Page 93 of I Kissed Shara Wheeler
On Thursday afternoon, after her AP Bio exam, she emerges from the classroom to find Shara at Smith’s nearby locker.
It’s the first time Chloe has seen them together since Shara got back, which is… weird. She’s not sure what she expected—maybe Smith trying to fend her off with a chair like a lion tamer—but it certainly wasn’t the sense of quiet ease that hangs around them. They stand the way they’ve always stood, angled into each other like two stretching plants, even after everything. She says something inaudible to him, and he laughs that sun-warm laugh of his.
First Rory, now Smith? How does she get to drop back into their lives like nothing happened? Even if Smith does feel guilty for dating her under false pretenses, she still did everything else she did.
A dozen lockers down, Ash is cramming their art kit—basically a fishing tackle box of polymer clay and googly eyes—into their locker. They glance up, and Chloe almost raises a hand to wave, but Ash pulls a sad face and turns away.
Right. Chloe’s the only one who has to experience consequences for her actions. So far, at least.
She marches up to the locker two spots over from Smith’s, where Brooklyn Bennett is sifting wide-eyed through her stacks of rubber-banded notecards.
“Hi, Brooklyn,” she says, aggressively friendly. “What’s up?”
“About to have a mental breakdown, that’s what,” she says. Brooklyn launches into a long, itemized list of all the questions she thinks she got wrong on every one of her exams, and Chloe plasters on a sympathetic expression and tunes it out, listening instead to Shara and Smith’s conversation.
“… just started talking again,” Smith is saying quietly. “What if I mess this up, and he goes back to pretending I don’t exist?”
“Right,” Shara deadpans, “this whole time he’s been minding his business and not leering at you from his bedroom window.”
“I’m being serious, Shara,” Smith says. “I think this is my last chance.”
“I’m being serious,” Shara counters. “I don’t think you’re going to run out of chances there.”
Over their shoulders, Chloe can see the homecoming picture still stuck up on Smith’s locker door. The blue dress, Shara’s God-honoring nip shadows.
“I’m gonna go study in the library,” Chloe announces loudly.
“Uh,” Brooklyn says, startled. “Okay.”
“Yep,” she says. Two lockers down, she can detect the slight shift in Shara’s shoulders as she listens in. “Should be there all afternoon.”
“Okay,” Brooklyn says again. “Thanks?”
She leaves Brooklyn staring after her and books it to her locker. From the makeup pouch, the one she once used to hold Shara’s cards, she removes something she brought to school earlier this week. It’s an escalation, for sure. A real break-glass-in-case-of-emergency type of measure.
As much fun as she’s had watching Shara blush and scowl and stare at her with those big spangly eyes, as addictive as it is to be so sweet to her that it splits like a sucked peppermint into shards that cut, as much as she knows she could keep twisting this around her finger until the heat death of the universe and never get bored, it’s time. Somebody has to make Shara answer for something, and Chloe’s going to do it. Warm that space cannon up, baby.
She checks her bangs one last time in the plastic mirror on her locker door, between a note from her mom and a photo strip of her and Georgia at the movies. God, if Georgia knew about this, she’d be so stressed out. Benjy would be game, though, he loves a scheme, and Ash would—
She shuts her locker and takes off for the library.
FROM THE BURN PILE
Scrawled in the margins of a sight-reading assignment
VALEDICTORIAN SPEECH: DRAFT #29
I would like to begin by addressing Principal Wheeler: Respectfully, sir, I’m going to find a way to ruin your life if it’s the last thing I do.
19
DAYS UNTIL GRADUATION: 9
It takes half an hour to edit her Euro history notecards down to the ones with potential for erotic subtext. Peninsula War? No. Corn laws? Absolutely not. Enlightened despot? Probably how Shara sees herself, but no. Would be really helpful if European history were less horrifying. She’s going to have to lean hard on the religious stuff.
She’s so absorbed in deciding whether Francis Bacon could possibly be sexy that she almost misses the sound of Shara entering through the side door of the library.
Her table is one of the secluded ones set aside from the main study area, so she has about a second and a half before Shara spots her. All at once, she kicks her backpack off the seat next to her, shoves her notes out of the way, flips her hair, straightens her shoulders, and, for the final touch, hooks her ankle around the empty chair and drags it a foot closer.
