The only scene Chloe’s imagination can supply at that moment is her own hand slamming down on a big red button to nuke herself and the entire campus from orbit.
“Useless.” She scoops up her study materials and storms off to her first exam. “Useless!”
* * *
“Did you hear Shara’s back?”
“I heard she faked getting into all those schools.”
“You didn’t hear that, she told you,” Chloe mutters, shoving through the crowd toward her exam. Just like the first Monday after Shara left, it’s impossible to go anywhere on campus without hearing her name.
“I heard she stole a boat and sailed to Mexico and back by herself.”
“I heard Smith dumped her.”
“Really? ’Cause I heard she dumped him because she’s a lesb—”
A siren blasts through the morning buzz, sending students ducking for cover with their hands over their ears. In the center of the hall stands Principal Wheeler, holding a megaphone and visibly out of breath.
“Willowgrove students!” he shouts into the megaphone. “If you are not a senior, there is no reason for you not to be in your first hour classrooms, in your seat, ready for your morning prayer and announcements! If you are a senior, you should be reporting to your first exam! This is not a disco! You are not on summer vacation yet! If I see any students in this hallway in two minutes when the homeroom bell rings, you will be in detention this afternoon! I repeat, detention! Let’s go!”
He lowers the bullhorn as everyone scatters, and then he turns and finds himself facing Chloe.
He looks absolutely awful. Hair askew, shirt buttoned wrong, dark circles under his eyes, all in all like a man who had a terrible weekend and is now having a terrible Monday. She wonders, briefly, how pissed he must have been when he checked Shara’s bedroom this morning and discovered that his bundle of Christly joy had vanished again with nothing left behind but tumbleweeds of hacked-off blond hair. Now he’s stuck running through the hallways with a bullhorn, trying to keep the stock value of the Wheeler name from dropping any lower.
He raises the bullhorn and says, over a squawk of feedback, “You too, Miss Green.”
She does not say, “I kissed your daughter, twice,” but she thinks it. She thinks it hard.
Instead, she smiles and salutes and marches off to her AP Lit exam.
Shara’s already in her desk when Chloe gets to Mrs. Farley’s classroom. The rest of the class is leaning across aisles and whispering behind stacks of notecards, and every last one of them is staring at the girl on the front row with the pink hair.
Before, when everyone in a room was staring at Shara, it made her more powerful, like the moon refracting sunlight. Now, if she notices it at all, she doesn’t let on. Her eyes are straight ahead, fixed on her neat line of pens and pencils.
She doesn’t look up when Chloe sits behind her, but her posture straightens slightly.
Mrs. Farley doesn’t say anything to Shara when she passes out the exam booklets. Not a dress code notice, not a demand for a doctor’s note for the month of class she missed, not even a disapproving look. Must be nice to be the principal’s daughter. If Chloe said a bunch of gay stuff on Instagram Live and then showed up at school with pink hair and a too-short skirt, she’d be catapulted out of the building and probably into the dumpsters behind the cafeteria.
At least she finishes her exam before Shara does. She slides her papers smugly onto Mrs. Farley’s desk, and that’s it—her very last English exam of high school.
When she turns around and sees Shara in the front row, head down, diligently writing her essay, she remembers Shara’s letter: three fingers on Chloe’s desk the first day of class. She remembers that moment, how she sat there with her nerves sparking and watched Shara pull sharpened pencils from a pencil case out of her backpack, which was also annoying, somehow—always a thing inside a thing inside a thing with Shara.
So, on the way back to her seat, she leans in and touches the corner of Shara’s desk with three intentional fingertips, light and short enough that anyone else could mistake it for an accident.
But Shara’s not anyone else. Her chin snaps upward, and she looks from Chloe’s hand to Chloe’s face, pen frozen on the paper, a piece of streaky pink hair falling across the top of her nose.
The way her eyes flash at Chloe … it’s not surprise. It’s not confusion. It’s bright, heady expectation, like she knew it was only a matter of time until this happened. Like she’s been waiting since she sat down for Chloe to come up there and kiss her.