“Yeah,” I murmured without thinking, replaying the night before in my head.
“Wait, what?” Toby asked, suddenly sitting up straight. She raised her sunglasses and looked closely at me. “Are you . . . and Dogboy . . . ?”
“Clark,” I said automatically.
Bri shook her head, starting to smile. “Andie, you are so busted,” she said. “I need details now.”
“Wait a sec,” Palmer said, eyes wide. “You guys haven’t done it yet, have you?”
Toby’s head whipped over and she stared at me.
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “But . . .” This was, after all, what I’d wanted to talk to them about. But also, once I talked to them about it, once I said the words and they became part of our conversation, I knew this would become real in a way it hadn’t been before. “But we’re talking about it. Like . . . happening-in-the-next-two-weeks talking about it.”
“Oh my god,” Palmer said, grabbing my arm and smiling at me. “That’s so huge.”
“I can’t believe you thought I would have done it without telling you,” I said, shaking my head. “Did you really think I would have forgotten to mention something that big to you guys?”
“I don’t know,” Bri said, her voice muffled as she dug in her bag for something. “Sometimes people don’t always tell each other every single thing. I mean—”
“Wait,” Toby said, talking over her as she looked around at all of us. “So this means all you guys are off, like, rounding the bases and I’m still in the dugout. I’m the person selling Cracker Jack in the stands.”
“This metaphor is getting weird,” Palmer murmured to me.
“You and Palmer are leaving me and Bri behind,” Toby said as she dropped her sunglasses down again and Bri started looking through her bag once more. “But after this, nobody can go off and have experiences without me. I’m falling way too far back.”
“So what’s the plan?” Bri asked, looking up from her bag. “Have you guys talked about it?”
I nodded, then hesitated. Something had been bothering me more than I ever would have let Clark know. “It won’t be his first time, though.”
“He’s done it?” Toby asked, looking shocked. “Way to go, Homeschool.”
“Yeah,” I said, taking a drink of my Diet Coke, which was mostly just crushed ice by now, then started to tell my friends about it. I’d suspected he had—he seemed to know a lot about the Colorado College dorms for someone who wasn’t spending a lot of time there. But when we crossed the line from “something that might possibly happen someday” to “something that’s actually going to happen in the foreseeable future,” Clark had told me about his ex-girlfriend and that they’d been pretty serious for a while. This had led to a night I wasn’t necessarily proud of, in which I’d googled “C. B. McCallister girlfriend Colorado College pretty” trying to get a visual on what his ex looked like, without success.
“Whoa,” Toby said, looking at me closely when I’d finished recounting the story, complete with embarrassing failed Internet stalking. “You really like him. Otherwise, you would have told us everything already, whether we wanted to know or not. And you wouldn’t care about his ex this much.”
I looked down at my cup, shaking it, like I could somehow get some more Diet Coke to emerge from the ice, wondering why I suddenly felt so much like I was going to cry.
“Andie,” Palmer said, her voice gentle and much quieter than usual, as she leaned closer to me, “it’s okay if you like him. It’s good.”
I nodded, even though I could feel that my lip was starting to tremble. This wasn’t even what I was getting upset about. It was something bigger, and so scary, that I was mostly avoiding thinking about it and hoping it would just go away. “I know that,” I said. “But . . . he’s leaving at the end of the summer.” I hated even saying it out loud, though it had been circling around in my head ever since I’d realized it the night of the scavenger hunt. Usually, end dates like this didn’t bother me. Usually, I loved them. But this was different. Clark was different. And I was starting to realize why all my three-week relationships had been so easy to get over—there was nothing at stake, so there was nothing to lose. And I knew that if we took this next step, if we went there, it would be that much harder when he headed back to Colorado.