Chapter 9

9

DAYS SINCE SHARA LEFT: 9

DAYS UNTIL GRADUATION: 34

Of all the weird parts of life at Willowgrove, chapel day was the hardest for Chloe to get used to.

Once a week, classes shift to an abbreviated schedule to make room for a compulsory hour-long service in the sanctuary on campus. Usually it happens on Wednesdays, but since they also have part of this week off for Easter, it’s a special Monday chapel day.

There’s a praise band of Willowgrove upperclassmen plodding through Christian rock songs, then a sermon, usually led by a teacher or Principal Wheeler himself. Sometimes a student will be moved by the Spirit to do a shaky fifteen-minute personal testimony at the microphone, like the time Emma Grace Baker explained that her diabetes has brought her closer to Jesus.

Before Willowgrove, the closest Chloe had ever been to church was listening to her mama practice Mozart, and chapel day has made sure she won’t ever be back. Sermons have ranged from “Halloween is Satanic” to “a sophomore sent her boyfriend nudes and he forwarded them to all his friends, so now we are going to do a very shame-y talk on modesty and then next week she’s going to switch schools while her boyfriend experiences exactly zero consequences.” Once, the Spanish teacher got up with an easel pad, drew a diagram of two stick men on a deserted island, and told them the fact that humanity would go extinct on that island was proof God doesn’t want anyone to be gay. Occasionally, the school hires actors to do a skit about bullying.

Chloe turns to Georgia as they file into the sanctuary.

“What do you think it’s gonna be this week?” Chloe asks her.

“Probably something festive, like a table read of the Passion of the Christ,” she says. She’s fidgeting with her hair, pinning it behind her ear.

“Remember last year when they had that cop come and try to scare us about drugs, but he ended up telling us exactly how many ounces of weed you can carry without getting arrested?”

“Iconic.”

“Hey, Chloe,” says a voice, “can I talk to you real quick?”

When she turns, it’s Smith who has found his way to her in the crowd. He’s wearing his letterman jacket, and Chloe almost has to admire his commitment to jock flexing. It’s eighty degrees outside.

Georgia eyes him under a skeptical brow, then Chloe, then the letterman jacket, then Chloe again. Isengard?

Chloe shakes her head.

“Be right back,” she tells Georgia, and she slips into the current with Smith.

“Is this about the party?” she asks once they’re out of Georgia’s earshot. “I promise I won’t tell your friends you secretly hate them.”

“I don’t hate most of my friends,” Smith clarifies. “But that’s not what I was gonna say.”

“Oh my God, hi, Chloe,” Mackenzie Harris says. Smith has been absorbed into the popular-seniors pocket of the crowd, and Chloe’s along for the ride like an unfortunate barnacle. “You look really pretty today. Is your makeup different?”

She punctuates the question by turning to Emma Grace and exchanging a raised-eyebrow, too-big smile, the kind of popular girl move that immediately gets Chloe’s skin crawling.

“Anyway,” she says to Smith, who manages to look somewhat apologetic. “You were saying?”

Smith leans down, closing enough of their height gap that he can lower his voice.

“I was reading Shara’s note again last night, and it hit me that maybe we’re thinking about the wrong kind of records. What’s another place that Rory has records, that Shara would have a key to?”

Records—?Oh, of course. Why didn’t she think of that? She’s only sat on the other side of the desk having her own file waved threateningly in her face approximately one billion times.

“Wheeler’s office,” Chloe concludes. “She meant his student records. Wait, are you saying you want to break into the admin offices?”

Smith holds up both hands, calloused palms out. “Nooo way. I’m not going anywhere near that.”

“What happened to ‘I’ll do anything to find my girlfriend’?” Chloe asks, cocking a brow.

“I can’t risk getting caught,” Smith says, and he adds, as if anyone has ever forgotten that Shara got recruited by Harvard and Smith got recruited by Texas A&M, “I signed with A&M, Chloe.”

“Isn’t that kind of an insurance policy though? Like, I don’t know anything about football, but I’m pretty sure Wheeler can’t put a famous quarterback in the Willowgrove recruitment brochures if he expels you before you get to start.”

Smith shakes his head. “It’s bigger than that. You know I already have my own page on the ESPN website? I’m gonna get an article written about me if I breathe wrong. It’s a miracle they haven’t found out about Shara, and I’m not about to push it.”

“Okay, fine,” Chloe concedes, “so what are you saying? You want me to do it?”

“Um,” says Mackenzie’s too-friendly voice beside her. “I was gonna sit there.”

Chloe looks up and realizes, to her horror, that they’ve moved into the pews, and she’s trapped in the middle of the Shara crowd. Mackenzie’s smiling that fake smile, but she doesn’t sell it the way Shara does. She has shark eyes.

Chloe glances toward the last pews, where Georgia is sitting wild-eyed between Ash and Benjy, looking ready to mount a Navy SEAL extraction mission.

