“My house!” Chloe says, out of breath. “My moms have pottery class in Birmingham on Monday nights.”
“Okay,” Shara says. She releases Chloe’s hand, breaking for the driver’s side. “Throw me the keys.”
“It’s my car,” Chloe points out.
Shara flips her hair over her shoulder, like that’s irrelevant. “I’m fast.”
She’s never considered “getaway driving” as one of Shara’s skills, but she has to admit, Shara’s been good at everything else she’s tried to do so far. She loops around to the passenger side and tosses the keys over the hood.
“Don’t wreck it or it’s my ass.”
Shara catches the keys in one hand and rolls her eyes. “I’m a great driver.”
And then she’s sliding into the driver seat, stealing the sunglasses out of Chloe’s cup holder and putting them on.
It takes half a minute for Shara to turn Chloe’s hand-me-down Camry into a music video. She rolls the windows down and takes the right turn out of the country club toward Chloe’s house without asking for directions, and she’s right—she is a good driver. She stays perfectly between the lines. One hand on the wheel, pink hair flying, knees apart under her church dress. They pass a car with a missing headlight, and Shara slaps the ceiling.
Chloe wonders how a month away turned Shara into this, but when Shara shoots her a look over the top of her sunglasses, she remembers that Shara’s always been this person. This is what I’ve been trying to tell you, she wrote on a card stuck under an auditorium seat. Shara’s not nice. Shara’s so many more important things than nice.
Then they get to Chloe’s house, and there Shara is, standing in Chloe’s kitchen, next to Chloe’s mama’s boob painting. Titania winds around her ankles before slinking out of the kitchen.
They’re alone. This is real.
Chloe realizes that she’s never actually been the one to kiss Shara first. She doesn’t know how to do it.
“Do you—” Chloe says. One of the crystal wind chimes is turning in the window, and the light falls across Shara’s face in a Botticelli swipe from cheek to jaw. “Do you, um, want something to drink?”
“Do y’all have sweet tea?” Shara asks.
Chloe beams a telepathic thank-you to her mom. “I do, actually.”
She pours two glasses. She even gets Shara a straw and a little paper cocktail napkin out of the junk drawer.
“Well, aren’t you a nice Southern hostess,” Shara says, watching Chloe add ice cubes to her glass. Chloe glances up and finds her smirking.
When Shara looks at her like that, all airy and sly, it makes Chloe think of the first time her mama brought home an icebox pie. It was strawberries and cream, her mom’s favorite, and the whole thing seemed to be a feat of mechanical physics. It didn’t make sense how the strawberries held effortlessly together when you sliced it, or how the cloud of meringue sat weightless on top. She remembers studying the layers from the side and having the inexplicable thought, This is a Shara Wheeler kind of pretty.
God. Shall I compare thee to an icebox pie? Couldn’t be gayer if she tried.
“I’m so stupid,” Chloe realizes out loud.
“No, you’re not,” Shara says. “You’re very smart. That’s our whole thing.”
“But you—this—ugh,” Chloe says. “It’s so—obvious. How come I didn’t figure it out sooner?”
“Took me a while too,” Shara says, and Chloe pushes the sweet tea out of the way and kisses the smirk off her lips.
They leave the glasses sweating on the counter and drift to Chloe’s bedroom, where Shara spends ten minutes touching everything. She examines the framed photos on the dresser and desk and scrutinizes the skincare products on the bathroom counter and flips through the NYU brochures.
“I don’t understand why anyone needs this many editions of Anne of Green Gables,” Shara says, thumbing the green spine of the ’90s edition Chloe inherited from her mama, and Chloe rolls her eyes and sits on the bed.
“You’re so nosy,” Chloe says, as if she minds.
“At least I didn’t break into your house to do this,” Shara says, “unlike some people I could mention.”
She gives Chloe that look again, and Chloe groans.
“Rory.”
“Smith, actually.”
“Whatever,” Chloe says. “Can you come back over here?”