Chapter 24

24

DAYS WITH SHARA (OFFICIALLY): 5

DAYS WITH SHARA (EMOTIONALLY): 1,363

DAYS UNTIL GRADUATION: 0

“You are not wearing a flannel to graduation,” Chloe says.

Rory pulls a face at her and the black dress shirt she’s holding up, unearthed from the depths of his closet.

“It’s a protest graduation,” Rory says. “Why does it matter what I wear?”

“Because Smith is gonna want to take photos, and you’re gonna be mad if you look stupid in them.”

He sighs, then snatches the shirt out of her hands. “Fine.”

“You should wear it with that chain you like,” says Shara’s voice.

She’s in Rory’s window, where the morning glows around her through the flowering dogwood and crepe myrtles, and under her burgundy graduation gown she’s wearing the same simple white sundress she wore in Chloe’s bed. Chloe can’t believe she’s dating someone who comes with her own reel of cinematic entrances.

(They are dating, right? They haven’t technically had the conversation, but trying to ruin someone’s life because you’re too attracted to them has to count.)

“Hi,” Chloe says.

“Hi,” Shara says, and then she looks at Chloe in that intense way she does, taking in her burgundy lipstick and the green dress she picked out carefully from a secondhand store in Birmingham. Pink blooms in her cheeks.

“Jesus, are you done checking her out?” Rory says.

Chloe’s jaw drops. “That’s what that is?”

“Shut up, Rory,” Shara says, pretending to fight it when Chloe pulls her in to her side.

All of their respective friends are scattered this morning. Benjy’s at home explaining to his parents why exactly he’s not attending his own graduation ceremony, and Ash had to pick up a last-minute shift at the paint-your-own-pottery studio where they sometimes work on summer break. Georgia and Summer are already at the dealership helping Summer’s parents, as evidenced by the seventeen nervous meeting-the-parents-who-kinda-know-but-don’t-know texts Chloe’s fielded this morning. April, Jake, and Ace are all probably still asleep, which leaves—

“Oh damn, it’s a party,” Smith says from Rory’s bedroom door.

Maybe it should feel weird for the four of them to stand in the same room like this, but it’s not. It’s just … funny, like how it’s funny now that Shara lived on a boat for a month or that Rory and Smith ever thought they were competing for Shara’s attention and not each other’s. High school is over, and everything is ridiculous.

Rory hands Smith a white dogwood blossom and says, “I got you these. I thought you might like to wear one or something.”

“Is that why you were on the roof this morning?” Shara says. “I was wondering.”

“They’re fresher if you get them off the tree than the ground, okay?” Rory mumbles.

“I love them,” Smith says, grinning as he takes it. “Thank you.”

He spends a minute fussing in the mirror on Rory’s closet door, trying to get the flower and cap to work together with his hair. He’s been growing it out for a month now, and it’s grown fast into short, dense curls.

“Hang on,” Shara says. “I have an idea.”

Smith lets her take his cap from him, and she produces a few hairpins from her dress pocket. She folds the elastic under and passes him the pins, pointing out the most strategic places for him to pin it into his hair.

“There,” she says, plucking up one of the flowers from the desk and tucking it behind his ear.

Smith turns to examine himself in the mirror again. He tilts his head from side to side, and then he catches Shara’s eye over his shoulder in the reflection and grins. She smiles back.

“Needs more flowers,” he concludes.

“More flowers,” Rory repeats with a nod before climbing dutifully out of the window.

He returns with two fresh handfuls of dogwood and crepe myrtle blossoms in white and pale pink, and Smith carefully twists them through his hair until it looks like there’s a garden growing straight out of his scalp. At his request, Chloe smudges a hint of gold eyeliner around the corners of his eyes. By the time they’re done, he looks like a god of the forest in white Air Forces.

Rory stares at him from across the room with wide eyes, like he’s never seen anything quite like him before. None of them have, really. There’s nobody like Smith Parker.

---

At the dealership across the highway from Willowgrove, Brooklyn descends on them with a clipboard before Chloe’s even shut the door of Rory’s car behind her.

“Do we all have our caps and gowns?” she asks. “Again, do we all have our caps and gowns? Rory?”

“It’s not even a real graduation, Brooklyn,” Rory grumbles.

“Not without caps and gowns it’s not,” Brooklyn says. It looks like it’s going to be a standoff between an unstoppable force (Brooklyn’s dedication to micromanaging anything that can possibly be micromanaged) and an immovable object (Rory’s refusal to do anything he is told to do, ever) when Smith appears over Rory’s shoulder.

