Some of the names could have a larger meaning, if you looked at them just right—the wax lips and the candy hearts, even the Chuckles—but most of them didn’t. It was just that they’d gotten a little carried away, relieved to be doing something—anything—together, to be reveling in laughter rather than sulking in silence, a happy reprieve, if not a permanent one.
“I have no idea why I’m eating so many of these,” Clare says, popping another M&M into her mouth as they cross the street. “I’m not even hungry.”
“Me neither,” Aidan says cheerfully. “We’re definitely gonna get sick.”
They haven’t discussed a destination, but once they hit the first few shops on the edge of town—the bakery and the jewelry store and the bank that gives out free popcorn on Saturdays—their options are few enough that they both know where they’re headed all the same. They pass a couple about their parents’ age leaving an Italian restaurant, and they can see down the street to where the lights are still blazing in the windows of Slices, but for the most part, the town is empty at this hour, quiet and still and pretty much all theirs.
At the village square—a rectangular green surrounded by rows of shops on three sides—they head straight for the stone fountain at the center, where the shallow water is littered with pennies, glinting like stars in the moonlight. The rain has stopped now, but there’s still the memory of it in the air, which smells as damp and cool as spring. They hoist themselves onto the ledge, their legs dangling as the water burbles at their backs.
“Remember the first time we came here?” Aidan asks, shaking the bag of Skittles in his hand. His eyes are on the train station across the street, where a few people are milling around on the platform, waiting for a late ride into the city.
This time, it’s Clare’s turn to be confused. “Not really,” she says, trying to think back. They’ve sometimes wandered over as a group after grabbing a bite at Slices, but she can’t remember a specific moment with Aidan, nothing meaningful enough that it would have earned a spot on the list.
“We weren’t together yet,” Aidan says, passing her a few Skittles. “But I liked you. A lot. And Scotty had the idea to get ice cream, but he didn’t have any money—”
“Oh, yeah,” Clare says, giving him a light whack on the shoulder as it comes back to her. “So he waded in to collect a bunch of change.”
“And you started splashing him, which turned into a big water fight.”
“I totally remember that. I just forgot you were there.”
“I find that impossible to believe,” he says with a grin. “I’m completely and totally unforgettable. Not to mention the fact that—”
“Aidan,” she says, and he pauses right on the cusp of a speech.
“Yeah?”
“Shut up.”
He laughs. “Fine,” he says. “But you always think you were the one to notice me first. Clearly I noticed you, too, though. Before we were anything.”
Clare lifts her eyes to the moon, which is bluish and nearly full, big as a spotlight and almost as bright. “Before we were anything,” she repeats, leaning back to trail her fingers through the cool water. “It seems like a long time ago.”
Aidan nods, scratching at his chin. “Hey,” he says. “I’m sorry about earlier.”
“It’s okay.”
“Not really,” he says. “It’s just that my dad made me—”
“You don’t have to explain. It’s my fault. I don’t know why I’m so weird about saying it. They’re just three stupid little words, right?”
“Well,” he says with a smile, “they’re not the stupidest.”
“I don’t know,” Clare says. “I mean… I is kind of silly, right? Bringing only one letter to the table seems like a pretty weak move.”
“And how about you?” he says, laughing. “Three letters when one of them already says it all?”
But they end it there. Neither is ready to say anything about the final word, the one sandwiched between the other two, though it hovers there anyway, as hard to ignore as if it were written across the sky in blinking red lights.
Clare swirls her hand through the water once more, then pats it dry on her dress. “I just realized I forgot to get a souvenir at the bowling alley.”
“It wasn’t exactly our finest moment,” Aidan says, turning to look at her. “I’m not sure it’s something you’ll want to remember.”
“I want to remember it all,” she says.
In the distance, the sound of a train whistle cuts through the night, and a half second later the bells on the signal lights begin to chime. When the train arrives with a rush of noise, coming to a clattering halt, they watch as a few people step off, then cross through the shadows of the streetlights to their cars.
“Do you ever imagine living here?” Aidan asks, tracking the train as it pulls away again, the red lights growing more distant. “Not like we do now. But the way our parents do. Coming home on the train after work, making dinner, having a house and a yard and all that stuff. Gardening on the weekends.”
“Gardening?”
“Well, raking leaves, maybe.”
She shakes her head. “You know that’s not—”
“I know,” he says, holding up his hands. “You’re gonna be off doing something brilliant. You’ll be some kind of lawyer or banker or journalist, with this crazy apartment in a big city. You’re gonna take over the world. But after that…”
“After I take over the world?” she says with a smile. “I might be kind of tired after that.”
“You know what I mean.”
She lifts her shoulders. “You don’t want that, either. Not really.”
“You’re the one with all the potential. What else do I have to do?”
“Besides gardening?”
He rolls his eyes. “Seriously. I love playing lacrosse. And I’m psyched that I get to do it for four more years. But let’s be honest. It’s not a career.”
“You never know. You said there’s a sports-management program at UCLA, right? That sounds up your alley.”
