“No, I mean tomorrow. It would give us more time.…”
“Well, much as I’d love to whisk you away, I’m sure your parents would be disappointed not to take you.” He smiles, but there’s something hard in the line of his jaw. “I hear this is kind of a big milestone.”
Clare reaches over and rests a hand on his shoulder. “I’m sure yours would take you if you just asked,” she says, though she’s actually not certain that’s true. His parents had been crushed that he hadn’t gotten into Harvard, especially his father. He’d been the first one in his family to go to college, and for a poor kid from south Boston, getting a full scholarship to Harvard had been like going to the moon. He spoke of it constantly with the kind of reverence usually reserved for church. To him, it was a magical place, one that had opened every door of opportunity for him, and it was his greatest wish that his son follow in his footsteps.
Aidan, on the other hand, was nothing but relieved by the rejection. He’d never had any interest in Harvard, with its cloistered buildings and hallowed halls and snow-covered paths; there was too much history there, too many expectations. He’d always wanted a place with sunshine and parties and cheering stadiums, a school that was thrumming with life and activity, somewhere big enough for him to make his own memories.
After a recruiting trip last fall, where he met with the Harvard lacrosse coach and took a tour of the campus, Aidan had returned even more set against it.
“You should’ve seen my dad,” he’d told Clare when he got back. “He had this goofy smile on his face the whole time. And when we went to watch a practice? It was insane. He’s never asked me a single thing about lacrosse, not ever, and then all of a sudden, the way he was talking to the coach, you’d think he was a lifelong fan.”
“Yeah, but what did you think?” Clare had asked.
Aidan shrugged. “It’s not for me.”
“How do you know?”
“I just know,” he said simply. “How do you know you want a small liberal arts school?”
Clare shook her head. “I just do.”
“Exactly.”
She knew he was right. There was a certain amount of gut involved in this decision to launch yourself into some random part of the world, blindly charging headlong into an entirely new life. She’d always known she was bound for the East Coast in the same way Aidan had always been headed west: instinctively and without logic.
But his father had never wanted to hear it, and when Aidan hadn’t gotten into Harvard, he couldn’t hide his disappointment. He’d always figured his son would come around to the idea of it. But really, he should have been worrying that Harvard would come around to the idea of Aidan.
There was no real reason why he shouldn’t have been accepted: His grades weren’t spectacular, but they were surprisingly good, given his lack of effort, and he was a legacy, not to mention a highly sought-after lacrosse player.
Still, he hadn’t gotten in.
Which was more than okay with Aidan.
But he knows all too well that if he were headed to Cambridge tomorrow, there’s no doubt his parents would be driving him there, giddy and excited. Instead, he’s going to the school of his dreams. But he’s doing it all alone.
When he shrugs, Clare’s hand slips off his shoulder.
“You know it was always Harvard or bust with them,” he tells her.
“Well, maybe it’ll be better to say goodbye at the airport anyway,” she says, her voice a little too bright. “You’d probably look a lot less tough if you showed up to the first day of practice with your parents.”
“Come on,” he says, relaxing his stiff-armed grip on the wheel and flashing her a little grin. “I’d look tough holding a teddy bear.”
She can’t help laughing at this. He looks so earnest right now, his freckles lost in the dark, his eyes big. With his red hair and round face, his lanky, too-tall frame, he always seems to Clare a bit like a teddy bear himself. So it’s sometimes disconcerting when she watches him on the field, dodging and checking, twisting and attacking, sprinting to beat defenders to the goal. It’s beautiful, in a way, seeing him like that, powerful and agile and surprisingly quick. But she’s always a little relieved when he removes his helmet at the end of the game, and he’s just Aidan again, pink-cheeked and sweaty and happy to see her.
“You’d look tough even if you had two teddy bears,” she assures him, giving his arm a little pat.
As they near the lake, the houses start to get bigger, sprawling mansions set back on enormous lawns. It’s such a far cry from their end of town—where the lots are the size of postage stamps, and the houses sit shoulder to shoulder—that it almost feels like they’ve traveled from somewhere a lot farther away.
