In one corner, Benjy rounds up April and Rory to discuss a plan for procession music. In another, Jake and Ash are painting shapes on each other’s faces. In between, they all travel in shifts to Webster’s next door, where Ace stubbornly insists on paying for Chloe’s double scoop of strawberry with sprinkles and marshmallows. He claims that it’s the Southern gentlemanly thing to do when you’ve kissed someone, even if it was months ago in character as an opera phantom. He passes Chloe her cone and then takes an ungentlemanly lick of Smith’s scoop of butter pecan.
Jake pulls out a Bluetooth speaker and puts on a shockingly good playlist, and the whole thing becomes a sort of haphazard rally-meets-party. Chloe looks around Belltower, and she sees things she’s never seen before. A softball girl hitting it off with a clarinet girl. Benjy asking Ace how big his biceps are. Brooklyn clumsily talking to April, who sits on a table in front of her looking deeply amused and poking Brooklyn’s knee with the toe of her sneaker. There’s something in the air, like a collective release of tension.
She passes a sponge to Ash and says, “This is nuts, huh?”
Ash nods. They’ve already got paint splattered up the side of their neck, matting tufts of ginger hair together. “The coolest.”
“Where did all of this come from?” she says. “Like, has everyone secretly been waiting for a chance to overthrow Wheeler? I definitely thought it was only us.”
“Yeah, it seems that way sometimes,” Ash says. “You know what it reminds me of?”
“What?”
“MMORPGs.”
Ah. A classic Ash tangent. Chloe can’t wait to see where this one goes. “Say more.”
“So, everyone is running around the same world doing the same quests, but all of them are on different timelines and at different points in the story,” Ash says. “Like you could meet up with a friend, and at the exact same point on the map at the exact same time, you might be able to see a character that they can’t see, because that character’s already dead at the point of the game where your friend is playing.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Or maybe you’re on a mission to save a villager from a bunch of giant squirrels in the forest outside town, but nobody else can see that villager, because they’re not on that mission.” Ash looks up from their work to smile at Chloe. “It’s not that they choose to let the villager get mauled by squirrels. It’s just that they’re on a whole different quest.”
“So, to be clear,” Chloe says, “the giant squirrels are high school trauma.”
“Yes,” Ash says simply. “Now, can you bring this glitter to Georgia?”
Chloe takes the can of glitter Ash presses to her hands and stands up.
She looks around for Georgia, but instead she sees Smith helping a junior get an ice cream stain out of her shirt. Two band kids strategizing how they’re going to explain this to their parents. Summer smiling like she’s at a pep rally. People who never talk in class.
There must be a lot of giant squirrels she can’t see, she realizes.
Shame is a way of life here. It’s stocked in the vending machines, stuck like gum under the desks, spoken in the morning devotionals. She knows now that there’s a bit of it in her. It was an easy choice not to go back in the closet when she got here, but if she’d grown up here, she might never have come out at all. She might be a completely different person. There’s so much to it here, so much that nobody tells anyone about.
So, if she’s the only one in the class of ’22 who’s really out for now, if her existence can provide cover for half her graduating class to stand up for something without saying things about themselves they can’t yet say, that’s enough. That’s plenty.
“So,” Benjy says when Chloe finds Georgia next to him, “I know things have been crazy, but I just wanted to say: Oh my God, Shara Wheeler is in love with you, and Georgia has been secretly dating a member of the homecoming court. Like, what is going on? Also, when do I get a hot person?”
“I saw you flirting with Ace,” Chloe counters.
“Yeah, he’s like, Dodge Truck Month–level straight,” Benjy says dismissively. “I’m not wasting my time.”
“Benjy, come lie down over here and let me trace you,” Ash calls over.
“Why?”
“It’s art.”
Benjy sighs but trots off.
“Yeah, uh,” Georgia says in a low voice, looking up from her paint. “At what point are we going to talk about the Shara situation?”