“Yeah, but it’s just a summer thing, not a real major,” he says. “Besides, who knows if I could even get in.…”
“You could,” she says firmly, but he shakes his head.
“I’m not you.”
“I don’t exactly have a career picked out, either,” Clare points out. “I have no idea what I want to do. I spent the last four years trying to get into college. I never really thought about what would come after that. I can’t even decide on a major.”
Aidan rolls his eyes. “Who has a major picked out before they ever set foot on campus? You’re putting way too much pressure on yourself. It’s totally normal not to know what you want to do with the rest of your life.”
“Yeah, but I don’t want to be normal. I want to know where I’m going.”
“Maybe it’s okay to be a little lost,” he says, and even in the dark, she can see his eyes, round as the moon and focused entirely on her. “Especially when it’s you.”
“What does that mean?”
He shrugs. “Just that you can do anything. And you will. You’ve got all the time in the world to figure it out. But me?” He sweeps an arm out across the town, the quiet shops and the empty streets. “Honestly, this kind of thing is probably more my speed. And I’m okay with that. Maybe I’ll coach.” He holds up a half-eaten chocolate bar. “Or I’ll open a candy shop. Or garden. I could always sell gardening tools.”
Clare tries to imagine it: a future here in this town, the same place where she grew up. But it’s too hard to stretch her mind that far; there are so many things still to come before all that. Right now, the world feels huge and full of possibility, and if she ever returns to this tiny corner of it, she knows it will have to be after she’s collected a whole slew of stories and memories and other experiences to bring back with her.
She reaches for Aidan’s hand. “You’re gonna do great things, too,” she tells him. “You just don’t know what they
are yet.”
He doesn’t say anything, but his fingers close around hers, and Clare’s heart sinks. Because right here—right now—it seems like an impossible thing: being with someone for any great length of time. It’s crazy enough to imagine that what you look for in a person at seventeen might be the same at eighteen and nineteen and twenty. But to imagine you might be with the same person at seventeen as at twenty-seven—and then thirty-seven and forty-seven—seems like a leap of faith that borders on insane.
“So what’s next, then?” Aidan asks, and Clare takes a deep breath.
“I don’t know,” she says, looking over at him. “Maybe we shouldn’t worry so much about the future. It’s not like there’s any way to tell what’s gonna happen that far down the road. We could end up almost anywhere… .” She pauses, considering her next words carefully. “But the one thing we know for sure is where we’re gonna end up tomorrow. I’m going to New Hampshire and you’re going to California. For four whole years. And whether we like it or not, we have to figure out what to do about that.”
Aidan is watching her with a slightly bewildered expression. “I only meant…” he says, then gives his head a little shake. “I meant what’s next on the list.”
“Oh,” Clare says, her face going hot. “Yeah. The list.”
“But you’re right,” he says. “I know you’re right. We need to figure this out.”
They lock eyes, each waiting for the other to begin. Across the street, there’s laughter as a group leaves Slices, and elsewhere, a far-off engine roars to life. Clare kicks nervously at the side of the fountain, letting her heels bounce off the stone, and Aidan blinks at her a few times.
“Okay,” she says.
He nods. “Okay.”
But still, it takes a few more seconds before she feels ready to start.
“Here’s the thing,” she says, before trailing off again, already stuck.
“Right,” Aidan says. “The thing.”
Clare takes a deep breath. “The thing is… if we stay together, I’m worried we’ll be missing out on a lot of college stuff,” she says, unable to look at him. “We’re supposed to be throwing ourselves into it, but how can we possibly do that if we’re always wishing we were somewhere else?”
“I know.”
“And it means we’d always be missing—”
“I know,” he says again, cutting her off, though not unkindly.
“And it would be impossible to—”
“It would,” he agrees.
“But it’s so hard to think about not being with you, either,” she admits. “I hate the idea of waking up in a dorm room a few days from now and knowing that you’re all the way on the other side of the country, but not knowing anything else. I don’t want to wonder what you’re doing, or what you’re eating, or who you’re meeting.… I can’t stand the thought of not having any idea what’s going on in your life. It’s just too awful.”
Aidan nods. “I feel the same way.”
“We’ve hardly gone a day without seeing each other in two years,” Clare says, staring at her hands. “I mean… you’ve been the most important person in my life.”
“You too,” he says, slipping an arm around her waist, and she leans against him, tucking herself into the familiar crook between his shoulder and his side.
“I don’t want to let you go,” she admits, and as she does, she realizes just how true it is. She can’t imagine driving away tomorrow without knowing she can call him a hundred times from the road, meeting her roommate without texting him about it, starting her classes without a good-luck e-mail from him.
She can’t imagine going about her days without Aidan to bear witness to them.
However much she knows that it’s the right thing to do.
It’s not until he runs his thumb gently across her cheek, wiping away a tear, that she realizes she’s crying. She presses her face into the worn fabric of his shirt, listening to the thump of his heart, feeling the steady rise and fall of his chest.
After a few minutes have passed, he kisses the top of her head.
