Hello, Goodbye, and Everything in Between(47)

Aidan laughs. “Does she skateboard, too?”

“Totally,” Clare says. “And she probably designed the skateboard herself.”

“She seems talented,” he teases. “Sounds like we did pretty well for ourselves.”

Clare shakes her head. “See? This is why I really don’t want to be thinking about this tonight. Because now I’m getting jealous of some girl who doesn’t even exist. Whatever else happens later, tonight is still about us. So I think we should just cross all those other bridges when we come to them.”

“Easy breezy,” Aidan says with a grin, and Clare nods.

“Easy breezy.”

He studies her for a few seconds without saying anything, then hitches up one shoulder in a sort of half shrug. “Okay, then,” he says finally. “What now?”

They head back into the kitchen to grab a couple of cans of pop from the refrigerator, then slip through the foyer, whispering so they don’t wake her parents. At the door to the basement, they make their way downstairs, leaving Bingo—who is afraid of stairs—to stand guard at the top.

“I’m gonna miss this place, too,” Aidan says as they emerge into the coolness of the basement, and Clare laughs, though she knows he’s serious. It’s just that it’s not much to look at: orange carpeting they’ve always meant to replace, a maze of pipes across the ceiling, pocked concrete walls, and a random collection of mismatched old furniture.

“It’s like the Island of Misfit Toys,” her dad had said once, surveying the scene after they’d brought down yet another retired armchair. “This is where good furniture goes to die.”

“What movie were you watching?” Clare said. “Nobody died on the Island of Misfit Toys.”

But she knew what he meant. The basement has always been a kind of way station between the rest of the house and the garbage dump for anything deemed too old. Right now, it holds two mattresses, an ancient couch, an embarrassingly outdated armchair, a scarred coffee table, and a mostly broken TV. The walls are bare except for a single painting of Lake Michigan that her father bought at a garage sale and her mother had already relegated to the basement by the time they made it home.

Aidan walks over to the couch, which is an ugly brown-and-beige plaid, and runs a hand fondly across the back of it. “So,” he says with a grin, “any chance we’re gonna be revisiting another first while we’re here?”

Clare’s eyes move from Aidan to the couch, and she feels a wave of nostalgia at the thought of all the nights they’ve spent curled up there together. It’s tempting now to repeat history: to grab his hand and pull him down beside her, to kiss him long enough that the rest of the world disappears, hard enough that she might forget what tomorrow will bring.

But she knows it’s more complicated than that—there are rules now, and the fact that they were the ones who set them doesn’t matter. The whole thing feels fragile enough without bringing the couch into it.

Besides, she knows exactly what first he’s talking about, and she can’t help flushing at the memory, more recent than some of the others. They’d waited more than a year, until they were both sure, until they were both ready. And then one night last winter, when her parents were out of town, it had happened right here on this couch. Ever since then, they always find themselves smiling in the goofiest possible way whenever they walk down here, as if the couch itself were a shared secret, something too big and too good to remain unnoticed for long.

Now, though, it sits between them like an oversize reminder of all that they’re losing.

“We’re broken up,” she points out, dragging her eyes away from it.

“We could postpone it,” he says hopefully. “It seems kind of silly to break up while we’re still in the same place, don’t you think?”

Clare shakes her head. “It’ll just make it worse.”

“I highly doubt that,” he says, walking over to her with a new sense of purpose. He looks at her intently, then starts to lower his head, and for a moment she feels herself falling under the spell of him all over again, this boy with the red hair and bright eyes. Even with all his cuts and bruises, she’s struck by how familiar the terrain of his face is, all the many freckles and lines, and she wonders if she’ll ever know another person by heart like this. But just before his lips touch hers, she snaps back, remembering all over again, and leans away.

“Aidan,” she says in a low voice, and he stands very still for a few beats, his mouth parted. Then he shakes his head and straightens up again.

“Yeah,” he says. “You’re right.”

They blink at each other, neither of them moving.

“It’s just that—”

“I know,” he says. “You don’t have to explain. We broke up. This is part of it. I guess I just didn’t want it to be. At least for a little while.”

“I know,” she says, looking away. She takes a few steps backward, bumping into the Ping-Pong table, which is the only thing actually purchased specifically for this room. She reaches behind her for one of the worn paddles, relieved to have stumbled across a distraction, and holds it up.

“Should we try one last time?”

“Sure,” he says, walking over the other side of the table. “But this isn’t going to be half as much fun as what I had in mind.”