Chapter 3

3

DAYS SINCE SHARA WHEELER LEFT: 3

DAYS UNTIL GRADUATION: 40

In her bedroom Tuesday afternoon, Chloe winds a silver chain around her finger and thinks of California.

Before freshman year, Chloe had only visited False Beach a few times. She always found it unbearable—no In-N-Out, no boba, only gas station Polar Pops and an Olive Garden with a two-hour wait on Fridays because it was the fanciest restaurant in town. (There have been rumors for years that a P.F. Chang’s is coming, but Chloe still thinks that’s a little too adventurous for False Beach.)

But when her grandma got sick and it was obvious she wasn’t getting better, her mama gave up her spot in the cast of the LA Opera and Chloe gave up her middle school friends and her twice-weekly sashimi for False Beach. That was four years ago.

Four years since she asked a girl in freshman bio why the chapter on sexual reproduction was taped shut and met Georgia, a Willowgrove student since kindergarten. Three and a half years since she ditched her goth phase and Georgia started keeping their five-year post-Willowgrove plan posted up in her locker. This year, Chloe and Benjy finally bullied Mr. Truman, the choir teacher, into choosingPhantom for the spring musical, and the two of them played Christine and Raoul, respectively.

And, it’s been four years since Chloe walked into her first class at Willowgrove and saw the girl from that billboard seated in the front row, highlighters lined up neatly. By the end of the day, she had heard: (1) That’s Shara Wheeler. (2) Shara Wheeler’s dad is Principal Wheeler, the man enforcing Willowgrove’s archaic rules. (3) Her family has more money than God. (4) Everyone—everyone—loves her.

Even Georgia, always unimpressed by Willowgrove in her own quiet way, said when Chloe asked that first week, “Yeah, honestly, Shara’s cool.”

Shara’s not cool. California was cool. Living in a place where it didn’t matter if everyone knew about her moms was cool. Shara is a vague mist of a person, checking all the right False Beach boxes so that everyone thinks they see a perfect girl in her place. What’s cool about that?

(No, Chloe still hasn’t found her own note from Shara. Yes, she has checked everywhere, including the pocket of the oxford that was pressed up against Shara’s cotton polo when they kissed.)

Chloe drops the delicate chain back into the drawer and shuts it, glaring at the bathroom mirror. Why is she looking at the only person in town immune to Shara Wheeler?

“You are cursed with flawless judgment,” Chloe says to her reflection.

In her room, she kicks a stack of college admissions booklets aside to reach her backpack. The hunt for her Shara note will have to wait for a couple of hours. She’s got a date with her French 4 final project, a full essay about uprisings in France from 1789 to 1832, which is due in three weeks. Georgia’s her partner.

“Mom, Titania ate my underwear again,” Chloe says as she sweeps into the kitchen.

Chloe’s mom, who is still wearing her work coveralls and shoving something enormous into the freezer, grunts out, “Sounds like a problem for someone who leaves their underwear on the floor, not me.”

“That’s the third pair this month. Can I have some money to go to Target tomorrow?”

Titania, the house cat in question, is perched on top of the refrigerator and surveying them both like a tiny panty-eating lord. She’s tempestuous and vindictive and has been a part of the Green household almost as long as Chloe has. Chloe’s moms like to blame her for Chloe’s personality.

“Check the change jar,” she says.

Chloe sighs and begins counting out quarters.

“What is that?” she asks, watching her mom rearrange frozen vegetables to make room for the mysterious icy bundle. “Did you kill someone?”

“Your mother,” she says as she finally manages to cram the thing in, “has requested a Southern feast when she gets home from Portugal this weekend. A very specific one.” She pats the hunk of meat once and turns to Chloe, a bit of short, dark hair falling over her forehead. She used to have Chloe help her dye it blue, but she’s kept it natural since the move. “This, my child, is a turducken.”

“You lost me at turd,” Chloe says. “But continue.”

“It’s a chicken stuffed inside a duck stuffed inside a turkey.”

“Where did you even get that?”

“I know a guy.”

“That’s … upsetting.”

Her mom nods and shuts the freezer. “My wife is a woman of refinement.”

