Literature / I Kissed Shara Wheeler

I Kissed Shara Wheeler is Casey McQuiston’s third Queer Romance novel and first Young Adult novel. It was published in 2022.

Shara Wheeler is the princess of Willowgrove Christian Academy. She’s the popular, pious, and rich daughter of the principal. After graduation, she’ll be attending Harvard and making the small town of False Beach, Alabama proud. For now, though, she’s Chloe Green’s only real competition for valedictorian of the 2022 graduating class.

Chloe Green, the NYU-bound, openly bisexual LA native that moved to the tiny, conservative town of False Beach with her moms four years ago; the only one who sees Shara for who she truly is (the most boring and fake person in a town full of boring and fake people). She's finally about to prove her academic superiority to Shara, and Willowgrove as a whole, once and for all by winning valedictorian. The only problem is that on Prom night, a mere month before graduation, Shara disappears.

To make things more complicated, she kissed Chloe the school day before she disappeared without any explanation, and Chloe wasn’t the only one. Willowgrove’s resident bad boy, Rory Heron, and Shara’s longtime quarterback boyfriend, Smith Parker, were also kissed. Now the three teens with only their connections to Shara in common must work together to find her by following the clues in the hidden pink cards she’s left for them. Along the way, they’ll learn some of the many secrets that Shara’s been keeping and start to realize that Shara’s not who any of them think she is.

Due to the nature of this book as both a Queer Romantic Comedy in a conservative setting and a mystery novel, please note that some spoilers are unmarked!

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I Kissed Shara Wheeler includes examples of:

