“Okay,” she says as, behind them, Oscar thumps a fist on the counter. They turn to see that their slices are ready. Aidan grabs the tray, and they all walk over to an empty table by the window.
As soon as they sit down, Scotty takes a huge bite of his pizza. The cheese is still steaming, and he winces, dropping it back onto his plate. “Too hot.”
Stella rolls her eyes. “You’re a numbskull.”
“Word of the day?” Clare asks. Ever since taking the SATs, Stella has become obsessed with neglected vocabulary, picking a new word to work into conversation every day.
But she shakes her head. “Nope, that’s just what he is. Today’s word is gobsmacked, though I can’t imagine I’ll have a chance to use it, since there’s never anything to be gobsmacked about around here.” She glances over at Scotty with a grin. “Except maybe how much of a numbskull you are.”
“Is that the kind of vocabulary that got you into a fine school like Florida State?” Scotty asks, picking at the crust of his pizza while he waits for the cheese to cool, and Stella—still a little sensitive about her only acceptance—gives him a withering look.
“Says the guy going to community college,” she shoots back, and everyone goes abruptly still. Beside Clare, Aidan lowers his pizza, his mouth still half-open, and Stella, immediately realizing she’s gone too far, turns pale.
For months now, this has been the one thing nobody has said. They’ve all spent the summer tap-dancing around the subject, and even now, on the eve of their departure, it feels somehow wrong to mention it.
Because of all of them, Scotty’s the only one not going anywhere tomorrow.
Not that they didn’t all have their share of rejection this past spring. As much as Stella’s now looking forward to the warm weather in Florida, what she’d really wanted was to be closer to home, just downstate at the University of Illinois. Aidan hadn’t gotten into Harvard, even as a legacy. And though Clare had been feeling confident about her chances at most of the places she’d applied, in the end, she’d gone only four for twelve.
Scotty, though, hadn’t gotten a single yes. After a high school career spent coming up with ever more creative ways to escape his classes, it shouldn’t have been a big surprise. But he and Aidan had spent so many months dreaming of conquering California together that it had taken Scotty weeks to get around to telling them, and when he finally did, they could all see how much it hurt. Since then he’s done his best to make a joke of it—as he does with everything else—but Clare suspects that the only thing harder than leaving is being left behind.
His face is blank now, his ears pink at the tips, and his wiry frame is folded over the table in a way that makes him look even scrawnier than usual. Scotty’s personality is normally big enough to make people forget about his size, but now it’s like the air has gone right out of him.
Stella looks uncharacteristically earnest as she lays a hand on his shoulder. “Hey,” she says. “I’m sorry. You know I didn’t mean—”
“Forget it,” he says. “It’s fine.”
Clare is struck by a memory of Aidan, sometime just after they’d started dating, suggesting they set up Scotty and Stella. He was still new then, still clueless about the subtle dynamics of the eleventh-grade population, and still unaware of the fact that the two of them had been sparring—more or less uninterrupted—since kindergarten.
“But Scotty’s so much fun,” Aidan had said, which was true. Most of his other new friends were on the lacrosse team, but he’d met Scotty in art class, where they were the only two guys. Their first assignment had been to do a charcoal drawing of an object that was important to them. All the girls had sketched heart-shaped lockets and old clocks and ornate diaries. Aidan had drawn his lacrosse stick. But Scotty, of course, had come up with a Picasso-like rendering of a Mr. Potato Head, and when Aidan leaned over to compliment it without a hint of irony, they became instant friends.
“Yeah, but he’s not right for Stella,” Clare had told him. “Trust me. I’ve known them both a lot longer. They’re oil and water.”
But that wasn’t exactly true. The problem wasn’t that they didn’t match; it was that they matched almost too well. They were both loud and funny, fearless and loyal, completely and utterly magnetic. It’s just that they’d spent the better part of their lives repelling each other.
