She’s been kissed and ditched by Shara Wheeler. And she’s not even the only one.
But … that lip gloss. Vanilla and mint. It’s absolutely, 100 percent the lip gloss she was wearing when they kissed. Chloe would never, ever forget that scent.
Which means Shara bought it specifically to kiss Chloe with.
Proof that Shara does, when she’s home at night in her powder-blue room, brushing her hair and painting her nails and winding a rubber band three times around a stack of study cards, think about Chloe.
And that feels a bit like winning.
FROM THE BURN PILE
Handwritten note from Chloe to Georgia
PLEASE DO NOT REACT AUDIBLY if Madame Clark picks this one up and reads it out loud like she did with Tanner’s ranking of girls’ butts I will literally kill you
Okay. So.
Shara Wheeler just kissed me. Like literally just now on my way to fifth hour.
AGAIN PLEASE DO NOT REACT you are calm you are a placid lake you are my moms after a pitcher of hemp tea
I was taking the faculty elevator shortcut, and she got on, and then she kissed me, out of NOWHERE.
And I think I kissed her back??? She’s hot! I panicked! She may be the bane of my existence, but she also looks like she lives in the hills of Sweden and spends all her time embroidering flowers on linen shirts like an extra in Midsommar. She looks like she smells nice and I’m here to report that she does in fact smell nice, like lilacs, except for her lip gloss, which was vanilla and mint. Like, what else am I supposed to do when a girl like that is about to kiss me? Anyone would have done the same thing.
ANYWAY. She kissed me, like really kissed me, like KISSED me, and then she was GONE.
What does it mean??? Shara Wheeler is the most tragic heterosexual to ever cram herself into a Brandy Melville crop top. She was obviously just screwing with me. This is mean straight girl behavior. Right???
What do I do????
Lilacs, Geo. LILACS.
2
DAYS SINCE SHARA WHEELER LEFT: 2
DAYS UNTIL GRADUATION: 41
The first thing Chloe saw when her moms’ Subaru crossed into False Beach city limits was Shara Wheeler’s face.
That’s not just what it felt like—although it does seem like Shara Wheeler is everywhere, all the time. It was literally looming forty feet wide over the interstate between a Waffle House and a Winn-Dixie under a swampy gray sky: a pretty blond girl with a pretty smile, holding a stack of textbooks and a protractor.
JESUS LOVES GEOMETRY! the billboard declared, which struck Chloe as a bit of a bold claim. A CHRIST-CENTERED EDUCATION AT WILLOWGROVE CHRISTIAN ACADEMY!
There are a total of five high schools in False Beach, and Willowgrove is the only one with a decent AP program and a theater department with the budget to do Phantom. As a fourteen-year-old literary nerd neck-deep in a goth phase, those seemed like the most important things a high school education could offer her. Her mom went to Willowgrove back in the ’90s, and she tried to warn her what it was like, but Chloe was insistent. If this was her only option, she could put up with the Jesus stuff.
“What kind of name is False Beach?” Chloe asked her mom for the five thousandth miserable time that day as they glided under Shara’s billboard. It was a question she’d been asking since her mom first told her the name of her hometown.
“It’s a beach but it’s not,” her mom answered, same as always, and her other mom flipped a page in The Canterbury Tales, and they kept driving out of the California sunset and into the buttcrack of Alabama.
False Beach sits on the wide banks of Lake Martin, which gives the slight illusion that it might be a beach town like Gulf Shores or Mobile down on the coast, but it’s not. It’s four hours inland from the Gulf of Mexico, closer to Atlanta than to Pensacola, nearly smack in the center of the state. The lakeshore isn’t even sandy, because the lake isn’t a real lake. It’s a reservoir made in the 1920s, surrounded by marshy banks and woods and cliffs.
It’s just a town by some water where nothing interesting ever happens. And, in what Chloe has learned is the nature of small towns, when one thing does happen, everyone knows about it. Which means by Monday morning, all anyone wants to talk about is where Shara could have gone.
Frankly, it’s not that different from every other day at Willowgrove. Here, Shara Wheeler is like Helen of Troy, if she were famous for being both beautiful and too tragically, terribly brilliant for her small town, or Regina George, if her brand was logging double the school-mandated volunteer service hours.
Shara Wheeler’s so pretty. Shara Wheeler’s so smart. Shara Wheeler has never been mean to anyone in her life. Shara Wheeler has the voice of an angel, actually, but she’s never auditioned for a spring musical because she doesn’t want to take the spotlight away from students who need it more. Shara Wheeler is the football team’s good luck charm, and if she misses a game, they’re doomed. Last year, there was a whole movement of freshman girls eyelash-gluing their own Cupid’s bows to re-create Shara’s signature naturally full, upturned upper lip. It’s a miracle nobody has put her likeness on like, the side of a butter container yet.