Shara stops moving.
“Are you running away again?” Chloe demands. She’s out of breath, her heart sledgehammering through her chest.
“I—” Shara starts. Above her head, her free hand falls limp on the lawn, palm open to the sky. “No, I—I wrote you a card.”
“Oh my God, why can’t you act like a normal human person?” Chloe says. “Why can’t you do one thing that’s not some fucking emotional manipulation gesture from fifteen million miles away? I’m not doing this with you anymore! All I have done for the past month is try to figure out who the hell you are, but I don’t even think you know!”
“Chloe—”
“Do you think love is just someone arranging their entire life around whatever you want?” she continues, ignoring Shara, whose face is as pink as her hair. “Do you have any idea what you even mean when you say you want me? No, you fucking don’t, because if you did, if it actually meant something to you, if it wasn’t about how much you get off on someone being obsessed with you, if you were actually willing to confront anything about yourself or sacrifice anything that actually matters to you, you wouldn’t be sticking notes on my window when I’m not looking! You would have kissed me when you had your chance in the library today!”
She doesn’t realize how long they’ve been stuck there, motionless on the lawn, until the floodlights automatically switch off. Suddenly, she’s looking down at Shara beneath her body in the lavender wash of the moonlight, feeling the rise and fall of Shara’s breaths between her thighs.
Shara’s unpinned hand is still loose above her head. It’s just lying there, surrendered, wide open. Chloe is absolutely sick to death of waiting for her to use it.
“I told everyone,” Shara says.
“Tell me.”
“Chloe. Read the card.”
“No!” Chloe snaps. “Say it to my face! Do this for real! Ask me on a date like everyone who has ever liked someone in the history of the universe!”
She gives Shara ten entire seconds to respond, but she doesn’t. She stares up at Chloe, eyes wide, lips parted around nothing.
She releases Shara’s wrist and jerks to her feet.
In her head, she’s cast Shara in the role of a million different beautiful women laid low: Marie Antoinette in pastel silks, Lucrezia Borgia dripping poison, vampire queens and girls in space. Now, standing over her, she doesn’t see any of them. She sees a girl with a kitchen-scissor haircut in a yard in the suburbs.
A month ago, she stood like this outside Shara’s house and refused to believe Shara was gone, because she knew the myth was a lie. That there was nothing extraordinary about Shara Wheeler.
This is the real tragedy: Everything extraordinary about her is trapped behind the myth.
“I have to study,” Chloe says. “Go home, Shara.”
* * *
On her way out of her last exam, Chloe hears a new rumor.
One junior tells another that some total narc of a sophomore walked in on two girls making out in the B Building bathroom. Five lockers down, two guys from the baseball team are muttering about how the girls got reported to Principal Wheeler, and he’s going to suspend them.
She’s hovering at the water fountain near the exit, trying to catch the name of the snitch she’s going to make her new mortal enemy, when one of the double doors opens.
“There you are,” Shara says when she sees Chloe, as if she hasn’t known Chloe’s exact whereabouts for months. She’s backlit in the doorway with afternoon sun, a hot breeze swirling her hair around her face in rose gold.
Chloe groans. Shara cinematic-ass Wheeler.
“I told you to—”
Shara cuts her off: “It was Georgia.”
Chloe’s stomach twists. Georgia’s name out of Shara’s mouth can’t possibly mean anything good.
“What? What was Georgia?”
“One of the girls from the B Building bathroom,” Shara says. “I thought you should know.”
“Georgia? With who?”
“Summer,” Shara says, “but they only saw Georgia, so she’s the only one who got reported.”
“Summer Collins? They— Since when?”
“I don’t know, nobody told me either,” Shara says. “Summer hasn’t exactly been dying to talk to me lately.”
Chloe doesn’t have time to react to that.
“Where’s Georgia now?”
“The office,” Shara says. “My dad’s gonna call her parents.”