Page 37 of I Kissed Shara Wheeler
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?
FROM THE BURN PILE
Lab report in Chloe’s AP Chem binder