“It’s over,” he says, his voice breaking a little on the word. “Isn’t it?”
She doesn’t answer. She doesn’t have to. They both know it’s true. There’s nothing to do now but nod into his shirt, trace the veins on the back of his hand, tip her head back and kiss him, long and hard and true, and then stand up together to leave this place behind, and start moving ahead to whatever comes next.
But just before they do, Aidan pauses to pull a penny from his pocket. He stands there a moment, rattling it in his palm, then tosses it into the fountain, where it makes a satisfying plunk before sinking to the bottom to join the constellation of other coins.
Clare is about to ask him what he wished for, but she stops herself.
She’s pretty sure she already knows.
As they walk away, she glances back at the rippling water, trying not to think about the fact that instead of finding a souvenir here—something to carry forward with them—they’ve managed to leave something behind.
It breaks her heart a little.
The Party
11:11 PM
From the front porch of Andy Kimball’s house, the music comes thumping through the windows with a force that makes the floorboards vibrate. Clare winces at the sound of it, already weary at the thought of what will greet them on the other side of the green door. She’d been tempted to go home after her talk with Aidan. But when she checked her phone on their way back to the car, there was a text from Stella, letting her know about the party—the last big bash thrown by someone from their class before everyone scattered to the wind—and it seemed to Clare a kind of a peace offering, one that she hadn’t had the heart to refuse.
“I didn’t realize so many people were still around,” Aidan says, rising onto his toes to look through a window.
Watching him, Clare can’t help thinking about all the other times they’ve stood here, on the threshold of so many parties just like this one. Ever since Andy’s parents came into some money from her grandfather a few years ago and started traveling constantly, she could always be relied upon to throw a party. Especially when there was nothing else going on in this town, which was most of the time.
Clare can’t imagine being fearless enough to give her house over to the masses so often, but she admires Andy for her creativity in explaining away a thousand broken vases over the years, wriggling out of countless warnings from the cops, and dodging blame for the many empty bottles in her parents’ liquor cabinet.
“I think it’s a lot of underclassmen,” Clare says as Aidan steps back from the window with a frown.
“Where’s Andy going again?”
“Michigan, maybe?”
He nods. “Right.”
Though the porch isn’t very big, they’re standing a good three feet apart, and there’s something odd about being so far away from him. They’ve never been the kind of couple who are all over each other, holding hands and making out in public; they’re more private than that, more contained. But at this point, they’ve been together so long that being near him is a kind of habit; in some ways, Aidan feels more like an extension of herself than a whole other person.
Which is why neither of them ever really notices when Clare rests a hand on his arm while he’s talking, or when Aidan hooks a foot around hers when they’re sitting in a booth. Stella’s always teasing them for the way they walk, so close together they tend to bounce off each other like a couple of bumper cars. And they’re rarely more than a few feet away from each other at parties, as if held fast by some magnetic force.
But this is the type of closeness you don’t notice until it’s gone, until you’re standing on opposite ends of a dimly lit porch less than an hour after deciding to break up, and all that’s left between you is a vast and painfully polite distance.
“So,” Aidan says, his face carefully neutral, “are we telling people?”
Clare looks up at him wit
h alarm. She hadn’t thought that far ahead yet.
“Sorry,” he says, seeming a bit unnerved himself. “I just assumed…”
She shakes her head. “No, you’re right. We probably should.”
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” she says, attempting a smile. “It’s just kind of weird to be doing this.”
He shifts as if to take a step toward her, then changes his mind and stays put. “I know,” he says. “I wish we didn’t…”
“Yeah,” she says, once he trails off. “Me too.”
They don’t even bother knocking. There’s no way anyone would hear it. Instead, Aidan pushes open the door, and the music blasts out into the quiet front yard, all rhythm and bass. When they step inside, they’re met by a wall of heat and bodies, the foyer crowded with people holding red cups above their heads, some of them dancing, others talking, most just trying to get through.
“Why is it so crowded?” Aidan yells back to Clare, making a face. “I think I’m too old for this kind of thing.”
“Good luck at college,” she says, giving him a friendly pat on the shoulder.
“I’m gonna go get a drink. You want one?”
“Yeah, and if you see Stella…”
“Yeah?”
Clare hesitates, then shakes her head. “Never mind.”
As he walks away, the top of his reddish hair visible above the crowd, Clare is struck by a completely illogical fear of losing sight of him. She watches as he pauses in the doorway between the foyer and the kitchen, bending a little as some girl, a junior on the girls’ lacrosse team, leans close to say something to him. Clare’s surprised by the stab of jealousy she feels at the sight, and she realizes this is how it will be from now on: next week and next month and next year.
Out in California, Aidan will soon be offering to get someone else a drink. Most likely someone tall and blond and impossibly beautiful, the kind of girl who gets asked whether she’s a model even when she’s doing something decidedly un-model-like, like eating chili fries or blowing her nose. Not long from now, it’ll be someone else’s hand he takes as they walk through a crowd, someone else he’ll be cracking jokes with, telling stories to, huddling with in a corner at a thousand different parties.