Kissing your sworn enemy before vanishing for a few weeks? What a power move!
The main character/narrator of this book by Casey McQuiston is Chloe Green, the queer teen daughter of two lesbians, one of whom grew up in a small town in Alabama before escaping to L.A. She found the love of her life, got married, and they had Chloe together (I can’t remember if she’s adopted or if they used in vitro with a sperm donor.)
I can’t remember what prompted it, but the summer before Chloe starts high school, they move back to her mom’s home town and sign Chloe up for the private Catholic high school.
The book takes place over the last month or so of Chloe’s senior year of high school, so we don’t get to see the culture shock she must have experienced in moving from L.A. to suburban Alabama. By the time we meet her, she seems to have settled in pretty well. She’s not popular, but she’s found her group of queer friends, most of whom are in the closet. One is nonbinary, and that information got out by accident when one of their online videos went viral.
Despite the fact that the queer kids don’t feel comfortable coming out of the closet, it seems like an open secret, and one that the students at least are fine with, even if the adults in the town are less accepting. Chloe makes no secret of the fact that she’s into women, although she doesn’t date in high school, even secretly.
It’s probably because she’s too busy being obsessed with Shara Wheeler, the literal poster child for suburban Alabama. Her dad is the principal of the school and there is an actual billboard in town with her face on it.
She’s a twiggy, blue-eyed blonde who never ties her hair back, always looks perfect, gets perfect grades, is dating the school’s quarterback, goes to church, wears her cross necklace, etc.
But it’s all an act.
Chloe appears to be the only one who can see it’s all an act and it drives her insane that no one else can see it.
I have to say I resonated so hard with this part of the book. I also have someone in my life who is a petite blue-eyed blonde and talks a lot about being “nice” and “not wanting to be a bitch.” But it’s all talk with no substance behind it and it drives me crazy that I’m the only one who can see it.
That’s where the parallel ends for me, because Shara and Chloe are the only two contenders for valedictorian. They both want the top prize and they’ll do anything to get it … including disappearing for a month after kissing your rival and leaving behind a trail of breadcrumbs for her to follow.
Shara disappears without a word the night of prom. Her family claims she’s spending time with a family member who lives out of town, but Chloe knows Shara wouldn’t miss class when she’s so close to finally becoming valedictorian.
If Chloe were smart, she would leave well enough alone, but she can’t because she’s obsessed with Shara. She tells herself it’s because winning valedictorian won’t mean anything if Shara disqualifies herself, but it’s really because she can’t stop thinking about that kiss Shara gave her before she disappeared.
Turns out, she’s not the only one Shara kissed before vanishing. There’s also Rory, the outcast who lives next door to Shara and has had a crush on her for forever. He also used to be best friends with Shara’s boyfriend, Smith, before they had a falling out that may or may not have had to do with Shara.
Chloe wrangles both Rory and Smith into a kind of team to help her track down Shara, but they both lose interest way before Chloe does, and it’s not because they don’t care about her. It’s because they realized they’re way more into each other than they had previously let themselves admit.
So Chloe is left to confront Shara on her own when she finally figures out where she’s been hiding all this time. Still wearing her prom dress.
But she’s been so distracted tracking down Shara that she almost missed a deadline for a class assignment and she ignores the people who have been her best friends for four years.
It is kind of hilarious to watch Chloe fall into Shara’s trap of getting so distracted trying to follow this trail of breadcrumbs Shara left that her schoolwork starts to suffer, but it bothered me that she let it turn her into a bad friend. Then again, who amongst us hasn’t neglected our friends upon becoming obsessed with a crush?
Shara does make her way back to school in time to graduate, and she’s been keeping up with her coursework while hiding out on her family’s yacht, so her grades haven’t suffered. But she shows up at school with her hair cut short and dyed hot pink. She and Chloe play some more cat-and-mouse games before finally getting together and Chloe makes up with her friends, mostly by throwing herself on the sword when her best friend gets caught making out with another girl. Her parents would kill her if they found out, so Chloe tells the principal she was the one making out with the other girl. She gets to finish the year, but she doesn’t get to attend graduation, which means she doesn’t get to give the valedictorian speech she’s been working so hard on.
So, Chloe and her friends decide to throw their own graduation.
I didn’t love this book, but I did enjoy following Shara’s trail of breadcrumbs with Chloe and getting to see Chloe finally realize why she was really so obsessed with Shara.
I found it sad that Chloe and Shara don’t realize their feelings for each other until they’re about to graduate, but the book doesn’t portray it as sad. Instead of focusing on how little time they have left before Chloe goes off to college and Shara does whatever (she didn’t get into Harvard), it highlights the fact that they have a whole summer to enjoy finally being together. And Smith and Rory have a whole summer to enjoy being together.
And, who knows, maybe they’ll find a way to make the long-distance thing work, or maybe they’ll find their way back to each other after college…