“I don’t want to be here either,” Chloe tells Mackenzie.

“Then, um, leave?”

“I—”

“Shhhh.”

It’s Emma Grace this time, shushing her from three seats down. Chloe doesn’t know when the praise band wrapped up, but suddenly she, Smith, and Mackenzie are the last three people standing in the entire sanctuary. At the altar, Principal Wheeler has stepped behind the microphone.

“Ms. Green, can you please sit down and be respectful, sweetheart?” he says into the mic. A ripple of giggles breaks out, and Chloe feels her face flush. She wants to shout that Smith and Mackenzie were standing too, but they’ve already sunk into their seats. She drops down between them and slumps low enough for her face to disappear.

“Good morning, everyone,” Wheeler says. He takes the mic off the stand and paces across the stage in that way he likes to do, like he’s a cool, casual dude talking about super relatable topics for teens. “I wanted to say a few quick words before we pray today. I want to remind y’all what the Bible tells us about gossiping. We’re all tempted every day to talk about each other, but Ephesians 4:29 says, ‘Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen.’”

On the projection screen above the altar, the Bible verse pops up in white letters on a blue PowerPoint slide. She remembers the note he jotted down in his office last week when she saw the card in his files. Sermon on gossip. Of course this was coming.

“I’ve been hearing that a lot of you have been gossiping about a member of the senior class who happens to be my daughter,” he goes on, immediately sucking all the air out of the sanctuary like a caught trout getting vacuum sealed for the freezer. “In fact, one of you took it upon yourself to personally ask me about it.”

Smith’s chin twitches, and Chloe sinks even lower until she’s eye level with the hymnal tucked into the back of the next pew.

She stares at the hymnal. The hymnal stares back.

The only days she likes Bible class are “spiritual devotion” days, when they get to go to the sanctuary and do free-range contemplation on God. She usually spends the hour crawling under pews with her friends, sharing vending machine snacks and hushed laughter. One of those days, about a month ago, Chloe left her favorite pen behind and had to sneak in between classes to retrieve it, only to find Shara.

The overhead lights were off, so the afternoon sun fell across the sanctuary in slashes through the tall, thin windows, and there Shara was, halfway illuminated in one. Even from the other side of the church, Chloe recognized her by her delicate quarter profile and the way her blond hair fanned behind her shoulders. She was by herself, her fingers resting on the spine of a hymnal in the next pew, and her head was bowed like she was praying.

Chloe left without her pen. She didn’t want to be alone in a room with Shara and God.

“I know you’re all very curious,” Principal Wheeler goes on. “When you care about someone, and they’re part of your community and your fellowship, it’s natural to worry about them. But it’s never okay to spread rumors, or to tell lies about another person. And if the Lord is calling someone to be somewhere else for a time, that’s nobody else’s business. All right?”

Chloe counts the rows quickly—it’s the same pew. The hymnal might be the same hymnal Shara touched that day.

Wasn’t it suspicious, actually, that Shara was in the sanctuary by herself? Praying in public is basically a competitive sport at Willowgrove—why would she be sneaking around to do it, unless she had something to hide?

Something like a little pink card?

They haven’t found any clues that point toward the sanctuary yet, but if they’re already hidden, and she can guess a place one might be, she can take a shortcut off the trail.

She slides the hymnal from the pew and shakes it upside-down—Emma Grace makes a face like she’s kicked a puppy named Jesus down a flight of stairs—but no card falls out.

“I want to remind y’all that here at Willowgrove we have a zero-tolerance policy for bullying, and bullying can come in many forms,” Wheeler says. “And one of them is gossip. So, if you’re going to spread a rumor about someone, think real hard about whether it’s really, really worth it. And then do the right thing.”

After an excruciatingly long pause, Wheeler leads the student body in prayer and then passes the mic to the guest speaker for an unnecessarily grisly lecture on the crucifixion. Smith shifts in his seat, pressing his fist into his chin. Chloe crosses her arms and wishes she were in the back row exchanging harrowed eye contact with Georgia instead of feeling Mackenzie’s bony elbow in her side.

Afterward, Smith grabs her arm before she can make a break for it.

“Ask Rory about the office,” Smith says. “He’s good at stuff like this.”

Willowgrove does have a cafeteria, but most students don’t actually use it. The high schoolers disperse into unofficial designated areas of campus for lunch: freshmen against the brick cafeteria exterior, sophomores on the steps of the sanctuary, juniors in the courtyard, and seniors with the prime real estate of the benches outside C Building.

She passes Smith, perched on the armrest of a bench, surrounded by the same people she was trapped between two hours ago during chapel. Mackenzie turns to Emma Grace and says something behind her hand, and they dissolve into laughter. Chloe glances at Smith, hoping for a lifeline of annoyance.

