Chapter 8

8

DAYS SINCE SHARA LEFT: 8

DAYS UNTIL GRADUATION: 35

“Sorry,” Chloe’s mom says, folding her arms across her chest. She leans against the side of the truck, where the logo of her welding company is painted in black. “You went to a party where last night?”

This is how it always goes with Chloe’s moms. They talk about everything, so every secret feels huge. She lasted until Sunday morning, then folded on the ride to the Birmingham airport.

“Dixon Wells’s house.”

“Why does that name sound so familiar?”

“Because he’s a douchebag of nuclear proportions. I’m sure I’ve complained about him before.”

“And this was when you said you were with Georgia?”

“No,” Chloe hedges, “I said I was going out with a friend. Which was true because I went to the party with a friend. Well, technically I met him there, but we went together.”

“Playing pretty fast and loose with the concept of truth there, junior. Do you want to tell me why you went to the house party of an atomic asshole?”

“Nuclear douchebag.”

“Sure.”

Since she knew she’d end up breaking, she already has her story. The whole hunting-down-her-academic-rival thing is too complicated to explain, and if she claims she wants to make peace with the Willowgrove elite as a graduation goodwill gesture, her mom will probably rush her to the ER for a head injury.

“I’m in a group project with a football player in my Bible class,” she says, “and I needed to tell him to stop blowing me off and do his part.”

“Ah, yes.” Her mom grimaces. “Mandatory Bible class.”

Bringing up Bible class always works. Her mom isn’t any happier than Chloe is to be stuck in False Beach, which is the main reason Chloe can’t be mad at her for dragging them here. Resenting Willowgrove has been a bonding activity for them these past few years.

“Yeah,” Chloe says. “Coach Wilson takes time away from his busy schedule of training the baseball team to inform six classes of seniors every day that premarital sex is a sin and homosexuals are an abomination. It’s great.”

Her mom looks like she has something to say, but then the automatic doors slide open and there’s her mama, looking the same as ever in a pair of loose linen overalls, tugging along a suitcase full of opera gowns. She has Chloe in her arms in a second, scooping her up and burying her fingers in Chloe’s short hair.

“Oh, sweet girl,” she says in Chloe’s ear. Chloe feels her throat go tight. She coughs into her mama’s shoulder. “I missed you so much.”

“Did you get grayer?” Chloe asks into her hair.

“Probably.” She releases Chloe, then turns to Chloe’s mom, gathers her up at the waist, and gives her a long, open-mouthed kiss like they’re on the bow of the freaking Titanic.

“Okay, okay,” Chloe says. “We’re still in Alabama. Let’s go.”

On the way home she recounts the story of Dixon’s party. She does get in trouble for lying, but the extent of her punishment is having to endure a thirty-minute lecture from her mama about the importance of open communication within a self-policing community, even one as small as a family of three. Chloe checks Shara’s Instagram for updates and says “uh-huh” in all the right places. There’s nothing new, just the same purposefully curated grid of warm-toned fake candids.

When she’s done with Shara’s Instagram, she returns to her group chat with Smith and Rory, where they’ve been discussing the postscript on Shara’s latest note. Chloe’s sure the word “records” is a reference to Rory’s music collection and wants to do a search of his room, but he responded via perturbed voice note this morning that he’s perfectly capable of looking on his own and neither of them are allowed back in his room ever again.

?????, Chloe texts, which the others know by now is her way of demanding a status report. Rory replies with a middle finger emoji.

At home, they eat the accursed turducken, over which her mama describes her hotel in Portugal and its fancy balconies and the room service custard tarts. After dinner, there’s homemade cheesecake with sugared cherries on top, which reminds Chloe of Midsummer and Shara, and then she’s itching to take her phone out and check Instagram again.

She drops her plate in the sink and heads for her bedroom.

“Hey, where are you off to?” her mama says, brushing a long lock of graying hair back into her braid. Her mom grunts past her in the hallway, hauling an armload of blankets out of the master bedroom. “We’re renting You’ve Got Mail.”

“Yeah,” her mom says as she dumps everything on the couch. “Aren’t you gonna watch Tom Hanks put an adorable indie bookstore out of business with us?”

And God, she missed her mama, she really did.

But … Shara.

“I have a huge paper due on Monday,” she says.

Her mama pouts. “Why did I raise you to be so responsible? I was supposed to raise you to be an anarchist.”

She shrugs. “Dropped the ball, I guess.”

Down the hall, she flips on her light and flops onto the bed.

If she were in her old room, she’d know what to do about Shara. It was easier to think there.