“Really,” Stella is saying now, her hand still on his shoulder. She looks genuinely sorry. “That wasn’t—”
“It’s okay,” Scotty says again, finally looking over at her. “I mean, it’s what’s happening, right? You guys are leaving and I’m staying here. It’s not like ignoring it’s gonna change anything.”
Clare leans forward. “Yeah, but…”
“Really, I’m fine with it,” Scotty says, and then his face cracks a little. “At least it means I won’t have to share my pizza with you guys anymore.”
“Your pizza?” Aidan asks, raising an eyebrow.
“Yeah,” Scotty says with a nod, looking more cheerful already. “You guys’ll be off eating your second-rate pizza in your totally untested new pizza places, and I’ll still be here… with all this to myself.”
Stella laughs, though Clare can tell it’s more out of relief than anything else; she’s just happy she didn’t inadvertently tip the whole night off-balance. Scotty gives her a quick sideways glance before turning back to Aidan.
“And you know what the best part is?” he asks, his grin widening. “Once you finally hit the road, I’ll be free and clear to ask a certain someone out. Maybe she can even come help me eat all that extra pizza.…”
It takes a second for Scotty’s meaning to register, but when it does, Aidan frowns. “Dude,” he says, shaking his head. “This is the last time I’m gonna say it. You’re not allowed anywhere near my sister.”
This is a joke that only Scotty ever seems to find amusing. For Aidan, it’s still a sore subject, and any reminder of last year’s spring formal—when he and Clare had ducked out early to find his best friend kissing his younger sister in a darkened hallway—is enough to make the vein near his temple start to jump.
Aidan has always been protective of Riley, and even once the full story came out later—how her date had abandoned her, and Scotty had been nice enough to keep her company, and then one thing led to another—he was still furious. They didn’t speak for weeks after that, Aidan and Scotty, in spite of Clare’s attempts to patch things up between them. And though their friendship eventually recovered—helped along by Riley’s admission that she was the one who kissed Scotty, and Scotty’s frantic promises that it would never happen again—the subject is still a sensitive one for Aidan.
Most normal people would tiptoe around something like that, avoiding it like a conversational pothole. But not Scotty, who still insists on dredging it up from time to time, apparently hoping it will eventually get funnier. Which it hasn’t.
“Too soon,” Clare says, tossing a balled-up napkin at him. Across the table, Stella is flashing him a look that very plainly says: “Stop being an idiot.”
Scotty’s smile falters, and he gives them a shrug. “Okay, okay,” he says to Aidan, holding up his hands. “I was only kidding. I promise your sister is off-limits.”
“Not like you’d have a chance anyway,” Aidan says with a grunt, folding his arms across his chest.
“Hey,” Scotty says, glancing up after an attempt to blow the wrapper off his straw fails completely. “I’m a catch.”
This makes Stella laugh until she coughs. She pounds her chest a few times for effect, and Scotty’s face clouds over again.
“What?” he says to Stella, a challenge in his voice. “Because you think I’m an idiot who couldn’t get into any real colleges?”
“No,” Stella says firmly. “Because I think you’re an idiot with a big mouth and a thoroughly distorted sense of self-confidence.”
As the two of them begin to bicker again, Clare glances over at Aidan, who is usually the referee in these situations. But at
the moment, he’s just watching them with an unreadable expression, his head tilted to one side. When she catches his eye, he gives her a weary smile, but in spite of everything, she can tell there’s a part of him that’s secretly enjoying it. This is just what he’d been hoping for tonight—something normal. Something light and silly and meaningless. Something that doesn’t feel like an ending.
“I’ve got a brilliant idea,” Clare says, and Scotty and Stella turn to her as if they’d forgotten anyone else was there. “Let’s play the quiet game.”
“I forfeit,” Scotty says with a shrug, and Stella says, “Of course you do,” and just like that, they’re off again on an unending circuit of teasing and arguing.
Clare leans back in her chair, looking around the tiny restaurant, where the light is warm and yellow. It would be impossible to count the number of nights that had begun or ended here, how many evenings had followed this very same pattern. She lets the blur of it all wash over her: the chirp of the video games and the girls singing tunelessly at a corner table, the smells of garlic and cheese, and the fluorescent lights of the sign in the darkened window, a red so electric it burns her eyes.
