Page 108 of I Kissed Shara Wheeler
Give us five more and it’s still true
You’ll always be my best
R. H.
21
DAYS UNTIL GRADUATION: 6
There are five school days after finals but before graduation, when the rest of the student body is reviewing for exams, but the seniors are expected to show up to school every day to do nothing. Allegedly, it’s a requirement that was created in the 2000s after one senior class used the time to execute a senior prank so elaborate the entire gym floor had to be replaced. Now, they have to be supervised.
Like Dead Week, this weird in-between week has a nickname, created by past Willowgrove seniors and handed down through the years. Chloe hates it.
“I’m not calling it that,” Chloe says on Monday morning, on the breezeway outside C Building. “It’s gross.”
“But it makes so much sense,” Benjy says. “It’s a pointless space between two important things.”
Ash spreads their hands in front of them like a marquee and says, “Taint Week.”
Chloe sighs. “Somehow this feels like Ace’s fault.”
She pushes the stairwell door open, but before she can reach the next set of doors, Dixon Wells comes bursting out of them. Georgia throws a soccer-mom arm in front of Chloe’s chest before they smash into each other.
Dixon is red-faced and swearing, his Logan Paul hair flying in every direction, and he bolts past them down the stairs and out of sight.
“Not too late to stop being a dick, Dixon!” Georgia calls after him.
“Geo,” Chloe says. “That was spicy.”
Georgia shrugs, catching the door on the backswing. “Somebody has to tell him.”
Benjy steps into the hallway first, then stops so suddenly Ash and Chloe pile up behind him.
“Jesus wept,” he says.
The entire hallway is crammed with students and white as a blizzard. Every locker, every bulletin board, every classroom door—all plastered with paper. Half the student body is there, passing sheets around and pulling folded pieces out of their locker vents and trampling them underfoot. Every page seems to be covered in different configurations of small, black type.
Overhead, the morning bell goes off, but nobody cares.
Chloe rips a page off the nearest bulletin board.
We can certainly make that arrangement for your son, it says, and as for the amount, $15K seems a bit low. What you’re asking would involve a lot of logistical support on our end to make sure this is done right, and the school doesn’t lose its status as a test center…
“Oh my God,” Georgia says, crowded against her shoulder. “No way. No way. Are these—?”
“Wheeler’s?” Chloe asks. “Is he actually talking about an—?”
“Admissions scam?”
“Isn’t that—?”
“A federal crime? Yeah, uh, I’m pretty sure it is.”
Chloe sets off down the hall in a frenzy, snatching up every page she can.
The papers are copies of emails, hundreds and hundreds of emails between Wheeler and parents of students. Payoffs and bribes and under-the-table deals to boost the scores of kids taking the ACT at Willowgrove.
She knew Mackenzie couldn’t have made a 29.
