One second passes, and another.
She throws her notes to the foot of the bed and reaches for her phone.
The video is an empty shot of the cabin of Shara’s parents’ sailboat, exactly the way Chloe remembers it: the bunk, the stairs, the pink toothbrush in a cup by the miniature sink. She watches the number at the corner of the screen go higher and higher: 37 viewers, 61 viewers, 112, 249 and counting. Familiar names start popping up with messages. Summer Collins types out a string of question marks. Tyler Miller asks if he missed it already. April Butcher sends a series of skeptical emojis wearing monocles.
When the number hits 300—three-quarters of Willowgrove’s high school population—Shara steps into the frame and says, “Hi.”
Her hair’s up, and her face is bare. She’s wearing a baggy old T-shirt with a hole in the collar, tugged over on one side so that her collarbone pokes out. Again with the clavicles.
“Here’s the thing.” She sits and stares directly into the camera, chin up, eyes intent. Chloe’s seen her make the same face before she aces an exam. “I lied.”
Chloe feels herself lean closer to the screen.
“I lied about … a lot of stuff, actually. Pretty much everything. But let’s start with the college thing: I didn’t get in to Harvard. I mean, I almost did, but I absolutely tanked the interview.” She holds up a slip of paper with the Harvard seal. “This is my rejection letter. So, there’s that, but the other part of the lie is, I bombed the interview on purpose.”
What.
“What,” Chloe murmurs at her phone.
Shara pulls a shoebox into view—where did she hide that when Chloe was there?—and dumps it out on the table. Papers come cascading out, unsealed envelopes and rubber stamps.
“The truth is,” Shara goes on, “the more I thought about it—about walking into my first day of classes at Harvard, where half the people in the room would be just as smart as me, and the other half would be smarter—I couldn’t do it. I didn’t want to do it. But I’d already made sure everyone knew about Harvard, so I decided to fake it. And then, of course, my dad wouldn’t let me apply to only one school, so I sat at the kitchen table while he watched me apply to seventeen different colleges he picked out. Duke. Vanderbilt. Yale, Notre Dame, Rice—you get the picture. And when enough time had passed, I started faking acceptance letters too. Researched what they all looked like. Made a big deal out of getting the mail myself every day. I even bought a few welcome packets off eBay.” She shrugs, offering the camera a wry smile. “Look, nobody can say I don’t commit to something once I decide to do it, okay? It just wasn’t Harvard I was committing to. And focusing on all this meant I didn’t have time to think about what came after.”
She pushes the box offscreen, and Chloe sees her eyes dart down to the comments streaming in. She shakes her head slightly and goes on.
“To be honest, it was easy. I’ve been lying my whole life—though I prefer to think of it as adapting. Working. As far back as I can remember, everybody told me I was pretty, I was perfect, I was a legacy, so I decided to be that, because it made my parents like me better and it made me feel safe. I lied to my family, to my friends, to my boyfriend, to people I barely even know, and I did it all to make people fall in love with something I made instead of someone I actually had to be. I still don’t really get what’s supposed to be bad about that—I mean, I liked being prom queen. I chose it. It made everything easier. What’s wrong with doing what it takes to have an easier life? Why is it so bad to want to feel special, or loved, or accepted? High school feels like all there is sometimes, the whole world, and don’t we all want the whole world to revolve around us? Isn’t that what our parents say? Let me tell y’all, sometimes a pedestal is a very comfortable place to be, because at least up there nothing can hurt you.”
She pauses, swiping a piece of hair out of her face.
“But anyway,” she continues, “a couple months ago, when I saw the end of senior year coming, I decided to run away. I knew it was only a matter of time until people found out about Harvard if I stayed. I was gonna come back once everyone missed me, win valedictorian, and let that be the way y’all remembered me. I loved the picture in my head: Shara Wheeler, she had more important places to be, but she came back one last time to remind us she was the best. Nobody ever had to see all the pins holding the dress together, if you know what I mean.
“That was my plan. This wasn’t ever part of it, but that was back when I thought I knew what all of my lies were and why I had to tell them. It hadn’t really occurred to me that I was lying to myself too. I didn’t know that part until two nights ago, and that’s why I decided to tell y’all everything. I think maybe I needed so many secrets to keep this one locked up, and now that it’s not locked up anymore, I don’t need the rest.”