Chapter 5

5

DAYS SINCE SHARA WHEELER LEFT: 5

DAYS UNTIL GRADUATION: 38

Chloe enters the choir room for lunch with a peanut butter sandwich in her lunch bag and murder in her heart.

Today, she’s greeted by the sight of Benjy, one foot planted on the scuffed tile floor and one pointed over his head, gripping his leg with his left hand, which would be startling if it weren’t such a classic Benjy ambush. Being friends with him is like being friends with a very loud pretzel.

Chloe dumps her backpack on the floor while Georgia claims a seat on the risers next to Ash, who’s hunched over their sketch pad with a charcoal pencil, squinting at Benjy.

“Business or pleasure, Ash?” Chloe asks.

“Final art portfolio,” Ash answers, blending a line so vigorously that their dangly Dorito earring almost falls out. “I’m short two figure drawings.”

“I thought she was going to let you sub in that painting series you did of lizards that came to you in a dream,” Georgia says.

“She changed her mind. Apparently it was ‘disturbing’ and ‘something to be discussed with my parents,’” they say with a shrug. “Benjy, can you move your head like, fifteen degrees to the right, but your nose five degrees to the left?”

“I can’t move my nose independently of my face, Ash.”

“You can try.”

“My leg is tired,” Benjy whines.

“Chloe?” Ash prompts.

Chloe nods. “I got it.”

She reaches up and grabs Benjy’s ankle to prop it up, and he grunts in relief. Between dance and all his shifts roller-skating at Sonic, Benjy is freaky strong for his size, but even he has his limits.

When Chloe first met Benjy, he was sort of the pet of the senior musical theater girls, always carted around by his older sister to rehearsals like a poodle in a handbag. But they’re the seniors now, and things are different. Being super talented exempts him from a certain amount of bullying, but the order of Willowgrove operations states that being super gay, even if you haven’t actually told anyone that you are, cancels a lot of that out. These days, he mostly gets harassed by fake-friendly jocks in the hallways to do eight-counts on command. Chloe can’t wait for those guys’ future girlfriends to drag them to see Benjy on Broadway one day.

“Anyway,” Benjy says, “as I was saying before, the whole thing is kind of a vibe.”

“What whole thing?” Georgia asks, unpacking a Tupperware of spaghetti from her backpack.

“The Shara Wheeler thing,” Benjy says. “I mean, it’s been days, so she’s like gone gone, right?”

Chloe’s heart clenches reflexively into a fist.

“I heard her parents haven’t reported her missing, so she’s like, somewhere,” Ash says. “But nobody knows where.”

“I know, that’s what’s so cool about it,” Benjy goes on. “Like, disappearing into the night in a ball gown? There’s something totally old Hollywood, tragic starlet, Lana Del Rey about it, and I’m like, kind of obsessed—ow, Chloe!”

Chloe, who didn’t notice her grip growing tighter and tighter on Benjy’s ankle the longer he talked about Shara Wheeler, relaxes her fingers. “Sorry.”

She glances instinctively to Georgia, who is already waiting to make eye contact with her. She mouths, Isengard? Their code word for, Do you need to be rescued?

Chloe rolls her eyes and shakes her head.

“As your teacher, I’m obligated to tell you that gossiping about a missing person isn’t very Christian,” Mr. Truman says, emerging from his office with an overstuffed folder of sheet music.

Like a lot of Willowgrove teachers, Mr. Truman was born and raised in False Beach and never left. He knew Chloe the second he saw her on his roster because he graduated Willowgrove in ’96 alongside her mom and Shara’s parents. Chloe once found him in her mom’s senior yearbook, looking like the coolest kid in the show choir. Her mom was more in the woodshop grunge crowd, but Mr. Truman remembers her.

Chloe can’t imagine why in the world Mr. Truman would spend his whole life at Willowgrove on purpose. Every teacher has to sign a “morality clause” saying they won’t drink or express political opinions or be gay, and while Mr. Truman has never said he’s gay, he is a single fortysomething choir director with an extensive collection of slouchy sweaters. Some of the sweaters even have elbow patches. Like, come on.

“As our teacher, you probably got all kinds of administrative intel about what’s actually going on with the missing person,” Benjy points out, “and you are obligated to tell us, because we’re your favorites.”

“Not technically missing,” Ash points out.

“Not technically my favorites,” Mr. Truman says. “I don’t have those.”

“Uh-huh,” Benjy says. “That’s why I taught half the sectionals last semester, for free. Because you hate me.”

“That’s called field experience; it’s for your college applications,” Mr. Truman clarifies. “If you’ll excuse me, I have to go plead my case to the administration for the fifteenth time this month to hire someone to fix the piano.”

“I told you, it’s the strings,” Benjy says.

“I know, but someone lost the key to the lid lock, so I also have to convince them to hire a locksmith.”

