Page 121 of I Kissed Shara Wheeler
All of their respective friends are scattered this morning. Benjy’s at home explaining to his parents why exactly he’s not attending his own graduation ceremony, and Ash had to pick up a last-minute shift at the paint-your-own-pottery studio where they sometimes work on summer break. Georgia and Summer are already at the dealership helping Summer’s parents, as evidenced by the seventeen nervous meeting-the-parents-who-kinda-know-but-don’t-know texts Chloe’s fielded this morning. April, Jake, and Ace are all probably still asleep, which leaves—
“Oh damn, it’s a party,” Smith says from Rory’s bedroom door.
Maybe it should feel weird for the four of them to stand in the same room like this, but it’s not. It’s just… funny, like how it’s funny now that Shara lived on a boat for a month or that Rory and Smith ever thought they were competing for Shara’s attention and not each other’s. High school is over, and everything is ridiculous.
Rory hands Smith a white dogwood blossom and says, “I got you these. I thought you might like to wear one or something.”
“Is that why you were on the roof this morning?” Shara says. “I was wondering.”
“They’re fresher if you get them off the tree than the ground, okay?” Rory mumbles.
“I love them,” Smith says, grinning as he takes it. “Thank you.”
He spends a minute fussing in the mirror on Rory’s closet door, trying to get the flower and cap to work together with his hair. He’s been growing it out for a month now, and it’s grown fast into short, dense curls.
“Hang on,” Shara says. “I have an idea.”
Smith lets her take his cap from him, and she produces a few hairpins from her dress pocket. She folds the elastic under and passes him the pins, pointing out the most strategic places for him to pin it into his hair.
“There,” she says, plucking up one of the flowers from the desk and tucking it behind his ear.
Smith turns to examine himself in the mirror again. He tilts his head from side to side, and then he catches Shara’s eye over his shoulder in the reflection and grins. She smiles back.
“Needs more flowers,” he concludes.
“More flowers,” Rory repeats with a nod before climbing dutifully out of the window.
He returns with two fresh handfuls of dogwood and crepe myrtle blossoms in white and pale pink, and Smith carefully twists them through his hair until it looks like there’s a garden growing straight out of his scalp. At his request, Chloe smudges a hint of gold eyeliner around the corners of his eyes. By the time they’re done, he looks like a god of the forest in white Air Forces.
Rory stares at him from across the room with wide eyes, like he’s never seen anything quite like him before. None of them have, really. There’s nobody like Smith Parker.
At the dealership across the highway from Willowgrove, Brooklyn descends on them with a clipboard before Chloe’s even shut the door of Rory’s car behind her.
“Do we all have our caps and gowns?” she asks. “Again, do we all have our caps and gowns? Rory?”
“It’s not even a real graduation, Brooklyn,” Rory grumbles.
“Not without caps and gowns it’s not,” Brooklyn says. It looks like it’s going to be a standoff between an unstoppable force (Brooklyn’s dedication to micromanaging anything that can possibly be micromanaged) and an immovable object (Rory’s refusal to do anything he is told to do, ever) when Smith appears over Rory’s shoulder.
“He has it,” Smith says, cheerfully slapping a folded gown and mortarboard against Rory’s chest. “Forgot it in the car.”
“I’m not wearing it,” Rory says.
“Yes, you are,” Brooklyn argues.
“It looks cute on you,” Smith says.
“Ugh.” Rory rolls his eyes so hard that his whole head goes around in an annoyed circle. “Fine.”
“Good,” Brooklyn says. She spins, cups her hands around her mouth, and yells, “They got theirs!”
Summer, who is standing on top of an ice chest in the middle of the lot with a megaphone in one hand, says through the crackly speaker, “Thanks, Brooklyn, but you really don’t have to take this job so seriously.”
“Agree to disagree!” Brooklyn yells.
Georgia’s standing next to Summer’s ice chest with a tank of helium. Summer leans over and holds the megaphone in front of Georgia’s mouth.
“Hey, Chloe,” she says into it.
