Chapter 4

4

DAYS SINCE SHARA WHEELER LEFT: 4

DAYS UNTIL GRADUATION: 39

Sometimes, when Chloe is stressed, she pictures herself in another life.

Not as somebody else. She imagines herself in a universe where she gets to be cool and super hot and everybody appreciates how capable and smart she is, like if she were a vampire hunter in Edwardian England. It’s a coping strategy, okay?

She tries to calm down as she drives to school by imagining herself at a fancy banquet, whipping up silk skirts to reveal a dagger strapped to her thigh before she flicks it across the room, straight into the wall an inch from vampire Shara’s face.

It doesn’t work; she pulls into the student parking lot in what her mama likes to call “an absolutely foul mood.” Ash is late, as usual, but Georgia and Benjy are already there, leaning up against the fender of Benjy’s Mustang. They carpool, since Georgia’s parents can’t afford to get her a car.

“You look like something crawled up your ass,” Benjy tells Chloe when she slams her car door behind her.

“This should help,” Georgia says. She hands over Chloe’s usual Starbucks order: iced matcha latte with two pumps of brown sugar syrup and one pump of vanilla. The closest False Beach will ever get to boba. She takes a long sip, but it does nothing about the five hundred screeching bats inside her brain, all named Shara Wheeler.

When she glances up, Georgia is studying her face, and Chloe forces a smile. She’s not eager to explain what happened after the Taco Bell drive-thru last night, and the angrier she acts, the sooner Georgia is going to ask.

All her friends know how she feels about Shara. Benjy was in honors world history when Chloe and Shara both chose Anne Boleyn for their midterm presentation and Shara scored five points higher by passing out homemade rose marchpane cookies like a Tudor tooth fairy. Ash let Chloe practically squeeze the bones in their hand to dust when Shara got called up in chapel as Junior Class Student of the Year, an award for which Chloe was disqualified due to “personal conduct.” It’s kind of a running joke among the four of them: Chloe and her bitter nemesis, a perfectly nice girl they all like.

If she told the rest of her friends about the kiss—which she won’t, because of her complicated feelings on Shara’s privacy—they’d probably throw her a Kissed the Hottest Girl in School party, which would make her want to die. And if they knew about the clues, they’d flame her in the group chat for letting herself get sucked into Shara’s deranged side quest, which would make her want to kill them. So, keeping things to herself is for everyone’s safety.

“Any news on the roommate front yet?” Chloe asks, knowing it’s a safe bet to change the subject. Benjy and Ash are going to Bama and RISD, respectively. Ash is sharing their dorm room with an internet friend they met in a free Catboy company on their Final Fantasy XIV server, but Benjy is still waiting to hear what type of guy he’s been stuck with.

Benjy takes the bait. “Not yet. My new fear is that he’ll be a hot straight guy. I cannot spend my first year away from home with an unrequited crush on a guy who wears neckties to football games.”

“Maybe he’ll have cute friends,” Chloe suggests.

“I don’t have high hopes for the gays of Tuscaloosa,” Benjy says.

“It’s gonna be great,” Georgia says. “You’ll either meet a guy who owns five seersucker suits or a guy who wants to drive you around on the back of his ATV, and either way, you get to have a whirlwind romance under a dramatic canopy of oak trees.”

“Are you gonna write me a coming-of-age movie or what?” Benjy asks her. “I’m ready to put Timothée Chalamet out of work.”

“Sorry, I don’t do screenplays,” Georgia says, taking a swig from her water bottle.

“Did y’all apply for your cool NYU apartment yet?” Benjy asks them.

Chloe nods. “We don’t get assigned until July though. I’m just glad I don’t have to live with a random.”

“Uh-huh,” Georgia hums.

“I—” Benjy starts, but he cuts himself off. A black Jeep has parked three spots down, and Benjy tries to turn a glare into a polite smile as Ace Torres climbs out. Ace spots them and offers his trademark shit-eating grin.

“Hey, Benjy!” he says with a wave. “Chloe, Jessica.”

He lumbers cheerfully off toward the courtyard where the jocks congregate before school, whistling to himself.

“Three months,” Georgia says, gesturing with her water bottle, which clangs against Benjy’s headlight. “For three entire months, I was stage manager and he was Phantom, and he still can’t bother to learn my name.”

Benjy releases a sigh like the bearer of a centuries-old feud. “What do you think goes on in that head?”

