“Oh, uh, yeah, it’s right inside, over here,” he says, turning to lead her toward the house.
“Bye, Chloe!” Ace calls after them. “Don’t leave before upside-down margaritas!”
“What in the name of God is an upside-down margarita,” Chloe hisses at Smith as he opens one of the massive French doors.
“You don’t want to know.”
There’s nobody inside except for a couple of juniors making out on a couch, and Smith sidesteps them neatly and leads her into the kitchen.
“Holy shitballs,” Chloe swears when she steps into it. The marble island is nearly the length of her entire bedroom at home. The stainless steel refrigerator looks like it could fit a human body. Maybe two.
“Yeah.” Smith adds in a rush, “Look, I’m sorry I missed your text. I was talking to Summer about the whole Shara thing, and they used to be best friends until they had some weird falling-out this year that they both refuse to tell me anything about, and it’s all—”
“It’s fine,” Chloe interrupts. “Tell me where I’m supposed to be looking.”
Smith leans on one of the six leather barstools lining the island, thinking. The more time she spends with him, the more she notices that he doesn’t carry himself like all the other football players out in the yard. He’s big, but he’s graceful. He doesn’t walk from room to room as much as he flows through them.
He’s wearing a Willowgrove football T-shirt with the sleeves torn off and a pair of swim trunks patterned with little pink flamingos. She spares exactly one second to find them charming.
“So,” he says, “I was with her the whole time we were here for prom photos, except when she went to the bathroom.”
“Where’s the bathroom?”
Smith pulls a face. “I think there are five of them. Six if you count the one in the pool house. So, she could have passed through pretty much any part of the house to get to one.”
Chloe groans. “I’m really getting sick of these country club mansions.”
“I know,” Smith agrees.
They split up—Smith takes the pool house and the finished basement, leaving Chloe the first and second floor. She works her way across the ground floor first, through spare rooms and game rooms and rooms that seem to have no use except adding square footage to the already astronomical square footage. She stumbles across what appears to be a man cave, the kind she and her moms heckle on HGTV—just a huge room full of nothing but a massive TV and a lot of tacky Bama decor.
On the second floor, she finds Dixon’s room, which is a study in the worst of teenage boyhood. Chloe likes boys and their defined jawlines and crooked smiles, but the pile of sweaty laundry in the corner makes her want to quit them altogether. She squeezes a test shot of the spray-on deodorant on the dresser and gags. This time next year, Dixon Wells will be cracking open a cold one with the rest of Kappa Sig before his lawyer dad gets them off the hook for some Dateline-worthy hazing. Gross. There’s no way Shara set foot in this room.
To be honest, it’s not only hard to imagine Shara in Dixon’s room; it’s hard to imagine Shara doing any of this.
The Shara that Chloe has spent four years alongside has always seemed like a passive, quiet thing. You hear stories about her weekends feeding the homeless or tutoring fifth graders or being an eyebrow model in Japan, but you never actually see her do any of it unless she posts a gorgeously composed photo to her 25,000 Instagram followers. She just floats around, never a hair out of place, wearing a uniform skirt that somehow looks shorter on her than everyone else but sits exactly at regulation length. She doesn’t get her hands dirty.
Chloe’s fingers twitch for the silver chain in her bathroom drawer. She’s always suspected there was something wrong with the math of Shara, but she’s never been able to prove what. And considering she can’t even picture Shara here, sneaking around someone else’s house with a fistful of clues and a plan to skip town—she’s never felt further from the answer.
She’s about to find Smith and tell him it’s a bust when she sees it.
On the landing between the first and second floors, tucked behind a stack of books and a fake plant, beneath a stuffed deer head, there’s a pink card.
She snatches it up and rips it open.
Inside, the first thing she finds is a polaroid of Shara and Smith smiling by the pool, the sun setting behind them. Shara’s in her pink prom dress, and Smith looks slightly uncomfortable in his tux but holds on tight to Shara’s hand. Chloe flips it over so she doesn’t have to look at them as she reads the card.