Eleven

It had never (not once) occurred to Chloe to feel guilty about her friend being gone. She had never (not once) thought that maybe she could have done something, said something, tried something that would have prevented whatever had happened.

Because Chloe never could control Elena. When it came to the Batman-and-Robin of things, Miss Hart knew that she belonged firmly in the background, the sidekick to every adventure, the tagalong without whom the plot would have followed the same order, the unnamed character at the end: Girl Number Three, Chloe Hart.



That was bad news for Chloe; she wanted to change the world, but she couldn't even change her own best friend. At the beginning of her friendship with Elena, this had made Chloe feel a little hopeless, but then she put things behind her and tried her best to make do with what she had. In addition to being hopelessly sweet, Chloe was something of an optimist.

(Something Chloe Hart didn't know: She had changed someone. She'd changed Mike Sullivan when she met him, but he was so willing to change he didn't see the shift at all. So dear, sweet, good-natured Chloe never even got her satisfaction; when Mike started following her around, she just assumed that he was as nice as she, and offered up all the secrets she had that Elena had never wanted to know.)

"I miss her," Chloe sighed one day. Maybe Elena hadn't wanted to know all of her best friend's secrets, and maybe she wasn't always available, and maybe she didn't always confess what she was thinking, but Chloe still loved her as she was.

Mike was eating a roast beef sandwich. They were sitting out on Chloe's porch. "Who?" he grunted around a mouthful; he had already practically forgotten about Elena Harrison, as had the entire school.

(This entirety, of course, did not account for Chloe Hart, Chris Mathis, Sam Newman, and Maddie Harrison.)

Mike and Chloe had taken to sitting together in the week-and-a-half since Elena had disappeared. They didn't sit in Mike's house because Chloe thought it smelled like the weight room at school and they didn't sit in Chloe's house because she was afraid that her house would smell like something equally unappealing to Mike.

She sighed. "Elena."

Mike felt stupid for forgetting. "Oh, yeah." He sort of wished that that stupid girl would either come home or turn up dead or something, so that Chloe would stop dwelling on her and the two of them could get together, already. There were already mutterings over why Chloe Hart was hanging out with Mike Sullivan, but Mike didn't want to cause mutterings; he wanted to cause waves. Tidal waves, the kind on which he could joyously ride out the rest of his high school career.

Chloe wasn't thinking about Mike. She never really thought about Mike, like that.

It was Elena she thought about as she sucked contemplatively on a lollipop on her front porch.