• Abusive Parents: Shara’s parents seem to be more worried about how people are reacting to Shara’s disappearance than her actual disappearance. When Shara is finally found, she reveals that her parents have known where she's been the entire time, as they have security cameras installed on their pier and a tracker “secretly” installed on her car. They haven’t made any attempts to get her to come home or even contact her because they prefer to ignore any behaviors they don’t like from her until they go away. After Shara’s livestream, in which she confesses that she intentionally flunked her Harvard interview so that she wouldn’t be accepted and comes out of the closet, they take her phone, the steering wheel from her car, and her door from its hinges.
• The Ace: Shara excels at most of the things she tries to do, be they academic or not.
  [Chloe’s] never considered “getaway driving” as one of Shara’s skills, but she has to admit, Shara’s been good at everything else she’s tried to do so far.
• Adults Are Useless: The most popular girl in school and one of the candidates for valedictorian goes mysteriously missing during Prom, and the only ones that bother to look for her are some of her classmates. Slightly justified in that Principal Wheeler claims that his daughter is just visiting family and is adamant that no one needs to (or should) look for her.
• Affectionate Nickname: Chloe calls her best friend Georgia "Geo" sometimes.
• Amazingly Embarrassing Parents: Chloe’s moms, to an extent. When Chloe comes home still wearing Shara’s crucifix after forgetting to take it off, she has to explain to her parents that it belongs to another girl, and she was wearing it to “mess with her”. Her mama says it reminds her of how she used to wear Chloe’s mom’s welding apron around the house when she was “in the mood”, to Chloe’s horror. Her parents then tease her about having “a thing for a Christian girl”, which Chloe vehemently denies. Later in the novel, when they come home early from a pottery class while Chloe is alone with Shara in her room after having just spent an ambiguous length of time making out with her, they invite Shara to stay for dinner. They then proceed to tell Shara about the time a five-year-old Chloe punched a mall Santa. Later, when Shara asks and Chloe is too distracted to try to stop her, they dramatically recount the story of how they met. After that, Chloe’s mom asks Shara is she wants to hear her DeNiro impression.^note She does it whenever she cooks Italian. According to Chloe, it's a bad one.
• Armoured Closet Gay: There are a couple moments where it looks like Shara may be homophobic and gay, but it's quickly made clear that's not the case (well, the first part, at least). In all the times that she antagonized Chloe, she never made explicit reference to her sexuality.
• Artistic License – History: As with a significant number of works that were written and take place in the early New '20s, no explicit reference is made to the Covid-19 pandemic. Shara specifically takes place in 2022, but even when earlier years are brought up in the story there are still no mentions of the pandemic.
• Awkward Kiss: Rory remembers his kiss with Shara Prom night as this. After it ended he only felt vague confusion. Justified, since it turns out that they're probably both gay.
• The Beautiful Elite: Shara is a member of the closest thing that False Beach has to this. Her father is principal of Willowgrove, which is the most prestigious and highly regarded school in town; her entire family is rich, and they live in the country club with other rich families; and, of course, Shara herself is considered extremely beautiful inside and out by pretty much the entire town.
• Beneath the Mask: Shara may seem like a warm and helpful Nice Girl to the residents of False Beach, but underneath that persona she's actually somewhat distant and cold. She's still a good person though... At least that's what her friends believe. It turns out that underneath her distant personality she's actually a Manipulative Bitch who's not afraid of lying or using blackmail to get what she wants. But then it turns out that what she wants is almost always harmless to others, or even better for them (eg. she uses underhanded tactics to get Rory and Smith together for "social capital"). It seems that it's really only Chloe who she targets so maliciously. Turns out this is because she's deep in the closet and crushing on her. Her homophobic upbringing and the pressure she felt from everyone in False Beach to be the perfect girl they saw her as meant that she couldn't even admit her sexuality to herself until she kissed Chloe the second time on the Graduation. And then after Shara realizes she's a lesbian, Chloe realizes that Shara is much more of a complex person than she initally thought
• Betty and Veronica: In the I Kissed Shara Wheeler group, The Quarterback Smith could be the Betty to Delinquent Rory’s Troubled, but Cute Veronica and Shara’s Archie. In this instance, Betty and Veronica get together after Archie sets them up.
• Big "NO!": Chloe lets out one of these before she jumps out of her window at Shara when she sees her with a pink card outside her room.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: This is what Chloe believes Shara is at the start of the book. As to whether or not it's true, it's complicated. See Beneath the Mask above.
• Blatant Lies: Shara's justification as to why she kissed Chloe before she ran away, and why she set up a scavenger hunt to lead to her. She claims she did it all just to distract Chloe from school so that Shara would be guaranteed Valedictorian once she returned from an extended, undisturbed study session. Downplayed since it could've been plausable at the start of the book, but by this point Chloe has already figured out that Shara has feelings for her, and she really ran away to get Chloe's attention.
• Butch Lesbian
  • Chloe’s best friend, Georgia, is described as a “backpacking granola baby butch”. She also went through “half a dozen different lesbian aesthetics” after coming out to Chloe before settling on her current style. They included things like [wearing leather jackets, getting short haircuts, and planning to join the soccer team. One of them consisted of “high femme red lipstick and drawn-on tattoos”.
  • Downplayed, since she's not explicitly referred to as one and not much description of her is given, but Chloe's mom seems to be another butch lesbian. For one, she was the one who gifted Georgia a carabiner which Chloe says helped her realize her butch identity. For two, she owns a welding company. In general, she seems to be significantly more masculine than both her wife and daughter.
• The Charmer: Applies to Smith, he's one of the most popular kids at Willowgrove with his peers and the staff both and he knows it. When it seems that Rory and Chloe are about the be caught sneaking into the air ducts through the library to break into the principal's office, Smith shows up and distracts the librarian with charm. Shara seems to be a female variation as well. Though we really never get to see her in action on-screen, we know that everyone thinks so highly of her that she can get almost anything she wants just by asking for it politely. For example, it turns out that it wasn't Chloe's bad luck or their similar positions at the top of the class that got them paired up in chemistry, Shara just asked to be partnered with Chloe off-screen and their teacher approved.
• Childhood Friend Romance: Rory and Smith. They were best friends in middle school before they had a falling out freshman year. As they search for Shara, they realize they’ve had feelings for each other the whole time and become an Offcial Couple.
• Church Lady: Emma Grace Baker is a teenage, exclusively negative example. Out of all the seniors she seems to be the most vocal and obnoxious about religious matters. She gossips about her classmates by saying that she's praying for them because they "haven't been saved" (openly bisexual Chloe Green being one of those classmates), she shushes Chloe while sitting rows behind her when the latter tries to talk to Smith during Mr. Wheeler's sermon, gives her a horrified look when Chloe turns a hymnal upside down and shakes it to check it for any of Shara's letters and she's once given a personal testimony to the school about how her "diabetes has brought her closer to Jesus".
• Closet Key: Chloe turns out to be one for Shara. Shara was previously deep in the closet, to the point that she jumped out of a moving car when her best friend tried to come out as bisexual to her and did not suspect that she was anything but straight as she was obsessing over Chloe and developing a long, elaborate plan to hurt her academic performance by forcing her to pay attention to Shara instead of school.^note And for the second time, no less!

