It looks identical to the songbook on Rory’s desk, the one Chloe got a glimpse of back when this all started.
If Smith starts reading love poems to Rory, she’ll never be able to look either of them in the eye again.
She squeezes her keys in her hand to stop them from jingling and shuts her eyes. For the rest of her life, she vows, she will simply insist that she didn’t see or hear anything.
“Is that—？” Rory starts. “It looks like the one you gave me.”
“I never really told you how I picked it out,” Smith says. There’s a faint creak, like he’s leaning back against a shelf. “My mom wanted to get you a shirt for your birthday, but I told her you liked writing songs and you couldn’t write lyrics down as fast as you could think them up. So she said my gift should be that I’d transcribe your songs if you sang them to me, and she let me get a pack of leather notebooks, and I gave one to you and kept the other one. I’ve never used mine, but I couldn’t get rid of it.”
“I still use mine,” Rory says.
“I know,” Smith says. “I saw it in your room.”
Rory’s smirk is audible when he says, “I guess I got attached to the aesthetic.”
“Stubborn ass.”
“Takes way longer without you though.”
A pause. Another creak of a shelf.
“Can I hear one sometime?” Smith asks. “One of your new songs?”
“That depends,” Rory says.
“Depends on what?”
And with all the courage in his noodle-y body, Rory says, “Depends if you don’t mind that they’re all about you.”
Chloe has to stop herself from pumping her fist like the end of The Breakfast Club.
It’s silent below, except for Summer talking to the iguana in the tank by the front of the store and Ash snapping their art kit back up. Then, after a few seconds, just long enough for a nervous first kiss, Smith laughs.
“Chloe!” Georgia calls out from the front of the store. “Let’s go! I gotta lock up!”
“Oh, shit,” Rory whispers, and there’s the shuffling sound of them hustling out of the shelves together, muffled laughter and light grunts from elbows thrown. She still can’t see them. They could be two lonely seventh graders with notebooks full of song lyrics, or they could be two almost-adults who haven’t laughed like this together in years.
“Coming!” Chloe calls. She can’t stop smiling.
FROM THE BURN PILE
Personal essay exercise: Smith Parker Prompt: What is a moment in your life that you felt truly yourself?
When we stopped running.
Written on the back of the same paper, in the same handwriting
You look like sun in moonlight
You’re faster on your feet
You’re five years back, you’re wrong, you’re right
You’re impossible to me
I’ve been up here waiting for you
Maybe I should have guessed
Give us five more and it’s still true
You’ll always be my best
R. H.
21
DAYS UNTIL GRADUATION: 6
There are five school days after finals but before graduation, when the rest of the student body is reviewing for exams, but the seniors are expected to show up to school every day to do nothing. Allegedly, it’s a requirement that was created in the 2000s after one senior class used the time to execute a senior prank so elaborate the entire gym floor had to be replaced. Now, they have to be supervised.
Like Dead Week, this weird in-between week has a nickname, created by past Willowgrove seniors and handed down through the years. Chloe hates it.
“I’m not calling it that,” Chloe says on Monday morning, on the breezeway outside C Building. “It’s gross.”
“But it makes so much sense,” Benjy says. “It’s a pointless space between two important things.”
Ash spreads their hands in front of them like a marquee and says, “Taint Week.”
Chloe sighs. “Somehow this feels like Ace’s fault.”
She pushes the stairwell door open, but before she can reach the next set of doors, Dixon Wells comes bursting out of them. Georgia throws a soccer-mom arm in front of Chloe’s chest before they smash into each other.
Dixon is red-faced and swearing, his Logan Paul hair flying in every direction, and he bolts past them down the stairs and out of sight.
“Not too late to stop being a dick, Dixon!” Georgia calls after him.
“Geo,” Chloe says. “That was spicy.”
Georgia shrugs, catching the door on the backswing. “Somebody has to tell him.”