Hello, Goodbye, and Everything in Between(14)

“Yeah, but we’re just pretending, and that’s what everyone does on a quad.”

“Okay, what else?”

“We’ll go to the library together every night, and you’ll study while I throw little balled-up pieces of paper at you and mix up all your color-coded sticky notes.”

“I don’t have—”

He leans to give her a stern look. “Yes, you do. You totally have color-coded sticky notes. And highlighters, too.”

She rolls her eyes. “Fine.”

“And we’ll eat ramen noodles for dinner and sneak into the bars together and go to boring lectures and watch a million movies on Sunday afternoons. And we’ll have roommates who are never there, so we can sleep over every night, all cozy on those tiny dorm room beds, and we’ll wake up every single morning just like this,” he says, tightening his arms around her. “All tangled up together.”

Clare closes her eyes. “Why…” she begins, then trails off, her voice unexpectedly full of emotion. “Why didn’t we just decide to do that?”

“Because we agreed that we have to live our own lives,” he says a little sadly. “And I get that. I do. But it doesn’t mean we can’t still be together.”

“Yeah, it does,” she says, sitting up a little, feeling like she’s just awoken from a deep sleep. She swivels around so that they’re facing each other. “ ’Cause that’s the thing—we won’t actually be together. We’re going to have three thousand miles between us.”

“Right, but—”

She shakes her head. “And it’s more than just the distance,” she tells him. “You know it is. Nobody survives this kind of thing. You pretend it’s going to work, and you make all these promises, and then you talk on the phone every night and text each other between classes and maybe manage a visit during fall break or something. But then everything’s awkward, because so much has changed, and you don’t fit into each other’s lives anymore. And then the cute guy from down the hall shows up to say hi, and even though he’s just a friend, you get jealous, and we get into a fight, and then you take off, and I leave you a million voice mails, and send you a thousand long and wordy e-mails, but you’re still bitter, so you go hook up with some random girl, which I hear about somehow, because let’s be honest, you always hear about these things somehow, and then I’m furious, because me and the cute guy were only friends, but what you did was unforgivable, and so it’s over, just like that, and then we have to see each other at Thanksgiving, at some party or at the bowling alley or even at Scotty’s house, and you end up standing in the corner looking all forlorn, and I’m stuck whispering to Stella in the other corner, and worse than that, there’s just all this stuff between us, jealousy and resentment and bitterness, and it’s awful, because there used to be nothing between us, and not in a bad way, but in the best way, because we never had any space for that kind of stuff, but now it’s there, and there’s no changing that, and the whole thing just ends up being sad and awkward and inevitable and totally, horribly, completely heartbreaking. And who wants that?”

Aidan stares at her for a long time. “Not me,” he says eventually, looking a little bit stunned.

“Exactly,” Clare says, satisfied.

“So… why don’t you just avoid the cute guy to begin with?”

“That’s not the point,” she says, though she can tell he’s only teasing her. “Wouldn’t you rather end things now, on our own terms, so we can at least still be friends?”

“I don’t want to be friends.”

“That’s all we’d be anyway, from that far away.”

He shakes his head. “That’s what you think?”

“I guess so.”

“God, Clare,” he says, his face darkening. “I hate how everything always has to be so black-and-white with you. Just because we wouldn’t get to… I mean, it’s not like we’d only be pen pals or anything.”

“I know, but—”

“This kind of thing doesn’t come along that often,” he says, his eyes flashing now. “And you want to just throw it away because it might get too hard. Or because you want to be free to meet someone new.”

“It’s not that,” she tells him, trying to keep the frustration out of her voice. “It’s just… we’re so young. It’s not that crazy to think we might not end up with the person we dated in high school.”

Aidan gives her a sour look. “We’re not your parents,” he says, picking up a small stone and tossing it out over the water, where it disappears into the gray chop of the waves. “This isn’t the same thing.”

Clare’s mom and dad had both been married before, each to their high school sweetheart. It wasn’t until after those other marriages had fizzled, after they’d both gotten divorced, that they were lucky enough to find each other.

To Clare, it seems like there must be a lesson in there somewhere.

“You don’t know that,” she says with a frown.

“I do, actually,” Aidan says, chucking another rock out into the lake, more forcefully this time. “Because they’re just one example. There are a million other couples who met in high school who are probably still ridiculously happy. You just refuse to see that, because you’ve already made up your mind.”