Because he’s no longer Clare’s. And she’s no longer his.
The thought wrenches at something inside her, makes her knees go a little wobbly as she leans back against the blue wallpaper in the foyer.
She tries to force her mind in a different direction, far from California, all the way over to New Hampshire, where in spite of everything she’s feeling at the moment, and in spite of how difficult it is to imagine from where she’s standing right now, it’s possible that there could be someone else waiting for her, too.
It might even be someone better—at least in theory—someone more suited to her than Aidan: the kind of guy who keeps a list of all the books he can’t wait to read, who likes to watch something other than sports, who thinks a color-coded calendar system is kind of brilliant.
After all, it’s not like she and Aidan have ever been perfect. They’ve never even been all that logical, in some ways. There are almost certainly better matches for both of them out there somewhere. So maybe this is just the way their story is supposed to go. Maybe, like her parents, this was all just a mistake they needed to make on their way to finding the one.
Maybe.
But that doesn’t make it any easier.
A new song comes on over the speakers, and Clare pushes off from the wall, rising onto her tiptoes and looking toward the kitchen. She’s debating whether to go find Aidan—who has yet to return with her drink, whether because he’s still talking to that girl or because he forgot about it entirely; she isn’t sure she wants to know—when someone puts a hand on her elbow. She turns to find one of their classmates, Anjali, smiling up at her.
“Hey,” she says, holding up her cup for a toast, but she lowers it again when she realizes Clare doesn’t have one. “When do you take off?”
“Tomorrow,” Clare tells her. “You?”
“Not till next weekend, actually. Yale starts on the later side. I think I might be the last man standing.”
Reflexively, Clare glances toward the doorway where Aidan disappeared. “You excited?” she asks, forcing herself to turn back to Anjali.
“Totally,” she says. “And you know how I swore I’d never take math again after a whole year with Mr. Mitchell? Well, I actually got into this special economics program, so it looks like it’s more statistics for me. What about you? Have you figured out your major yet?”
“Uh, we don’t have to declare until sophomore year,” Clare says distractedly as someone pushes past her. She presses her back up against the wall. “Lucky for me.”
“Same with Yale, but I feel like most people already sort of know what they want.”
“Well, not me,” Clare says a little too brightly. “I still have no clue.”
“Oh, come on,” Anjali says with an encouraging smile. They’re the same type of person, cut from the same mold. They’ve been in all the same honors classes for as long as Clare can remember, have gone head-to-head in GPA rankings, and have worked alongside each other at countless bake sales and soup kitchens and student council meetings. They’ve spent all of high school working hard and making plans, and now they’re supposed to go off to college and jump headlong into whatever comes next.
Only Clare has no idea what that is yet.
“You’re gonna have a million options,” Anjali is saying, but Clare just stares at her.
“I don’t know,” she says. The room suddenly feels much too warm, and she wipes at her forehead. “I don’t… everything’s really up in the air right now. I guess…”
Anjali is watching her expectantly.
“I guess I’m just feeling a little lost.”
“Oh,” Anjali says, clearly surprised. “Well, that’s okay.”
“Do you mind if I… ?” Clare pauses to lick her lips. “Sorry, I just…”
Anjali steps aside to let her pass. “Sure, yeah. Of course. Good luck with everything if I don’t see you.”
The bathroom is just at the other end of the foyer, and after pushing her way through a group of underclassmen huddled around a video that’s playing on someone’s phone, Clare’s relieved to find that it’s empty. Someone has left a red cup on the sink, and the roll of toilet paper is unraveled on the tile floor, but otherwise, it’s not in bad shape for a party like this.
The idea was just to escape, but she realizes now she actually has to go, and when she’s done, she splashes some cold water on her face, then pauses to study herself in the mirror. It’s about eleven thirty now, but it feels much later, and she realizes how exhausted she is. It seems like a million years ago that she told Aidan there would be no sleeping tonight, that they only had so much time left, and they had to make it count. Now, all she wants to do is curl up and go to bed.
When she opens the bathroom door, she’s surprised to find the foyer is nearly empty now. But there’s cheering coming from the direction of the backyard. She hurries through the kitchen, where a few people—unbothered by the commotion—are still sitting around the table playing cards, and then out past the living room and onto the patio, where the rest of the party seems to be bunched into a loose, shifting circle.
From where she’s standing, a few feet back, Clare can tell it’s a fight—the heavy thwack of landed punches, the jeering and shouting, the scraping of sneakers—but it’s not until she pushes her way through the huddle that she realizes, with a shock, that it’s Aidan and Scotty.
Aidan’s head is low; he’s got Scotty tucked in a headlock with one arm, and he’s using the other to pummel him. It almost looks to Clare like they’re just messing around, the way they so often do, and for a half second she lets herself believe it’s true. But then she sees Scotty’s face, which is red and distorted, and Aidan’s, his teeth gritted and the vein on his forehead standing out.
As she watches in horror, Scotty twists free, swinging out and landing a punch squarely across Aidan’s cheek. The smacking sound it makes, bone-crunching and solid, sets her heart racing. But Aidan barely reacts; he rocks back on his heels, then lurches forward again, landing a punch that cracks the side of Scotty’s glasses.
