanted. Nobody at Willowgrove knows what to do with that. I sure didn’t.”

Shara thinks she’s The Girl? But Shara’s The Girl. What do you say when The Girl tells you that you’re The Girl to her?

Before she can guess, the front door rattles open.

“Chloe?” her mom’s voice calls from across the house. “You home?”

Shara jolts upright.

“I thought they had pottery class?”

“They do!”

The house is small enough that even if both her moms stopped to drop their shoes and bags at the door, at least one of them should be to the living room by now. Shara jumps out of bed, and Chloe shouts out a preemptive, “Hey! You got back fast!”

“Yeah,” says her mama. “The last part of the class was bisque firing. What kind of amateurs do they think we are? We figured we might as well come home for dinner— Oh!”

Her mama freezes in the doorway.

The scene: Chloe, wedging herself into the doorway, smiling through smudged makeup. Shara, near the desk, Mrs. Dalloway upside down in her hands like she’s in Chloe’s room to discuss Virginia Woolf and nothing else. Her mama in clay-splattered chambray, buffering.

Chloe’s mom appears over her mama’s shoulder and says, without a moment’s hesitation, “Oh, hi! You’re Wheeler’s kid, aren’t you?”

“We were studying,” Chloe says.

“Finals were last week, Chlo,” her mom points out.

“I should go,” Shara says.

“You don’t have a car,” Chloe reminds her.

“Tell you what,” Chloe’s mom announces in that broad voice she has when she’s about to recalibrate an entire situation. “I got the stuff to make spaghetti and a half gallon of strawberry ice cream from Webster’s in the freezer. Why don’t you stay for dinner, and Chloe can drive you home after?”

“Mom,” Chloe hisses. It’s way too early for Shara to experience her mama’s weird hemp tea or the bad DeNiro impression her mom does when she cooks Italian.

But to Chloe’s surprise and horror, Shara says, “Okay.”

And the next thing Chloe knows, Shara’s helping with the sides while her mom whips up a quick red sauce and Chloe boils the pasta, and they’re all pretending it’s normal and not absolutely the most bizarre thing that’s happened in Chloe’s entire life.

My moms walked in on me and Shara hooking up and convinced her to stay for dinner and now Shara is making garlic bread and my mom is telling her about how I punched a mall Santa when I was five,she texts Georgia.

“Top five Chloe moment,” her mom concludes.

Georgia immediately texts back, SLDJFASDLAFAKLSAS NO followed by, SHARA??? FINALLY????? HOW??????? in rapid succession. And then, summer is losing her mind rn.

What happens next is her fault. While she’s occupied with her phone, she misses her chance to intervene when Shara asks her mom, “How did y’all meet?”

“No, Shara, don’t—” Chloe attempts, but her mom has already dramatically put down her wooden spoon.

“The year was 1997,” she says.

“Oh God,” Chloe moans.

“I was a bright-eyed, nineteen-year-old ingenue fresh out of Alabama, bartending to pay my way through trade school, and there was this waitress, Jess, and she was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen in my entire life. Perfect button nose. Killer smile. Eyes like a forest at night, like something you want to wander into—”

“Mom, please.”

“—and I’d never been in love before, but I saw her in her little apron, and I felt what I had been waiting my whole life to feel. And it only took me six months to work up the nerve to ask her on a date.”

“And then she tried to kiss me at the end of the night and found out I didn’t realize it was a date,” her mama interjects.

“And so we got to have a second first date, and we’ve been living life like every day is our first date ever since.”

Chloe turns to Shara to mouth an embarrassed apology, but Shara only smiles a little and returns to the bread with her face slightly pink. She remembers what Shara wrote in her first note, that she’d heard the stories of Chloe’s mom before she ever met Chloe.

First Georgia, now Shara—come to the Green house, teenage queers of False Beach, for the first non-depressing glimpse of your future.