“Okay, first of all, I did not lose the key. It went missing from your office,” Benjy says. “Second of all, I told you that installing a padlock on a piano was barbaric and you didn’t listen.”

“I wouldn’t have had to put a padlock on it if y’all would stop opening it up when I’m not looking.”

“That also was not me,” Benjy points out.

“All right, well,” Mr. Truman concludes. “Wish me luck.”

He heads for the door, but pauses at the risers, examining Ash’s sketchpad.

“That’s … huh.” He tilts his head sideways. “Did you make Benjy’s head—?”

“A fried egg?” Ash says. They nod serenely. “Yeah. Isn’t it cool?”

“You’re a visionary,” Mr. Truman says, hand over heart, and then he’s out the door.

“You drew me as an egg?” Benjy demands, dropping his leg so fast that Chloe narrowly avoids a roundhouse kick to the nose. “I thought this was figure drawing.”

“It is,” Ash insists. They flip their sketchbook around to show their work, which is a gorgeously detailed study of the human form topped off with a sunny-side-up egg where Benjy’s head should be. “It’s my interpretation of figure drawing.”

“I’m not posing for you anymore.”

“I already drew you.”

“Well, erase it.”

“No, I like it,” Ash says simply. “It’s my art. I don’t make you un-choreograph your Nicki Minaj songs.”

“Hard to argue with that one,” Chloe notes, and Benjy sighs hugely and retreats to the piano bench.

“Benjy,” Georgia says. “Play us a song.”

It works; Benjy’s scowl immediately transforms into a smile. There’s probably not a single thing Benjy loves more than someone asking him to play a song.

Back when they still had spring musical rehearsals, a handful of them would hang back afterward and Benjy would take requests. Chloe would sing along, then a junior in a supporting role would pick out a harmony, and eventually some strange quiet freshman would join in. It usually lasted fifteen minutes before Mr. Truman sent them home, but sometimes it would feel like hours on the tile floor with her back against Georgia’s back and her head tilted on Georgia’s shoulder so she could project her voice to the ceiling.

She smiles, the memory replacing Shara’s mysterious whereabouts and suspiciously healthy cuticles in her mind. Ash puts down their sketchbook and joins Benjy on the piano bench. It’s always funny to see them next to each other, because they have almost the exact same mullet-y haircut, one ginger, one brown. If the dress code allowed, they’d probably have given each other undercuts by now.

“There it is,” Benjy says, backtracking over the last few keys with his left hand. One of them brings a mysterious noise with it, like an angry little bee somewhere inside the piano, the one Mr. Truman was complaining about.

He twiddles with a few keys around the middle of the keyboard, searching for the faint buzz again, but what Chloe hears is one familiar note out of the jumble. What is it about that note?

Somewhere you go almost every day.

Keeping your vows.

Hiding in the brakes.

Wait.

Wedding vows.

I’ll run from thee and hide me in the brakes.That’s a line from A Midsummer’s Night Dream, and Midsummer is where the wedding march comes from, not the here-comes-the-bride one but the other one, and Shara mentioned vows—

“Benjy,” Chloe says. “Do you know the wedding march?”

“I have played all of my straight cousins’ weddings,” Benjy says wearily, “so, yes.”

“Play the first note.”

He does—that solid, resounding middle C—and Chloe hears it. The vibration of one of the interior strings against something flimsy, like paper.

“Huh,” she says. She does not fly across the room and rip the top off the piano and fling it out of the way like Smith throwing a touchdown pass, but she very, very badly wants to. In her head, she is punching the entire thing apart with her bare hands. In reality, she purses her lips and says, “That’s weird.”

If she’s right, and the thing inside the piano is what she thinks—Jesus, Mr. Truman said it’s been acting up since last month. That would mean Shara’s been crawling around leaving clues for weeks. Who is this girl?

When the bell rings for the end of lunch, she waves her friends off the way she always does to hang back for her sixth hour, Girls Select Chorus. As soon as the door shuts behind them, before Mr. Truman or any of her classmates come straggling in from lunch, she crosses to the upright piano.

The silver key from Shara’s card is already in her pocket, just in case, and when she pushes it into the padlock on the piano lid, it’s a perfect fit.

Guess that explains who stole the piano key.

Carefully, she eases the case open and peers down into its guts, all its dozens of levers and mysterious pieces, and there, paperclipped to one of the strings, is an unpleasantly familiar pink card.

And leave thee to the mercy of wild beasts.That’s the rest of the line.

Junior year. AP Lang. Chloe and Shara were paired up for a project—involuntarily, of course. Ms. Rodkey split the class up in twos and forced them to memorize and perform a conversation from one of the plays they covered in their Shakespeare unit. She’ll never forget Drew Taylor in his tube socks stammering through King Lear.

