Hello, Goodbye, and Everything in Between(3)
“Stop… being romantic?” Aidan asks, looking amused.
“Yes.”
“Have you ever thought that maybe you need to stop being so practical?”
Clare sighs. “One of us has to be.”
“The one who planned a romantic scavenger hunt for our last night?” he says, looping an arm around her shoulders and giving her a little squeeze.
She rolls her eyes. “It’s not a scavenger hunt.”
“Well, whatever it is, I think it’s suspiciously romantic for someone so annoyingly practical,” he says, drawing her closer. Her head only comes up to his chest, so she has to tip her chin up to look at him. When she does, he leans down to kiss her, and even though they’ve kissed a thousand times before—have kissed, even, in this very parking lot—it still makes her stomach go wobbly, and she’s seized by a sudden worry over how few of these they have left.
Together, they walk up the front steps of the school, and Clare tugs on the handle of the big wooden door, but it refuses to budge. She knocks a few times, in case there might be a security guard inside, but nobody answers.
“It’s still a couple weeks till classes start,” Aidan points out. “I’m sure nobody’s here on a Friday night.”
“I thought maybe there’d be summer school or something.…”
“Let’s just skip to whatever’s next.”
Clare shakes her head, not sure how to explain that this is the whole point of the night. To fit two whole years into one final evening; to dump all the pieces out of the box and then put them back together again in the right order so that they can see the whole thing spread out before them.
And so that they can say goodbye.
But to do that, they need to start at the beginning.
“No,” she says, looking up at the stone building. “There has to be a way in. It’s the first place we saw each other.…”
Aidan smiles. “Mr. Coady’s Earth Science class.”
“Exactly,” she says. “Not that you remember.”
“Of course I do.”
“You do not. At least not that first day.”
“Oh, come on,” Aidan says, laughing. “How could anyone not remember you?”
“Impossible,” she agrees, though she knows that’s not true. Clare’s been called a lot of things—smart and funny, driven and talented—but memorable certainly isn’t one of them. The most important things about her—the ones she’s most proud of—are apparent only once you get to know her. At first glance, she’s almost entirely unremarkable: brown hair and brown eyes, average height and ordinary looks. Mostly, she just blends in, which has always been fine with her: You could do a lot worse in high school. But that meant that before Aidan, no boy had ever really noticed her before.
That first day, he’d sat down in the desk right behind hers. The teacher was handing out geodes to pass around the room, and when it was her turn with one of them, Clare cupped it in her hands. It looked like a regular old rock on the outside, but inside, it was full of glittering purple crystals. When she turned to pass it to the new kid, he kept his eyes on the stone. But later—after he’d finally noticed her, after they’d both realized that this was the start of something—she would come back to that moment again and again. Because that’s how she felt when she was with him—like she’d been a rock her whole life, ordinary and dull, and it wasn’t until she met him that something cracked open inside her, and just like that, she began to shine.
“We have to get inside,” she says now, feeling oddly desperate.
Aidan gives her a strange look. “Does it really matter?”
“Yes,” she says, rattling the door handle once more, though it’s clearly useless. “We have to start this thing right.”
She knows he doesn’t understand why this is so important to her, and she’s not sure she could tell him even if she tried. It’s just that the clock is ticking down fast toward tomorrow, when everything will change. And this—this plan for their last night together—was supposed to be the one thing she could control.
All summer, Clare has been poring over class descriptions and campus maps and messages from her new roommate, trying to get a clearer picture of what her life will soon look like. But as much as she’s read, as much as she’s tried to find out, it’s impossible to imagine the details. And it’s the not knowing that’s the hardest part.
There’s so much of it, too. She doesn’t know whether she’ll be able to balance Intro to Psychology with History of Japan, or whether she’ll find someone to sit with in the dining hall during those first few crucial days, when loose collections of strangers start to solidify into groups of friends like hardening cement.
She doesn’t know whether she’ll get along with her roommate, a girl from New York City named Beatrice St. James, who seems to only want to talk about what bands she’s been seeing this summer, and who—Clare suspects—will end up wallpapering their room with concert posters.
She doesn’t know whether it’s a mistake to leave her winter coat behind until Thanksgiving break, whether she’ll find it unbearable to share a bathroom with twenty other people, whether girls from the East Coast will dress differently than the girls here in Chicago. She doesn’t know whether she’ll stand out or blend in, sink or swim, feel homesick or independent, happy or miserable.