But then she met Shara, who glides into every room like she’s on a parade float, beaming and waving and tossing her hair. Every morning, Shara walks into Mrs. Farley’s class, and every morning, people stop what they’re doing to see what shade of lip gloss she’s wearing that day. It’s the same whispery feeling that fills a room when a teacher announces it’s movie day, and every time it happens, Chloe feels like the only one who’d rather be talking about last night’s homework than watching The Crucible.
Today, though, the seat in front of hers never fills.
* * *
With five minutes to go in the period, she checks the clock over the whiteboard, then shuts her binder and packs it up.
To her left, Brooklyn Bennett leans over and whispers, “What are you doing?”
Nobody loves rules like Brooklyn, student body president, head of the debate team and Model UN, editor in chief of the yearbook—basically a list of extracurriculars with a skirt on. Chloe has to admire her fanatical tunnel vision, but if she’s high-strung, Brooklyn Bennett is a $20,000 viola.
“Chill, Brooklyn,” Chloe whispers back. “I’m getting out early.”
“Why?”
“You’ll see,” Chloe says. “Any minute now—”
Right on cue, the intercom sounds.
“Chloe Green, please come to the office. Chloe Green to the office, please.”
Brooklyn stares at her. Chloe shrugs, picks up her bag, and waves goodbye to Mrs. Farley.
It’s gone like this once a week since sophomore year: She gets dress coded and winds up in Principal Wheeler’s office getting lectured on the importance of “respecting guidelines set in place to minimize distractions in the classroom” by the end of first hour.
Freshman year, she adjusted to Willowgrove by making problems on purpose, but nobody showed up to her GSA meeting, and she got suspended for bringing free condoms to school in protest of the abstinence-only sex ed policy. The lesson she learned: Nobody at Willowgrove actually wants anything to change, not even her own friends, who are all wonderful and queer and absolutely dead set on not coming out until after graduation. If she couldn’t even change their minds, it wasn’t worth jeopardizing her chances at college with an expulsion.
So, since then, she’s settled for breaking dress code: platforms taller than one inch, socks that end above the knee but below the hem of her skirt, pentagrams embroidered into the collars of her oxfords, dark lipstick. Last year, Ash got famous on TikTok for making earrings out of everything they could find, and now Chloe has a full rotation of gummy worms and hot sauce packets and preserved fruit slices to dangle from her earlobes. Just enough to push back.
It’s a track record that made it too easy to get Mrs. Sherman to report her this morning. When a beautiful, blond small-town princess disappears, surely a full-scale FBI manhunt led by Wheeler himself must follow. Screw the cards, screw the key—the fastest shortcut to Shara is to know what they know, and the fastest way to do that is to get herself into the principal’s office.
On the way, she pops into the bathroom by the chem lab to check her reflection.
Sophomore year, she stopped here before chem every day to tidy up her makeup and shake out her hair. She was stuck with Shara as a lab partner fall semester, and random classmates were always coming up to their lab table with pathetic excuses—like, no, Tanner, Shara doesn’t have time to help you with step five. Chloe started touching up before class in self-defense.
Sophomore year was also the one time it appeared possible that she and Shara could be friends.
It was second semester, after Shara and Smith got together. They weren’t lab partners anymore, but Chloe still sat behind Shara in precalc. It wasn’t her all-time best subject—she really had to work for her ninety-eight average. One day, she got a test back with her answer to a conic sections problem crossed out in red. Shara turned around and confided that she’d missed the same one.
The next day, Shara asked if she’d had a hard time with the homework, and then Chloe became the person Shara talked to in the few minutes before class. For the first time, she got a glimpse of what other people must see when they look at Shara. It was easy to look into those round, innocent eyes and infer kindness when there was nothing else there.
Until a Friday morning, when they were supposed to be reviewing their own midterm study guides and Shara asked, “Do you get number seven?”
She scanned the problem—a question about finding the length of the latus rectum of a parabola, which was exactly the concept she’d spent an hour the night before trying to nail.