“I’m gonna walk across that stage to get my diploma and keep walking until I hit a city with a Trader Joe’s,” Chloe says.
“Hey.” Her mom folds her arms as she peers across the kitchen at her. “Is this normal baseline Chloe curmudgeon behavior, or are you cranky because you miss your mama? Is one mom not good enough for you?”
Chloe shrugs it off, gathering up her purse and keys from the table by the back door under one of her mama’s abstract paintings of boobs. “I’m fine.”
“Or is it whatever has been making you act weird since last week?”
“I’m fine!” Chloe snaps. “You try wearing bikini bottoms as underwear and see how pleasant you are!”
“Okay. But, you know. If you need to talk about anything. Girls, boys, whatever. The end of senior year brings up a lot of emotions for everyone. I know you’re—”
“Bye!” Chloe calls as she breaks for the door. If she slams it fast enough, she’s sure the ghost of Shara can’t follow.
* * *
It takes fifteen minutes to drive to the center of False Beach from Chloe’s house, and absolutely nothing of consequence but a Dairy Queen is passed along the way.
What the locals call “downtown” is a single main street lined with historic redbrick buildings and two-story shops pressed up against one another with iron balconies and Southern small-town charm. It all leads up to a white courthouse, towering with cast-iron pillars and a wide town square at its feet, Civil War era. There used to be some ugly Confederate monument at the square’s center, but two summers ago someone pulled it down in the middle of the night and rolled it into Lake Martin, which is the only cool thing that’s ever happened in False Beach. Last year, the city council held a contest to choose a new town mascot and installed a bronze statue of the winner: a rearing deer with huge antlers named Bucky the Buck.
Chloe takes a left at the square and parks in front of Webster’s Ice Cream right as the bell tower chimes five o’clock in the evening.
Belltower Books, so named because it sits inside the base of the tower, is pretty much the only place in False Beach worth being. It’s small, only two cramped rooms plus a third that requires a climb up a ladder and special permission, with books piled high on every available surface, like the floor, or the shelf above the toilet, or the top of a terrarium containing a fat iguana. Every hour on the hour, the bell in the tower echoes through the walls of the store, rattling all the way down to the front desk, where Georgia’s dad sits in his aviator glasses and listens to The Eagles.
She finds Georgia perched on the top of the ladder with a paperback, the bottom half of her uniform traded for rolled-up gray sweats and Tevas. The two of them look a lot alike—brown eyes, thick eyebrows, angular jaws—but Chloe’s aesthetic is more dark academia and Georgia’s is more backpacking granola baby butch. They even have almost the same short, dark hair, but Chloe has blunt, decisive bangs, while Georgia doesn’t care who sees her forehead.
Georgia is the kind of person who enters a room like she’s stepped inside it a thousand times, knows where everything is, including the exits, and isn’t worried that anything could have possibly changed since the last time she was there. She’s too tall to look small, too gentle to be imposing, too smart in ways that have nothing to do with chemical formulas or antiderivatives to care about her GPA. One time, in their creative writing elective, Chloe was assigned to describe a person with one word. She chose Georgia and described her as “sturdy,” like a tree, or a house.
It’s a miracle that someone like Georgia coalesced from the primordial ooze of Alabama. Life would be unbearable without her.
Chloe reaches up and taps twice on the side of Georgia’s ankle. “Whatcha readin’？”
Georgia flashes the cover without looking up from the page: Emma.
“Austen? Again?”
“Look.” Georgia sighs, apparently finished with the passage she was on. She never speaks when she’s mid-passage. “I tried one of those literary contemporaries Val suggested—”
“Please don’t call my mom Val.”
“—and the thing about books these days is, a lot of them are just not that good.”
“And yet you want to write a book these days.”
“The trick is,” Georgia says, shutting her book, “I will simply write a good one.”
“I don’t get the Austen thing with you,” Chloe says as Georgia slips between the rungs of the ladder to the shag rug below. “I always found Emma annoying.”