“He has it,” Smith says, cheerfully slapping a folded gown and mortarboard against Rory’s chest. “Forgot it in the car.”

“I’m not wearing it,” Rory says.

“Yes, you are,” Brooklyn argues.

“It looks cute on you,” Smith says.

“Ugh.” Rory rolls his eyes so hard that his whole head goes around in an annoyed circle. “Fine.”

“Good,” Brooklyn says. She spins, cups her hands around her mouth, and yells, “They got theirs!”

Summer, who is standing on top of an ice chest in the middle of the lot with a megaphone in one hand, says through the crackly speaker, “Thanks, Brooklyn, but you really don’t have to take this job so seriously.”

“Agree to disagree!” Brooklyn yells.

Georgia’s standing next to Summer’s ice chest with a tank of helium. Summer leans over and holds the megaphone in front of Georgia’s mouth.

“Hey, Chloe,” she says into it.

Brooklyn puts them to work. Most of the cars have been moved to the back lot to make room for a small stage and a single mic stand, the former on loan from Summer’s parents’ church and the latter from Rory’s A⁄V collection. Ace and Smith and all the other jocks are tasked with the manual labor of setting up chairs and tables, while Ash and the art club kids hang up signs and Benjy directs some of the choir contingent in assembling a balloon arch.

Across the two-lane highway, the rest of the class of ’22 starts pulling into the student lot, posing for pictures outside the auditorium in their caps and gowns. A few of them stop to stare over at the dealership, where a pink-haired Shara is on Smith’s shoulders, hanging a sign that says BLESSED ARE THE FRUITS with FRUITS in glitter glue. That’s got to be one of Benjy’s.

This is part of it, after all. There will always be people who like Willowgrove the way it is. The Mackenzies and Emma Graces and Dixons, the Drew Taylors, but also the quiet kids who feel safe there. Some of them have been in so deep for so long, they’ll always be happier like this. Some of them are too scared, or didn’t want to have that conversation with their parents. Some of them will reconcile these two sides of the highway in their hearts years from now.

Chloe’s starting to understand. She can climb on a stage in a parking lot and try to change something, but she can’t decide the rest for anyone else.

While Brooklyn has the assigning and assembling and decisive pointing covered, Summer plants herself in front of the local TV news crew as soon as they arrive. Her dad stands at her shoulder while she aces the interviews and smiles her pretty, dimpled smile. When asked, he explains that his business is happy to provide a place for anyone to stand up for something.

“Ever thought about being a politician’s wife?” Chloe whispers to Georgia as they tie off balloons. “Summer’s kind of crushing this.”

“Nah,” Georgia says. “If I wanted that, I’d date Brooklyn.”

Chloe glances across the lot to where Brooklyn is shouting at a bunch of band kids. “Yeah. That girl is going to be a White House intern before she’s old enough to buy beer.”

Georgia laughs and starts measuring out ribbons. “Where are your moms, by the way? Didn’t you say they were coming?”

“Yeah,” Chloe says. She glances at her phone. “They should have been here by now. I wonder—”

Before she can finish the sentence, her mom’s work truck comes trundling up to the lot.

There are cardboard boxes sliding around the bed, and when it pulls up closer, Chloe can see three people in the cab. Her mom parks beside the TV news van and climbs out in her nicest pair of coveralls, followed by her mama, and then—

“Is that Mr. Truman?”

Chloe passes her balloon off to Georgia and jogs over.

“Sorry we’re late!” her mom says, circling around to the back of the truck and unlatching the tailgate. “We had to pick some stuff up at the last minute.”

“Mom,” Chloe says, “what did you do?”

Mr. Truman reaches into the bed and slaps one of the boxes.

“She knows a guy who has access to the school on weekends,” he says. “I’m not saying that guy is me, but, you know. Always helps to know a guy.” He picks up the box and grunts. “Jesus Christmas, this is heavy.”

Mr. Truman and his imminent back sprain shuffle away as Chloe’s mama joins her at the side of the truck.

“We did something very cool,” she says. Gently, she rearranges a piece of Chloe’s bangs. Chloe scrunches her nose and puts it back. “Your mother is very hot and daring. I want you to know that.”

Her mom finally slides the remaining box up to the tailgate and opens it.

“Mom,” Chloe gasps when she sees what’s inside.

