It’d be a lie—a huge, Willowgrove-Christian-Academy-football-budget-sized lie—to say she’s never envisioned what sort of perfection incubator Shara Wheeler climbs inside when she goes home every day. A tank of goo to preserve her dewy complexion? A professional hairstylist on retainer? Where does Shara go when she’s not having picturesque Starbucks dates with her quarterback boyfriend or spinning out suspiciously good comparative lit essays? Who is she when, for once, nobody is looking?
Only one way to find out.
She kicks the door open, and—
The room is empty.
Shara’s room is, of course, a nice, normal room. Suspiciously plain, even. Bed, dresser, nightstand, vanity, bookshelf-slash-desk combo, eggshell lamp with a silver chain. There’s a dried homecoming corsage on the windowsill and a tube of Burt’s Bees lip balm in a seashell dish on the dresser, alongside a bottle of lilac body spray and a pile of bookmarked paperbacks for school. The walls are a simple biege, with framed photos of her family and her boyfriend and her flock of identical pointy-elbowed, flowy-haired friends with perfect Glossier faces.
Where’s the Glossier Gang now? Nursing their prom hangovers, Chloe guesses. Clearly, none of them are here looking for clues. That’s the thing about popular kids: They don’t have the type of bond forged in the fire of being weird and queer in small-to-medium-town Alabama. If Chloe tried to ghost like this, there’d be a militia of Shakespeare gays kicking down every door in False Beach.
Why isn’t Shara here?
Chloe clenches her fists, steps inside, and starts with the desk.
If there’s no Shara to interrogate, maybe her room has some answers. She peers through the contents of the desk and shelves, looking for Shara’s Gone Girl calendar with days of the week marked by “gather supplies” and “frame Chloe for my murder.” All she finds are college brochures and a box of pink stationery monogrammed with Shara’s initials—thank-you cards for the imminent flood of graduation checks from rich family. No incriminating diary pages crammed in the wastepaper basket, just the cardboard packaging for some lip gloss.
Jewelry box: nothing notable. Closet: clothes, a carefully organized shoe rack, prom and homecoming dresses zipped inside tidy garment bags. （Who uses garment bags?） Underwear drawer: half-empty, enough modest petal-soft things gone for a week or two. Bed: over the tucked-in ivory quilt, a neatly folded Harvard T-shirt. God forbid anyone forget that Shara got into her first-choice school, with offers from basically every other Ivy in the country.
Chloe releases a hiss through her teeth. This is just a bunch of perfectly normal stuff, suggesting the perfectly normal life of a perfectly normal girl.
She doubles back to the vanity, opening the drawer. Tubes of lip gloss line up neatly in almost identical shades of neutral pink, most half-used, labels rubbing off. At the end of the row, one is brand-new, so full and shiny it could have only been used once, if ever. She recognizes its packaging from the wastepaper basket.
When she twists the cap off, the scent hits her just as hard as it did the first time she smelled it: vanilla and mint.
The window opens.
Chloe swears, drops to the carpet, and crawls under the desk.
A pair of black Vans appears on the windowsill, bringing with them the skinny frame of a boy in distressed jeans and a flannel. He pauses—she can’t see his face, but his body twists like he’s checking that the coast is clear—and then drops down into the room.
Dark curly hair with caramel highlights, light brown skin, long and straight nose, a jawline both square and delicate like fishbone.
Rory Heron. Willowgrove’s answer to every brooding bad boy from every late ’90s teen drama. The most eligible bachelor amongst the stoners-skaters-and-slackers rung of the social ladder. She’s never had a class with him, but she’s heard he doesn’t attend them much, anyway.
She watches as his eyes track the same path she did—the dresser, the bed, the pictures on the wall. After noticing he’s kicked the corsage off the sill and onto the floor, he picks it up with gentle fingers and examines the dried buds before returning it to its place. Chloe’s eyes narrow. What is Rory Heron doing here, in Shara’s bedroom, fondling her corsages?
Then he turns to the desk, sees her, and screams.
Chloe lunges to her feet and slaps her hand over his mouth.
“Shut up,” Chloe hisses. Up close, his eyes are hazel-y brown and wide open in alarm. “The neighbors could hear you.”
“I am the neighbors,” he says when she releases him.