But Smith’s attention is on something in the distance, and she follows his line of sight to find exactly the person she’s looking for: Rory, pointedly avoiding the rest of the grade by situating himself inside the campus live oak. One good thing about the weird, jealous feud between Rory and Smith: As long as she can find one, she’ll find the other.

The live oak is massive and technically off-limits to students, since its lower branches are perfect for both easy climbing and filing a lawsuit when you break your arm. For what it’s worth, she thinks, Rory does look like a cool rule-breaker lounging up there on a bough.

He’s not alone either. There’s also Jake Stone, the infamous Stone the Stoner, and on the branch above Rory, there’s April Butcher, most often spotted cruising around the parking lot after school on a longboard like girls Chloe used to see at the Santa Monica Pier. The only indication that she cares about anything at all is the fact that she’s on the marching band’s drumline.

“Yo, Chlo,” Rory calls down to her as she approaches.

She squints up at him and the acoustic guitar in his lap. “How’d you get a guitar up there?”

“The tree provides,” April answers for him. She unwraps a Tootsie Roll pop and puts it in her mouth.

“I’m assuming you come bearing Shara news,” Rory says, plucking a melancholic chord.

Chloe stares up at April and Jake, both exuding an air of disaffection that suggests they’d rather be hotboxing Rory’s Beemer right now.

“They know about the Shara thing?”

Rory furrows his brow. “They’re my friends. Of course they know about the Shara thing. Did you not tell your friends about the Shara thing?”

“You’re like,” Jake says from his tree nest like a lightly blazed owl, “taller than I thought you were like, up close.”

“Thanks?” Chloe says, and then she pulls herself up to a low branch and explains Smith’s theory about the clue and the office. “He doesn’t want to help us with this one, though, so it’s just us.”

“Oh.” Rory’s next chord goes unpleasantly flat. He glances up, and Chloe knows he’s looking at Smith, and that Smith is now trying to pretend he was squirrel-watching. “Figures.”

Chloe barrels on. “Can we talk logistics? I’ve spent a lot of time in Wheeler’s office, so I know the layout pretty well.”

“So have I,” Rory points out.

“You—” Right. She forgot she has that in common with Rory. She spares a thought for how much butt warmth they’ve unknowingly shared via Wheeler’s office chair over the years. “Well, I’ve also spent a lot of time at school after hours for rehearsals and club meetings, so I know that—”

“Every door in this school is on a timer and locks automatically at 5 p.m.?” Rory finishes for her. “Yeah, I know.”

“How?”

Rory shrugs. “You ever heard of this thing called loitering?”

“Okay,” Chloe says, “so, then—then you know that there’s no way to get in or out of the building outside of school hours without a key, and there’s no way to get to Wheeler’s office during the day without going through Mrs. Bailey and five other administrators, so basically our options are to get a key or evacuate the entire campus, which seems kind of extreme but I’m not totally against it—”

“Or we could hide somewhere inside C Building until everyone goes home,” Rory suggests simply.

“That would work,” Chloe agrees, “except all the inside doors would still be locked.”

“Wait,” Jake says. “What’s your friend’s name? The one who looks like you but with better vibes?”

“Her vibes are fine, dude,” Rory says. “Don’t be shitty.”

“Thank you,” says Chloe, whose vibes have never been complimented before. “Um, do you mean Georgia?”

“Yeahhh, that girl,” Jake says. “Isn’t she a library aide? I always see her when I’m skipping sixth hour.”

“Yeah, she is,” Chloe says. “Why?”

“Well, then she has a key.”

“To the library office,” Chloe points out. “Not the principal’s office.”

“Right,” Rory says, drumming his fingers on the fretboard of his guitar. “But you work backward from what you have.” He jerks his chin up toward the top of the tree, which brushes up against the side of C Building. “The library office, it’s that window, right?”

Chloe looks up through the branches to the second-story window covered in Easter egg stickers and lined with books. She knows it well; Georgia sometimes lets her sneak in her overdue books to avoid late fees.

“Yeah,” she confirms.

Rory does a contemplative lip bite. “Pretty short jump.”

“Okay,” Chloe says, “so we can get out of the building. But there are still at least three locked doors between that window and Wheeler’s office, unless you can like, walk through walls.”

“What about through the ceiling?” Rory asks.

“Dude,” April says, her jaw dropping so fast, her Tootsie Roll pop plummets to the ground below. “Do you mean—”

Rory smirks. “That’s exactly what I mean.”

“Without us?”

“There’s no way it could be all four of us,” Rory says. “Way too risky. You guys have to be the support team from the parking lot. Jake?”

“But it’s our dream!”

“What are you talking about?” Chloe demands.

Rory tilts his head back, settling it against the tree so his curls crumple up at his crown and his jawline goes all model-y, his eyes slipping closed like visions of perfectly executed pranks are dancing in his head. He answers, in the wistful voice of someone announcing a long-awaited fantasy: “The air ducts.”