Because Chloe and her mom were both miserable about the move, her West Coast mama resolved to be aggressively positive about discovering the South. She bought a red Bama shirt to wear in her vegetable garden and a matching set of houndstooth luggage for her work trips abroad. She even put up a framed photo of Dolly Parton on the kitchen windowsill. It’s a whole thing.

But her favorite activity has been seeking out every possible Southern delicacy. Back home, the most Alabama thing about their kitchen was the pitcher of sweet tea Chloe’s mom always kept in the fridge. Now, her mama has insisted on learning how to fry chicken thighs and green tomatoes, sampled each item on the Bojangles menu, and become a regular at every soul-food joint in town.

And apparently, she’s going to make Chloe eat some kind of nightmare poultry matryoshka, which is even worse than when she roasted a chicken by shoving a can of Miller Lite up its ass.

“I’m gonna walk across that stage to get my diploma and keep walking until I hit a city with a Trader Joe’s,” Chloe says.

“Hey.” Her mom folds her arms as she peers across the kitchen at her. “Is this normal baseline Chloe curmudgeon behavior, or are you cranky because you miss your mama? Is one mom not good enough for you?”

Chloe shrugs it off, gathering up her purse and keys from the table by the back door under one of her mama’s abstract paintings of boobs. “I’m fine.”

“Or is it whatever has been making you act weird since last week?”

“I’m fine!” Chloe snaps. “You try wearing bikini bottoms as underwear and see how pleasant you are!”

“Okay. But, you know. If you need to talk about anything. Girls, boys, whatever. The end of senior year brings up a lot of emotions for everyone. I know you’re—”

“Bye!” Chloe calls as she breaks for the door. If she slams it fast enough, she’s sure the ghost of Shara can’t follow.

---

It takes fifteen minutes to drive to the center of False Beach from Chloe’s house, and absolutely nothing of consequence but a Dairy Queen is passed along the way.

What the locals call “downtown” is a single main street lined with historic redbrick buildings and two-story shops pressed up against one another with iron balconies and Southern small-town charm. It all leads up to a white courthouse, towering with cast-iron pillars and a wide town square at its feet, Civil War era. There used to be some ugly Confederate monument at the square’s center, but two summers ago someone pulled it down in the middle of the night and rolled it into Lake Martin, which is the only cool thing that’s ever happened in False Beach. Last year, the city council held a contest to choose a new town mascot and installed a bronze statue of the winner: a rearing deer with huge antlers named Bucky the Buck.

Chloe takes a left at the square and parks in front of Webster’s Ice Cream right as the bell tower chimes five o’clock in the evening.

Belltower Books, so named because it sits inside the base of the tower, is pretty much the only place in False Beach worth being. It’s small, only two cramped rooms plus a third that requires a climb up a ladder and special permission, with books piled high on every available surface, like the floor, or the shelf above the toilet, or the top of a terrarium containing a fat iguana. Every hour on the hour, the bell in the tower echoes through the walls of the store, rattling all the way down to the front desk, where Georgia’s dad sits in his aviator glasses and listens to The Eagles.

She finds Georgia perched on the top of the ladder with a paperback, the bottom half of her uniform traded for rolled-up gray sweats and Tevas. The two of them look a lot alike—brown eyes, thick eyebrows, angular jaws—but Chloe’s aesthetic is more dark academia and Georgia’s is more backpacking granola baby butch. They even have almost the same short, dark hair, but Chloe has blunt, decisive bangs, while Georgia doesn’t care who sees her forehead.

Georgia is the kind of person who enters a room like she’s stepped inside it a thousand times, knows where everything is, including the exits, and isn’t worried that anything could have possibly changed since the last time she was there. She’s too tall to look small, too gentle to be imposing, too smart in ways that have nothing to do with chemical formulas or antiderivatives to care about her GPA. One time, in their creative writing elective, Chloe was assigned to describe a person with one word. She chose Georgia and described her as “sturdy,” like a tree, or a house.

It’s a miracle that someone like Georgia coalesced from the primordial ooze of Alabama. Life would be unbearable without her.

Chloe reaches up and taps twice on the side of Georgia’s ankle. “Whatcha readin’?”