Around them, everyone is shouting, though it’s hard to tell whether they’re egging them on or trying to get them to stop. Clare catches a quick glimpse of Stella’s panicked face on the other side of the circle, her eyes flashing in the yellow light that’s spilling out from the kitchen. And then Scotty takes another swing, and before she can think better of it, Clare’s moving in their direction.
“Aidan,” she shouts as she comes up behind him, but he doesn’t respond. He doesn’t even look at her. He’s too busy staggering toward Scotty again. But Clare charges forward anyway, skidding to a stop right behind Aidan and reaching out to grab his arm, determined to end this before it can get any worse.
He shakes her off without even turning in her direction, his entire focus on Scotty, and so on her second try, Clare—still shouting for him to stop, determined to make him listen, though he’s so clearly unable or unwilling to hear her—loops both arms around his waist in a kind of backward bear hug, then yanks back hard.
Her only thought is to get him out and away, to break them up before one of them gets seriously hurt, but everything is dark and blurry and confused, and just as she starts to tug on him, a bright flare of pain explodes above her right cheek, and she stumbles backward in shock, her hands cupped around her eye.
There are a few seconds when nobody reacts; Aidan and Scotty stop to stare at her, and the rest of the crowd looks on dumbly, as if they’ve forgotten they’re not watching this on a screen, that they’re here and now and part of this, too. It’s so quiet they can hear the neighbor’s dog barking to go out, a car pulling into the driveway, the sound of glassed-in laughter from the living room.
But then the moment snaps, and everything happens fast.
Even before Clare can fully register what happened—that she got popped in the eye, either by Scotty’s fist or else Aidan’s elbow, it’s hard to know—Stella is there, taking her by the arm and leading her toward the kitc
hen.
Behind her, she can hear a flurry of panicked and excited voices, but above all the rest of them, Aidan and Scotty are shouting at each other.
“It was you,” Aidan yells, his voice filled with fury.
“Was not,” Scotty growls back at him, and then a few other people chime in, breaking them up yet again.
By the time they reach the kitchen, which Andy is busy clearing of people, Aidan and Scotty have trailed in behind Clare, their eyes full of worry as they hurry to her side, apologizing again and again.
“Get back,” Stella snaps at them as she guides Clare over to a chair at the blocky wooden table—still strewn with cards from an abandoned game—and they obey. Aidan retreats to the doorway just behind Clare, so that she can’t see him, and Scotty sinks miserably into a chair across from her, gingerly removing his broken glasses.
She can see now that one of his eyes is pink and puffy, his lip split wide open, and she twists to see if Aidan is hurt, too, but when she does, she feels the pain flare again behind her own eye, and Stella puts a hand on her shoulder, steadying her. Clare tries to mumble a few words of thanks, but Stella just shakes her head.
“Don’t move,” she says, then looks up at Andy, who is busy rooting around in the freezer. “Can you please hurry up?”
“There are no peas,” she calls out, looking only vaguely concerned about the situation at hand. She’s thrown enough parties to have dealt with just about everything, and this is not the first fight that’s happened here by a long shot.
“Any steaks?” Scotty asks.
“No,” Andy says, holding up a frozen pizza box. “Just this.”
Stella rolls her eyes and crosses the space from the table to the fridge in three long strides. “Regular ice cubes are fine,” she says, grabbing a bag of cups from the counter and dumping out the contents.
When she returns with the bag of ice, Clare still has a hand clapped firmly over her eye, which feels huge and bulging, like her palm is the only thing holding it in place. The whole side of her face is throbbing, and her eyelid feels thick and gluey, but she only registers all this in a distant way, numb and detached. She’s still too shocked to be truly in pain.
“Don’t I get one?” Scotty asks, pointing to the ice bag, and Stella glares at him as she drops into the seat beside Clare.
“I’m taking care of your collateral damage first.”
“I’m so sorry,” Scotty says to Clare for the millionth time, still shaking his head. “So, so, so sorry. We would have never—”
“Here,” Stella says, ignoring him as she gently pries Clare’s hand away from her face, replacing it with the ice pack, which stings at first, then—as she lets it settle there—starts to feel wonderfully cool, slowing the pulse that has sprung up somewhere behind her sore eye. “How does it feel?”
“Fine,” Clare says, distracted. She turns to look at Aidan, who is slumped against the doorway, his hands in his pockets. He looks utterly miserable, and not just because of the cut below his right eye, which is raw and red. “What the hell were you guys thinking?” she says to him, then glances back at Scotty, who’s wearing a slightly vacant expression.
“I don’t know,” he says, bringing two fingers to his lip and coming away with blood. He looks around for Andy, who seems to have drifted off, then reaches behind him for a napkin, dabbing at the cut. “It was stupid.…”
“You think?” Stella asks, raising an eyebrow.
Aidan steps around so that Clare can finally see him with her one good eye. “You know that I’d never…” he says, his voice desperate and strained. He scrubs at his face with his hands, and she can see that one of his knuckles is split open. There’s blood smudged across his fingers. “I’m sorry. I’m just… I feel terrible.” He brings a hand to his chest, looking pained. “I hate the thought that something we did—”
“You did,” Scotty says from across the table, still mopping at his lip with a napkin. “Something you did.”