• Coming-Out Story: I Kissed Shara Wheeler turns out to be this for many of its characters.
  • Smith develops an understanding of what it means to be nonbinary with help from Ash, and adopts a more outwardly feminine style for himself. He also realizes he has feelings for Rory and has had them for quite some time. By the end of the book, he’s dating Rory and growing out his hair. When Chloe asks, he says that he’s still using he/him pronouns “for now”.
  • Rory realizes that he’s gay and that he has feelings for Smith. He interpreted his feelings of jealousy whenever he saw Smith and Shara together as him being jealous of Smith for dating the one girl he's ever crushed on, when in reality he was jealous of Shara.
  • Shara finally understands and accepts that she’s attracted to girls after she kisses Chloe for a second time, following what must’ve been years of denial.
• Cowardice Callout: Shara and Chloe give one to each other when Chloe finds Shara on the Graduation. Chloe says that Shara is "so scared of what people in some fucking nothing town think of [her]" that she ran away. Shara admits that she might be scared but not as scared as Chloe is and claims that all the confidence and aloofness Chloe shows in Willowgrove is just a façade meant to mask how afraid of uncertainty she really is.

Shara: But you—you march into school every day like you know everything and you're better than everyone, and that's how I know you're terrified. You have to decide that you're so certain about everything, because uncertainty scares the shit out of you.

• Crocodile Tears: From Chloe's perspective, Shara used these once while convincing their PE class that she must've lost her cross necklace while jogging in the football field. What actually happened was that Shara threw out the necklace a week before at the library, unaware that Chloe was there and watching. Chloe then took the necklace from the trash after she left. Though it's evident that Shara was putting on a show to their class to cover up what she had done^note as the class goes out to search the field on their hands and knees, Shara makes no effort to discourage them or even pretend to look herself, she really did regret losing her chain. Only ten minutes after she had thrown it out in in the library, she went back for it, even frantically searching when she couldn't find it in the trash. It's plausible that her tears did come from a place of genuine emotion, even if her version of events was pure fabrication.
• Dedication: Dedicated to queer kids living in the Bible belt.
• Deep South: Heavily zigzagged, which is expected from a book dedicated to queer kids living in the Bible Belt. Chloe makes no secret of her distaste for False Beach, but it's shown that her view is narrowminded. Georgia confronts her on this when she tells Chloe that she won't be going to NYU with her. After Chloe asks why she's giving up on leaving, Georgia tells her that between them Chloe was the only one who actually wanted to. She then goes on to say that Chloe ignores anything good about False Beach, like the fact that it's the hometown of all her best friends and they only met because Chloe moved from LA. That being said, Chloe's perspective isn't entirely unfounded. Chloe is punished by adults and ostracized by her peers for being openly queer in Willowgrove, just as her friends are and her mom was as a student. By the end of the book, great progress has been made, with Willowgrove's student body becoming much more openly accepting and Mr. Wheeler losing his job as headmaster. Chloe grows to realize that False Beach itself isn't intrinsically queerphobic, and that if change occurs it will be because of the queer people who chose to stay.
• Defrosting Ice Queen: Happens to Shara. By the end of the book, she's much more comfortable with vulnerability and accepting of herself, and it shows by how emotive she's become.
  Shara has so many more expressions than she did before. It's like [Chloe's] unlocked Shara Premium.
• Delinquents: Rory and his friends, Jake and April. They're known for frequently skipping class, playing pranks (Rory flooded the biology classroom the week they were supposed to be dissecting frogs), and generally breaking whatever rules are in place. They even have long-held dreams of sneaking through the school through the air ducts. Beyond that, at least one of them regularly smokes weed (Jake Stone the Stoner) and they also steal the signs of public property, but only if they pay homage to racist historical figures ^note Admittedly applies to a good chunk of public property in False Beach.
• A Dick in Name: Chloe points out that Jerk Jock Dixon literally has "dicks" in his name^note phonetically.
• Distracted by the Sexy: Chloe nearly falls off a ladder after seeing Shara in just her bralette while trying to sneak into her bedroom through the window.
• The Dog Bites Back: At the end of the book, Principal Wheeler is exposed for accepting bribes from rich parents to raise their students' test scores. The one who leaked this information? His own daughter, who he had been emotionally abusive to her entire life.
• Driving Question: Where is Shara Wheeler? And, less obviously, who is Shara Wheeler?
• Eating the Eye Candy: Shara regularly does with Chloe. Chloe doesn’t even realize until Rory exasperatedly asks Shara if she’s “done checking [Chloe] out” one time.
  Chloe: That's what that is?
• Epigraph: The novel opens with lyrics to Mr. Brightside.