She loved the apartment in LA. It was right on the edge of the city, a three-bedroom on the fourth floor, and she still has the layout committed to memory. The single bathroom, the hall closet Titania liked to hide inside, the pink wingback chair in the living room. To the left of the kitchen sink, there was an antique hutch her moms salvaged from an estate sale and painted mint green. Her room had a sliding glass door to a tiny balcony and views of the skyline. When she was ten, her moms finally let her have the key to it, and she never felt as cool and adult as she did while reading books on a beach towel on her own private balcony all summer long.

The house here in False Beach is only slightly bigger than the apartment, but it feels too big, somehow. She misses hearing her neighbor’s daily routines through the walls and getting sweet tea from the kitchen without losing the Bluetooth connection between her headphones and her laptop. She misses her old room, the lavender-yellow-green layers of paint as she got older and the spot on the closet door where she stuck a Legend of Korra poster and never got the tape off. It’s hard to learn everything you know about life in the same room and then pack everything up one day and never see it again.

They’ve tried to make her new room as Chloe as it can be. They painted the walls green and strung up lights around the ceiling, and above the metal bars of her headboard, they hung a giant framed print of her favorite taco truck from their old neighborhood. There’s no balcony, only a window facing the sideyard next to the AC unit, but her mom built a wooden bench the width of the sill so Chloe could read in the sun.

It still doesn’t feel like home though. After her grandma died sophomore year, Chloe hoped they’d go back, but there was her grandma’s house to sort through and sell, and the estate to settle, and then it was too late to finish high school somewhere else.

Titania hops up on the bed, and Chloe pats her between the ears.

One of the things her moms say Chloe inherited from Titania is the way they both need something to scratch at, a place to dull their claws so they don’t tear the house apart. That’s something Willowgrove has on the hippie schools she went to in California: a chance for her to compete.

It’s why she can’t stop poking around the place where Shara’s supposed to be. As long as they’ve both been at Willowgrove, Chloe finally had someone to fight for dominance, and that gave some kind of reason to life here. It’s not like Shara is that important; it’s just that, without her, Chloe’s not sure what the point of anything is.

Her friends, she recalls suddenly. That’s the point of her life here. Georgia and Benjy and Ash, her friends she was supposed to spend Friday night with before Shara got in the way.

She rolls over, picks up her phone, and FaceTimes Georgia.

“’Sup,” Georgia answers after two rings.

“Geoooo,” Chloe says back.

The shot is backdropped by the overstuffed shelves of Belltower. Georgia’s wearing her favorite T-shirt, an off-white tee with a picture of Smokey Bear surrounded by woodland creatures and the slogan Be careful, there are babes in the forest, and she’s chugging from her emotional support water bottle. The store must have gotten a shipment of new releases—that’s the only reason she’d go in when the shop’s closed on Sundays.

“You know, I’m really glad you landed on your gay aesthetic,” Chloe tells her. “Aspiring park ranger looks great on you.”

“Thanks,” she says. “I don’t know why it took me so long. I guess I didn’t realize being a Girl Scout and being gay could be the same thing.”

“Remember your ‘Hey Mamas’ phase,” Chloe says.

“Please, that was like, one week,” Georgia groans.

In the year since Georgia first told Chloe she liked girls, she’s cycled through a half dozen different lesbian aesthetics trying to figure out which one was her. First was tying her hair up and wearing Nike sports bras and researching face exercises to sharpen her jawline, then it was high femme red lipstick and drawn-on tattoos, next were ripped jeans and thrifted leather jackets, and exactly once, she considered cutting off her hair entirely and trying out for the soccer team. In the end, Chloe’s mom gifted Georgia a carabiner for her seventeenth birthday, and she chopped off her hair above her shoulders and it all came together.

“Where have you been?” Georgia asks. “I texted you like, three times last night to see if you were coming to Ash’s for movie night.”

Chloe winces.

“My mama came home from Portugal today,” she says. “My mom’s been going nuts cleaning the house. She roasted an actual turducken. It’s a whole thing. How was the movie?”

“We got sidetracked doing a mozzarella stick tasting.”

“A what?”

“Benjy drove us around and we picked up mozzarella sticks from every place in town. Then we ranked them on a scale of one to ten for flavor, presentation, structural integrity, and dipping sauce.”

“Oh my God. I’m so mad I missed that. Did you average the results at the end? Who won?”

“Chloe, we’re gay. We can’t do math.”

“Okay, well, next time I’ll come and make a spreadsheet.”

“This is why we need you,” Georgia says. “Once in a generation, there is born a bisexual who can do math. You’re the chosen one.”

