I think that’s where this started to go wrong for me . There are things that don’ t make sense about me. I don’ t know if I belong here . How can that be possible, to feel estranged from a place where everyone loves you? To owe your life to a place and still want to run? I’ ve been trying and trying to figure out what it is about me that makes me feel this way and why it feels so deep and so big that it must be most of me, the skin stretching between my knuckles and across my shoulders and then the bones under them too.
Knowing that I couldn’ t have you if I wanted to—that stings almost the same . It’s almost the same feeling. They’re right beside each other. What do they have in common?
I’d prefer if you kept this one to yourself,
S
When Chloe was in sixth grade, she won the California state spelling bee.
It wasn’t easy—not because she had any trouble spelling, but because her school didn’t believe in “creating a competitive environment for students.” At nine, she came home with a stern note for forcing her friends into an underground fight club of timed math quizzes during unstructured play time. They were not going to be pitting kids against one another in the spelling bee qualifier rounds.
But she saw the previous year’s winner on the local news and refused to let it go until her moms had figured out how to get her independently qualified and she had crushed every other eleven-year-old in the state with the final word, “dipsomaniac.”
The moment she set foot on Willowgrove’s campus, she signed up for the Quiz Bowl team. She joined the French Club on the promise that there would be tests at the convention and started quietly tracking the highest grades in each of her classes, and she discovered that her only real competition was Shara.
This letter is finally, finally proof that Shara has always seen her the same way. They’re equals. That’s what she’s thinking as she drags her fingertip down the crease of the paper.
But she’s also thinking about Shara researching how Georgia’s dad is the owner of Belltower. That Chloe likes to spend her afternoons there with the books.
Did she figure out Chloe’s plans that weekend so she could come by the shop when Chloe wasn’t tucked into a corner with Little Women? Did she check the street for Chloe’s car? How many times did she write the note out before she settled on the exact loops in Chloe’s name? Did she sit on her ivory quilt and plan a whole day around creating this moment, right now, Chloe sitting here with this letter, thinking about Shara thinking about her?
It feels even more intimate than the Shakespeare passage in the piano. Willowgrove is where Shara is—was—every day, but Belltower is Chloe’s. Shara doesn’t have a key. She had to walk through the doorway that Chloe repainted last summer and make polite small talk with Chloe’s best friend.
She thinks about the ends of Shara’s hair brushing her desk in precalc and the flutter of a pulse under her fingers. If Shara was really in control of that play, if that was all it meant to her, why was her heart beating so fast?
The deeper she gets into this, the more she pictures the hours Shara spent on it. On Smith and Rory too, yes, but Chloe’s the one who got a whole letter on loose-leaf paper addressed only to her. There’s no clue leading to or from this one. Her kiss was the one Shara bought brand-new lip gloss for.
The postscripts on the cards always allude to something that only one of the three of them can translate, but when she lines them up next to one another, something doesn’t match. The clues for Smith and Rory usually reference a specific memory, but the clues for Chloe reference art. Not just any art—books found at Belltower, Shakespeare, Phantom. She specifically picked Chloe’s favorite things, wrote riddles in Chloe’s own language, and hid them in Chloe’s favorite places. Like Chloe is special.
She wonders.
What if this is why Shara wants Chloe to know who she is?
What if that kiss on the elevator was more than the first phase of a plan?
What if Shara’s more than an evil shitbird? What if Shara is an evil shitbird who’s in love with her?
* * *
“Chloe, thank God you’re here,” her mama says when she finally stumbles inside. She holds up one of the thousand puzzle pieces spread across the kitchen table. “Would you describe this color as honey or amber?”
“It’s yellow,” she says.
“Thank you!” her mom says. “It goes in the yellow pile!”
“But the yellow pile has five subsections, Val.”