Chapter 6

6

DAYS SINCE SHARA LEFT: 6

DAYS UNTIL GRADUATION: 37

The last thing Chloe wants to do, definitely at this moment and maybe ever for the rest of her life, is spend her Friday night watching Dixon Wells slobber all over a beer bong with Shara Wheeler’s boyfriend.

It’s not that she doesn’t enjoy parties, or large groups of screaming people, or Saturday nights that get a little sloppy. It’s very well-documented by Benjy’s Snapchat stories that she enjoys all those things. She even once almost got French-kissed by Tucker Price from the Quiz Bowl team in his parents’ saltwater jacuzzi. Straight A’s and being capable of having fun are not mutually exclusive.

But a party full of the type of people popular at Willowgrove is not Chloe’s idea of fun, especially when it’s hosted by Dixon Wells. Dixon is a particular variety of affable jerk prevalent in Alabama: the type who insists it’s okay for him to make offensive jokes because he’s not actually racist/sexist/homophobic/transphobic/whatever so he doesn’t actually mean them, but aren’t the jokes so funny? Dark humor. Of course, the student body voted him prom king over Smith, who seems boring but at least decent.

Dixon’s house has one of those curved driveways out front like it should have valet service. Cars Chloe recognizes from the school parking lot line the street: Jeep, Jeep, Jeep, Range Rover, Jeep, jacked-up truck, jacked-up truck, jacked-up truck. She slots her hand-me-down Camry in behind an F-150 with a lift kit that belongs in the Australian outback.

I’m here, she texts Smith.

She waits five minutes, then another five, but Smith doesn’t text back. Fantastic. She can hear the party raging in the backyard, but she doesn’t want to walk in alone.

She can do this. She’s wearing her heaviest ankle boots, the black ones with the big rubber treads and the three-inch heels. Benjy calls them her mankiller boots. She can do anything in her mankiller boots.

She closes her eyes and reels through a dozen alternate, fearless versions of Chloe, landing on an image of herself as a ruthless queen with a million yards of bloodred velvet pooling around her, stomping around a palace with a vial of poison and incredible hair. That’ll do.

She opens the door, plants her mankiller boots in the Wellses’ impeccably groomed front lawn, and immediately gets her heel trapped in a patch of mud.

She yanks herself loose and, only slightly pink in the face, stomps off.

The backyard is enormous, with a massive trampoline and a redbrick outdoor kitchen with a marble island and a gas grill that probably cost more than a semester at Willowgrove, which isn’t cheap. Even the grass looks expensive. Nobody seems to be wearing actual clothing, only soggy T-shirts or swimsuits or cut-off shorts. She feels overdressed by having shoes on.

She peers across the wide pool full of screaming girls in bikinis on linebacker shoulders, trying to pick Smith out of the crowd.

Every person she passes stops what they’re doing to watch her walk by. She straightens her shoulders and stares ahead, same as when she stood on stage in front of the whole school and put her heart into singing “Think of Me.” Eyes up, chin out, pretend that nobody is taking out their phone to do a mean Snapchat story about it.

“Chloe Green!” someone yells, and God, she hopes it’s Smith. She whips her head around—

Nope, it’s Ace Torres, shaggy dark hair dripping chlorine everywhere and that disconcertingly wide grin. Her jaw clenches automatically.

He reaches her in two enormous strides, looming like a wet bear with a slice of pizza. “Chloe! You’re here! That’s so crazy!”

Technically, Ace is harmless, and she wouldn’t have any reason to hate him more than the average meathead Willowgrove boy if he hadn’t imposed upon the most important spring musical of her high school career. She always thought Mr. Truman was above stunt-casting a football bro, but he practically had a stroke when Ace managed to sing four bars at tryouts.

“Yeah, I’m as surprised as you are,” she says, dodging a drop of pool water.

Ace laughs. “Dude, I miss seeing you guys at rehearsal.”

“You could still hang out with us,” Chloe points out.

“I kinda get the feeling you don’t actually want that,” Ace says. Chloe blinks at him. “But it’s cool! You’re here now! Dope! Are you here with somebody?”

There’s no easy answer to that, but she goes with, “Smith invited me.”

“That’s what’s up,” Ace says. “He needs more friends!”

She glances around the party, which seems to include more than a quarter of their grade and sizable delegations of the sophomore and junior classes. There are so many bodies in the pool, it’s impossible to tell where one naked trapezius ends and another begins. “Is this not enough friends?”