• Evidence Scavenger Hunt: The first half or so of the book is dedicated to finding the clues that will lead to Shara's location. As mentioned above, all of Shara's clues are meant to be found in a somewhat linear fashion. Where a card will have a clue that will hint the location of the next card/clue until the last one is found and Shara's location is (ideally) revealed.
• Expository Hairstyle Change: Shara gets one. She cuts her hair above shoulder-length and dyes it pink. Smith is notably growing out his hair at the end of the book.
• Flat "What": Chloe lets out one of these when Ace says that Shara was helping him practice for the spring musical auditions.
• Flowers of Romance: Smith asked Shara out to Homecoming by having dozens of carnations delivered to her in class. Specifically, her chemistry class that she was partnered with Chloe in. Needless to say, Chloe doesn't fondly remember the day she had to finish a lab on her own while Shara was occupied by her gifted carnations.
• Genre Mashup: It's both a wacky Young Adult Queer Rom-Com and a dramatic mystery novel about a girl who's suddenly disappeared and must be found by a team of her classmates. It intentionally leans into and subverts many of the common tropes and clichés of both genres. This is because McQuiston was inspired to write it by a desire to a make rom-com similar to many of the YA novels and movies that they loved growing up, but queer (both in terms of characters' sexualities and genders).
• Good Is Not Nice: Chloe's mom assures her that there's a difference between being nice and being kind when Chloe tearfully asks her moms if they think she's a bad person after her fight with Georgia. This is one of the themes of the book, and it fits both Chloe and Shara's characters. Chloe is shown repeatedly that she is mean sometimes, even without noticing, but her friends like her anyway and accept her as she is. Of course, Chloe does acknowledge that she has a problem with occasionally seeming angry without meaning to when she's scared that she knows she needs to work on. But her general sour attitude is not portrayed as something she needs to change, it's just who she is as a person.
• Goth: Chloe apparently used to be one freshmen year. In the present day, she describes her aesthetic as "dark academia".
• Hereditary Homosexuality: Chloe is a bisexual girl being raised by her two married mothers. She was conceived with her mom's egg and carried by her mama.
• Jerk Jock: Dixon Wells and his followers are played straight examples. Chloe assumes that all jocks are this as well as Book Dumb at the beginning of the book before meeting Lovable Jocks Ace and Smith. Rory has bad experiences with being terrorized by jocks, which contributed to his friendship with Smith falling apart their freshmen year after Smith joins the football team.
• Jerkass Realization: After her fight with Georgia, Chloe fears that she's a bad person. Her moms assure her that she isn't, but she does realize that she has a bit of an anger issue, where she comes across as angry when she's really scared. She also realizes that she's not the nicest person just in general, but that's just the kind of person she is, which isn't a problem.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Chloe qualifies being a downplayed Insufferable Genius and Snark Knight who really means no harm (to most people most of the time, Shara is a clear exception).
• Kiss-Kiss-Slap: After they stop arguing and start kissing on the Graduation, Chloe actually stops to throw Shara into the lake.
• Little "No": Chloe’s reaction to seeing Shara with yet another pink card, this time outside her window. It’s preceded by a Stunned Silence and followed by a Big "NO!".
• Lovable Jock: Smith and Ace are two lovable jocks. Smith is a Nice Guy who’s uncomfortable with the thought of having to dissect frogs for biology class. Ace is like most of the jocks in that he loves to party. He is wildly different in that he’s not at all homophobic (he has apparently kissed “all his homies”) and doesn’t go out of his way to bully his peers. He also has a genuine interest in theater that others aren’t aware of.
• Love Revelation Epiphany: After many twists and turns, Shara and Chloe realize that they do like each other. In her letter addressed to Chloe alone, Shara reveals that she's constantly been going out of her way to get closer to Chloe, and that sophomore year she came up with a plot to seduce Chloe and break her heart to hurt her academic performance. After finishing the letter^note and more than a couple rereads, Chloe concludes that Shara is in love with her and that’s why she ran away, but when Chloe finally finds and confronts her on the Graduation, Shara denies it. Chloe doesn’t believe her and successfully goads Shara into kissing her ^note before she throws Shara off the boat and leaves. Soon enough, Shara confesses on an Instagram Live that she ran away for a girl's attention, and that the girl realized it before she did. Chloe takes this confirmation and decides to use Shara's old seduction plot against her. Pretty much everyone involved starts to assume either that Chloe and Shara are dating or that they're being obtuse by not getting together. It's only after Chloe starts to understand who Shara is under her various personas that she finally realizes that she’s “in love with a monster turducken”.