Georgia flashes the cover without looking up from the page: Emma.

“Austen? Again?”

“Look.” Georgia sighs, apparently finished with the passage she was on. She never speaks when she’s mid-passage. “I tried one of those literary contemporaries Val suggested—”

“Please don’t call my mom Val.”

“—and the thing about books these days is, a lot of them are just not that good.”

“And yet you want to write a book these days.”

“The trick is,” Georgia says, shutting her book, “I will simply write a good one.”

“I don’t get the Austen thing with you,” Chloe says as Georgia slips between the rungs of the ladder to the shag rug below. “I always found Emma annoying.”

“The book or the character?”

“The character. The book is fine.”

Georgia leads the way to the front desk, announced by the echoing clangs of the water bottle she always carries as it collides with bookshelves and chairs. Georgia’s mom waves from across the store, headphones on as she does inventory.

“Why is Emma annoying?” Georgia asks.

“Because she’s manipulative,” Chloe says. “I don’t think she really makes up for everything she does to everyone else by the end.”

“The point of the book isn’t for her to make everything right. It’s for her to be interesting,” Georgia says, slipping behind the desk for her things. “And I think she is—she’s this girl trapped in the same place she was born, so bored with what she’s been given that she has to play around with people’s lives to entertain herself. It’s a good character.”

“Sure, okay.”

“Also, it’s romantic. ‘If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more.’ Best line in Austen’s entire body of work. And I’ve read them all, Chloe.”

“How many of them have you read?” Chloe deadpans.

“All of them.”

Chloe laughs, eyeing the books behind the counter.

“Anything new in the ol’ CMFC?”

While Georgia rereads Regency classics, Chloe’s favorite stories are the ones where the headstrong young woman on a cinematic journey to master her powers falls for the monster who’s been antagonizing her all along. Georgia knows this, so she curates a stack of books behind the counter for Chloe and adds to it every time they get something Chloe might like. She affectionately calls it Chloe’s Monster Fucker Collection.

“One,” Georgia says. She plucks a battered paperback off the top of the stack—one of those ’80s high fantasies with a loinclothed, mulleted elf on the cover. Her mama has a million. “Fairy princess on a heroic quest ravished by evil elf mercenary. Straight though.”

Chloe sighs. “Thanks, but I’m maxed out on male villains for the month,” she says.

“Thought so,” Georgia says. She chucks it toward a box of secondhand books to be shelved. “Still on the hunt for the megabitch of your dreams.”

“It doesn’t have to be an evil queen,” she says. “It’s just preferred.”

While she does like boys, she generally finds the traits of a compelling villain—arrogance, malice, an angsty backstory—tedious in a man. Like, what do hot guys with long dark hair even have to be that upset about? Get a clarifying shampoo and suck it up, Kylo Ren. So your rich parents sent you to magic camp and you didn’t make any friends. Big deal.

“If the girl’s going to end up with a dude who’s a monster,” Chloe says, “it needs to be—”

“Phantom,” Georgia finishes for her as they head outside, because she’s heard it five hundred thousand times.

“Monster on the outside, but on the inside, he cares about her career goals!” Chloe says. “Call me old-fashioned, but a man’s place is in the basement, preparing vocal exercises for his more talented wife.”

“You are as insane as the day I met you,” Georgia says. “All I want is a nice girlfriend in a cottage where we have philosophical conversations over scones or something.”

“And I support you,” Chloe says, “in making that your retirement plan when you’re like, thirty and tired of living in New York with me.”

“Thanks so much,” Georgia says, sliding into the passenger seat. “God, I’m starving.”

“Same,” says Chloe, whose appetite has made a quick turnaround from turduckens.

“Taco Bell?” Georgia says, like always.

“God, my left boob for a Shake Shack,” Chloe says as she cranks up the engine. “This town is so depressing. I bet nobody in city limits other than you, me, and our parents even knows who Jane Austen is.”

“My parents have kept a bookstore open here for twenty years, so I’m pretty sure the average False Beach resident isn’t that illiterate,” Georgia points out. “You know, Shara Wheeler came in for Emma a couple months ago.”

“Ew.”

“I can say her name. She’s not Beetlejuice.”

