And sure enough, when I pulled up in front of Winthrop, there Clark was, sitting on one of the picnic tables, reading a book, a big white dog waiting at his feet—the dog we walked every Sunday.
I got out of my car and walked toward him, glancing away from Clark and looking at Winthrop for just a moment. I saw the statue differently now. I’d decided that he wasn’t pointing to anything or anyone. Now all I could see was that he was reaching out his hand to someone. For me that explained the expression on his face that I’d never quite been able to understand before.
He was hopeful and nervous and scared and a little bit proud of himself for doing it—extending his hand to someone, not knowing if they’d take it. This was, I had realized, one of the scariest things of all, requiring much more courage than sailing across an ocean and landing on an unknown shore.
At least that’s what I saw. Clark and Tom’s new theory was that he was a time traveler who’d somehow been transported to the past and was just trying to hail a cab.
We all still hung out by Winthrop a little—but we hadn’t done another scavenger hunt since Toby left the group. This was much to the dismay of a very cute college freshman who really wanted another chance to prove his quest skills.
Having a boyfriend in college, I’d learned, wasn’t that different from having a boyfriend at school with you—you didn’t have any teachers in common, but you could still do homework and complain about classes together. Clark was living in the dorms, finishing revisions on the book while he took classes. He was going to be taking a lighter course load in the spring, when his publisher planned a huge book tour.
Fan interest was already reaching a fever pitch, people clamoring to join a lottery to read the early copies. I’d already read most of it, and so had my dad and Tom, though we’d all been sworn to secrecy.
For the first few weeks after we’d gotten back together, I’d been worried that things might fall apart again, not sure that I was up to being in a real relationship, one with actual stakes and feelings and something to lose. But things were going really great, and I was trying to take it one day at a time, trying not to think about schedules or book tours or what would happen when I went to college. We would figure all that out later. But for now there was just Clark. Just the boy I loved.
“Hey,” he said, setting down his book and standing up when he saw me, as Bertie lunged toward me, tail wagging wildly.
“Hey,” I said, walking over to Clark, but Bertie got in the way, and I leaned down and scratched his ears, and under his chin, sending his back leg thumping. “Hi to you, too,” I said, stepping around Bertie and giving Clark a kiss. We lingered that way for a moment, and then he kissed my forehead and squeezed my hand.
“How was Toby?”
“She was good,” I said, smiling at him. “Ready?”
He slung his arm around my shoulders and I wrapped mine around his waist, tucking my fingers through his belt loops, and we started to walk, the dog leading the way, sniffing every available rock. “I was born ready.”
“Please don’t say that,” I said, shaking my head, and Clark laughed. “That sounds like something Tom would say.”
“Well, in that case, I’m going to say it all the time,” Clark said. He smiled down at me. “Where were we?”
“They were trying to cross the frozen lake,” I said immediately. “And Marjorie was telling everyone about frostbite prevention.”
“Oh, was she?” Clark asked, but I could hear the laughter in his voice. “Okay. So they’re about to cross the lake . . .” He paused, and I waited, knowing that any minute now he’d suggest a possibility, and we’d go from there.
And as it slowly started to get darker, we walked together, the leaves crunching under our feet, both of us tossing out ideas, trading off, adding a detail here and a moment there, as the world we were building unfolded and the story, without any end that I could see, continued on.