• Nonconformist Dyed Hair: Rory has some lighter streaks in his hair that highlight his rebellious nature, especially in a conservative school like Willowgrove. After Shara confesses to lying about Harvard and comes out of the closet on Instagram, she finally comes back to school with her hair chopped short and dyed hot pink ^note Rory even helped her dye it. Chloe notes that it's absolutely against Willowgrove's dress code.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: Shara pretended not to understand a concept that Chloe herself didn't understand in their precalculus class sophomore year, so she could ask Chloe to help her with it. Chloe picked up on it and assumed Shara was trying to mock her, which led to the end of their minor friendship. What Shara was actually trying to do is arguably worse. It turns out that she was trying to execute the first step ^note find excuses to get close to Chloe in her plan to seduce Chloe and then break her heart so that she wouldn't care about beating Shara in school anymore.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Chloe, a student that takes almost, if not literally, all APs and maintains ninety-eights across the board. She forgets to work on her part of the French project she was doing with Georgia that's worth twenty percent of their final grade because she was so focused on finding Shara. This leads to Georgia blowing up on her for constantly neglecting to work on the project with her to hang out with "Smith and Rory and the rest of [Chloe's] new friends." This severely damages Chloe's friendship with Georgia and the rest of their friend group to the point that they stop talking to each other.
• Obviously Not Fine: Chloe avoids telling her friends that she's looking for Shara to avoid dealing with their reactions, but she doesn't do a very good job of hiding the fact that something's bothering her. Just two days after Shara's disappearance, she tells her friend Benjy that "[she's] good" when he asks only for him to immediately point out that she came to school with only one of her eyes done. Notably, her emergency liner pen had been sitting untouched in her locker for so long that she needed to scribble with it on her hand to get it working and fix her mistake.
• Pastiche: Casey McQuiston has stated that they took inspiration from many other dramas and romcoms that they loved as a teenager. Among those works, John Green novels are included. They have also named three works for being especially influential: Paper Towns, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo and Gone Girl. All of these works feature a girl or woman whose mysterious nature kicks off the plot (which often follows her dissapearance). This is also the case with Shara.
• The Pastor's Queer Kid: This is the case for Shara. Though False Beach is quite a conservative and religious community in general, her parents are especially influential. They are actively involved in church activities and her father is principal of Willowgrove, a Christain academy. They both mistreat Shara even before she comes out, and they're far from approving after she does.
• Performance Artist: Chloe and most of her friends are self-identified "theatre kids" and "Shakespeare gays". Their senior year they got to perform The Phantom of the Opera, largely because they demanded it. Benjy in particular is a gay boy who frequently gets lead roles in Willowgrove's school plays and musicals, can play piano and aspires to be on Broadway one day. Their theatre teacher, Mr. Truman, has not confirmed himself to be gay^note he actually can't since he works for Willowgrove, but to Chloe and her friends he very obviously is.
• Platonic Declaration of Love: Chloe exchanges one with Georgia after they make up.
• Post-Kiss Catatonia: The kiss Shara gave her before the events of the book apparently induced this in Chloe. She recalls that Shara kissed a semester’s worth of French out of her head.
• The Promposal: As mentioned above, Smith and Shara’s relationship started when Smith asked her out to Homecoming by ordering dozens of carnations to be sent to her in class. Her lab partner Chloe wasn’t nearly as charmed.
• Rage Breaking Point: Chloe loses it on Shara after she tells her that technically, the Graduation is not a yacht, since it's under thirty-five feet.

