Themes I Kissed Shara Wheeler Casey McQuiston

Competition and Rivalry as Intimacy: How Shara Wheeler and Chloe Green’s Rivalry Became Love

Defining the Thematic Claim

In I Kissed Shara Wheeler, competition and rivalry serve as a covert vehicle for intimacy. Chloe Green and Shara Wheeler, valedictorian rivals at a small Alabama high school, translate their mutual obsession into a private language of puzzles, taunts, and high‑stakes games. Their rivalry is not a barrier to love but the very form their love takes—a safe space where both can feel intense emotion while denying it. The novel argues that for two girls who cannot openly express queer desire in a conservative town, competition becomes the only acceptable channel for passion.

Tracing the Rivalry Across Three Plot Arcs

1. The Origins: Rivalry as a Mask for Longing

The earliest evidence of the rivalry‑as‑intimacy pattern appears in Shara’s long letter hidden inside Mansfield Park (Chapter 12). She confesses that from sophomore year onward, she fantasized about “all the ways [she] could ruin [Chloe’s] perfect record”—reporting uniform violations, changing 99s to 89s, even slashing tires before the AP exam. Yet she also admits, “Sometimes, when I was feeling especially creative, I would imagine how I could make you fall in love with me.” This juxtaposition reveals that Shara’s competitive scheming is a surrogate for romantic pursuit. She cannot say “I want you,” so she says “I want to beat you.” Chloe, for her part, reads the letter repeatedly, “touching the pen strokes,” indicating she recognizes the intimacy encoded in those words.

2. The Disappearance Game: Competition as Collaboration

When Shara vanishes after prom, her puzzle‑note system forces Chloe, Rory Heron, and Smith Parker into an uneasy alliance. The clues—a locker combination, a bag of peach rings, a note at the football stadium—are designed to make them compete for Shara’s attention yet also cooperate. Chloe’s driving motivation remains beating Shara at her own game. In Chapter 3, she tells Smith, “There’s no point in finding it if we can’t all agree we’re in this together,” but her internal monologue reveals she is “worrying about” Shara’s remark about her. The rivalry here transforms into a team sport: by solving Shara’s puzzles, Chloe is performing the intimacy of knowing Shara better than anyone else. The pink note cards become love letters disguised as game pieces.

3. The Reversal: Chloe’s Cat‑and‑Mouse Game

After Shara returns with pink hair and a new openness, Chloe consciously adopts competitive tactics to keep Shara chasing her. In Chapters 18–19, she sets “horny little traps”: she swipes her thumb across her lip while eating a granola bar, asks Shara if she wants to try her eyeliner, and makes a bet on the calc exam. Shara reacts with “indignant” frustration, storming off each time. Chloe thinks, “She still thinks she gets whatever she wants … I can be smart about it—let her think she might have a chance and then give her the first bottom‑of‑the‑heart rejection.” This calculated game mirrors Shara’s original scheme, but both are now fully aware that the competition is flirtation. The cross necklace that Shara later returns to Chloe becomes a symbol of this dynamic: a token of rivalry (Shara hid it because it represented her parents’ expectations) that gets transformed into a pledge of authentic connection.

Character and Symbol Connections

  • Chloe Green: Her identity is built on winning—she recalls the California spelling bee and her 35 ACT score. For her, intimacy is something that must be earned through effort. When Shara kisses her in the elevator, Chloe immediately analyzes it as a move in a game: “Proof that Shara … think[s] about Chloe. And that feels a bit like winning” (Chapter 1). Later, during the calculus exam scene in Chapter 18, she touches the corner of Shara’s desk with “three intentional fingertips,” mirroring Shara’s earlier gesture—a competitive echo that is also a private caress.

  • Shara Wheeler: She describes her rivalry fantasies as “ways to ruin [Chloe’s] perfect record,” but also as ways to “make you fall in love with me.” Her competitive drive is indistinguishable from romantic desire. In the laundry‑room confession (Chapter 22), she admits she was “afraid of being bad,” implying that rivalry gave her a role—the “pretty mean girl”—that allowed her to repress her true feelings.