The box contains two dozen thick, burgundy leather envelopes, each one embossed with the Willowgrove crest in white. Her mom takes out the topmost folder and opens it.

It winds her to finally see it in real life. The fancy gothic font, the shiny gold seal, the ridiculous, beautiful full name her moms picked out for her.

This certifies that Chloe Andromeda Green has satisfactorily completed the course prescribed by the Alabama State Board of Education for the accredited high schools—

“This is why y’all asked for the names of everyone who was coming today?” Chloe demands. “I thought Mama was going to make personalized cookies again.”

“Oh, I did,” she says, producing a Tupperware of frosted sugar cookies. “The diplomas were Jack’s idea. Helped to have a list though.”

Chloe looks over at Mr. Truman, who’s huffing and puffing as Shara helps him set the box of diplomas down on the stage, and back to her moms.

“I love you so much,” Chloe says, folding herself into her mom’s arms.

“I love you too, coconut,” her mom says thickly in her ear. “I’m so proud of you.”

“Don’t make me cry,” Chloe says. “I spent forever on my eyeliner.”

Her mom sniffs. “God, you are your mother’s child.”

“Hold that for one more second,” her mama says. “I almost got a good picture.”

“Mama, stooooop.”

---

After Rory shreds “Pomp and Circumstance” on his Flying V, before Mr. Truman starts handing out diplomas, he leans into the microphone.

“I’d like to—” A squawk of feedback. “Lord in heaven. I’d like to invite someone up to say a few words. The valedictorian of Willowgrove Christian Academy’s class of 2022: Chloe Green.”

A sound rushes up to her ears, and it takes her a second to identify it: a round of applause. She’s had a lot of fantasies of this moment, but this isn’t part of most of them. She always expected everyone to sort of tolerate her at the podium. But when she looks around, Georgia is whooping through cupped hands, and Smith is pounding his feet against the ground, and somewhere in the back, her moms are blasting an air horn.

She turns to her left, to Shara, who’s looking at her like she did on the bow of that sailboat, like the logic of the world all comes down to Chloe being there and she’d be disappointed to see anyone else.

“Make it a good one,” Shara says, and she pushes Chloe to her feet.

From the makeshift stage, Chloe can see it all. April and Jake with their feet up on the chairs in front of them, Brooklyn fussing with the tassel on her cap, Ash’s glue-and-glitter-decorated mortarboard flashing in the sun, Summer fanning herself with a paper plate, Smith’s and Rory’s shoulders pressed together in the front row, the TV cameras, her moms huddled by the news vans with Summer’s parents.

She reaches into the neck of her gown and pulls a sweaty sheet of loose-leaf paper out of her bra. Last night, around midnight, she finally figured out what she wanted to say and scribbled it down in the nearest notebook she could find.

“Hi, guys,” she says into the mic. “I’m Chloe, obviously. Um. I’ve imagined this moment a lot. Pretty much every day, actually. I don’t even know how many drafts of this speech I’ve written, but I ended up scrapping them all. None of the old versions were right, because they were written for a different place with different people in it.

“A lot of those drafts were angry or had a lot of curse words or were just kind of mean, which I’m not really sorry for, because Willowgrove can be pretty mean, so I think it’s fair. But I’ve learned more about Willowgrove in the past month than I have in the past four years, and that’s not really the speech I want to make anymore.

“When I first moved to False Beach, I was pretty sure I was smarter and better than anyone in Alabama. I found my friends, and I decided those were the only people at Willowgrove worth my time. I was convinced that I knew, with absolute certainty, who did and did not deserve a chance. But then, about a month ago, someone kissed me.”

She looks out at the crowd, to where Shara’s smiling a soft smile under the Alabama sun. She sent Shara the speech last night for her notes, so she already knows most of what Chloe’s going to say. She even ghostwrote a line or two.

“It’s a long story—like, really long—but the short version is, that kiss brought people into my life who I’d never even spoken to before, and I discovered we had more in common than I ever would have guessed. I learned that there are jocks who love theater and stoners who know a lot more about the world than I do. I learned that a lot of us—a lot more than I thought—are doing whatever it takes to survive in a place that doesn’t feel like it wants us. I learned that survival is heavy on so many of us. And on a personal level, I realized I’d gotten so used to that weight, I stopped noticing how much of myself I’d dedicated to carrying it.