“She’s not,” Chloe agrees. “She’s worse.”

---

In terms of popular after-school locations for social gatherings, the Taco Bell three minutes from campus is Willowgrove’s Met Gala. It’s where you go to see and be seen. It’s where every sophomore gets their first after-school drive-thru when they score their license. Last fall, Summer Collins and Ace Torres were rumored to have had an explosive breakup in the parking lot that ended in a Baja Blast to the face.

It also means that about half the part-time staff is composed of Willowgrove students whose parents forced them to get a job. The drive-thru cashier on Tuesday nights is a Willowgrove junior named Tyler Miller with a tragic haircut and a trombone on lease from the school. Taco Bell has been Chloe’s Tuesday night tradition with Georgia ever since last summer, when her mom fixed the engine on her old car and handed over the keys, so she’s spoken to Tyler more times through a crackly speaker than she has on campus.

When she pulls up to the window, he nearly fumbles her change.

“Um, hang on,” he says after passing over her order. “There’s something else.”

The window shuts.

She shoots a confused look at Georgia, who checks the bag, then shakes her head and shrugs.

The window reopens, and Tyler clumsily hands something over.

“I’m, um, supposed to give this to you.”

It’s a sealed envelope. A pink one.

Sirens wailing in her head, she snatches the card and flips it over. Her name is written on the front. She stares down at it: the gentle arcs of the H, the perfect loop of the O.

She whips back to Tyler. “You couldn’t have given it to me at school?”

“I—she—she brought it here last week and told me specifically to give it to you the next time you came through the drive-thru,” he says.

“Who did?” Chloe demands.

His voice comes out shaky when he says it, like it’s the name of an angel, “Shara Wheeler.”

“And you just did it?”

“That’s the first time Shara Wheeler has ever spoken to me in my life,” he tells her dreamily. “I didn’t even think she knew I existed.”

“Oh my God,” Chloe says, and she slams on the gas.

Chloe,

Your mom graduated Willowgrove with my parents. You know that, right? I remember them talking about it at the dinner table the summer after eighth grade.

“I heard Valerie Green is moving back. Remember, she got suspended for coming to school with blue hair? She’s married to a woman now. They want to send their daughter to Willowgrove.”

Before your first day, I took the file out of my dad’s office. Saw your entrance exam. You did pretty well, huh?

I’ve been curious about you since before I met you, but the way things work at Willowgrove, I never could get close enough to figure you out.

High school’s almost over. Now or never, right?

XOXO

Shara Wheeler

P.S. [email protected]

Rory finally picks up on the fourth try.

“For what possible reason are you calling me?”

“Where are you?” Chloe demands, throwing a taco wrapper into the bag. She called him as soon as she dropped Georgia off at Belltower with a flimsy excuse, right after she heard back from Smith.

“I’m … at my friend’s house?”

“Which friend?”

“Jake.”

“Who’s Jake?”

“Uh, Jake Stone?”

“Stone the Stoner?” She knows him—well, knows of him. Benjy almost got suspended once for happening to be in the boys’ bathroom when Jake was caught vaping in there. Stringy blond hair, unpopular lo-fi SoundCloud music, future owner of a neck tattoo. “Okay, good, then you’re not far from your house.”

“How do you know where Jake lives?”

“Benjy lives on his street,” Chloe says impatiently. “False Beach really isn’t that big. Anyway, I’m on my way to your house, and so is Smith.”

She can practically hear Rory’s eyes go wide over the phone. “Why?”

“Because I’m absolutely dying to play a few holes of golf,” she says. “I got my Shara note, obviously.”

“Where?”

“Don’t worry about it,” she snaps. She cuts a sharp left, waving off a guy in a truck who honks at her.

“Why do we have to meet at my house?”

“Because it’s equidistant from Belltower and Smith’s house,” Chloe says. “She gave me an email address. I think that thing from your note is the password. Now can you please call the front gate for me? My car is a piece of crap and the mall cops are gonna be suspicious.”

“Okay, okay, Jesus, I’ll meet you there.”

She hangs up and chucks her phone into the empty passenger seat.

