Page 107 of I Kissed Shara Wheeler
If Smith starts reading love poems to Rory, she’ll never be able to look either of them in the eye again.
She squeezes her keys in her hand to stop them from jingling and shuts her eyes. For the rest of her life, she vows, she will simply insist that she didn’t see or hear anything.
“Is that—?” Rory starts. “It looks like the one you gave me.”
“I never really told you how I picked it out,” Smith says. There’s a faint creak, like he’s leaning back against a shelf. “My mom wanted to get you a shirt for your birthday, but I told her you liked writing songs and you couldn’t write lyrics down as fast as you could think them up. So she said my gift should be that I’d transcribe your songs if you sang them to me, and she let me get a pack of leather notebooks, and I gave one to you and kept the other one. I’ve never used mine, but I couldn’t get rid of it.”
“I still use mine,” Rory says.
“I know,” Smith says. “I saw it in your room.”
Rory’s smirk is audible when he says, “I guess I got attached to the aesthetic.”
“Stubborn ass.”
“Takes way longer without you though.”
A pause. Another creak of a shelf.
“Can I hear one sometime?” Smith asks. “One of your new songs?”
“That depends,” Rory says.
“Depends on what?”
And with all the courage in his noodle-y body, Rory says, “Depends if you don’t mind that they’re all about you.”
Chloe has to stop herself from pumping her fist like the end of The Breakfast Club.
It’s silent below, except for Summer talking to the iguana in the tank by the front of the store and Ash snapping their art kit back up. Then, after a few seconds, just long enough for a nervous first kiss, Smith laughs.
“Chloe!” Georgia calls out from the front of the store. “Let’s go! I gotta lock up!”
“Oh, shit,” Rory whispers, and there’s the shuffling sound of them hustling out of the shelves together, muffled laughter and light grunts from elbows thrown. She still can’t see them. They could be two lonely seventh graders with notebooks full of song lyrics, or they could be two almost-adults who haven’t laughed like this together in years.
“Coming!” Chloe calls. She can’t stop smiling.
FROM THE BURN PILE
Personal essay exercise: Smith Parker
Prompt: What is a moment in your life that you felt truly yourself?
When we stopped running.
Written on the back of the same paper, in the same handwriting
You look like sun in moonlight
You’re faster on your feet
You’re five years back, you’re wrong, you’re right
You’re impossible to me
I’ve been up here waiting for you
Maybe I should have guessed