When she turns back again, Aidan is smiling at her.
“Hey,” he says, leaning to bump her shoulder gently with his.
“Hey,” she says quietly, so quietly it’s almost lost in the noise of the place, a noise that no longer belongs to them. But Aidan hears her anyway.
“Any chance,” he says, “that you could pass me the Parmesan?”
She reaches out for it, handing it to him with a little smile. But later, when nobody’s looking, and the pizza is gone, and the shaker of cheese has been forgotten, she can’t help herself: She picks it up again and slips it into her bag.
The Beach
7:54 PM
Outside the restaurant, the sky is now a deep pink, turning the trees and the lampposts and the pitched roof of the train station into silhouettes. Together, they wander over to Aidan’s car, which is parked at an angle on the street, and then the four of them stand in a little semicircle around the hood, as they’ve done so many times before, waiting for someone to decide in what direction the night will go.
Usually, there are more of them, arguing about what should come next. But over the past couple of weeks, the rest of their friends have scattered across the country, setting out from their little suburb of Chicago in a dozen different directions like the spokes of a wheel: Caroline to Texas, Will to Ohio, and Elizabeth to North Carolina; Georgia left ages ago for a freshman-orientation wilderness trip in upstate New York, and the twins, Lucia and Mateo, had driven out to Stanford on their own, leaving time to see some sights along the way. Then, earlier this week, they’d lost most everyone else when the University of Illinois started up, dozens of their friends all migrating south at once.
“It’s kind of weird, isn’t it?” Clare asks, slipping her hands into her pockets.
Stella nods, her eyes fixed on the sidewalk. “And then there were four…” she says, and they all grow silent. Though dusk hasn’t yet given way to dark, the streetlamps above them snap on, casting long shadows across the sidewalk.
Finally, Scotty clears his throat. “So what’s the plan?”
“There’s not much going on,” Stella says, digging her phone out of her purse and scrolling through her texts. “Pretty much everyone’s gone already. But apparently Andy Kimball’s having people over later. And Mike Puchtler and those guys are going bowling. They said we could meet up, if we want.”
“And if all else fails, we could always go hang out in my backyard,” Scotty says. “Just for a change of pace.”
“You have a backyard?” Clare asks in mock disbelief, since they ended up there pretty much every single night this summer, eating his mom’s home-baked cookies beneath the starry sky as the clock wound down on another evening.
“Actually,” Aidan says, thumping the hood of the car, and everyone turns to him, “I think we’re gonna head out on our own.”
Scotty’s face falls, and he stares at his best friend. “So… this is it?”
“Yeah, what happened to quality time?” Stella asks, frowning at Clare. “You’re gonna leave me alone with this clown on our last night together?”
“No,” Clare says quickly, over the sound of Scotty’s protests. “Just for a little while. We still have some… talking to do. But we’ll meet up with you guys later for sure.”
“Right,” Aidan says. “We just have to make a few stops first.”
Stella laughs. “Let me guess: Clare made a list.”
“Clare made a list,” Aidan agrees with a grin.
“Pro and con?”
“More of a schedule for the evening, actually.”
“Hey,” Clare says, frowning at them. “How else are we supposed to figure this out?”
Scotty rolls his eyes. “Yeah, it’s not like there’s any way you could have seen this whole college thing coming. It must’ve really snuck up on you.”
“It’s not that,” Clare says, glancing at Aidan, and when their eyes meet, he smiles almost without meaning to, which is the kind of smile she loves best: It’s like a sneeze, a reflex, a twitch, helpless and automatic, and it only happens when he looks at her.
“It’s more that we can’t exactly seem to agree,” he says, holding up his wrist to show them all his watch. “And I’ve only got, like, ten hours left to convince her. So no time to waste.”