“I always picture a cute little hamster running on a wheel,” Chloe says.

“But it’s wearing an itty-bitty letterman jacket,” Benjy adds.

Georgia asks, “What did the hamster letter in?”

“Javelin,” Benjy says. “I’m surprised he remembers my name. God forbid people think we’re friends.”

“Do you want to be friends with Ace Torres?”

“No,” Benjy says haughtily. “I’m just saying; it’s one thing to steal a role that doesn’t belong to you”—here, he pauses to emphasize that he’s the one who deserved the role—“and it’s something else to steal it and then act like it never happened.”

Chloe watches as Ace enters the courtyard and pulls Smith into one of those bizarre, sideways bro-hugs. Because of course Ace’s best friend is Smith Parker, which means Smith came to the matinee performance of Phantom last month, which means he brought Shara, which means Chloe had to do an entire show pretending not to notice Shara front and center with her judgy face and shiny hair and—

She doesn’t realize how hard she’s squeezing her matcha until the lid pops off.

The bell rings, and Chloe shrugs off another look from Georgia and leads the way to B Building. They split at the double doors—Georgia’s first hour is calculus, Benjy’s is history—and Chloe heads straight down the hall to Mrs. Farley’s AP Lit classroom.

By the girls’ bathroom, Mrs. Sherman is at her usual post, permed and scrutinizing passing students like the Eye of Sauron but with clumpy mascara. Chloe waves with the tips of her fingers as she passes, making sure Mrs. Sherman gets a good, long look at her nonregulation black nail polish. That should do it.

In her seat, second row center, she pulls out her binder and sets it on the smooth, cool surface, then lays out all three of the novels they’ve been discussing, one on top of the other so their spines form a pleasing column. Almost enough to distract from Shara’s empty seat in front of hers.

Every morning of the past year, she’s deliberately beaten Shara to Mrs. Farley’s class. She figured out early on that English is Shara’s best subject, which means every bit of extra credit counts. If she can get an additional 0.5 percent participation grade from being two minutes earlier, she’s going to. She is not repeating the junior year travesty of losing her lead in Ms. Rodkey’s class by a single point.

And because she’s always in her seat before Shara, she always has to watch what happens when Shara enters a room.

There’s this stupid thing that people always say about girls in murder documentaries. She lit up a room when she walked in. Chloe used to think it was what people said to make someone sound better when they felt bad about what happened to them, or maybe a trick of the brain, a misinterpretation of the glow a person takes on in your memory once they’re gone.

But then she met Shara, who glides into every room like she’s on a parade float, beaming and waving and tossing her hair. Every morning, Shara walks into Mrs. Farley’s class, and every morning, people stop what they’re doing to see what shade of lip gloss she’s wearing that day. It’s the same whispery feeling that fills a room when a teacher announces it’s movie day, and every time it happens, Chloe feels like the only one who’d rather be talking about last night’s homework than watching The Crucible.

Today, though, the seat in front of hers never fills.

To her left, Brooklyn Bennett leans over and whispers, “What are you doing?”

Nobody loves rules like Brooklyn, student body president, head of the debate team and Model UN, editor in chief of the yearbook—basically a list of extracurriculars with a skirt on. Chloe has to admire her fanatical tunnel vision, but if she’s high-strung, Brooklyn Bennett is a $20,000 viola.

“Chill, Brooklyn,” Chloe whispers back. “I’m getting out early.”

“Why?”

“You’ll see,” Chloe says. “Any minute now—”

Right on cue, the intercom sounds.

“Chloe Green, please come to the office. Chloe Green to the office, please.”

Brooklyn stares at her. Chloe shrugs, picks up her bag, and waves goodbye to Mrs. Farley.

It’s gone like this once a week since sophomore year: She gets dress coded and winds up in Principal Wheeler’s office getting lectured on the importance of “respecting guidelines set in place to minimize distractions in the classroom” by the end of first hour.

Freshman year, she adjusted to Willowgrove by making problems on purpose, but nobody showed up to her GSA meeting, and she got suspended for bringing free condoms to school in protest of the abstinence-only sex ed policy. The lesson she learned: Nobody at Willowgrove actually wants anything to change, not even her own friends, who are all wonderful and queer and absolutely dead set on not coming out until after graduation. If she couldn’t even changetheir minds, it wasn’t worth jeopardizing her chances at college with an expulsion.

