I Kissed Shara Wheeler

“What does it mean??? Shara Wheeler is the most tragic heterosexual to ever cram herself into a Brandy Melville crop top. She was obviously just screwing with me. This is mean straight girl behavior. Right???”

In the first interchapter, Chloe writes a note to her best friend, Georgia, about her kiss with Shara. The quotation reveals that Chloe assumes Shara is both straight and mean. The quotation also reveals Chloe’s conflicted mindset: although she is excited about the kiss, attracted to Shara, and intrigued as to what it could mean, she is inclined to assume the worst in others to protect herself.

“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 a SAT geometry problem.”

Smith’s appearance challenges the stereotype of the typical football quarterback. Chloe compares him to an SAT geometry problem because he is puzzling in that he deviates from her expectations of him. Chloe uses a simile, “like a SAT geometry problem,” as a characterization device, conveying Smith’s appearance by comparing it to something many young adult readers will understand: a college admissions test.

“All around them, the rest of Willowgrove is filtering into first hour, and every single one of them takes a second to stare as they pass. Chloe Green, the one who scored a 35 on the ACT. Smith Parker, the saint who led Willowgrove to the state champ title two years in a row. And Rory Heron, best known for flooding the bio lab on purpose. The three of them occupying the same spot is ripping a hole in the Willowgrove space-time continuum.”

At first glance, Chloe, Smith, and Rory are an unusual trio because each of them aligns with a different high-school stereotype: the queer, smart, theater kid; the football jock; and the rebellious skater. The quotation conveys that their association destroys the sense of order established at Willowgrove, in which everyone remains within rigidly defined social boundaries. The quotation highlights the power of three seemingly different people uniting for a shared purpose.

“It didn’t exactly feel like the earth-shattering moment I always thought it would, mostly because I was just…confused. I sat there and watched Smith pull up to her house the way I’ve always watched him pull up to her house a million times since sophomore year, smiling so wide, I could see how white his teeth are from the roof.”

In an interchapter, Rory describes his kiss with Shara. That the kiss “didn’t exactly feel like the earth-shattering moment [he] always thought it would” suggests that Rory’s feelings may be misdirected. His focus in this passage on Smith’s appearance rather than Shara’s foreshadows that his romantic feelings are not for Shara at all. He displaced his feelings for Smith onto Shara because that’s what his community expects him to feel.

“Shara’s not cool. California was cool. Living in a place where it didn’t matter if everyone knew about her moms was cool. Shara is a vague mist of a person, checking all the right False Beach boxes so that everyone thinks they see a perfect girl in her place. What’s cool about that?”

The quote reveals Chloe’s sense of superiority over residents of False Beach in general and Shara in particular. To Chloe, Shara is the poster child for False Beach and Willowgrove Christian Academy, but Chloe’s judgment is based largely on appearances, such as Shara’s image on a billboard promoting Willowgrove. At this point in the novel, Chloe fails to recognize the complexity of Shara’s identity and consider anything that contradicts negative stereotypes of Shara, such as her braless homecoming photo, which suggests Shara may have a rebellious side.

“If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more.”

Georgia mentions her favorite quotation from Jane Austen’s Emma when speaking with Chloe. The quotation aligns with Chloe’s and Shara’s hidden feelings for each other. The quotation also aligns with Georgia’s and Summer’s feelings for each other. In both cases, the young women are reluctant to reveal their true feelings due to fear of getting hurt and facing rejection from their community.

“Chloe takes a second to think about that one. Shara may have dragged them into this, but she doesn’t deserve for the school’s most unapologetic d-bag to know she kissed a girl. Even if Chloe doesn’t care about Smith’s reputation, she does care about that. Like, in a general moral sense.”

Chloe has reservations about Dixon knowing that she and Shara have kissed. Although Chloe is open about her sexuality, Shara and Smith are not. If Chloe’s kiss with Shara becomes public, it might harm both Shara and Smith due to other people’s intolerance. While Chloe still has mixed feelings about Shara, she likes Smith, and she does not want to see either hurt by Dixon.

“No, I mean, like…like you were switched or something, but you look the way you’re supposed to look, and you’re still flour, so why should you feel like you’re wrong?”

Smith says this when speaking with Summer about a project at school in which they had to “take care of” a bag of flour as though it were a baby. The quotation and conversation suggest that Smith feels out of place and “wrong” for his sense of identity.