  • Pink note cards: These function as the primary symbol of competition‑as‑intimacy. Each note is a cryptic dare (“You already know the answer,” “Nice one”). Chloe ultimately burns them at the bonfire (Chapter 25), signalling that the game phase is over, but the act of burning is itself a shared ritual—a final team victory.

  • Peach rings and the burn pile: The peach rings (a sugary, childish treat) represent the sweetness of the game. Rory’s tape from the burn pile records Shara’s confession that her prom‑night kiss was “the only thing I didn’t think would judge me.” The burn pile itself, a site of destruction, also holds evidence of genuine feeling.

Complexity and Contradiction

The rivalry‑as‑intimacy framework is not without tension. It excludes others: Smith Parker and Rory Heron are also kissed by Shara, but they are not part of the same competitive bond. Shara tells them she kissed them because they were “safe”—they wouldn’t judge her—whereas with Chloe, the stakes are personal and adversarial. The intimacy of rivalry is exclusive, almost predatory. Moreover, Chloe’s revenge game in Chapter 18 is explicitly manipulative; she plans to “break [Shara’s] heart” in “the first bottom‑of‑the‑heart rejection of her entire charmed life.” This suggests that competition can be weaponized to hurt as well as to connect.

The contradiction resolves when Shara and Chloe finally kiss after the country club escape (Chapter 23). Shara admits, “You’re like, the girl,” and Chloe thinks, “She’s never been kissed on a bed before. … She’s glad it’s Shara. Nobody else would have felt important enough.” The competition has been a stage for importance: to be a worthy rival means to be seen fully. The burn pile also contains Shara’s rejected drafts, including “Chloe, You win. I hope that’s what you wanted,” acknowledging that the game had always been about giving each other victory.

Five Study Questions and Answers

  1. How does the epigraph from The Killers (“It started out with a kiss…”) set up the theme of competition‑as‑intimacy? The epigraph signals that a single kiss triggers the entire plot, but the kiss itself is ambiguous—both a challenge and a confession. Throughout the novel, every kiss (elevator, prom rooftop, laundry room) is layered with competitive meaning: Chloe analyzes Shara’s lip gloss for signs of premeditation, and Shara times her kisses for maximum impact. The kiss is both an opening move in a game and an act of genuine longing, collapsing rivalry and intimacy into one gesture.

  2. In what way does Shara’s letter in Chapter 12 reveal that her competitive fantasies were actually romantic ones? Shara writes that she imagined “how [she] could make you fall in love with me” alongside fantasies of ruining Chloe’s perfect record. She admits, “It’s always been so easy, making people love me. I was sure I could do it to you.” By framing seduction as a victory, she merges the two impulses. The letter itself becomes a love letter—Chloe reads it repeatedly, and the pen strokes become tactile proof of Shara’s obsession.

  3. Why does Chloe decide to “make Shara chase her” after Shara returns? How does this advance the theme? Chloe wants to reverse the power dynamic and prove she is not just another conquest. By setting “horny little traps” (the lip‑swipe, the eyeliner offer), she forces Shara into the position of pursuer. This extends the rivalry game into a romantic negotiation. It shows that both girls need the competitive framework to express desire safely; without the game, the feelings feel too vulnerable.

  4. What role do the pink note cards play in transforming competition into a shared language? The cards are the literal medium through which Shara communicates her riddles. Each note is a challenge (“I know you can figure this out”) that assumes Chloe is smart enough to play. They create a private code that no one else can fully decode. When Chloe burns them at the bonfire, she symbolically ends the game, but she also honors it—the fire is a ceremony for their invented language.

  5. How does the bonfire scene in Chapter 25 resolve the rivalry‑as‑intimacy thread? At the bonfire, Chloe “burns the pink note cards Shara left for her,” and Shara says, “Burn them.” They smear marshmallow on each other and admit that their past hatred “was really recognition.” The final image of “Chloe kissing Shara under the sunset” replaces the competitive game with open partnership. The rivalry is not erased but sublimated into a shared understanding—they both know they had to compete to find each other.