“But we’ll call you later,” Clare says as she gets into the car. When Stella gives her a skeptical look, she adds, “Double-pinky promise.”
“You know who probably doesn’t accept double-pinky promises?” Stella asks, walking over to rest her elbows on the open window. “Beatrice St. James.”
Clare can’t help laughing at this. “Which is why I’m so lucky to have you.”
“You really are,” she agrees. Then her face rearranges itself so that she looks more sincere than usual. She glances quickly behind her, then back at Clare. “Hey,” she says, leaning in close, her voice a low whisper. “Good luck, okay? And listen…”
Clare tilts her head to one side, waiting.
“I know I might have said that I thought it would be crazy for you guys to try staying together…”
“Just once or twice.”
“But,” Stella continues, then pauses and licks her lips, “but… I don’t know.”
Clare stares at her. I don’t know is not a phrase she usually associates with Stella, who is much more prone to statements like I told you so or Trust me or Here’s the plan.
“I mean, what you guys have… it’s pretty cool.” She twists to look over her shoulder, to where Aidan and Scotty are talking a few feet away. “So, I don’t know anymore. I guess… I guess I’m just saying that I have no idea what you should do.”
“That’s very helpful,” Clare says, patting her hand. “Thanks for the pep talk.”
In spite of herself, Stella laughs. “Sorry.”
“No, it’s fine. It’s great, actually. I’ve missed getting to talk to you about this stuff lately, especially since it’s been so hard to figure out—”
Behind Clare, the driver’s-side door is flung open, and Aidan drops into the other seat, looking over at both of them with an expectant smile.
“Ready?” he asks, and Clare gives him a startled nod.
“We’ll see you guys later,” Stella says, tapping the car door once before stepping back to stand beside Scotty, who lifts a hand.
“Yeah,” he says cheerfully. “Hopefully you’ll still be speaking to each other by then.”
Clare waves back, but the words send a little jolt through her. She realizes that he’s right. The next time she sees them, there’s a pretty good chance that she and Aidan will have broken up, and everything will be different.
“You ready?” Aidan asks, turning the key in the ignition.
Clare looks out through the dirty windshield, watching as Stella and Scotty walk off together, and then she nods.
“Ready.”
As they drive, the headlights cut through the bluish dusk, sweeping across the town square and the train station, the library, and the park with its statue of a deer, stoic beneath a coat of blue graffiti.
Aidan is sitting low in the seat, one hand on the wheel, the other twisting the dial of the radio. He doesn’t have to ask the reason behind the next stop. They’ve been there together so many times that the drive feels almost mechanical, as if they’re not so much steering as being pulled in the direction of the beach.
Clare plays with the edge of her seat belt, where the fabric is frayed, twisting a loose thread around her finger. She can’t stop thinking about what Scotty said. For years, she’s been planning every aspect of her life—college essays and applications, extracurricular activities and sports, volunteering and homework—with an eye toward leaving for college. Yet somehow, she hadn’t managed to prepare herself for leaving Aidan, which feels so much bigger than the rest of it.
They’ve known for months that they’ll have to part ways tomorrow. No matter what they decide about the future—stay together or break up—it doesn’t change that. At six thirty tomorrow morning, Clare will start the long drive to New Hampshire with her parents, and just a few hours later, Aidan will be on a flight to California.
But now that it’s so close, she realizes just how deeply she’s misjudged the distance; for a long time, it had felt like something way out on the horizon, this moment, something she had to squint to make out, so far away it didn’t seem quite real. Until now, when it’s suddenly hurtling toward them at an impossible pace, so swiftly that it doesn’t matter whether or not Clare is ready for it. There’s no preparing at this point. There’s only steeling yourself. There’s only hoping for the best.
She leans back against the seat, letting her head roll to the side. “I wish you were driving me,” she says, and Aidan glances over at her. The radio has landed on a bluegrass station, and the sound of a guitar rises and swells in the otherwise quiet car.
“Isn’t that what we’re doing?”
Hello, Goodbye, and Everything in Between Page 3