So, since then, she’s settled for breaking dress code: platforms taller than one inch, socks that end above the knee but below the hem of her skirt, pentagrams embroidered into the collars of her oxfords, dark lipstick. Last year, Ash got famous on TikTok for making earrings out of everything they could find, and now Chloe has a full rotation of gummy worms and hot sauce packets and preserved fruit slices to dangle from her earlobes. Just enough to push back.

It’s a track record that made it too easy to get Mrs. Sherman to report her this morning. When a beautiful, blond small-town princess disappears, surely a full-scale FBI manhunt led by Wheeler himself must follow. Screw the cards, screw the key—the fastest shortcut to Shara is to know what they know, and the fastest way to do that is to get herself into the principal’s office.

On the way, she pops into the bathroom by the chem lab to check her reflection.

Sophomore year, she stopped here before chem every day to tidy up her makeup and shake out her hair. She was stuck with Shara as a lab partner fall semester, and random classmates were always coming up to their lab table with pathetic excuses—like, no, Tanner, Shara doesn’t have time to help you with step five. Chloe started touching up before class in self-defense.

Sophomore year was also the one time it appeared possible that she and Shara could be friends.

It was second semester, after Shara and Smith got together. They weren’t lab partners anymore, but Chloe still sat behind Shara in precalc. It wasn’t her all-time best subject—she really had to work for her ninety-eight average. One day, she got a test back with her answer to a conic sections problem crossed out in red. Shara turned around and confided that she’d missed the same one.

The next day, Shara asked if she’d had a hard time with the homework, and then Chloe became the person Shara talked to in the few minutes before class. For the first time, she got a glimpse of what other people must see when they look at Shara. It was easy to look into those round, innocent eyes and infer kindness when there was nothing else there.

Until a Friday morning, when they were supposed to be reviewing their own midterm study guides and Shara asked, “Do you get number seven?”

She scanned the problem—a question about finding the length of the latus rectum of a parabola, which was exactly the concept she’d spent an hour the night before trying to nail.

“You, um,” she said, “you have to find the equation of directix first.”

“Are you sure?” Shara said. “Can you show me?”

Shara leaned over Chloe’s scratch sheet with her pencil, hair falling over her shoulder, and she followed Chloe’s suggestions until she started doing something backward and Chloe grabbed her wrist to stop her.

Her thumb pressed into the soft flesh on the inside of Shara’s wrist, just below the palm. She could feel Shara’s pulse racing.

Shara shook her off, but it was enough for Chloe to figure out what was going on. She was lying. She’d known since freshman year that Shara was a liar, but in a few weeks, she’d managed to forget.

Chloe looked up from the paper and said, “You already know how to do this, don’t you?”

When Shara met her eyes, their faces were inches apart. She didn’t flinch. “Do you?”

“Of course I do.”

“Then show me.” Shara’s face was smooth and unreadable, except for the incremental raise of her left eyebrow, which said, prove it.

That’s what the popular kids at Willowgrove do: They pretend to be your friend for a chance to make you look stupid. She must have noticed what Chloe was struggling with and decided to rub it in her face.

Chloe snatched the paper out from under Shara’s hands and told her to figure it out herself, and that was the end of that.

Now, Chloe finishes straightening her collar and heads to the principal’s office.

She winks at the receptionist, Mrs. Bailey, as she signs in. Mrs. Bailey shakes her head in that familiar way, like, what a shame that such a brilliant student can’t also be a nice, polite, straight young lady.

What’s the point? They have Shara for that.

“Wheeler, man, you already know what’s up,” a gratingly familiar voice says from the short hall that connects the principal’s office to reception. “But hey, I’ll talk to you later, okay?”

Out strolls the poster boy for thick-necked, hot-ugly football players: prom king Dixon Wells. He flashes a flirtatious smile at Mrs. Bailey. Why are popular guys allowed to wander around during class like they’re friends with all the teachers?

“See you later, my lady love.”

“Oh, stop it, Dixon,” she says in a high-pitched voice that suggests she doesn’t want him to stop at all. She turns to Chloe and drops her voice an octave. “You can go on back, sweetie.”

Chloe takes her seat in Mr. Wheeler’s office, a small room with all the trappings of a Good Old Alabama Boy: mounted trout, wraparound Oakley sunglasses with camo Croakies on the bookshelf, photos of himself as a Willowgrove senior in his football uniform. He was quarterback of the Wolves’ first state champ team, and it’s still his proudest accomplishment twenty-five years later. That and telling teenagers they’re going to hell.