With her window rolled down, Clare can already hear the rush of waves from the beach below. Aidan turns onto the drive that leads down to the lake, a winding road that cuts a path along a ravine, and when they reach the bottom, there’s nothing but the water and the sand and a narrow strip of parking lot dotted with a few scattered cars.
They park and walk out along a stone path, moving away from the pavilion with the picnic tables and grills, and the playground, which stands quiet now in the dusk, and out toward where the length of sand is wider and a little bit rougher. The sky is streaked with orange, bright against the violet backdrop, and the water is golden in the last of the light. Clare’s breath hitches in her throat at the sight of it.
“I’m going to miss this,” she says as she slips off her sandals. Beside her, Aidan is kicking off his sneakers, so that they go arcing out onto the beach. They step off the path, their bare feet sinking into the sand, to collect them again.
“I’ll still be pretty close to the water, I think,” he says as they begin to walk toward one of the enormous piles of boulders that act as breakers against the waves, jutting out over the lake in regular intervals along the coast.
“You think?” she says, staring at him. “Haven’t you looked at a map?”
Aidan shrugs. “I figured it would be better if it’s all a surprise.”
“All? Have you even read any of your orientation stuff?”
“I looked at some of the lacrosse packet,” he says, and before she can reply, he gives her a hard look. “You sound like my parents.”
“Unfair,” she says, stopping abruptly.
He slings an arm around her shoulders, drawing her close, and they half stumble forward again in the soft sand. “Sorry,” he whispers, his mouth close to her ear. “I’m just…”
“I know,” she says, circling an arm around his waist.
They climb the rocks together, stepping carefully where the waves have made the surfaces dark and slick, and once they’ve reached their spot, they sit together with their feet dangling off the edge.
Far out in the water, they can see the winking light of the tall yellow weather buoy, which was put in a couple of years ago to send environmental data back to a lab somewhere in Indiana. With its broad base and skinny top, and the sensors that appear more like googly eyes than anything else, it looks to all the world like a drowning robot, and they’ve grown rather fond of it over the years, dubbing it Rusty after a lively discussion about the effect of salt water on metal.
Worrying over Rusty’s well-being has become one of their favorite pastimes, and last summer Scotty suggested that someone should swim out and give the poor guy a life jacket or an inner tube or something. A few of them made a halfhearted attempt, but the buoy was a pretty long way from the shore, and nobody was quite committed enough to the joke to go the full distance. Still, every time they went down there, someone inevitably brought it up again, and the challenge was passed around once more as they wondered who would finally save poor Rusty.
Now Aidan squints out at the buoy, which flashes white against the pale line of the horizon. “Guess he’ll have to live without us for a little while.”
“I have a feeling he’ll make it.”
Aidan turns to look at her. “I think
this is my favorite stop yet.”
“That’s just because it’s the first one you actually remember,” she points out, and he laughs.
“True,” he says, scooting closer. “But I’m in it more for the reenactment.”
“You can’t replicate a first kiss,” Clare tells him, glancing back over her shoulder to where everything had started that night, the night of the bonfire. It wasn’t any sort of special occasion, just a small party, a spontaneous gathering of friends and acquaintances, with a blazing fire at the center of it all that threw off sparks in the night and made everything hazy and indistinct.
Clare had lost Stella only moments after arriving, so she’d wandered over to the cooler on her own, but once she got there, she hesitated. It was a bitter autumn night, teetering on the edge of winter, and the heat from the fire wasn’t enough to warm her all the way through. She was still standing there, trying to decide whether or not she actually wanted a cold drink, when Aidan stepped up and plunged a bare hand into all the ice, fishing around for a can and then handing it to her with a gallant smile.
“Thanks,” she’d said, holding the can between her blue mittens. “Though if you’re gonna play bartender, you really need some gloves.”
He glanced down at his hand, which was raw and red and still dripping, and then, without thinking, without even realizing what she was doing until it was done, Clare had reached out and cupped his hand between her own.
Their eyes met for a startled moment, and then he smiled.