Before Ace can answer, he catches sight of someone over her shoulder. “Hey, Smith, look who’s here!”

And there’s Smith, emerging from the snack table. As soon as his eyes land on Chloe’s face, they dart guiltily to his pocket, where his phone must be.

“Hey, Chloe, uh, glad—glad you made it,” Smith says.

She sighs, not wasting any more time. “Hi. Can you show me where to get some water?” She glares at him pointedly until he takes the hint.

“Oh, uh, yeah, it’s right inside, over here,” he says, turning to lead her toward the house.

“Bye, Chloe!” Ace calls after them. “Don’t leave before upside-down margaritas!”

“What in the name of God is an upside-down margarita,” Chloe hisses at Smith as he opens one of the massive French doors.

“You don’t want to know.”

There’s nobody inside except for a couple of juniors making out on a couch, and Smith sidesteps them neatly and leads her into the kitchen.

“Holy shitballs,” Chloe swears when she steps into it. The marble island is nearly the length of her entire bedroom at home. The stainless steel refrigerator looks like it could fit a human body. Maybe two.

“Yeah.” Smith adds in a rush, “Look, I’m sorry I missed your text. I was talking to Summer about the whole Shara thing, and they used to be best friends until they had some weird falling-out this year that they both refuse to tell me anything about, and it’s all—”

“It’s fine,” Chloe interrupts. “Tell me where I’m supposed to be looking.”

Smith leans on one of the six leather barstools lining the island, thinking. The more time she spends with him, the more she notices that he doesn’t carry himself like all the other football players out in the yard. He’s big, but he’s graceful. He doesn’t walk from room to room as much as he flows through them.

He’s wearing a Willowgrove football T-shirt with the sleeves torn off and a pair of swim trunks patterned with little pink flamingos. She spares exactly one second to find them charming.

“So,” he says, “I was with her the whole time we were here for prom photos, except when she went to the bathroom.”

“Where’s the bathroom?”

Smith pulls a face. “I think there are five of them. Six if you count the one in the pool house. So, she could have passed through pretty much any part of the house to get to one.”

Chloe groans. “I’m really getting sick of these country club mansions.”

“I know,” Smith agrees.

They split up—Smith takes the pool house and the finished basement, leaving Chloe the first and second floor. She works her way across the ground floor first, through spare rooms and game rooms and rooms that seem to have no use except adding square footage to the already astronomical square footage. She stumbles across what appears to be a man cave, the kind she and her moms heckle on HGTV—just a huge room full of nothing but a massive TV and a lot of tacky Bama decor.

On the second floor, she finds Dixon’s room, which is a study in the worst of teenage boyhood. Chloe likes boys and their defined jawlines and crooked smiles, but the pile of sweaty laundry in the corner makes her want to quit them altogether. She squeezes a test shot of the spray-on deodorant on the dresser and gags. This time next year, Dixon Wells will be cracking open a cold one with the rest of Kappa Sig before his lawyer dad gets them off the hook for some Dateline-worthy hazing. Gross. There’s no way Shara set foot in this room.

To be honest, it’s not only hard to imagine Shara in Dixon’s room; it’s hard to imagine Shara doing any of this.

The Shara that Chloe has spent four years alongside has always seemed like a passive, quiet thing. You hear stories about her weekends feeding the homeless or tutoring fifth graders or being an eyebrow model in Japan, but you never actually see her do any of it unless she posts a gorgeously composed photo to her 25,000 Instagram followers. She just floats around, never a hair out of place, wearing a uniform skirt that somehow looks shorter on her than everyone else but sits exactly at regulation length. She doesn’t get her hands dirty.

Chloe’s fingers twitch for the silver chain in her bathroom drawer. She’s always suspected there was something wrong with the math of Shara, but she’s never been able to prove what. And considering she can’t even picture Shara here, sneaking around someone else’s house with a fistful of clues and a plan to skip town—she’s never felt further from the answer.

She’s about to find Smith and tell him it’s a bust when she sees it.

On the landing between the first and second floors, tucked behind a stack of books and a fake plant, beneath a stuffed deer head, there’s a pink card.

She snatches it up and rips it open.

Inside, the first thing she finds is a polaroid of Shara and Smith smiling by the pool, the sun setting behind them. Shara’s in her pink prom dress, and Smith looks slightly uncomfortable in his tux but holds on tight to Shara’s hand. Chloe flips it over so she doesn’t have to look at them as she reads the card.