She can’t believe Shara didn’t give her a puzzle of her own to solve. Smith got a secret code, and Rory got a hint about the open window, but Chloe didn’t even get a chance to prove she’s smarter than whatever stupid riddle Shara could come up with for her. Her note was literally handed to her. It’s insulting.

She’ll come back to what was actually in the letter later, and the small silver key she found in the envelope. What the hell could it even be a key to?

When she parks outside Rory’s house, hers is the only car on the street. Smith is leaning against the mailbox, staring across the driveway at Shara’s house like she might pop out of the bushes any second. Rory arrives next, annoyed and surly in some kind of vintage ’80s convertible in cherry red.

“Are your parents home?” she asks him.

He brushes past her to unlock the door. “Does it matter?”

“I mean, I’m not the one who’d have to explain this to them.”

Rory shrugs. “My mom and stepdad are in Italy for the week.”

“Casual,” Smith comments under his breath.

Rory’s house is nice, technically. Like an HGTV special on all the different ways to interpret beige. It reminds her of shopping for houses with her moms and walking into an open house where everything had been staged so obviously that you could tell no one actually lived there. But this is a lived-in version, complete with a wedding picture above the fireplace: two smiling middle-aged white people and a bored kid that could be Rory from five years ago.

“Where’s your computer?” Chloe asks.

Rory glares at her from beside a vase of artificial hay. “In my room.”

“Okay.”

She’s halfway to the second floor before she hears Smith behind her, followed finally by Rory. Upstairs, she doesn’t need to guess Rory’s bedroom door—there’s one with a stolen stop sign affixed to it, and Rory’s friends are known for their pastimes of leaning moodily against brick walls and low-level vandalism. She lets herself in.

If all the color has been drained out of the rest of the house, Rory’s room is where it went. The shelves are stuffed with action figures, the double bed covered in a deep-purple bedspread and discarded flannels, the walls plastered with prints of weird abstract art. Beside a tower of red Vans sneaker boxes, there’s a Leon Bridges tour poster and a turntable on a cabinet spilling vinyl records onto the carpet. She recognizes a few of the sleeves from the music curriculum her mama enforced growing up: Prince, Jimi Hendrix, B. B. King.

Under a dogwood-shaded window, there’s a desk with a silver MacBook and an analog tape recorder with a pile of color-coded tapes, surrounded by a scattering of guitar picks and coiled guitar string. All the actual guitars are up a ladder in a lofted sitting area full of bean bags—and damn, those are a lot of really expensive guitars. One entire wall is painted with black chalkboard paint and covered in sketches and notes from friends. Chloe counts at least three different hand-drawn penises.

A bulletin board is hung over the dresser, bursting with photos and scraps and ticket stubs. She can see a shot of Rory laughing at a concert with a handsome salt-and-pepper-bearded Black man who must be his dad, and another with a college-aged guy sporting a Morehouse College sweatshirt, tied-up locs, and the exact same hazel eyes as Rory. There are a bunch of cards signed DAD, the kind of two-line note you include in a care package that says more than a letter could. It’s weird to see so many pictures of Rory smiling, especially when real-life Rory is scowling three feet away.

“How many street signs have you stolen?” Smith asks, eyeing the collection of metal in the corner by the desk.

“More than this. Jake has some at his house.” He must see judgment when he glances at Smith, because he rolls his eyes. “Chill. We only steal the signs of things named after some old racist. It’s not my fault that’s all of them here.”

“This is…” Smith says, craning his head to get a better look at the sparkly red Stratocaster up in the loft. “Dope.”

It is, admittedly, a cool room, the way Rory’s car is admittedly a cool car.

Rory leans against the ladder and shrugs. “Don’t sound so surprised.”

“I’m not surprised,” Smith says, immediately on the defensive, “I’m just saying.”

“I don’t need your opinion.”

“No, just my girlfriend’s, apparently.”

“You’re mad because you’re finally having to confront the fact that being a big deal in high school isn’t gonna get you whatever you want forever.”

“I’m pretty sure I’m mad because my girlfriend cheated on me with you.”

“Maybe there’s something I have that you don’t.”

“What, a rich stepdad and a house in the country club?”

“More like taste,” Rory says. “Interests. The ability to care about things that aren’t jock itch.”