She switches the call to her laptop and slides Georgia’s face to the side, opening up Chrome while Georgia describes how Ash almost threw up in a bush because they keep insisting they’re not lactose intolerant even though they obviously are. Georgia and her do this a lot—sitting on FaceTime for hours while they work on homework or scroll silently through their phones. What she loves most about Georgia is how she’s only ever felt completely comfortable in her company, even when she’s pissed off or stressed or insecure or weird. Everything’s easy with Georgia.

“Did you ever figure out what that card was about?” Georgia asks. “The one Shara left for you at Taco Bell?”

Ah. That’s why everything’s easy with Georgia. Because she can read Chloe’s mind.

“Popular girl wants attention, I guess,” Chloe says. Her hands fidget on the keyboard, and somehow she’s pulling up the burner email account Shara left for them. Hm. Well, since she’s here, might as well check the drafts. Maybe there’s something new since the last five times she checked. “Who cares?”

“Uh, you, like three days ago?” Georgia points out. “Like, a lot?”

“I thought you were sick of me complaining about Shara,” Chloe says. She doesn’t find any new drafts, but the editing timestamp on the one in the folder says someone logged in this morning. Suspicious.

“I mean, kind of,” Georgia says. “But getting kissed by Shara Wheeler is the most interesting thing that’s happened to either of us in a long time, so I’m kind of invested.”

“It wasn’t even a good kiss,” Chloe lies spectacularly. “Anyway, that’s Smith’s problem now.”

“Fine, starve me.”

She could tell Georgia the truth. She thinks about it, even. Georgia knows every other one of her secrets. But she feels fiercely protective of this one, even with Georgia—especially with Georgia. She’s not sure she wants to hear Georgia’s take on this situation. Georgia is the light on the dark side of Chloe’s moon, and sometimes Chloe doesn’t want to see what’s going on over there.

“Do you have time to talk about something real quick?” Georgia asks.

“Is it about the French project?” Chloe says, praying for a change of topic. “Because I promise I am doing tons of research on the June Rebellion.”

“Watching Les Mis doesn’t count.”

“I don’t see why not.”

“Madame Clark specifically said we can’t use it as a source.”

“Fine, then I’ll do other research. Like reading Les Mis.”

“Look, as long as you write your half of the paper, I don’t even care. I just want this year to be over.”

Chloe nods. “I will. Can you send me your notes so far?”

“Yeah, hang on.”

Georgia’s face disappears momentarily, and then there’s the ping of an email.

As she opens her inbox, she considers sending Shara an email enumerating all the ways she’s pissed Chloe off, but there’s no way Shara would take the bait. She’s not responding to Smith’s texts or her friends’ Instagram comments, only communicating through cryptic notes. Everything has to be a guess, a backward word you can only see by holding it up to a mirror. She won’t respond to something so obvious.

“Ooh, color-coded,” Chloe says, opening the Google Doc Georgia sent her. “I see you took my suggestions.”

“Yeah, well, at this point, fifty percent of my human interaction is in Google Docs, so I needed some structure.”

Willowgrove has a strict no-phones-on-campus rule, but most students have workarounds. One of the most popular: creating a Google Doc and giving your friends editing permission, so everyone can type in it like an unofficial group chat. It looks like schoolwork, and if a teacher gets too close, you delete everything.

Something changeable, something easily hidden …

“Chloe?” says Georgia, and she jumps.

“Sorry, I spaced,” Chloe says. “What were you saying?”

Georgia frowns, tucking her hair behind her ear. “I was reminding you that it’s due on the twenty-sixth.”

“I know,” Chloe assures her, even though somehow she thought it was the twenty-eighth. “I’ll even come to school in full French revolutionary cosplay the day we turn it in. Really sell it.”

“Cool, I’ll be Marie Antoinette,” Georgia says. “We can roll in a guillotine and do a whole historical reenactment. Anyway, there’s something I—”

“Actually,” Chloe says, clicking to create a new document. She has an idea. “I gotta go do something. Pick this up later?”

“Okay, tomorrow?”

“Yeah, definitely,” Chloe says. “Loveyoubye.”

She hangs up and copies the URL for the doc, pastes it into a blank email, puts the burner account into the address field, and hits send.

She imagines Shara getting that ping on her phone. Maybe she’s in a hotel with a stolen credit card, bundled up in a fuzzy white robe with a fake ID and cash fanned out on the nightstand, skimming her lips on the rim of a champagne flute. Maybe she’s locked away in some cabin in the woods, thumbing through her copy of Emma. Maybe she’s on a beach in Gulf Shores getting her toes licked by a college sophomore named Brayden.

Wherever she is, she’ll see the notification. And then she’ll open the email and see the link. And then she’ll click on the link, and she’ll see the document Chloe created and the three words typed at the top of the page.

Where are you?