“It’s hanging over us, isn’t it?” She glances from the road to meet my eyes briefly. “We’re not talking the way we usually do because we know tonight will be goodbye.”
It’s one thing to understand we’re probably dreading the same parting moments, the imminent end of us. It’s something else entirely to hear her put the feeling into words, not to mention with such effortless, immediate efficiency. I know I’ve presumed our relationship will end with this trip, but truthfully, we haven’t had the conversation.
“Will it?” I ask. “Be goodbye, I mean?”
Juniper’s confidence softens into something delicate. “A long-distance relationship in the final semester of our senior year doesn’t really . . .”
“I know,” I say.
I do know. I know this probably isn’t literally one of our final conversations. I know there’s texting. There’s social media. We could stay friends, stay in each other’s lives. It wouldn’t be the same, though, and honestly, it probably won’t happen. I know Juniper well enough to know she could never be content clinging to our one week together, memories drifting unreachably into her past.
I muster a smile, hoping to trick myself into being okay with this. “You were saying something about getting goodbyes out of our systems?”
Juniper nods, and I can practically feel her trying to recapture her cheerful momentum. “Whatever we’re planning on saying in Boston,” she explains, “let’s say it now. That way we’ll have the goodbye behind us. We won’t have to dwell on it during this entire drive.”
I’m not convinced the idea will work. That anything could banish our impending goodbye from my thoughts. But I’m willing to try. “Okay,” I tell her. “You go first.”
Her expression goes stony. “Fitzgerald Holton,” she says. “I did not expect to like you when we first met.”
I laugh, improbably. “Oh yeah. This is working. I’m feeling better already.”
Juniper swats my shoulder, permitting a laugh past her lips. Her dark-pink lips, which she chews when she’s making one of the million decisions her mind processes every day.
No. I won’t do this right now. I focus on her goodbye.
“But what I feel for you has gone past ‘like’ into . . . I don’t know,” she continues, earnest again. She watches the road intently, like she’s searching for something. The right description, maybe. “It’s something bigger,” she says. “I feel like I’ll carry your fingerprints on who I am for the rest of my life. I’m excited for the future. But this week with you has taught me I can still run toward what’s to come while holding on to the past. The boy I traveled down the coast with, the fights I’m glad I had with my family, the feeling of a kiss by a frozen waterfall. Everything.”
I say nothing, and not because of the conversation’s weight. I’ve told Juniper she changed me, and I will never forget the ways she opened my world. I had no idea I changed hers.
“I guess it’s a part of growing up I didn’t understand,” she says. “Who I am, the home I come from, they’ll never be gone even though they’ll never be the same. Hiraeth, right?”
She throws me a small smile. I try to return it, but hiraeth has pulled open torn edges I’m trying hard to mend. “The home you’re talking about only lives in memories,” I say. I hear the hurt in my voice. It’s impossible to hide. I didn’t want this conversation to veer into my mom’s health, and yet, I have a feeling it’s inescapable.
I have no doubt Juniper understands what I mean. She doesn’t reply for a moment.
When she does, her voice isn’t fragile or sympathetic. “You know,” she says, “I remember more about nearly everyone than they remember about themselves.”
I blink, thrown. I don’t understand why she’s changing the subject.
“Do you remember the first thing you said after we kissed?” She glances over, and in a half second of eye contact I catch the endless intensity I know well.
“What?”
“Do you,” she repeats, slower, “remember the first thing you said after we kissed?”