They eat dinner, and then, over bowls of ice cream, her mama asks, “So, Shara, where are you going in the fall?”

“I’m actually thinking about taking a year off,” Shara says, catching Chloe by surprise. “For a while, I felt like I should stay here, but I—I’ve been thinking that might not be a good idea for me anymore. I don’t know where else I would go though. It’s like, the whole world is here.”

Her mom nods thoughtfully, setting down her spoon.

“You know what’s wild?” she says. “When you’re born and raised in False Beach, you think Webster’s is how strawberry ice cream is supposed to taste. You can go to the fanciest ice cream parlor in LA or New York and have the most incredible scoop of fresh, artisanal strawberry ice cream in the world, but it’s still gonna be disappointing, because it doesn’t taste like the only strawberry ice cream you had for the first eighteen years of your life, when you were learning what ice cream was supposed to taste like.”

Shara nods slowly, turning the melting lump of ice cream in her bowl over and over with her spoon.

“But when I left,” Chloe’s mom goes on, “I figured something out real quick: It’s not the whole world. Just because everyone here knows who you are, and everyone talks about everyone else’s business, that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to be the person you know you are. There are things out there for you that you haven’t even thought of yet, that you don’t even know how to think of yet. Who you are here doesn’t have to be the same as who you are out there. And if the person you feel like you have to be in this town doesn’t feel right to you, you’re allowed to leave. You’re allowed to exist. Even if it means existing somewhere else.”

No one says anything, but Chloe’s mama reaches over to rest a hand on her mom’s.

“Anyway,” her mom says, “you wanna hear my DeNiro impression?”

“Mom.”

---

Before they leave for Shara’s house, she puts the necklace in her pocket. When they hit a red light, she hands it to Shara.

“I would apologize for being a freak and keeping it all this time,” Chloe says, “but you’ve done weirder stuff, so let’s call it even.”

Shara stares down at it as the light turns green.

“How did you know it was mine?”

“I, um.” Chloe keeps her eyes on the road. “I saw you. You didn’t notice me, but I was in the library that day.”

“Oh,” Shara says. “That’s embarrassing.”

“Can I ask you something?” Chloe waits for Shara to nod and continues, “What made you decide to get rid of it?”

Shara is quiet, and when Chloe glances over, she’s latching the chain around her neck.

“It wasn’t like anything happened,” Shara says. “My parents gave it to me when I turned thirteen, with this whole letter about how it represented me becoming a woman of Christ. It was like wearing a little travel-size version of their expectations. And everyone could see it, and I couldn’t control what they thought it meant to me, and I didn’t want anyone to think the way I love God is the same way other people at Willowgrove love God. It was just—it was too much. I knew my parents would notice if I stopped wearing it, so it had to go.”

“You came back for it though,” Chloe points out gently.

“Yeah, well,” Shara says. “Sometimes I come back for stuff.”

They pull up to Shara’s street, and Shara’s dad is waiting on the front porch swing in his Willowgrove polo, looking serious as an altar call. Last time Chloe checked, he was supposed to be in handcuffs. Maybe he’s already out on bail.

“I guess they noticed I left again,” Shara says.

“Do you think he knows what you did?” Chloe asks.

“Maybe,” Shara says. “But he’s got bigger problems than me right now, so maybe I can get out of False Beach before I have to deal with it.”

Shara slips the necklace under the neckline of her dress and straightens her shoulders, and Chloe realizes this is Shara when nobody’s looking. Born so smart and so curious and so fucking proud that not even Jesus could convince her she was wrong. Saved by God first and her God complex second. Going through hell and painting pink nail polish over it.

“You’re kind of a badass,” Chloe says. She’s trying not to look too impressed, but she knows it’s not working, because Shara’s mouth tugs into that satisfied smirk.

“Wow, you’re like, obsessed with me,” Shara says.

Chloe turns her face away. “Bye.”

Shara laughs and kisses Chloe hard on the cheek before she goes.