“A lot of high school is about figuring out what matters to you and what doesn’t. For some of us, popularity matters. For others, it’s grades or dating or extracurriculars or our parents’ opinions or all of the above. Sometimes, it’s a question of whether anything that happens in these four years matters at all. And it does, but not in the way a lot of people think.

“High school matters because it shapes how we see the world when we enter it. We carry the hurt with us, the confirmed fears, the insecurities people used against us. But we also carry the moment when someone gave us a chance, even though they didn’t have to.”

She glances up at Georgia.

“The moment we watched a friend make a choice that we didn’t understand at first because they’re brave in a different way.”

She finds Mr. Truman in the crowd, sweating rings in his dress shirt.

“The moment a teacher told us they believed in us.”

Benjy and Ash both smile back when she looks at them.

“The moment we told someone who we are and they accepted us without question.”

In the front row, Smith and Rory are easy to find.

“The moment we fell in love for the first time.”

She drops her eyes back to her paper.

“Most of the things we’re feeling right now are things we’re feeling for the first time. We’re learning what it means to feel them. What we can mean to one another. Of course that matters. And this, here, right now—even if nothing changes, even if all we can do today is prove that we exist, and that we’re not alone—I think it matters a whole fucking lot.”

She flips the page over. Almost done.

She takes one last look out at the crowd, and she thinks that this can be what it means—even only in part—to be from Alabama.

It’s her mom welcoming every one of her friends into their house without hesitation, Georgia hiking out to the cliffs to read a book from Belltower, Smith with flowers in his hair and Rory yanking down street signs, the stars above the lake and midnight drives, hand-painted signs and improvised spaces in parking lots. All the things that people can make False Beach into.

None of the people she loves in this town are separate from it. Benjy grew up on Dolly Parton. Ash named themself after Alabama ash trees.

And Shara—Shara’s an Alabama girl no matter what color she dyes her hair, and she’s always been an Alabama girl, every second she was breathing down Chloe’s neck. An Alabama girl outsmarted her with Shakespeare. An Alabama girl kissed her life into chaos.

She used to imagine lying to her future NYU classmates, telling them she never left California. Now she imagines telling them this.

“So, that’s the main thing I wanted to say,” Chloe goes on. “I also want to say thank you to a few people. To my friends, Georgia, Benjy, Ash—thank you for being my place here when I didn’t have anywhere else.

“To Smith and Rory, I will never stop feeling lucky to have gotten to know you.”

The last line on the page says, To Shara, but that’s all. She never could figure out what to say.

“And to the girl who kissed me,” she says, “I have done some of the best work of my life because of you. And I know you have done some of the best work of your life because of me. I don’t know a better way to explain what love means to two people like us.”

---

After the diplomas, while everyone’s squeezing together for photos and Chloe’s moms are busy wrangling her friends for a group shot, after the news crews have gotten their footage but before they’ve finished packing their cameras and big spongy microphones, Smith sidles up between Chloe and Shara.

“I got a question,” he says.

“Flowers still looking great,” Chloe says promptly.

“Appreciated,” he says. “What exactly is the church board planning to do about your dad, Shara?”

Shara sighs and shrugs. “I think they’re trying to throw enough money around to make it go away. They hired a legal team to shut down anybody who tries to post about it anywhere, and the only cop I’ve seen around my house is Mackenzie Harris’s dad, so.”

“So, in other words,” Smith says. He squints into the sun, eyes flashing gold. “If something’s gonna happen, the story has to get out of False Beach.”

“I guess so,” Shara says.

“All right,” Smith says as he leaves them, “I’m gonna go win somebody a broadcast journalism award.”

Smith Parker is always, always a quarterback. He’s a strategist. He plans five steps ahead. So, he’s subtle about swaggering up to a camera guy and slapping palms like they’re old friends. It looks natural when he leans in and says something to the guy that Chloe can’t hear, finishing off with a smile. Nobody would ever know what he’s done. Certainly not whoever updates his ESPN profile.

It takes another minute for the cameraman to whip around, grab his reporter, and yank her into the van.

They peel out of the dealership, cutting a U-turn in the middle of the highway to screech into the Willowgrove parking lot, gunning straight for the auditorium.

The nearest reporter, one from Birmingham, turns to his crew and says, “Pack y’all’s shit up now.”

When the auditorium doors swing open and grads come streaming out of the building, the crews are waiting. Principal Wheeler steps out of the air conditioning and directly into a mob of microphones.

From Chloe’s side, Shara shades her eyes with her hand and watches.

“Well,” she says, white teeth glinting, “bless his heart.”