“Yeah, it’s probably that delightful personality of yours, man.”

Chloe squeezes her eyes shut and tries, as hard as she can, to remember why exactly she’s subjecting herself to this shitshow.

An image immediately fills her mind: Shara with her brand-new-lip-gloss smile, leaning across the counter to give Tyler Miller a pink envelope. Shara putting everything in place to show Chloe she was already ten steps ahead, that she guessed Chloe’s exact moves before Chloe had even caught her scent.

“Okay!” Chloe snaps, and Smith and Rory pause mid-roast, mouths still open. “Hello! I also kissed Shara—which both of you seem to keep forgetting about—and I, personally, would like to know why, so can we please do what we came here to do?”

After a pause, Smith is the first to grumble, “Okay.” Rory makes a sound like his molars are stuck together.

“Rory,” Chloe says briskly, “what’s the password?”

He gives her a hearty glower, then extracts a Moleskine from the mess on his desk and lets it fall open to the center, where a pink card has been tucked.

“Thank you,” Chloe says. When she reaches for it, she glances down at the pages around it, which are covered in jagged, handwritten lines. Some of the words look like they might rhyme at the end. “Oh my God, you do write sad poems about Shara.”

“Don’t look at those!” Rory says, snapping the notebook shut.

“I wanna see,” Smith says, craning his neck for a better look.

“Fuck both of y’all,” Rory grumbles. “Chloe, you’re the one who just told us to focus.”

“Right,” she concedes. She drops into the chair at Rory’s desk, opening his laptop and laying out her card next to Rory’s. She can sense Smith hovering behind her. He’s probably reading what Shara wrote to her. Good. She’s tired of being the only one who knows Shara isn’t who she pretends she is.

“Hey, wait—” Rory starts as she opens up a browser window.

“Don’t worry, I’m not gonna look through your search history,” Chloe says, pulling up Gmail and typing in the email address from her note. “I can guess.”

Smith and Rory crowd together, leaning in to watch Chloe finish pounding out the password. She hears the soft thump of Rory elbowing Smith in the ribs and pretending it was an accident.

There’s nothing in the inbox when it loads, not even a promo email in the spam folder.

“The drafts,” Smith recites. “Check the drafts.”

There’s one email in the drafts folder, unsent. The subject line says, BRB.

Chloe sucks in a breath as she clicks it open.

Hi,

This is Shara. Of course it’s Shara. You already know that.

I had to leave. I promise it’ll make sense soon.

I’m sorry I haven’t told any of you how I really feel about you. I’m still not sure how. This is the only way I could think of.

XOXO

Shara

P.S. Chloe, the next card is for you. It’s somewhere you go almost every day. Until then, you’re keeping your vows, and I’m hiding in the brakes.

“What is this?” Rory asks. “This—this doesn’t explain anything.”

“A clue,” Smith says. “The postscript is another clue.”

“How do you know?”

“Because this is what Shara does,” he says. “It’s like … little hints. She can’t just let you in. You have to figure out your way there.”

“So, she wants us to find her?”

“I think so. It sounds like Chloe has to do it.”

“Chloe?”

“Chloe, do you know what it means?”

Chloe can hear their voices overlapping, struggling to get her attention, but she can barely make out the words through the ringing in her ears, growing louder and louder the more she imagines Shara sitting at her dainty little vanity and typing out her smug little email and knowing she could get Chloe to read it. That she could lay out all the pretty pieces of a puzzle and have the three of them fighting over who would get to put it together first.

Of course. Of course Shara gave her this instead of an explanation. Of course Shara cast herself as the main character of her own personal John Green novel. And now the rest of them are supposed to be happy getting shuffled around like stupid little chess pieces, because Shara kissed them, and it’s her board.

The problem is, Shara counted on Chloe being like Smith and Rory and everyone else at Willowgrove, waiting for her to notice them and magically make them interesting or smart or cool. Chloe knows better. She’s kissed Shara Wheeler, and it changed absolutely nothing.

She pushes away from the desk and storms out, ignoring Smith’s confused shout after her.

She’s going to beat Shara at her own game. And then she’s going to destroy her for it.