Hello, Goodbye, and Everything in Between(30)

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 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.