48 pages • 1 hour read
Casey McQuistonI Kissed Shara Wheeler
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
Chloe Green is upset because Shara Wheeler is missing after senior prom at which she kissed Chloe in the school elevator. Chloe finds a spare key to Shara’s house and enters. She investigates Shara’s room and finds nothing out of the ordinary. However, she finds a barely used vanilla- and mint-scented lip gloss. She remembers the aroma of vanilla and mint from Shara’s kiss.
While Chloe is still there, Shara’s next-door neighbor, Rory Heron, breaks into the room through the window. From a note addressed to Rory, Chloe finds that Shara also kissed him. A peculiar code, peach100304 is included in the note, and it adds, “P.S.S. Tell Smith to check the drafts. Chloe should have the rest” (8).
Chloe tells Rory that she has also kissed Shara. When Chloe and Rory hear the front door open, they jump through the window and escape down the ladder Rory used.
The first interchapter comprises a note Chloe passed to her best friend, Georgia, following the kiss. The note reveals that Chloe finds Shara attractive and that Shara smells like lilacs. It also indicates that Chloe is unaware of Shara’s motive and believes Shara to be exhibiting “mean straight girl behavior” and messing with her (13).
Chapter 2 Summary
Chloe reveals that she first saw Shara’s face on a billboard promoting Willowgrove Christian Academy. Chloe opted to attend Willowgrove because it was the only high school in False Beach with a “decent” advanced placement program and a theater department with the budget to perform Phantom of the Opera. False Beach is the hometown of one of Chloe’s moms. Chloe and her two moms moved from Los Angeles, California, to False Beach, Alabama.
Chloe and Rory meet Smith at school. Chloe remembers the day Smith and Shara became a couple and that Smith sent Shara two dozen carnations. Chloe tells Smith that she and Rory each kissed Shara. When Smith asks Rory whether he likes Shara, he responds, “Kind of” (19). When he asks Chloe the same question, she says “I barely even know her. I have no idea why she kissed me. I just want to beat her to valedictorian” (20). Chloe and Rory show Smith the note that Shara left and ask what the code means. Although Smith doesn’t know what “peach” means, he reveals that the numbers are his locker combination.
Smith finds a bag of peach candy in his locker. Attached to the bag is a second card from Shara. She writes to Smith that she doesn’t know how to tell him the truth but hopes to show him. She then tells him to hold on to the code included in the previous note. The three conclude that Shara has set up a puzzle for them and that they must piece it together to find out where she is. Chloe notices uncomfortable tension between Rory and Smith, which she attributes to jealousy about Shara. In the second interchapter, McQuiston provides a glimpse into Rory’s inner thoughts. He describes being kissed by Shara and expresses feeling “confused” (27).
Chapter 3 Summary
While hanging out with her best friend Georgia, Chloe receives a note from the drive-thru window at Taco Bell. In the note, Shara indicates that she has been curious about Chloe ever since meeting her and wants to figure her out. She includes an email address at the end of the note. The envelope also includes a key.
Chloe and Smith meet Rory at his house where they test the email address Shara provided. For the password, they use the code that Shara included in the first note. They access a Gmail account and check the document drafts, as the second note had instructed. There, they find another message from Shara indicating that the next card is for Chloe and that it can be found somewhere she goes every day.
Chapter 4 Summary
Chloe is sent to Principal Wheeler’s officer for wearing black nail polish. He is Shara’s father. While in the office, she realizes that he, too, is at a loss as to where his daughter is.
In a personal essay transcribed in the novel, Smith reveals that he loves football and associates the love he has for his father with football. He associates football and spending time with his family with a moment he felt truly himself.
Chapter 5 Summary
Chloe attends choir practice and recalls Shara’s last message indicating that the next note can be found somewhere Chloe goes every day. She also remembers that previous notes included the clues “Keeping your vows” and “Hiding in the brakes,” which she associates with wedding vows and the following line from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “I’ll run from thee and hide me in the brakes” (65). She asks her friend Benjy to play the first note of the wedding march on the piano and she hears something “flimsy, like paper” on the string (66). As soon as her friends leave for lunch, she uses the key Shara provided to open the piano, and she finds the next note inside.
