Page 71 of I Kissed Shara Wheeler
Freshman year, when she got the campus tour from Georgia, she learned the secret of this elevator. If you stop it between floors and pry the inner doors apart, the inside of the outer doors is covered in thirty-six years of Willowgrove student graffiti. She and Georgia left their initials in Sharpie.
She jams the button for the top floor, counts the seconds, and on “two” she yanks the emergency stop.
When she wrenches the inner doors apart, the message is three feet tall and just as wide. It must have been here, hidden and still drying, when Shara pulled her close and kissed her.
On top of hundreds of signatures and lewd scrawls, there’s a heart painted in pink nail polish. And inside it, Shara’s daubed four cursive words.
I already told you .
Chloe checks three times to make sure she’s read it right.
No postscript. No clue. No more confessions. Not even a direction to look next.
It’s the end of the trail. This is where it was always leading: nowhere.
FROM THE BURN PILE
Contents of one of Rory’s tapes, unspooled. Marked with a green sticker for “personal.”
Maybe I just want to be Smith.
Not like, the way most guys at Willowgrove wanna be him. I don’t want to be the quarterback or anything. It’s more like, looking over the fence at him and Shara and thinking about what Shara sees when she looks at him. The way he throws his head back when he laughs or how he carries himself like the human version of that “Lo-Fi Hip Hop Beats to Study To” thing on YouTube. The time he showed up at her door before school on a Wednesday morning with a Styrofoam box of pancakes because he wanted to bring her breakfast. I remember what it was like to see Smith up close like that.
So, I guess maybe I want to know what it’s like to be that. To look in the mirror every day and see someone who knows exactly where they fit in, to be able to want—I mean, have—a girl like Shara.
I don’t know. I don’t know what else to call it.
14
DAYS WITHOUT SHARA: STILL 22
Rory pulls up outside the gym ten minutes after Chloe texts the group chat. When Smith slides into the passenger seat, his lipstick has been wiped off, but the rest of his makeup is still there. Chloe watches from the back seat as Rory stares at him across the console.
“Don’t say anything,” Smith says, the glitter around his eyes shimmering in the dashboard light.
“I—I wasn’t going to,” Rory says. “I like it.”
He puts the car in drive without another word.
Chloe tells them about the elevator and the nail polish note and then sits silently and waits for their reaction. Maybe it’ll be a breakdown this time, or one of them will cry, or Rory will pull over to write the next great sad-boy anthem. Surely, if she’s at her wit’s undeniable end, they must be too.
Instead, Smith tips his head back and laughs.
“I don’t know what I expected,” Rory says, and then he’s laughing too.
“What about this is funny?” Chloe demands.
“The whole thing,” Smith says, shaking his head. “Like, I have to laugh.”
“But she—”
“Do you wanna go get some snacks?” Rory asks.
“Damn,” Smith says, “yeah, I do.”
“But—” Chloe starts.
“Chloe,” Smith says, “there’s nothing we can do about it tonight.”
