Hello, Goodbye, and Everything in Between(2)

Clare laughs. “The point is that we’re hopeless. So no more talking. For now, let’s just drive, okay?”

He leans forward, reaching for the keys, and then turns over the engine.

“Okay,” he says.

Their first stop isn’t far away, and they drive in silence, all the familiar sights of the town slipping by outside the window: the bridge over the ravine, the road lined with pine trees, the gazebo in the park. Clare tries to absorb each one of them as they whip past, because by the time she returns at Thanksgiving, she knows she might be someone entirely different, and she suspects that—because of that—all this might look different, too. And something about that scares her. So one by one, she tries to pin them all in place: each tree, each road, each house.

This is how it all started this morning, when she woke up in a panic about how many goodbyes she still had to say. Not just the people: Aidan, of course; and her best friend, Stella; Aidan’s sister, Riley; and his pal, Scotty; plus the handful of their other friends who are still around.

But there was also the town itself. All the landmarks that had been the background to her childhood. She couldn’t leave without going to the village green one more time, or getting one last slice of pizza at their favorite spot. She couldn’t possibly take off without one more trip to the beach, one final party, one last drive past the high school.

And so she made a list. But it didn’t take long for her to realize that most of the things that meant something to her were inextricably tied to Aidan. This place was a ghost town of sorts, littered with milestones and memories from their nearly two-year relationship.

So it had turned into something else, this night: a nostalgia tour, a journey into the past, a walk down memory lane. It would be a way for her to say goodbye to this town where she’d lived her whole life, and maybe—somehow—to Aidan, too.

She can’t help shivering a little at the thought of this, and she presses the button on the car door, closing her window.

Aidan glances over. “Too windy?” he asks, rolling up his own window, and she nods. But it’s more than that. It’s the same icy dread that fills her each time she starts to imagine it; not just the goodbye, but everything that’s to come afterward: the hurt that will surely trail them to opposite coasts, so strong that she can already feel it even now, when he’s only inches away.

The truth is, she’s still waiting for her heart to get on board with the decision her head has made. But she’s running out of time.

When they reach the long drive leading up to the high school, Aidan frowns. “So tell me,” he says as they pull up to the front of the sprawling building and into one of the empty parking spots. “Why exactly are we here?”

It’s early evening on a Friday toward the end of August, and the school sits hushed and empty. Though she spent four years here, Clare’s already having trouble remembering the feel of the place when it’s full of students, everyone spilling out the wooden doors and onto the front lawn. It’s only been two months, but somehow, all that seems like a very long time ago.

“Because,” she says, turning to Aidan, “it’s the first stop on the list.”

“I know that,” he says. “But how come?”

“It’s where we met,” she explains as she gets out of the car. “And the idea is to start at the beginning.”

“So this is a chronological scavenger hunt then.”

“It’s not a scavenger hunt at all. Think of it more like a refresher course.”

“A refresher course in what?”

She smiles at him over the top of the car. “Us.”

“So kind of like our greatest hits,” he says, twirling the keys on his finger as he walks around to her, and for a moment, it’s like none of the rest of it happened. Just now, just for this second, he’s not the person she knows best in the world, but the new kid again, the one who’d shown up on the very first day of junior year, all red hair and freckles and ridiculous height, appearing out of nowhere and turning her inside out.

The slanted light is at his back, forcing Clare to squint as she studies him for a few long seconds. “Did I ever tell you,” she says, “that I used to be late to English every single day, just so I could bump into you on your way to Pre-calc?”

“Well, now I feel kind of bad,” Aidan says, his eyes creasing at the corners. “If I’d known that, I would’ve tried to be more punctual.”

“It wouldn’t have mattered,” she says, remembering the way he used to come loping around the corner, his books tucked under his arm like a football, always missing the bell, at first because he’d get lost, and later because he’d always manage to lose track of time. “I would’ve waited all day. I probably would’ve waited forever.”

She’s not serious, of course, but there’s something wistful in his smile.

“Yeah?” he says.

She shrugs. “Yeah.”

“I wish you still would,” he says, though not spitefully; he says it quietly, evenly, a simple truth, an earnest request.

But it still leaves a mark.

“You have to stop doing that,” Clare says. “Stop being the romantic one.”

Aidan looks surprised. “What?”

“It’s not fair,” she says. “I hate that you get to be the good guy here. It’s not like I want to break up with you. It kills me just thinking about it, but I’m trying to be practical. Starting tomorrow, we’re gonna be a million miles away from each other, and it doesn’t make sense to do this any other way. So you have to stop.”