Smith,

I have to tell you something about this picture. I look happy, right? What I was thinking in this moment was, “We’re not going to make it to Graduation .”

P. S. Check the records, Rory. Chloe should know where they are. The key is already there, where I am .

Outside, she slips past the defensive line shotgunning White Claws and toward the pool house. The side door is slightly ajar—Smith must still be in there—and she reaches for the handle—

She tries to take another step, but she can’t. The heel of her boot is stuck, again, this time in a puddle of sucking mud between two of the pavers leading to the door. She tugs, but the ground tugs harder.

This far back in the yard, the sounds of the party are muted enough that she can hear Smith’s voice from within the pool house, and she opens her mouth to abandon her pride and ask him to pull her out of the lawn, but first, another voice speaks.

“… fine,” Chloe makes out. “Don’t worry about it.”

She doesn’t spend much time around people likely to be at a Dixon party, but it’s easy to assign a face to the voice. Summer Collins, softball star and homecoming court member. Pretty, popular, in Chloe’s AP Bio class, the only Black girl in the class of ’22. Her older sister famously came out as a lesbian two years after graduating, and her dad’s rich because he owns the car dealership across the road from Willowgrove.

“Remember eighth grade?” Smith’s voice asks. “When we had to take care of that bag of flour for life sciences?”

“Yeah,” Summer says, “I dropped it out of my mom’s car and exploded our baby all over the driveway the first night I had it.”

“Remember how your mom took us to the store to find the exact brand of flour and replace the bag, and we brought it to class, and I freaked out because I thought everyone could tell—”

“And you narced on us to Mrs. Young? Yeah, how could I forget? We failed. That’s the only time I’ve ever gotten a bad grade on a science project in my life. I was pissed.”

“Do you ever … I don’t know, feel like that sometimes?”

Hell. Chloe drops to one knee and starts clawing at her boot laces, attempting to free herself before she can accidentally hear any revelations about Smith Parker’s internal life.

“Feel like what?” she hears Summer ask. “Pissed at you?”

“No, I mean, like … like you were switched or something, but you look the way you’re supposed to look, and you’re still flour, so why should it feel like you’re wrong?”

“Oh,” Summer says. “Actually—”

With a final heave, Chloe manages to dislodge her foot, but the momentum sends her tumbling forward, through the doorway, and onto the polished concrete floor of the pool house. Right at Summer’s feet.

Summer and Smith both freeze, red Solo cups in hand, staring down at her sprawled out with one shoe on.

“Okay, well,” Chloe says, “someone should really look into the safety standards of this house party. Lawsuit waiting to happen.”

“You good?” Summer asks as Smith extends a hand to help Chloe up. “You shouldn’t drink more than one if it’s your first time.”

“Appreciate it, but I don’t drink,” Chloe says. Smith pulls her to her feet with the full force of his biceps, which almost sends her tumbling all over again, and now she’s embarrassed and motion sick. “Was looking for Smith. Hi, Smith.”

“Hey,” Smith says. He raises his eyebrows unsubtly at her. “Did you find the bathroom?”

“Yeah, I found it,” she says.

Summer looks them over, arches an eyebrow, and shakes her head. “Is there still pizza left?”

“Uh, I think so,” Chloe says.

“Finish this later?” Summer says to Smith.

“Uh,” Smith says, “I mean, it’s fine.”

Summer shrugs, leans out the open door, then quickly ducks back in. “Looks like Ace got upside-down margaritas started. Somebody’s gonna get their teeth knocked out and you only have one chance to be able to tell that story.”

“Uh, actually,” Chloe attempts, “I was gonna—”

But Summer is gone, and Smith is right behind her.

“—go home,” she finishes to no one.

That’s what she should do. She can send Smith a photo of Shara’s note from the comfort of her bedroom, where nobody is going to end the night throwing up in the pool and having to fish their retainer out of the filter.

She steps into the doorway and leans down to recover her shoe from the lawn.

Although … maybe this is where she needs to be. Know thy enemy, et cetera. Four years of looking at Shara from the outside hasn’t gotten her anywhere, but this could be her chance to climb into Shara’s skin for a night and see her from the inside.

“Shara absolute nightmare Wheeler,” she sighs to herself.

She pulls off her other boot, squares her shoulders, and walks barefoot into the party.