“You started it,” Aidan says weakly.
“No way, dude,” Scotty says, shaking his head. “I was just joking around about your sister. Which, by the way, you’ve got to lighten up about. But you were the one who threw the first punch.”
Aidan flexes his jaw, but says nothing.
“And it wasn’t me who clocked you,” Scotty continues, his eyes moving to Clare. “I’m pretty sure it was Aidan’s elbow.”
“That’s not the point,” Clare says, feeling Aidan’s gaze on her. She lowers the ice, but when she catches Stella’s grimace at the sight of her eye, she shifts it back onto her cheek. “You guys are idiots for fighting at all.”
“It is the point,” Scotty says, sitting forward. “Because everyone’s always blaming me for everything, and I’m always the screwup around here. But it wasn’t me this time. It was your hothead boyfriend.”
Nobody says anything, and Clare looks over at Aidan, a move that requires her to turn her whole head. His left eye is nearly swollen shut now, but the rest of his face is completely ashen, and his mouth has fallen half-open.
He looks like someone has punched him all over again.
They stare at each other, weighing something invisible to the rest of the world, and then, finally, Clare tips her chin down.
“I’m not her boyfriend anymore,” Aidan says quietly, still watching Clare, and after a pause, she nods in agreement.
“He’s not my boyfriend anymore,” she echoes, but something about the way they’re saying it doesn’t make it sound quite real.
She sets the dripping bag of ice on the table, scattering a few of the cards, and forces herself to look at Stella, who is staring at her, wide-eyed and genuinely astonished.
“Wow,” she says, blinking a few times. “I’m gobsmacked.”
Clare can’t help smiling, though it makes her eye begin to throb again. “See? And you didn’t think you’d get to use it today.”
“There’s no other word for it.”
“You guys broke up?” Scotty says, looking from Aidan to Clare, then falling back into his chair. “I didn’t think you’d actually ever do it.”
Me neither, Clare thinks, trying to swallow the lump in her throat.
Beside her, Stella shakes her head in disbelief. “End of an era,” she says, a little wistfully, and Clare glances over at Aidan, who attempts a smile in spite of his sore eye.
“End of an era,” he echoes, and in spite of her sore heart, she smiles back at him, too.
The Dance
12:02 AM
Later, after the ice has melted and new bags have been made, after cuts have been cleaned and bandages pressed on, after the kitchen fills up again and the party resumes as if nothing ever happened, Aidan and Clare slip out to the empty patio together.
When they reach the spot where the fight occurred, they both stop. In the light from the kitchen windows, they can see a few drops of blood on the flagstones, and a small glinting sliver from Scotty’s broken glasses.
“Scene of the crime,” Aidan says, lifting his gaze. Stella fashioned him a thin white bandage out of some tape and gauze, and it sits just below his eye so that from a certain angle, it almost makes him look like a football player, or like one of those tourists with a needlessly thick layer of sunscreen.
But beneath all that, even in the shadows, Clare can see the regret scrawled across his face.
He scratches the back of his neck. “I really am sorry, you know.”
“I know,” she says. “I do. But I still don’t get it. What the hell happened?”
“I don’t know,” he says with a shrug.
“This can’t just be about your sister. That was over a year ago. And honestly, it wasn’t even that bad. There’s no way you can still be mad about it.…”
He’s doing his best to avoid her eyes, so Clare takes a step closer, putting an arm on each of his shoulders, forcing him to look at her.
“So what are you so upset about?”
“I don’t know,” he mumbles. “Yo
u and me, I guess. Tonight. Everything.”
“Yeah, but those aren’t reasons to use Scotty as a punching bag. You’ve been annoyed with him all night. How come?”
Aidan ducks away from her grip, walking to the edge of the deck, where he stands looking out over the yard. “I don’t know,” he says again, and when Clare walks over to join him, he sits down on the top step. “We used to always talk about California. Hanging out on the beach. Learning to surf. And now he’s staying here.”
“Yeah, but that’s not—”
“It would’ve been so easy, you know?” Aidan says, the words tumbling out in a rush now. “All he had to do was go to class more often. Read a book every now and then. Pay attention. He’s not an idiot. I mean, he is—but not in that way. All he had to do was try a little harder, and we could’ve been out there together.”
Clare swallows hard, hurt by the truth of it: that she’d wasted so much time thinking similar thoughts about Aidan and Harvard, daydreaming about the two of them together on the East Coast. While all that time, Aidan was wishing the same thing—only about Scotty.
“I don’t know,” he says, kicking at the stones of the patio and scattering a few acorns. “I guess I didn’t even realize I was pissed at him.”
“You’re not really,” Clare says, her face growing warm as she thinks about her own conversation with Stella earlier. “You’re just sad to leave. And you’re taking it out on him.”
Aidan shrugs. “It’s just that so much is about to change. It’d be nice if there was at least one thing that could stay the same, you know?”
It takes Clare a moment to find her voice. “I know. But then…”