I Kissed Shara Wheeler(6)

Up close, Smith Parker is … not quite as huge as Chloe thought. He’s more tapered than bulky, more like a dancer than a football player. He’s one of the few athletes Chloe considers good-looking instead of thick-necked hot-ugly: high cheekbones, striking brown eyes with sharp inner corners and arched brows, dark brown skin that somehow remains clear during football season. He’s tall, even taller than Rory. Did he grow somehow since before prom? Has he always been this square-jawed and triangle-shaped? He’s like an SAT geometry problem.

“Smith,” she says. He doesn’t respond at first, still yelling down the hall at one of his teammates—and, really, football season ended four months ago, can they find another personality trait?—so she tries again. “Smith!”

When he finally looks, it occurs to her that Smith Parker may not even know who she is. He definitely at least knows her as that weird queer girl from LA with two lesbian moms, like everyone else does, but does he know who she is? Her reputation for leading the Quiz Bowl team with an iron fist could be meaningless to him. Has Shara told him that Chloe is her only rightful academic nemesis?

“What’s up?” Smith says. He glances beside her to Rory, who is retracting into his uniform sweatshirt, and does a little chin nod.

Chloe purses her lips. “Can we talk to you for a second?”

Smith looks over his shoulder to where Ace Torres is at the door to the physics lab, slapping palms with yet another football guy. It’s common knowledge at Willowgrove that first-hour senior physics is dumbed down and graded on an extreme curve to help student athletes keep their GPAs up.

“I really gotta get to class,” he says.

Chloe releases a hiss. “It’s Football Physics.”

“I know,” Smith says, “but—”

“And it’s the last month of school,” Chloe points out. “Nobody cares if anyone’s late, least of all you.”

“Look, I had a long weekend,” Smith says, turning to her. This time, she can see heaviness around his eyes. She wonders how he spent his Sunday—probably cow tipping with the boys or something. “Can y’all just—”

Rory blurts out, “I kissed Shara.”

Smith freezes. Rory freezes. Untipped cows on the edge of town freeze.

When Smith speaks again, his voice is low. “What?”

“I mean, uh,” Rory says. It’s almost funny, the way all his class-cutting, shoe-gazing edginess shrinks into nothing. Boys are so embarrassing. “She, uh—before she left, we, um—”

“He kissed Shara. And so did I,” Chloe says, stepping up like the Spartacus of people who have kissed Smith Parker’s girlfriend. “I mean, she kissed me, if we’re being specific. But I kissed her back.”

Smith stares at her face, then at Rory’s, then Chloe’s again.

“Y’all think this is funny?” he asks. “Because it’s not.”

“It’s a little funny,” Chloe notes.

“It’s not a joke,” Rory insists.

If Smith knows anything about Willowgrove’s lower social ranks, he should know that Chloe and Rory have never so much as shared eye contact in the hallway, much less a conspiracy to prank the quarterback. The entire ecosystem of Willowgrove depends on rigid divisions between each social stratum. Smith has to know she wouldn’t be upsetting the natural order if she didn’t absolutely have to.

A muscle in Smith’s jaw twitches.

“Well, that pretty much sucks to hear,” Smith says. “Why’re you telling me?”

“Because we need to talk,” Rory attempts. “All of us.”

Chloe takes a more direct approach. “Rory, show him the note.”

“What note?” Smith says.

Rory grumbles but swings his backpack around and unzips it. It’s covered in Thrasher patches and pretentious buttons and contains precisely zero schoolbooks.

“She left us that,” Chloe says when he gives Smith the card. “Do you know what the last part means?”

Smith stares at it for a long minute, then he folds it closed and calmly hands it back.

“You like her, don’t you?” Smith says to Rory. “Still?”

Chloe glances between them, at the pinched set of Smith’s mouth and the unhappy crease between Rory’s thick eyebrows. She doesn’t usually credit too many complicated feelings to teenage boys, but there’s definitely some kind of messed-up history there. The Shara Vortex.

“Kind of,” Rory says, in the voice of a boy who climbed through Shara’s bedroom window the day before.

Smith nods with grim satisfaction and turns to Chloe.

“What about you?”

Chloe blinks and lowers her voice. “I barely even know her. I have no idea why she kissed me. I just want to beat her to valedictorian.”

Smith considers that and nods again. Chloe is starting to suspect she doesn’t get jocks at all.

“I don’t know what peach means,” Smith says, “but the numbers are my locker combination.”



* * *



Smith Parker’s locker is a mess.

It at least smells better than the other football players’ lockers, but it’s crammed with textbooks and overstuffed notebooks and more books than he could possibly have to read for a regular English class. There is also a surprising number of cosmetics: tubes of moisturizer, hair ties, dark brown concealer, pomegranate lip balm. He shoves those behind a box of Little Debbie oatmeal pies.