Hello, Goodbye, and Everything in Between(42)

“So are you okay?” Stella asks as she grabs a filter, and Clare shrugs.

“I’m a little tired, but I’m sure the coffee will help.”

“No, I mean about Aidan.”

“I thought you didn’t want to hear about that.”

Stella glances over her shoulder with an impatient look. “Of course I do. I was just upset before. So I said some things. And so did you. But it’ll be a while before we see each other again, and I don’t want to leave it like that. So tell me. Are you okay?”

“I don’t know yet,” Clare says, leaning back against the counter. “Do I seem okay?”

“Aside from the eye?”

Clare presses a finger to her cheek and winces. “Forgot about that for a second.”

“Well, it’s not gonna make it any easier to forget about Aidan.”

“I think it was Scotty who got me, actually.”

“Then I guess it won’t be easy to forget about him, either,” Stella says, hitting the start button and turning around. “I know it won’t for me, anyway.”

“Do you have to?” Clare asks. “I mean, can’t you just…”

“See how it goes?” she asks, giving Clare a funny look. “Come on. This from the girl who put together a whole scavenger hunt to decide the fate of her relationship.”

“It wasn’t a scavenger hunt. Why does everyone keep calling it that?”

“Whatever,” Stella says. “The point is… you needed an answer because you’re leaving tomorrow.” She glances down at her watch. “Today. You’re leaving today. And so am I.”

“Yeah, but if you really like him…”

“C’mon, Clare,” Stella says, wiping her hands on a towel. “Listen to yourself. Why would it be different for us? You and Aidan were together forever. This was just a summer thing. It wasn’t ever meant to last.”

“But do you want it to?”

Stella tilts her head back, gazing at the ceiling. “I’m not sure,” she says. “But there are a lot of possibilities besides stay together and break up, you know. Not everything has to be so black-and-white.”

“Says the girl who only wears black.”

Stella laughs. “You know what I mean.”

The smell of coffee fills the kitchen as it starts to brew, bitter and warm, and Clare closes her eyes, inhaling deeply. She thinks, for a moment, about all the things her parents have been telling her this summer. How college is the first chapter of the rest of your life. The beginning of everything. The place where you meet your lifelong friends.

Clare understands that this is supposed be comforting. They’re just trying to be enthusiastic, assuring her that the best is yet to come. But it feels like what they’re saying is that everything she’s done up until now isn’t important enough to last. That all these years, all these memories—none of it actually counts. That it’s all just going to disappear behind her like a trail of bread crumbs. And only she knows the truth: that without it, she’ll be lost.

Besides, she already has a lifelong friend, and it’s hard to imagine a better qualification for the title than having known someone forever.

She opens her eyes again. “I’m gonna miss this.”

Stella gives her an odd look. “Making coffee together in Scotty’s kitchen? I’m pretty sure we’ve never done this before.”

“No,” Clare says. “You.”

“You’ll be fine,” Stella says. “We both will. Everyone says you make fast friends in college.”

“I don’t know,” Clare says. “I think I prefer slow friends.”

Stella smiles. “Me too.”

“That better not be a crack about me,” Scotty says, pushing open the screen door, and when his gaze lands on Stella, it lingers there. Watching him, watching them, Clare wonders how she hasn’t seen it before, this new closeness between them. There’s something reassuring about it, something that just seems to fit.

“I’ll let you two finish up in here,” she says, smiling at Stella as she steps around Scotty, slipping out the door before they can object.

Outside, she swats away the mosquitoes as she crosses the deck to find Aidan asleep on one of the lounge chairs, his head tipped to one side. Quietly, she lowers herself onto the chair beside him, lying curled on her side, so that when he jolts awake, it’s to find her face only inches from his.

“No sleeping, remember?” she says, beaming at him.

He sits up, still drowsy. “Why do you look like that?”

“Like what?” she says, then points at her eye with a grin. “Oh, this? Probably because you punched me in the face.”

“Not that,” he says, giving her a weary look as he swings his feet to the ground. “Why do you look so… happy?”

“I don’t know,” she says honestly. “I guess I just missed you.”

He frowns at her. “How long was I asleep?”

“Not long,” she assures him.

Overhead, a plane flies past, and they track it across the sky, a little bead of light moving through the clouds, which are gauzy and gray against all the blackness. Clare sits up, facing Aidan so that their knees are touching in the space between the chairs.