“Oh my God.” Chloe is paralyzed on the spot. For the second time this evening, panic erupts in her chest like a Disneyland New Year’s Eve pyrotechnic show, whistles and flashes and sparklers spelling out YOU’RE SCREWED, CHLOE GREEN in the sky. “Ohmygod ohmygod ohmygod—”
Rory, who has already swept the files up off the desk and started cramming them back into the cabinet, whispers at her, “Don’t freak out.”
“What is he doing!” Chloe wheezes. “He should be home watching NCIS!”
“Chloe.”
“Oh my God, Smith was right, we shouldn’t have done this—”
“Chloe!” Rory says again, grabbing her shoulders. “The more you freak out, the more likely we are to get caught.” He gives her a little shake, and her anxious brain rattles unpleasantly. “Chill. This is the fun part.”
He’s got to be kidding. “The fun part?”
“We’ve all got our own ways to have fun in False Beach, right?” Rory pushes her up onto the desk. “You get horny for books—”
“Very reductive way to describe being interested in literature,” Chloe points out hysterically, reaching for the ceiling with numb hands. She can hear the jingle of keys in the hallway.
“—and I get away with shit,” Rory finishes. “So get up in that ceiling and get away with this.”
She closes her eyes, takes a huge breath like she’s jumping off a high dive, and heaves herself up through the vent hole. Rory’s right behind her, and he manages to catch the vent cover with the toe of his sneaker and push it back over the opening just as the office door opens below.
Wheeler pauses in the doorway, a Jack in the Box bag in his hand and a suspicious furrow creasing his forehead. Chloe’s insides are Pop Rocks.
He walks over to the desk and picks up the framed family photo, which Chloe left where it fell in her panic. He frowns, then licks his thumb and rubs a smudge off the glass in front of his own little photographic face before returning it to the desk, face out.
And then he sits down at his desk, takes out a burger, and turns the music back on.
“Let’s go,” Rory says to her.
She leads the way this time, retracing the route back to the library, down through the vent—Rory grabs their bags and shirts—over the pile of books they left behind and through the dark stacks, past the study tables, over the front desk, to the door of the library office.
“Turn around,” she says.
“What?” Rory asks. “Why?”
“The key’s in my bra. Don’t look.”
“I promise you, I do not care.”
“Just do it!”
“Fine,” he groans, doing a theatrical ninety-degree turn so Chloe can fish the key out from between her boobs.
With the door unlocked, they’re almost to sweet freedom. Rory texts April and Jake while Chloe unlatches the window and throws it open. The sun has gone down since they climbed through the first vent.
“You know what I just realized?” Chloe sticks her head out to estimate the distance between the sill and the tree. Not as close as it looked from the ground, but there’s a big, sturdy-looking branch a couple of feet below, and if she lands right, she should be able to shimmy down it to the trunk. “This is the second time you and I have thrown ourselves out a second-story window for Shara Wheeler.”
“She has that effect,” Rory says, and then he climbs over the sill and disappears into the night.
“Shit,” Chloe whispers after him.
She jumps, and after a lot of maneuvering and swearing and scrambling and scrapes on her arms from tree bark, they hit the ground running. They bank around the side of the building, cursing through a copse of thorny bushes, and break free to the ditch separating the faculty parking lot from the service road alongside it.
Jake’s car is waiting with the back door open. Chloe launches herself into the backseat full of Bojangles bags and energy drink cans with a crunchy, rattling crash. They take off before Rory’s even done pulling it shut behind him.
There are five electric seconds in which the only sounds are the roar of the engine and Chloe catching her breath, and then Rory releases a low whistle, and Jake laughs and cranks up the radio.
Chloe laughs too, loud and breathless, adrenaline blazing in her veins. Rory was right. She got away with it. It was one of the most terrifying things to ever happen to her, and it was fun.
Ten minutes out from school, Jake pulls into Sonic and tips the roller-skating waitress ten dollars for four slushes, and they take off again, speakers going tinny from the boom of the bass as April shoots her straw wrapper at Rory.