I Kissed Shara Wheeler

There was this one weekend, a million summers ago, when I sat on the shore drinking a frozen limeade, and I realized the only thing I wanted to look at was the way the sun hit the girls swimming in the lake. The problem has always been this: When I look at you, I taste lime, and I see light on water.

I have done some of the best work of my life because of you. And I know you have done some of the best work of your life because of me. I don’t know a better way to explain what love means to two people like us.

There's a girl with brown eyes who reminds me of the first book I ever loved. When I look at her, I feel like there might be another universe in her. I imagine her on a shelf too high for me to reach, or peeking out of someone else's backpack, or at the end of a long wait at the library. I know there are other books that are easier to get my hands on, but none are half as good as her. Every part of her seems to have a purpose, a specific meaning, an exact reason for being how and what and where it is.

I don’t believe doing something in front of everybody makes it more meaningful, anyway. If anything, it makes it stop belonging to you.

She feels like spine of a book about to crack and spill out all the love story guts.

High school matters because it shapes how we see the world when we enter it. We carry the hurt with us, the confirmed fears, the insecurities people used against us. But we also carry the moment when someone gave us a chance, even though they didn't have to. The moment we watched a friend make a choice we didn't understand at first because they're brave in a different way. The moment a teacher told us they believed in us. The moment we told someone who we are and they accepted us without question. The moment we felt in love. "Most of the things we are feeling right now are things we're feeling for the first time. We're learning what it means to feel them. What we mean to one another. Of course that matters.

What do you say when The Girl tells you that you're The Girl to her?

You were the only one it could be.

She’s glad it’s Shara. Nobody else would have felt important enough.

There are things that don’t make sense about me. I don’t know if I belong here. How can that be possible, to feel estranged from a place where everyone loves you? To owe your life to a place and still want to run? I’ve been trying and trying to figure out what it is about me that makes me feel this way and why it feels so deep and so big that it must be most of me, the skin stretching between my knuckles and across my shoulders and then the bones under them too. Knowing that I couldn’t have you if I wanted to—that stings almost the same. It’s almost the same feeling. They’re right beside each other. What do they have in common?

All I want is a nice girlfriend in a cottage where we have philosophical conversations over scones or something.

If I seem confident, it’s because I have to. You, of all people, know what I mean.

Shame is a way of life here. It's stocked in the vending machines, stuck like gum under the desks. Spoken in 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.

Sometimes it feels like I'm gonna explode, like everything I'm feeling is the first time anyone's felt it, ever, in the history of the universe, and then I get so angry when people don't understand that I'm walking around feeling like this and still doing everything I'm supposed to do and making As and getting into NYU and putting up with all of the Willowgrove bullshit. I—I can't even explain how I feel, and it feels wrong to say it without the right words, so I don't say it at all, but then nobody knows, and I'm mad that nobody knows, even though I don't even want them to know.

And to the girl who kissed me,’ she says, ‘I have done some of the best work of my life because of you. And I know you have done some of the best work of your life because of me. I don’t know a better way to explain what love means to two people like us.

While she does like boys, she generally finds the traits of a compelling villain—arrogance, malice, an angsty backstory—tedious in a man. Like, what do hot guys with long dark hair even have to be that upset about? Get a clarifying shampoo and suck it up, Kylo Ren. So your rich parents sent you to magic camp and you didn’t make any friends. Big deal.

Jealousy is a funny thing. We spend so much of high school consumed by it, hating that another person has something we don’t, wishing we could taste what it’s like to be them.

but if she learned anything from her mom, it's that the real world is where people who hate high school go to be happy.

Just because everyone here knows who you are, and everyone talks about everyone else’s business, that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to be the person you know you are. There are things out there for you that you haven’t even thought of yet, that you don’t even know how to think of yet. Who you are here doesn’t have to be the same as who you are out there. And if the person you feel like you have to be in this town doesn’t feel right to you, you’re allowed to leave. You’re allowed to exist. Even if it means existing somewhere else.

All frogs do is eat bugs that we hate and mind their business. They don't deserve all that. They're literally just vibing.

God, Shall I compare thee to an icebox pie? Couldn't be gayer if she tried.

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.

What I want is... I want to fall in love. I want to have a big, dramatic, ridiculous love story, like a period piece, and my love interest is played by Saoirse Ronan and I get to wear a fancy corset. I want to write books about the way that feels. And I don't know if I'll ever have any of that here, but I know what I'll lose if I leave.

When Shara looks at her like that, all airy and sly, it makes Chloe think of the first time her mama brought home an icebox pie. It was strawberries and cream, her mom’s favorite, and the whole thing seemed to be a feat of mechanical physics. It didn’t make sense how the strawberries held effortlessly together when you sliced it, or how the cloud of meringue sat weightless on top. She remembers studying the layers from the side and having the inexplicable thought, This is a Shara Wheeler kind of pretty. God. Shall I compare thee to an icebox pie? Couldn’t be gayer if she tried.

Shara’s always been this person. ‘This is what I’ve been trying to tell you’, she wrote on a card stuck under an auditorium seat. Shara’s not nice. Shara’s so many more important things than nice.

This is why we need you,” Georgia says. “Once in a generation, there is born a bisexual who can do math. You’re the chosen one.

What she means is that nice and kind are not the same thing. Plenty of people aren’t nice at all, but they’re kind. And that’s what matters.

Depends if you don't mind that they're all about you.

That works for me," Ash says. "My ideal body is no body at all." Chloe snorts. "Just a head floating above a sexy void." "That's so gender of me," Ash says, beginning to chisel out Smith's cheekbones.

She links arms with Georgia to dance and sends up her only prayer of the past four years: May they always come back to each other