Hello, Goodbye, and Everything in Between(62)
He’s still there, of course, standing in the rain as he watches them go. It almost feels to Clare like she left a piece of her heart back there with him, the two halves being stretched between them like taffy. She lifts a hand, and he does the same, and they remain like that for what feels like a very long time, fixed in a slow-motion version of goodbye.
In another kind of story, Clare knows, this would be different. If this were a movie, she’d yell for her dad to stop the car, and then, amid the screech of the brakes and the squeal of the tires, she’d go hurtling out the door, running down the rain-soaked street, desperate to tell Aidan one last thing before she goes.
But the truth is there’s nothing more to say. Over the past twelve hours, they’ve spent all their words—generously, riotously, fully—like a couple of gamblers throwing down every last chip without a single thought for tomorrow.
And now, she knows, the only thing left for them to do is to go out and find some more stories to tell, to start a brand-new collection of adventures and memories, to keep them close like the best of all souvenirs, and then one day, if they’re really lucky, to find a way to bring them home again.
At the mail center, the man behind the counter scans Clare’s receipt before disappearing into the back room to retrieve the box. Behind her, the line is long, and everyone seems restless, but nobody more than Clare, who stands on her tiptoes, craning to see what it is that someone sent her.
It’s not that she never gets mail; when you go to school a couple of hours from the nearest major city, you end up doing most of your shopping online. But since starting here last fall, she can count on one hand the number of unexpected packages she’s received.
There were two from her mother back in September, not long after she first arrived: one filled with candy and photos, the other with a few things she’d accidentally left behind. And then a couple for her birthday in October, including one from Stella that contained an old dictionary with words like confidant and rapport and camaraderie carefully circled throughout. (Clare suspected they were more than just suggestions for enhancing her vocabulary.)
But that’s pretty much it.
So when the man finally returns with a square box, heaving it onto the counter, Clare has to keep herself from reaching for it while he checks her name off a form.
“Rocks?” he asks, raising his eyebrows as he scribbles something.
“Huh?
“Someone sending you rocks?”
Clare shakes her head. “I don’t think so.”
“Sure feels like it,” he says, pushing it over to her, and when she picks it up, she realizes that he’s right. It’s heavier than it looks, and she readjusts her grip, her fingers slipping beneath the weight of it.
She makes it all the way to the end of the crowded hallway before she allows herself to look at the return label, though by that point, she doesn’t need to. The moment she picked up the box, she knew exactly who it was from and what was inside.
Even so, it nearly takes her breath away when she sees Aidan’s familiar handwriting in the upper-left-hand corner of the box. Beside the return address, he’s crossed out the word FedEx with a thick black marker and written carrier pigeon instead.
She hasn’t heard a word from him in five months. Not since that first night back home over Thanksgiving.
And now, there’s this: a box appearing as if from nowhere, as if by magic.
Someone bumps her elbow, and she fumbles it a little, catching it with her knee. She realizes she’s still standing in the middle of the hallway, so she forces herself to walk up the stairs, weaving through dozens of students on the way to class—nodding here and there at the ones she knows—and cradling the box as if it were something fragile, though she’s already sure it’s not.
Outside the building, she hurries over to a bench, then sits with the package balanced on her lap, staring at the address. It takes a long time for her heart to slow down. Just the sight of Aidan’s name has sent her spinning, and she tips her head back to look up at the sky, trying to collect herself again.
It had been like this over Thanksgiving, too: Seeing him there in her driveway after three whole months apart, three whole months of silence, was enough to make her dizzy. With his clear blue eyes and the reddish stubble along his jaw, he looked completely different and yet also staggeringly, heartbreakingly familiar.
It only took a moment for everything else to fall away: all the words she’d planned to say to him, all the things she’d been waiting to tell him.
One of them, most of all: that she was seeing someone new.
But before they even had a chance to say hello, before they’d even exchanged a word, Aidan was kissing her, right there in the driveway, and suddenly that didn’t seem so important anymore. In fact, it seemed like the least important thing in the world.
It wasn’t until after they broke apart and she saw the look in his eyes—a look that matched her own, stuck somewhere between longing and regret—that she realized he was seeing someone, too.
They hadn’t talked after that. She avoided him for the rest of the break, started a thousand e-mails to him once she returned to school, let her thumb hover over his name on her phone too many times to count. But it seemed better to leave it alone. They’d both moved on. They’d known it might happen. It was the way things were supposed to go.
Over Christmas, he stayed in California, which she only knew because Riley had mentioned it in an e-mail, how she and her parents were going out there to visit him. Clare couldn’t help wondering if he was trying to steer clear of her, though she knew it was much more likely he was staying out there to be with his new girlfriend. It would be weeks yet before she’d break up with her own boyfriend, but still, something about the thought of Aidan’s sunshine-filled holiday made her feel horribly lonely.