“Yeah,” he says, “but I’m not sure what it means.”
He shows her a picture on his phone of the back of Brooklyn’s camera, where the National Honor Society photo is zoomed in on Shara. Seniors get the privilege of doing their extracurricular photos with silly concepts and gags, so instead of a posed group shot, it’s a dozen of the grade’s highest GPA holders in Mrs. Farley’s room, surrounded by the classroom stash of board games.
She remembers taking this photo. She’s on the left side of the frame with Georgia, pretending to fight over a game of Uno. Brooklyn’s sitting primly in front of Connect Four, while Drew Taylor makes a show of studying a chess board. Shara’s at a desk across the room, alone, her elbow propped up on the board game SORRY!.
In the picture, Shara’s holding something in her hand. Chloe zooms in on Smith’s phone screen, squinting to make out the details.
It’s the SORRY card, the one that tells you to send an opponent back to the starting space on the board.
“Back to start…” Chloe mumbles.
All of this started with three kisses: Chloe, Smith, Rory. They’ve been to Dixon’s house, where Shara last kissed Smith, and the roof where she kissed Rory. The only place left, the only kiss they haven’t revisited, is Chloe’s.
She passes the phone back to a confused Smith. “I know where to go.”
Cape flying, she barrels out the back door of the gym and past the choir room, down the hallway full of spare lockers and closets, around the corner, and through the open door where the back of A Building connects to the elementary classrooms on the first floor of B Building.
Walls of crayon-colored pictures of beach balls and construction paper wishes for a happy summer break blur out in a muted rainbow—a stray teacher’s aide yells something after her—and then she skids to a stop at the faculty elevator. It opens as soon as she calls.
Inside, nothing looks out of place. She checks behind the handrail before hiking up her suit pants and climbing on top of it to check the light fixture on the ceiling. It’s not until the doors slide shut that she sees it.
There’s a smear of pink nail polish on the lip of the inner doors, right where they meet.
Freshman year, when she got the campus tour from Georgia, she learned the secret of this elevator. If you stop it between floors and pry the inner doors apart, the inside of the outer doors is covered in thirty-six years of Willowgrove student graffiti. She and Georgia left their initials in Sharpie.
She jams the button for the top floor, counts the seconds, and on “two” she yanks the emergency stop.
When she wrenches the inner doors apart, the message is three feet tall and just as wide. It must have been here, hidden and still drying, when Shara pulled her close and kissed her.
On top of hundreds of signatures and lewd scrawls, there’s a heart painted in pink nail polish. And inside it, Shara’s daubed four cursive words.
I already told you .
Chloe checks three times to make sure she’s read it right.
No postscript. No clue. No more confessions. Not even a direction to look next.
It’s the end of the trail. This is where it was always leading: nowhere.
FROM THE BURN PILE
Contents of one of Rory’s tapes, unspooled. Marked with a green sticker for “personal.”
Maybe I just want to be Smith.
Not like, the way most guys at Willowgrove wanna be him. I don’t want to be the quarterback or anything. It’s more like, looking over the fence at him and Shara and thinking about what Shara sees when she looks at him. The way he throws his head back when he laughs or how he carries himself like the human version of that “Lo-Fi Hip Hop Beats to Study To” thing on YouTube. The time he showed up at her door before school on a Wednesday morning with a Styrofoam box of pancakes because he wanted to bring her breakfast. I remember what it was like to see Smith up close like that.
So, I guess maybe I want to know what it’s like to be that. To look in the mirror every day and see someone who knows exactly where they fit in, to be able to want—I mean, have—a girl like Shara.
I don’t know. I don’t know what else to call it.
14
DAYS WITHOUT SHARA: STILL 22
Rory pulls up outside the gym ten minutes after Chloe texts the group chat. When Smith slides into the passenger seat, his lipstick has been wiped off, but the rest of his makeup is still there. Chloe watches from the back seat as Rory stares at him across the console.
“Don’t say anything,” Smith says, the glitter around his eyes shimmering in the dashboard light.