“Much better,” he said. “Thanks.”
After that, they’d started talking—about what? She can’t even remember now—and soon they were walking down toward the water together, daring each other to stick a toe in, though it was much too cold.
“Isn’t it kind of cool that there’s all this sand, but each grain is totally different?”
Aidan gave her a funny look. “Guess I must not have been paying attention that day.”
“What day?”
“In Earth Science,” he said. “I have a habit of daydreaming.”
“Oh,” she said, shaking her head. “No, I actually read that somewhere else.” She stopped walking and lifted a finger, pointing up at the sky. “I also read that there are even more stars than there are grains of sand in the whole world. Isn’t that crazy?”
He was looking down at her with a mystified expression, and Clare bit her lip, feeling a little self-conscious. She’d spent enough time watching Aidan over the last few weeks to know that a guy like him probably wouldn’t go for a girl who read science magazines in her spare time, and the wheels in her head spun frantically in an effort to find some other topic of conversation, something he’d be more interested in.
But then he bent down and scooped up a handful of sand, sifting through it with his thumb. She could see his lips moving, see that he was murmuring under his breath as he stared at the grains in his palm. After a little while, he looked up again.
“That is pretty crazy,” he said, and she felt a wave of relief.
“Right?”
He cupped his hand, then tipped it to one side, letting the sand pour back out onto the beach. “There’s got to be, like, thousands just right there. And that’s only one handful. From one beach. In one town. In one state. In one country. That means there must be about a zillion stars.” He tilted his head back to take in the speckled sky with wide eyes, then laughed. “I mean… wow.”
“Yeah,” Clare said, unable to keep from smiling as she watched him. “Wow.”
Eventually, they clambered up onto the rocks, continuing to talk until it was late—too late—and the fire behind them had died out, and everyone else had drifted back to their cars. Being there with him, it felt like no time at all had passed, but at some point, Clare heard her name shouted from a distance, the words made thin by the chilly breeze. She half turned in that direction, but just as she was about to get up, just before she could leave, Aidan leaned over and kissed her, and the surprise of it was enough to warm her straight down through her toes.
Even hours later—after he walked her back to the car and she finally let go of his hand, after she told Stella on the ride home what had happened, after she crawled into bed and lay there staring at the ceiling, reliving the whole night again—she felt all lit up inside. Some unseen part of her, which had only ever been lukewarm, was suddenly blazing.
She smiles at him now, still half-caught in the memory.
“It was perfect,” she says. “Nothing will ever come close.”
“Nothing?” Aidan says with mock horror. “You’re telling me that none of the thousands of other kisses we’ve had over the last couple of years have compared? I mean, if I’d known that, I wouldn’t have been trying so hard.”
She gives his chest a little shove. “You weren’t trying that hard.”
“Hey, that was some of my best stuff,” he says. “Remember that time we made out in the coat closet at Andy’s party? Or that night in the park?” He pauses for a second, and then his face brightens. “Or that kiss we had in your basement?”
“Which—”
He cuts her off with a grin. “You know which one.”
“Oh,” Clare says, blushing a little. “Right.”
“So you’re saying none of those were better?”
“They were all great. They just weren’t the first. Firsts are always the ones that last. You know?”
Without warning, he brings his face to hers, but when their lips meet, there’s too much momentum behind it, their depth perception lost in the gathering dark. He cups the side of her face with his hand—the way they do in the movies—which is something he’s never done before, not once in all the time they’ve been dating, making the whole thing feel off somehow, theatrical and staged and too full of effort.
When she pulls back a bit too abruptly, he looks wounded.
“What?”
“Nothing,” she says. “It’s just—I think you’re trying too hard to make it special.”
“I thought that was the point of all this,” he says, his voice resigned. “I thought we were supposed to be reliving all the big moments.”
“We are,” she says. “But we’ve got to talk about the future, too.”
He doesn’t respond to this, only shifts away from her a little so that he’s fully facing the water. Ahead of them, the sky is still painted orange at the very edge, while heavier clouds are gathering at their backs, bringing with them the smell of rain.