For some reason, that's the thing that finally makes Chloe snap.

• Rags to Riches: Downplayed with Rory. Despite how he presents himself at school, he actually lives in the country club, the richest part of town. The reason for this is because his parents had split up and he moved in with his mother and rich stepfather. He resents living in the country club with his mom and stepfather and would prefer to live with his dad, even though he's not nearly as well off financially.
• Rivalry as Courtship: Between Chloe and Shara, naturally. Both have been obsessed with surpassing and beating the other academically since they’ve met. They’ve also been crushing on each other without even realizing for probably just as long.
  Shara: I think you still mean it [that Chloe hates her] a little bit […] That's what makes this work.
• Shipper on Deck: Ash mentions during an exchange of notes between them and Tyler Miller that Chloe likes someone, but “doesn’t know it yet”. In the same exchange, they ask Tyler if he's in love with his friend Tucker.
• Shout-Out
  • Mr. Brightside is quoted at the beginning of the book. It's also played at Dixon's party. ^note The Hayley Kiyoko cover of it is even the final song on Chloe's official character playlist.
  • Shara uses Burt's Bees lip balm.
  • Chloe describes Shara as "Regina George, if her brand was logging double the school-mandated volunteer service hours".
  • Smith keeps a box of Little Debbie's Oatmeal Creme Pies in his locker.
  • One of many students spreading rumors about Shara following her disappearance claims to have heard that Shara had been sent away by her parents to hide a pregnancy. Benjy points out that this is a Riverdale plotline, as well as a really stupid idea.
  • Chloe also says that Shara "looks like she lives in the hills of Sweden and spends all her time embroidering flowers on linen shirts like an extra in Midsommar".
  • Chloe's friend group plans on watching Labyrinth during one of their regular movie nights.
  • Georgia's a big Jane Austen fan.^note She's read all her works. All of them.
• Signature Scent: Shara always smells like lilacs. Chloe repeatedly mentions this in her note to Georgia in which she freaks out because Shara had just kissed her with no explanation before class that day. She also mentions lilacs as a contender for the "best smell" during a conversation with Rory and Smith, without really meaning to say it.
• Sir Swears-a-Lot: Chloe swears a significant amount, as is the status quo with a Casey McQuiston protagonist. Deuteragonist Rory also has this trait. Chloe especially loves to exasperatedly drop the line "Shara fucking Wheeler" when she has to perform some sort of dangerous feat during the search for her.
• Slap-Slap-Kiss: A nonphysical, zigzagged example. Chloe's confrontation of Shara on the Graduation leads to them fighting over all of the other's flaws and ends with them kissing a second time.
• Soapbox Sadie: Downplayed, it seems Chloe was some variation of this when she first transferred to Willowgrove, but with less soapboxing and more genuine action. Regardless, she was never very successful with making change. By the time of the book, she has largely given up on Willowgrove and has resigned herself to rebelling through minor dress code violations.
• The Social Expert: Shara embodies this trope. She's keenly aware of how the people around her feel about each other and about her. Not only that, but she's good at fitting into the image that they have of her regardless of how far from true it is. Using deception and her knowledge of people, she's able to predict what they'll do in any given situation and manipulate them into behaving however she likes.
• Sugar-and-Ice Personality: Shara is an inverted example. Her cold side is only really known by her friends and her warm side (or at least what appears to be a one) is what she shows to everyone else. Smith, who is dating Shara and genuinely considers her to be his best friend, describes Shara as having been distant frequently.
  Chloe: Sounds to me like she’s kind of frigid.
• Take That!: While describing her partiality for villains, Chloe mentions that although she is bisexual and a "monster fucker" (a title Georgia bestowed on her for her tendency to be drawn towards romance novels featuring at least one morally grey love interest who may or may not be a literal monster), many villainous traits she finds unattractive in men specifically. As an example of an unattractive male villain, she uses Kylo Ren.
  While [Chloe] 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.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: In the I Kissed Shara Wheeler group. Mostly between former best friends Rory and Smith, but Chloe is plenty unenthusiastic with the idea of having to work with both of them to find Shara, even more so when they won’t stop fighting. This is also how Chloe usually describes every past class or assignment that she was partnered with Shara for as.
• Title Drop: Chloe titles the group chat she creates for her, Smith, and Rory to share any information related to their search for Shara I Kissed Shara Wheeler. Smith wasn’t having it, but that doesn’t stop her from using it (in her head, at least).
• Transparent Closet: Played with. Chloe and her friends are about the closest thing to openly queer at Willowgrove, but not all of them are even out. Chloe and Ash are openly queer (Chloe is bisexual and Ash is nonbinary), but technically Georgia and Benjy aren't as they've only told their very close friends about their sexualities (lesbian and gay respectively). Despite this, plenty of homophobic jocks in his grade bully Benjy. Georgia is described as butch, but she's closeted to her parents. Also applies to their theatre teacher and director Mr. Truman, who literally cannot come out while working at Willowgrove in order to keep his job. As a more downplayed example, Shara also becomes this to Chloe once the latter correctly assumes that she's in love with her and that's why she ran away.
• Unseen No More: After the first fifteen chapters are spent looking for her, Shara is found and makes her first in person appearance in chapter sixteen of twenty-five.
• We Used to Be Friends: Rory and Smith were best friends in middle school but broke apart after Smith joined Willowgrove’s football team. Rory claims that Smith thought of himself as “too cool” for him after joining the team, while Smith claims that Rory started ignoring him without explanation.