She remembers pushing her desk together with Shara’s, glaring when Shara’s skirt had the audacity to cross the invisible barrier between them and brush her knee. She remembers Shara smiling brightly at the teacher over the printed list of sample scenes before turning to Chloe and saying, “We’re doing Midsummer.” Like she was the only one who got to decide. Like Chloe hadn’t grown up listening to her moms recite Twelfth Night at each other over morning coffee.

She remembers their argument—Chloe wanted to do Olivia and Cesario meeting, Shara wanted Demetrius and Helena in the wood—and the way Shara’s fingers were warm on the back of her hand when she reached over to point out the lines she didn’t like. She remembers wanting to throw her copy of Midsummer at Shara’s perfect, polite face, but that they did, eventually, agree to do it.

They met in the library after school and read lines at each other for an hour, Shara’s cheeks going pinker and pinker with quiet anger the more Chloe recited without glancing at the page. Chloe chewed on a smile, off-book. It was obvious which of them was going to do better on the assignment. For once, it didn’t matter that Shara had gotten her way.

She remembers the way Shara left in a huff, swinging her backpack over her shoulder, and then walked into class the next day with every word committed to memory. Chloe stood at the front of the room as Shara recited in her sugary drawl, I’ll follow thee and make a heaven of hell, and she stared at Shara’s face, at the pearl studs on her earlobes and the lock of hair tucked there behind her ear and her lip balm catching the light from the window when her mouth moved, and she willed her to miss a line, just one line. She didn’t, and in the end, they were graded as a team anyway.

Chloe reaches inside the piano, slips the card out from between the strings, and opens it.

On the top flap of the card, Shara’s written out another quote from Midsummer. Chloe knows this one from memory too. Hermia and Helena.

As if our hands, our sides, voices, and minds,

Had been incorporate. So we grew together,

Like to a double cherry—seeming parted

But yet an union in partition—

Two lovely berries molded on one stem;

On the other flap, the note is addressed to her:

Chloe,

Being the principal’s daughter does have at least one perk: a master key makes everything easier. Mr. Truman seems nice, though, so I did feel a little bad.

Glad you figured this one out . I stayed up all night memorizing our scene, but this was the one I really wanted to do. It’s such a nice image, a double-stemmed cherry. I think we’re like that. You always seemed to be right next to me, even though we never could get that close to each other. But then, I don’t have to explain metaphors to you, do I?

XOXO

S

“So, you’re back in?” Rory says when they meet behind the gym after seventh hour.

“I was never officially out, and this isn’t Ocean’s 8,” Chloe tells him. “Though if it was, I would be Cate Blanchett.”

“Never saw it,” Rory says, examining his cuticles. Then, so quietly she’s not sure she’s meant to hear it, he adds, “I’m Rihanna.”

Smith’s still reading over the postscript at the bottom of the card Shara left in the piano. It’s addressed to him.

There are a couple more things I need you to know about me,it says. I left a photo of us in the last place you kissed me. Maybe it’ll help.

“The last place I kissed her?” Smith says incredulously. The three of them are maintaining a careful two feet of distance like they’re saving room for Jesus at a homecoming dance. Smith looks at Rory while Rory looks down at his feet, then Rory looks up, and Smith dedicates himself to studying the toes of his Air Forces. Chloe longs for last week, when she’d never had Shara’s mouth on hers and her biggest problem was finding a sticky bra for prom.

“You don’t remember the last place you kissed her?” Chloe asks.

“No, I do,” Smith says. “It was at Dixon Wells’s house when we were taking prom photos.”

“Okay, so,” Rory says, “ask him if you can come over and look for it.”

“It’s not that easy,” Smith says. He rubs a hand over the buzzed hairs on the back of his neck. “Dixon is kind of an asshole.”

“Yeah,” Chloe agrees. “No joke.”

“I thought he was your friend,” Rory says.

“Dixon is a guy I hang out with,” Smith tells him. “That’s not the same thing.”

“What are you saying?” Chloe asks.

“I’m saying that if I ask to come over to look for something Shara left there, he’s probably gonna be a dick about it and want to know what it is, and if he finds out my girlfriend cheated on me with both of you, he’s definitely gonna be a dick about it.”

Chloe takes a second to think about that one. Shara may have dragged them into this, but she doesn’t deserve for the school’s most unapologetic d-bag to know she kissed a girl. Even if Chloe doesn’t care about Smith’s reputation, she does care about that. Like, in a general moral sense.

“Okay,” Chloe says. “So, how else can we get into Dixon’s house?”

“He’s throwing a party tomorrow night,” Smith says. “I’ll look for it then.”

“You need help,” Rory says. “Dixon lives across the golf course from me. I’ve seen his house. It’s basically a small country.”

“You could—well, one of you could come with me. Two might be pushing it. He gets weird about people he doesn’t know showing up. If we want to keep this to ourselves, only one of you can come.”

“She wrote it on my note,” Chloe says quickly. “I’ll go.”