“Spanish,” Rory says.
“What?”
“Smith’s in Spanish right now.”
Chloe squints at him. Rory squints back. The speed with which he recited Smith’s schedule goes unaddressed but not unnoticed.
“Can you get him?” Chloe asks.
Rory heads off with a fake story about Smith being needed in the principal’s office and returns with him in tow, as well as—
“Why is Ace with you?” Chloe asks, eyes narrowed. Ace smiles.
“We ran into him in the hall on the way here,” Smith says, sounding only slightly annoyed.
“If y’all are skipping, I want in,” Ace says.
Chloe sighs. If Rory’s friends are involved, she guesses Smith’s might as well be too. She wonders, momentarily, if she should have just told Georgia, instead of lying about an overdue book to get the library key, or if Benjy could understand this elaborate Shara production better than Chloe if he got the chance—
No, Rory’s and Smith’s friends don’t count. It doesn’t matter if they know, because they think she’s weird anyway. Her friends will clock how far off the rails she’s going, and that’ll make everything even more complicated.
“I don’t even care anymore,” she says, and takes off for the auditorium.
Inside, Smith leads them to the front, where he and Shara sat for the matinee, and the three of them split up. Rory climbs onto the stage and inspects the bottom of the curtain while Chloe folds down the first row of seats one by one, but it’s Smith who finds the envelope stuck with a magnet to the metal leg of seat A21.
They all gather around—except for Ace, who stopped at the entrance for a Powerade from the vending machine—as Smith opens the envelope. This note is a long one. They’ve been getting longer and longer, Shara’s handwriting on the cards shrinking smaller and smaller. Smith reads out loud.
Hi,
Me again. Not sure which of you is reading this, but I’m sure all of you will at some point. Good job with the song lyric, Chloe, since I know that was you.
Smith, you sat right there, one seat over, rolling your program up in your hands because you were so nervous for Ace. You told me you didn’ t think he could do it, that you’d never heard him sing before. You were afraid he was going to humiliate himself in front of the entire school, and then your jaw dropped when he sang his first line. I really do admire that about you—the way you root for other people. You didn’ t know that I already knew he could sing, that he told me his mom raised him on Stephen Sondheim soundtracks. You didn’ t know that’s the reason Summer doesn’ t talk to me anymore—because she caught us.
Chloe, I remember your dress. God, they put you in that nightmare of a frilly white costume gown, more a robe than anything, absolutely hideous, tied at the waist. You should sue. You looked straight into the spotlight. You were avoiding my eyes, weren’ t you? Do you remember dropping the beginning of a line? （Don’ t worry, I don’ t think anyone else noticed.） You must have spent so many hours perfecting the delivery, internalizing the rhythm, and I felt it skip right on past you and your open mouth. You missed a cue by about a second and a half. I squeezed the armrest so I wouldn’ t smile.
This is what I’ ve been trying to tell you.
XOXO
S
P. S.
Rory, I haven’t forgotten about you. Sometimes I think about last fall, when you had detention and the game got called for rain . Did you think I didn’ t know you were watching?
Before Chloe has a chance to react to what Shara wrote about her, Ace saunters up the aisle, chugging Mountain Blast.
Smith folds the card shut and says to him, “Summer caught you with Shara?”
Ace chokes.
“Oop,” Rory says. He hops up on the edge of the stage to watch the show.
Ace wipes a dribble of fluorescent blue from his chin. “She—she told you that?”
“She wrote it,” Smith says. He holds up the card. “In here.”
“I—it wasn’t like that—”
“Then what was it like?”
If this were two weeks ago, Chloe would be worried she might have a jock-versus-jock Thunderdome deathmatch on her hands. But she’s gotten to know both of them a bit since then, and they’re two of the least confrontational people she’s ever met—especially Smith. Once, when she was looking for him after school, she found him in the bio lab, poking around at the bean sprouts. Another time, he saw her with a book of poems and told her his mom was a spoken-word poet back in the ’90s, and that she gave him a Danez Smith collection for his birthday.