Hello, Goodbye, and Everything in Between(5)
They’re nearly to the car when she stops short.
“Shoot,” she says, glancing back over her shoulder. “I meant to get a souvenir.”
“So this is a scavenger hunt.”
“I just thought it might be nice. You know, to have something from each place we stop tonight.”
Aidan tilts his head at her. “You sure this wasn’t just an elaborate plan to steal all those precious gemstones from the Earth Science classroom?”
“I think precious might be overstating it,” she says. “But no.”
“Okay, then,” he says, stooping to grab an ordinary-looking rock from the ground at his feet. It’s slate gray and rounded at the edges, and he rubs at it with the end of his plaid shirt before handing it over with a solemn look.
“Here,” he says, and Clare feels the weight of it in her palm. She runs her thumb over the smooth surface, thinking back to that first day she’d seen him in class, the way his face had lit up when he turned over the rock to find all those purple crystals, like it was a fortune cookie or an Easter egg, the best kind of surprise.
“By my authority,” Aidan is saying now, “as a B-plus student in Mr. Coady’s junior year Earth Science class, I’m pleased to inform you that this little gem is now officially considered precious.”
And here’s the amazing thing: Now it was.
The Pizza Place
7:12 PM
For a while, the two of them stand just outside Slices, peering in through the fogged windows at all the unfamiliar faces.
“Didn’t take them very long to move in, huh?” Aidan says, squinting at a corner booth that used to belong to some of his lacrosse buddies and that is now occupied by a cluster of sophomore girls all huddled over their phones.
“Out with the old…” Clare says lightly, though she feels a bit unsettled, too. After three weeks of goodbyes—three full weeks of sending their friends off one at a time—it feels like the town should be empty now. But here, it looks like any other night, the place completely packed, full of laughter and gossip and noise.
It’s just that it’s no longer their laughter and gossip and noise.
Aidan turns to face her, his blue eyes bright. “Let me guess,” he says, rubbing his hands together. “First place I spilled something on you.”
Clare shakes her head. “Nope.”
“First place you saw me trip over my own feet? First time you saw me eat four slices of pizza in under ten minutes? First time I did that trick with a straw wrapper?”
“First place we talked,” she says, stopping him, because she knows this could go on all night. “Not that it was much of a conversation, but it was the first time you spoke actual words to me.”
“Oh, yeah,” he says. “I remember now. I’m pretty sure I said you were the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen, and then asked you out right there on the spot.”
“Close,” Clare says with a smile. “You asked me to pass the Parmesan.”
“Ah,” he says. “One of my lesser-used pickup lines.”
“Worked on me,” she says as he pulls open the door.
Inside, the restaurant is thick with steam and filled with the smells of tomato and mozzarella. There’s exactly one middle-aged couple in the far corner, hunched over their pizza and looking hassled by the chaos all around them. Otherwise, pretty much everyone is under the age of eighteen. That’s the way it’s been for as long as anyone can remember—this place isn’t so much a restaurant as an off-campus lunch spot, an after-school meet-up point, a weekend hangout for the high school crowd. With its cracked leather booths and basic brown tables, the row of aging video games along one wall and the ironclad rule that slices come plain only, it’s always just sort of belonged to the town’s younger population.
Just inside the doorway, Aidan stops short, and Clare sees that their usual table is occupied by a few of the underclassmen from the lacrosse team. When they notice Aidan, they start to scramble to their feet, but he waves them back down again.
“Sorry,” one of them says. He looks like a younger version of Aidan, round-faced and broad-shouldered and easygoing, but all the confidence drains right out of him at the sight of his former team captain. There’s a note of awe in his voice as he apologizes. “We thought you’d already skipped town.”
“Just about,” Aidan says, clapping him on the back. “I’m headed out tomorrow.”
“Do practices start right away?”
Aidan nods. “Preseason.”
“Well, good luck, man,” he says, and a few of the others chime in with well wishes, too. “Can’t wait to hear all about it at Thanksgiving.”
As they walk away from the table, Aidan takes Clare’s hand, and she gives his a little squeeze. She catches sight of their reflection in the darkened window and realizes how lost they both look, like they’ve walked into a familiar room to find that all the furniture has been rearranged. But then they recognize a voice over near the register, and they both turn to see Scotty, leaning against the counter and scraping his pocket for coins.
Aidan steps up beside him, slapping down a five-dollar bill.
“It’s on me,” he says, reaching out to punch his friend’s shoulder, but it doesn’t quite land because Scotty manages to dodge him, cuffing Aidan’s ear before ducking away again. Clare hangs back as the two of them tussle the way they always do, circling each other like boxers until they notice Oscar—the hulking, largely silent cashier who has been there forever—watching them from behind the counter, looking entirely unamused.