On one side of the note card is another quotation from Midsummer, a play Chloe and Shara worked on for a project during their junior year:
As if our hands, our sides, voices, and minds,
Had been incorporate. So we grew together,
Like to a double cherry—seeming parted
But yet an union in partition—
Two lovely berries molded on one stem (67).
On the other side is a note addressed to Chloe saying that although Shara stayed up all night to memorize the scene they recited for their project, this was the scene she wanted to perform. Shara writes that she appreciates the image of a “double-stemmed cherry” and associates it with her and Chloe. She states, “You always seem to be right next to me, even though we never could get that close to each other” (68–69). At the end of the note, Shara leaves a clue for Smith indicating that she left a photo of them in the last place they kissed. Smith recalls this was at Dixon Wells’s house. Smith states that he will look for the note the following night at Dixon’s party. He states that because Dixon gets “weird about people he doesn’t know showing up” (70), only Chloe or Rory could go—not both. Chloe decides to accompany him.
Chapters 1-5 Analysis
From the beginning, the novel conveys Chloe’s conflicted attitude toward Shara. Not only is Chloe competitive and eager to beat Shara for the title of valedictorian, but she (somewhat incoherently) regards Shara as both the stereotypical nice-but-boring-girl and the manipulative, mean girl that frequently appear in young-adult novels. Yet, she also feels attracted to Shara.
The vanilla- and mint-scented lip gloss Chloe finds in Shara’s bedroom represents the possibility that Shara may be less boring and predictable than Chloe had thought. While vanilla sometimes represents purity and conformity to conservative Christianity, mint often represents strength and complexity—that there is more to Shara than what meets the eye. That the lip gloss was new at the time Shara kissed Chloe suggests that Shara may have bought it with that kiss in mind. However, this idea is challenged when Chloe finds that Rory has also been kissed. Chloe finds it “absolutely, annoyingly predictable” that Rory may be in love with Shara (9). When Chloe feels threatened, she often resorts to judging others based on prejudice and narrow stereotypes.
The novel presents an interchapter document at the end of each narrative chapter. These interchapters, each titled “FROM THE BURN PILE,” include notes passed between students and drafts of writings that provide background about the characters and their relationships. They provide context for what goes on in the narrative and highlight the discrepancy between characters’ behaviors and their true feelings.
The first interchapter highlights what the kiss meant to Chloe. Not only is Chloe attracted to Shara, but she is excited about having kissed her. That Shara smells like lilacs perhaps symbolizes not only that Shara appears perfect but also that she is strong and complex. Perhaps more pertinent is that Chloe is so fixated on Shara’s smell—the lilacs and the scent of her lip gloss. Smell is tied intimately with sexual attraction. Like sexual attraction, smells are invisible but powerful. In a town consumed by appearances, the sense of smell is a symbol of what exists beyond appearances. The interchapter again highlights Chloe’s tendency to make assumptions. That Chloe refers to the kiss as “mean straight girl behavior” reveals her propensity to make assumptions about Shara without knowing her (13).
Because Chloe first saw Shara’s face on a billboard promoting Willowgrove Christian Academy, and because Shara is the principal’s daughter, she regards Shara as a representation of conformity and judgment. The text draws a contrast between Shara’s pious persona and Chloe’s strong, loud, and unapologetic one. Chloe’s background differs from other residents in her community. Not only does she identify as bisexual, but she was born and raised in California by two lesbian moms. Chloe exhibits strength in openly embracing her sexuality and beliefs, even though they are at odds with those that govern her community.
When speaking to Rory and Smith, Chloe doesn’t acknowledge her attraction to Shara. Instead, she emphasizes her motive to compete with her for valedictorian. Although Chloe is strong in her identity as a queer person, she fears being vulnerable and getting hurt. Likewise, the male characters, Rory and Smith, give the impression that their interest in Shara is motivated by romantic love. In this sense, all three of the characters involved in the quest to find Shara misrepresent their motivations. Although Chloe notices the uncomfortable tension between Rory and Smith, she attributes it to the conventional trope of two men competing for the same woman. However, the text hints that there is more to the story. That Shara’s kiss wasn’t an earth-shattering moment for Rory and, rather, left him “confused,” suggests that the truth may differ from expectations.
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