She knows the office well enough that if there’s anything out of place, anything that would point to where Shara’s gone or if she’s even gone at all, Chloe will spot it.

“Chloe Green,” a deep voice drawls.

Mr. Wheeler looks the same as usual, all chin and beach tan like he should be giving fishing tours on a fifty-foot yacht. He drops a pile of folders on his desk and takes a seat in his creaky leather chair.

“Mr. Wheeler,” Chloe says back.

“I was hoping to see you in here less now that you’ve almost graduated.”

“You know, I actually think I might miss our weekly meetings,” she says. “What can I help you with this time? Ready to finally update the English curriculum? I have a lot of ideas.”

He stares calmly back at her. Mouthing off at Wheeler isn’t even that fun because he never gets that angry, unlike Mrs. Sherman, who Chloe will probably send into cardiac arrest one day. Wheeler just looks tired.

“I’m glad you have a sense of humor.”

“Only got a few more weeks to use up the rest of my material.”

“You know,” Mr. Wheeler says, “people aren’t going to give you as many chances as I do out there in the real world. You should remember that.”

“Sure,” Chloe says. He’s said it nearly every time she’s been in here, but if she’s learned anything from her mom, it’s that the real world is where people who hate high school go to be happy. “So, what’s the infraction this time?”

“You already know,” he says. “Mrs. Sherman said you were practically showing off your nail polish to her.”

“I thought she might like it.”

Wheeler sighs, rubbing his brows with his thumb and forefinger. “Why do you keep doing this, Chloe?”

“You seem stressed,” Chloe says, seeing an opening. “Any particular reason?”

“Excuse me?”

“Just, you know,” she says. “I noticed Shara wasn’t in first hour today.”

She’s not sure what she expected, but it’s certainly not the way Wheeler chuckles.

“Rumors going around already, huh?” He takes out a sticky note and jots down sermon on gossip. “You know, you try your best to lead your flock, but sometimes they wander right to the cliff anyway.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that gossip is against God’s will, and so is lying,” Wheeler says, putting his pen down. He shakes his head, offering Chloe a white-toothed smile. “Shara’s visiting family. That’s all. I hate to disappoint y’all, but there’s really no story here.”

It’s a good lie, and he’s good at delivering it, which isn’t surprising, since he spends his whole life telling students God cares about spaghetti straps. It’s almost believable.

“It’s not gossip as long as it’s for a prayer chain,” Chloe says. “What family? Do they live here?”

There’s a pause a millisecond too long, and she sees something flash in his eyes the way she has a few times before, when she catches a crack in his fake geniality—something like contempt, or maybe even fear. She swears she’s seen it once in Shara’s eyes, too, that day in precalc. That’s okay. She’s spent a long time converting that into energy. She’s like a plant that’s learned to photosynthesize spite.

“Look, Chloe,” he says. “I’m gonna level with you. You get away with more than most people could get away with at this school. Do you know why that is?”

She thinks, Because you can’t afford to expel the example of academic excellence that you dangle in front of parents of prospective students for tuition money, and you need a new pool.

She says, “No, I don’t.”

“Because you have potential, Chloe. You are an exceptional student. You set the curve in all your classes. You work harder than almost any student I’ve ever seen at this school.” He leans back in his chair, springs groaning ominously. “And I would hate to see all of that go to waste because of the choices you make between now and graduation.”

She presses the toes of her shoes into the floor. She’s pretty sure that’s a threat to not dig any deeper.

“Am I getting detention?” she asks in the politest tone she can manage.

Wheeler considers this. Chloe stares at the framed photo on the desk: Mr. Wheeler and his beautiful wife and daughter in white linen and khakis, smiling up from the deck of a sailboat with the name Graduation etched in cursive on the stern. Chloe wants to pinch Shara’s little blond two-dimensional head off.

“Not this time,” Wheeler says. “You’re free to go.”

“Thanks,” she says, and she leaves without looking back.

She got what she came for though. When Wheeler took out his Post-its, he jostled the stack of folders on his desk, and Chloe saw the corner of a pink card peeking out. Shara’s stationery.

Shara left her parents a note, just like the rest of them.

She really is gone, and not even Wheeler knows where she is.