All We Can Do Is Wait(18)
“I guess Amherst could be good,” Aimee said once over a weekend lunch at Johnny’s in Newton Centre. It was a favorite place of theirs, where they’d been on their first official date, Scott attempting to pay for the meal with a wad of crumpled bills before Aimee insisted they split it. “Though I feel like their theater department is kinda small?”
Aimee tended to get the lead, or at least a big part, in most of the school plays. She was talented and pretty, in “an interesting way,” as Scott’s mom put it. “Doesn’t BU have a good theater major?” Scott asked, trying to sound nonchalant, but of course wishing beyond wish that Aimee would end up at a school just down Comm Ave, instead of all the way at the other end of the state, or even worse, in a different state altogether.
“True,” Aimee said, chewing thoughtfully on a french fry. “But I dunno . . . it’d be fun to be somewhere else, y’know?” She looked at Scott, maybe suddenly realizing the implications of what she was saying. “But not too far. I mean, obviously somewhere you can come visit a lot.”
“Right,” Scott said, giving her a smile and taking a sip of his Coke. He had a helpless feeling churning in his stomach, a gnawing certainty that he’d already lost Aimee, had been losing her since the day they got together, making out at a soccer party back when Scott was just a freshman on the JV team.
He’d since made varsity—one of the few sophomores at Newton North, a strong soccer school, to do so. So it wasn’t like Scott didn’t have his own stuff going on, his own things to be excited about. But beyond high school, his future didn’t look anything like Aimee’s. He wasn’t quite good enough at soccer to get a scholarship, so he’d probably stay in town, maybe go to UMass Boston or Suffolk or something, somewhere that wasn’t too expensive. He’d probably still work weekends at his parents’ store, a pizza shop in Newton Centre that had gradually grown to offer a larger menu and also half-functioned as a kind of specialty foods grocery. The business did well enough, but it was small and local, and Scott’s parents were never quite secure in their finances.
Newton was a rich town, with only a few scattered poorer families to give the place character or something. Scott was from one of those families, all of whom lived in houses in Nonantum or Newton Corner, near Watertown, where the terrorist kid was hiding in that boat after the Marathon bombing. Scott was often keenly aware of the differences between him and Aimee, whose parents lived in a big house on Farlow Hill and who had never once mentioned student loans or financial aid or anything.
After lunch, Scott and Aimee walked, hand in hand, to the T stop, taking the D train down to Fenway, where they saw a movie and cuddled and made out and ate popcorn, Scott letting things feel normal again, like this wasn’t all going to end in a year and a half.
Things progressed regularly enough throughout that fall and into the winter, with soccer and plays and all the immediate stuff of high school taking precedence over Aimee’s future plans. But when February vacation rolled around, Aimee announced that she was going to spend the week looking at colleges with her dad. Scott had assumed that they’d spend the break together, like they had the year before, watching Netflix and doing some discreet, quiet fooling around in Aimee’s attic-like third-floor bedroom. He was crushed—and angry—when she told him just a few days before the vacation was set to start.
“Well, what am I gonna do for a week now?” he asked her, sitting on Aimee’s bed while she sat at her desk, half paying attention to the physics book on her lap.
She sighed, looked up at him. “I don’t know! I thought you’d be working at the store most days anyway.”
She was right, of course. Scott’s parents put him to work during almost all of his vacation time, but he would have a few nights free at least, nights when he thought he and Aimee would be cozy together at her house, which was really the only place he ever wanted to be those days. He told her that and she rolled her eyes. “We can make up for lost sex time when I’m back,” she said, returning to her book.
Scott didn’t hate the sound of that, but he did hate the idea of Aimee exploring her potential new life without him, of her falling in love with some school and returning at the end of the week convinced she just had to move halfway across the country to go to Northwestern. (This trip was Aimee’s Midwest tour of schools. The East Coast ones would be visited on weekends.) It made Scott feel bratty and hot in the face, like he was a kid wanting to throw a really big and cathartic tantrum. But he restrained himself. He didn’t want Aimee to see him being so immature, so uncollegiate, even though that was exactly what he felt, desperately wanting them to stay teenagers in love forever, not wanting time to move on, not wanting anyone to grow up any more than they already had.
Despite all of Scott’s useless petulance, Aimee went on the trip, and Scott remained in town, working long days at the store and then mostly bumming around at night. One evening, he went over to Pete del Vecchio’s house, a friend from the team who lived nearby. They played FIFA and Pete talked about girls, specifically Pete’s longtime crush, Taissa Groff, Aimee’s hot and kind of strange best friend, who lived in a sprawling, ghostly old mansion that had an elevator in it. Scott was trying not to text Aimee too much, not wanting to seem too needy. But sitting there in Pete’s dingy basement rec room while Pete droned on about how Taissa had provocatively brushed past him at a party back during Christmas break, Scott felt lonely and cramped and dejected. So he sent Aimee a text, asking how things were going. He was pretty sure she was in Ohio at the moment, looking at Oberlin and Kenyon.