“You know what’s funny? By the end of the song, he never says if he’s jealous of the guy or the girl.”

Ace says this when talking about the song “Mr. Brightside” by The Killers. The quotation reflects the love triangle between Shara, Smith, and Rory. Although Rory is jealous of Shara and Smith’s relationship, it is not clear whether he is jealous of Smith or Shara. In this context, the passage suggests that the more obvious assumption isn’t necessarily the correct one.

“The whole thing sounds kind of dramatic to Chloe, until she remembers the feeling in her gut the first time she saw Shara, like the universe had dropped a personalized time bomb into first-hour world history. Maybe some people are supposed to hate each other.”

After Smith tells Chloe about his strained relationship with Rory and Rory’s jealousy toward him, Chloe reflects upon her relationship with Shara. The quotation reveals a parallel between Smith’s relationship with Rory and Chloe’s relationship with Shara. Ironically, the “hate” Chloe attributes to these relationships is, in both cases, love in disguise.

“Something settles into the air between them, an unsteady truce. They have almost nothing in common outside the fact that they’ve both kissed Shara Wheeler, unless there’s something else.”

Chloe begins to feel a connection to Smith, a person she originally dismissed as a football jock. The end of the quotation, “unless there’s something else,” foreshadows the revelation of her and Smith’s commonality in being queer.

“It’s why she can’t stop poking around the place where Shara’s supposed to be. As long as they’ve both been at Willowgrove, Chloe finally had someone to fight for dominance, and that gave some kind of reason to life here. It’s not like Shara is that important; it’s just that, without her, Chloe’s not sure what the point of anything is.”

While Chloe demeans Shara, Shara also instills in her a sense of existential purpose. Chloe’s existential purpose of competing against Shara aligns with Rory’s existential purpose of winning over and dating Shara. For both Chloe and Rory, Shara embodies a version of acceptance, affirmation, and success that they want for themselves.

“Shara has been the ultimate girl since I was in kindergarten. And that’s not my opinion—literally everyone I’ve ever met thinks Shara Wheeler is the ultimate.”

The quotation reflects Rory’s conformity to others’ expectations and ideas as to what constitutes success. For Rory, Shara is the “ultimate girl” of the all-American success story who would earn Rory the social acceptance and affirmation that he craves. It is later revealed that Shara is a substitute for Rory’s misdirected feelings for Smith. In a community in which being gay is frowned upon, Rory masks his true feelings through his fixation on a person he believes others would approve of.

“If Shara were an SAT question, she’d be one of those confusing logic puzzles. Critical reasoning with no obvious answers to rule out. Simple, straightforward words arranged in a strange, winding order, something to get lost inside until you realize you’re way behind on time and you’re going to have to bubble in C for the last four problems.”

Chloe begins to realize that Shara is not as simple and predictable as she had assumed her to be. The quotation hints at the complexity of Shara’s character and foreshadows some of the other qualities that will be revealed later. As with Smith in an earlier passage, Chloe uses comparison with a standardized test problem as a technique for revealing character. Smith is geometry, while Shara is logic.

“I think that’s where this started to go wrong for me. 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.”

In a long note to Chloe, Shara reveals that she feels she doesn’t belong in her community. Although Shara is regarded as the perfect model for her school and community, she wants to “run.” Shara reveals that, at her core, she doesn’t fit in with her community and the beliefs it represents, which hints at her queerness. The quotation highlights Shara’s inner struggles and her complexity of character, thereby revealing the fallacy in Chloe’s harsh judgment of her.

“Like…I like my body, because it’s fast and strong and good at football. But it also has to be a dude’s body, because I play football. So like, maybe sometimes I wish it was smaller or softer or…different… but I don’t really have a choice. And I can wear stuff like my letterman jacket and feel better because I could be shaped like anything under that, and I can imagine that maybe I’m not shaped like a dude sometimes.”

Smith speaks with Ash, Chloe’s nonbinary friend, about how he views his body. Smith’s view of his body is fluid in that he appreciates his athleticism and ability to play football, but also sometimes wishes his body were “softer” or “different.” Although Smith does not determine his gender identity in the novel, his views suggest he may be a transgender woman or a nonbinary person.

“I feel like there are different sides of me, like I could be anyone and touch anyone and love like that kind of Holy Ghost love—everywhere and everyone. Most of my friends act like they know exactly who and what they are, like there’s only one answer, but to me, that feels like putting a beginning and end on something that’s not supposed to have either.”

