5
DAYS SINCE SHARA WHEELER LEFT: 5
DAYS UNTIL GRADUATION: 38
Chloe enters the choir room for lunch with a peanut butter sandwich in her lunch bag and murder in her heart.
Today, she’s greeted by the sight of Benjy, one foot planted on the scuffed tile floor and one pointed over his head, gripping his leg with his left hand, which would be startling if it weren’t such a classic Benjy ambush. Being friends with him is like being friends with a very loud pretzel.
Chloe dumps her backpack on the floor while Georgia claims a seat on the risers next to Ash, who’s hunched over their sketch pad with a charcoal pencil, squinting at Benjy.
“Business or pleasure, Ash?” Chloe asks.
“Final art portfolio,” Ash answers, blending a line so vigorously that their dangly Dorito earring almost falls out. “I’m short two figure drawings.”
“I thought she was going to let you sub in that painting series you did of lizards that came to you in a dream,” Georgia says.
“She changed her mind. Apparently it was ‘disturbing’ and ‘something to be discussed with my parents,’” they say with a shrug. “Benjy, can you move your head like, fifteen degrees to the right, but your nose five degrees to the left?”
“I can’t move my nose independently of my face, Ash.”
“You can try.”
“My leg is tired,” Benjy whines.
“Chloe?” Ash prompts.
Chloe nods. “I got it.”
She reaches up and grabs Benjy’s ankle to prop it up, and he grunts in relief. Between dance and all his shifts roller-skating at Sonic, Benjy is freaky strong for his size, but even he has his limits.
When Chloe first met Benjy, he was sort of the pet of the senior musical theater girls, always carted around by his older sister to rehearsals like a poodle in a handbag. But they’re the seniors now, and things are different. Being super talented exempts him from a certain amount of bullying, but the order of Willowgrove operations states that being super gay, even if you haven’t actually told anyone that you are, cancels a lot of that out. These days, he mostly gets harassed by fake-friendly jocks in the hallways to do eight-counts on command. Chloe can’t wait for those guys’ future girlfriends to drag them to see Benjy on Broadway one day.
“Anyway,” Benjy says, “as I was saying before, the whole thing is kind of a vibe.”
“What whole thing?” Georgia asks, unpacking a Tupperware of spaghetti from her backpack.
“The Shara Wheeler thing,” Benjy says. “I mean, it’s been days, so she’s like gone gone, right?”
Chloe’s heart clenches reflexively into a fist.
“I heard her parents haven’t reported her missing, so she’s like, somewhere,” Ash says. “But nobody knows where.”
“I know, that’s what’s so cool about it,” Benjy goes on. “Like, disappearing into the night in a ball gown? There’s something totally old Hollywood, tragic starlet, Lana Del Rey about it, and I’m like, kind of obsessed—ow, Chloe!”
Chloe, who didn’t notice her grip growing tighter and tighter on Benjy’s ankle the longer he talked about Shara Wheeler, relaxes her fingers. “Sorry.”
She glances instinctively to Georgia, who is already waiting to make eye contact with her. She mouths, Isengard? Their code word for, Do you need to be rescued?
Chloe rolls her eyes and shakes her head.
“As your teacher, I’m obligated to tell you that gossiping about a missing person isn’t very Christian,” Mr. Truman says, emerging from his office with an overstuffed folder of sheet music.
Like a lot of Willowgrove teachers, Mr. Truman was born and raised in False Beach and never left. He knew Chloe the second he saw her on his roster because he graduated Willowgrove in ’96 alongside her mom and Shara’s parents. Chloe once found him in her mom’s senior yearbook, looking like the coolest kid in the show choir. Her mom was more in the woodshop grunge crowd, but Mr. Truman remembers her.
Chloe can’t imagine why in the world Mr. Truman would spend his whole life at Willowgrove on purpose. Every teacher has to sign a “morality clause” saying they won’t drink or express political opinions or be gay, and while Mr. Truman has never said he’s gay, he is a single fortysomething choir director with an extensive collection of slouchy sweaters. Some of the sweaters even have elbow patches. Like, come on.
“As our teacher, you probably got all kinds of administrative intel about what’s actually going on with the missing person,” Benjy points out, “and you are obligated to tell us, because we’re your favorites.”