I Kissed Shara Wheeler

by Casey McQuiston

“Okay, but I feel like that too, and I’m not nonbinary.”

“Are there … times you don’t want to be a dude?”

“Does it matter? I’d have to be a guy no matter what.” “You know … if being a guy feels like something you have to do, like it’s an obligation or something…” Ash says carefully. “Maybe think about that.”

Ash yells over the burst of noise, and Smith glances over their shoulder to check his face in the mirror wall. Chloe sees him smile before she leaves.

“I love kissing people,” Ace says. “It’s like, a hobby of mine. I would describe myself as a make-out hobbyist.”

He spots Chloe across the crowd and smiles a nervous smile, and the glitter under his eyes catches the grimy light

Chloe tucks her phone into her suit jacket and shakes out her cape. For the last time in her high school career, it’s curtain call.

It’s the SORRY card, the one that tells you to send an opponent back to the starting space on the board. “Back to start…” Chloe mumbles. All of this started with three kisses: Chloe, Smith, Rory. They’ve been to Dixon’s house, where Shara last kissed Smith, and the roof where she kissed Rory. The only place left, the only kiss they haven’t revisited, is Chloe’s.

It’s the end of the trail. This is where it was always leading: nowhere.

“Don’t say anything,” Smith says, the glitter around his eyes shimmering in the dashboard light. “I—I wasn’t going to,” Rory says. “I like it.”

“A standardized test booklet when you break the seal on it.”

“That smell triggers my fight or flight,” Rory says.

Chloe sighs, chomping into her corn dog. “God, to live in the mind of a jock.” “Sorry I’m not motorboating an encyclopedia from 1927.”

thing that springs to mind is Ace at a party shouting about Mr. Brightside: He never says which one he’s jealous of.

“You know,” Chloe says. She keeps her voice low, her tone noncommittal. “It would be okay. If you didn’t like Shara. If you didn’t like girls at all.”

It’s not fair, she thinks. Here she is, on a cliff in a thrifted suit with a glittery quarterback and the human embodiment of repressed homoerotic angst, and none

of them have ever had the luxury of running away from what they are. Neither has Georgia, or Benjy, or her mom, or Mr. Truman, or Ash. Any of them.

Maybe it’s hard to be Shara and love a girl. But why should she get to run? Why shouldn’t she have to go through hell too? Why shoul...

“I don’t care about my stupid GPA, and nobody’s going to care about yours after we graduate,” Georgia points out. “You know that, right?” “It’s important to me,” Chloe says.

“Well, it’d be nice if I was important to you,” Georgia spits out.

“I’ve been begging you to help me with this project, and every time you blow me off for Smith and Rory and the rest of your new friends.”

“You’re gonna leave for New York and forget about me,” Georgia says, quieter now. “You’re gonna be right there next to me the whole time,” Chloe insists. “No, I’m not.” “Of course you are.” “No,” Georgia says again. “I’m not.”

“Georgia, you cannot spend your life in False Beach.” “God, you’re still not even listening to me! Has it ever occurred to you that I might not completely hate this place?”

“We literally shit on this place every single day of our lives.” “No, you do,”

The key is there, where I am.

The key was taped to the back of the picture of Shara on her parents’ sailboat.

The sign in the background announcing Anchor Bay Marina. Shara, smiling, angelic. “I’m gonna kill her,” Chloe says, and she reaches for her keys.

“Of course I’m mad. You wasted a whole month of my life on your demented scavenger hunt that wasn’t even going anywhere, while you’ve been luxuriating on a yacht like an oil baron—” “This isn’t a yacht,” Shara says. “It’s under thirty-five feet.” For some reason, that’s the thing that finally makes Chloe snap.

I don’t even feel bad that you’re in love with me.”

“What? No. What?”

“You literally told me in the Mansfield Park letter.” “Chloe, oh my God. Read it again. I told you what I was going to do. My plan was to make you obsessed with me,”

It’s time for the kick in the teeth—the flat reminder that this is the exact type of joke that straight girls like Shara inflict on girls like Chloe who have the misfortune of being queer in their line of sight.

“I told you,” Shara says. She looks up at Chloe, face impassive. “Did I do too good of a job with that letter? Did you forget everything else in it? Come on, what is

the one thing we both want, that I’ve been trying to figure out how to get since you showed up at Willowgrove?”

“You mean valedictorian?”

“This whole thing was pretty distracting, right?” Shara says. “I turned in my assignments for the last nine weeks ahead of time, but you’ve probably missed a couple deadlines, right? Dropped a percentage point or two?” “You did this to—to sabotage my chances at valedictorian?”

“They both think they love me, but I’m not the one they’re here for.”

“Everybody wants to use me for something, Chloe,” Shara says. “At least with them, there was something in it for me too.” “Like what?” “Social capital and entertainment, mainly. But I’m bored, and high school’s almost over, so I thought I’d point them at each other and see what happens.”

“I was always gonna break his heart.” “Why?” “Because I can’t love him back.” “Why not?” Chloe demands. “I just can’t, okay?”

“Tell yourself whatever you want,” Chloe says. “Won’t change the fact that you’re so scared of what people in some fucking nothing town think of you that it made you do all this.”

You have to decide that you’re so certain about everything, because uncertainty scares the shit out of you.” “I cannot express how much none of this is about me,” Chloe says.

“You wanted to know I was looking at you,”

“You liked it, didn’t you? You liked knowing I was thinking about you all the time.”

“Maybe that’s what you told yourself,” Chloe says. “But deep down, somewhere under all this bullshit, you kissed me because you wanted to.”

When Chloe leans in, she sees it: Shara’s gaze flickering to her lips. “Then why do you want me to kiss you right now?”

“Told you,” Chloe says. And with one solid shove, she pushes Shara—prom dress and all—over the railing and into Lake Martin.

“I finally figured out fried green tomatoes!

“She said she did all this because she lied about getting in to Harvard, and because she wanted to distract me so she could win valedictorian,” Chloe rattles off. “And to force you and Rory to talk to each other, because she thinks you’re only dating her because of him.”

“Oh, thank you, Jesus.” “What?”

“I thought I was gonna have to tell her myself. Whew.”