“Look,” Clare says finally, after a few minutes have passed in silence. “You know how I feel about you.…” When he doesn’t respond, she clears her throat, more insistent this time. “Aidan. You know that, right?”
He nods, his jaw set.
“But I just… I think we might have an expiration date.” The waver in her voice surprises her; it’s not the first time she’s said this, but still, it hovers between them, clattering and definitive. “And we need to talk about it.”
“Can’t we wait just a little longer?”
“We can’t keep putting it off.”
“I bet we could,” he says with a hint of a smile. “I’m really, really good at putting things off.”
She smiles, too. “That’s true.”
“How about this?” he says, turning to her, his eyes hopeful. “Let’s pretend—”
“Aidan.”
“No, hear me out. Let’s pretend—just for a few minutes—that we’re both going to the same place tomorrow.”
“Yeah?” she says, and he tucks her under his arm, resting his chin against the top of her head, so when he talks, she can feel the vibration of it, low and gravelly.
“Yeah,” he says. “The way I see it, we’ll meet up every morning and go to the dining hall together, and we’ll eat awful bacon and cold eggs and catch up on our work. Then we’ll walk to class—you to some Advanced Theory of Something-or-Other and me to Intro to Beginner’s Goofing-Off-for-Jocks—and then afterward, we’ll hang out on the quad, and I’ll be play
ing guitar—”
“You’re tone-deaf,” she points out, and he shrugs.
“Yeah, but we’re just pretending, and that’s what everyone does on a quad.”
“Okay, what else?”
“We’ll go to the library together every night, and you’ll study while I throw little balled-up pieces of paper at you and mix up all your color-coded sticky notes.”
“I don’t have—”
He leans to give her a stern look. “Yes, you do. You totally have color-coded sticky notes. And highlighters, too.”
She rolls her eyes. “Fine.”
“And we’ll eat ramen noodles for dinner and sneak into the bars together and go to boring lectures and watch a million movies on Sunday afternoons. And we’ll have roommates who are never there, so we can sleep over every night, all cozy on those tiny dorm room beds, and we’ll wake up every single morning just like this,” he says, tightening his arms around her. “All tangled up together.”
Clare closes her eyes. “Why…” she begins, then trails off, her voice unexpectedly full of emotion. “Why didn’t we just decide to do that?”
“Because we agreed that we have to live our own lives,” he says a little sadly. “And I get that. I do. But it doesn’t mean we can’t still be together.”
“Yeah, it does,” she says, sitting up a little, feeling like she’s just awoken from a deep sleep. She swivels around so that they’re facing each other. “’Cause that’s the thing—we won’t actually be together. We’re going to have three thousand miles between us.”
“Right, but—”
She shakes her head. “And it’s more than just the distance,” she tells him. “You know it is. Nobody survives this kind of thing. You pretend it’s going to work, and you make all these promises, and then you talk on the phone every night and text each other between classes and maybe manage a visit during fall break or something. But then everything’s awkward, because so much has changed, and you don’t fit into each other’s lives anymore. And then the cute guy from down the hall shows up to say hi, and even though he’s just a friend, you get jealous, and we get into a fight, and then you take off, and I leave you a million voice mails, and send you a thousand long and wordy e-mails, but you’re still bitter, so you go hook up with some random girl, which I hear about somehow, because let’s be honest, you always hear about these things somehow, and then I’m furious, because me and the cute guy were only friends, but what you did was unforgivable, and so it’s over, just like that, and then we have to see each other at Thanksgiving, at some party or at the bowling alley or even at Scotty’s house, and you end up standing in the corner looking all forlorn, and I’m stuck whispering to Stella in the other corner, and worse than that, there’s just all this stuff between us, jealousy and resentment and bitterness, and it’s awful, because there used to be nothing between us, and not in a bad way, but in the best way, because we never had any space for that kind of stuff, but now it’s there, and there’s no changing that, and the whole thing just ends up being sad and awkward and inevitable and totally, horribly, completely heartbreaking. And who wants that?”