In an interchapter, Smith shares his insight and experience in the form of a personal essay. He conveys the complexity of his identity and suggests that his gender, sexuality, or both are fluid and expansive. Smith and his mother interpret Christianity in a nonrestrictive way and suggest that one should not put limits on love. Later in the passage, Smith describes the theater party in which Ash applied makeup to him as a pivotal moment in his discovery of other aspects of his identity, and he admits to having feelings for Rory since he was 13.

“What’s wrong with doing what it takes to have an easier life? Why is it so bad to want to feel special, or loved, or accepted? High school feels like all there is sometimes, the whole world, and don’t we all want the whole world to revolve around us? Isn’t that what our parents say? Let me tell y’all, sometimes a pedestal is a very comfortable place to be, because at least up there nothing can hurt you.”

When Shara goes live on Instagram, she reminds her followers of the shared need to feel special, loved, or accepted and suggests that she has hidden behind others’ admiration of her to mask the vulnerability that lies beneath her façade. Shara’s explanation aligns with the sentiments of other characters in the novel who hide their selves to protect themselves from judgment.

“In her head, she’s cast Shara in the role of a million different beautiful women laid low: Marie Antoinette in pastel silks, Lucrezia Borgia dripping poison, vampire queens and girls in space. Now, standing over her, she doesn’t see any of them. She sees a girl with a kitchen-scissor haircut in a yard in the suburbs. […] This is the real tragedy: Everything extraordinary about her is trapped behind the myth.”

Chloe mythologizes Shara throughout the novel and regards her as a variety of tropes rather than as a complex person whose real experiences and inner life are unknowable. When Chloe fights her, she gets close enough to her to see her humanity rather than her mythologized persona. She then realizes that what makes Shara truly extraordinary isn’t the simplified versions of her but the real person that Chloe has yet to discover.

“Shara doesn’t throw things away because they mean nothing to her. She throws things away because they mean too much.”

The quotation refers to Shara’s disposal of her crucifix necklace. Shara is divided between her faith and her sexual identity, and both are deeply meaningful to her. In the same way she throws away her necklace, she tries to throw away her sexual identity by pretending her notes to Chloe were part of an elaborate plan to win valedictorian. However, just as she tries to fish her necklace out of the trash, she tries to reveal her true feelings for Chloe through her livestream on Instagram.

“It’s a standardized logic and reasoning question: If it’s true that Shara did the terrible things in her notes, and it’s also true that Shara can only tell lies, then the terrible things must be only part of the story. The other part, still hiding behind all the smoke and mirrors and studied indifference, is someone who cares. A lot, in a very specific way, about a few, select people and a few, select things.”

Once Chloe finds that Shara was responsible for exposing her father’s corruption, and once she reads Shara’s note about the crucifix necklace, Chloe realizes that Shara cares about people and faith. Chloe begins to realize that she had misjudged Shara by labeling her as mean. The quotation also reveals the novel’s message that being a Christian and being queer are not mutually exclusive because Shara represents both.

“Shara isn’t a monster inside of a beautiful girl, or a beautiful girl inside of a monster. She’s both, one inside of the other inside of the other.”

Chloe realizes that Shara is a complex person who cannot fit into any one trope or stereotype. Like everyone else, Shara is a perfectly imperfect human who contains both the good and the bad. This passage expresses the fulfillment of Chloe’s character arc, which takes her from a courageous but prejudiced and judgmental teenager to a wiser and more nuanced young adult.

“My parents gave it to me when I turned thirteen, with this whole letter about how it represented me becoming a woman of Christ. It was like wearing a little travel-sized version of their expectations. And everyone could see it, and I couldn’t control what they thought it meant to me, and I didn’t want anyone to think the way I love God is the same way other people at Willowgrove love God. It was just—it was too much. I knew my parents would notice if I stopped wearing it, so it had to go.”

Shara explains to Chloe that the crucifix necklace represented her parents’ expectations of her. Because she faced the conflict between others’ expectations and her sexual identity, she felt compelled to throw away the crucifix and the expectations it represented. The passage suggests that Shara’s exploration of her sexual identity is bound up with her exploration of religious identity. Just as she does not love other people as she is expected to (because she is queer), she does not love God as she is expected to.