Aiden is late, so I’m sitting on one of the rusty old canoes behind River Depot, scrolling through photos on my phone. When I make it past the photos of me and Aiden out on the lake, and me and Emma in our red uniforms, and the glowing ruins, there’s a photo of me and Zander. Just a selfie, taken after a baseball game. It feels like a century ago that I was sitting on his bed, suggesting I move in with him senior year. The thought makes me realize that I may not even see him before I move. How weird is that, having loved someone for so long, and then they just drift away into the ether?

It makes me want to text him. To tell him all of the things I’ve been thinking about the last month—how much of a mistake we were. But when I think about texting him, I just jot it down in a note on my phone. Because I don’t need to open that door. When Aiden and Ellis come around the corner, I’m just finishing a note. Aiden is smiling as he run-walks down the hill toward me, barreling ahead in an almost uncontrolled way. He kisses me on the lips and then pulls me behind him toward the river, only pausing for a second. At the river, we come to a stop, still hand in hand.

Even though we’ve been hanging out—and kissing—for weeks now, it’s the first time he’s kissed me in front of anyone. And my face must show it, because he looks at Ellis and then me. “What?” He shrugs and smiles, his eyebrows pulled together in confusion and amusement.

“Nothing.” I smile, and shake my head, because it feels like we might have just had a very official couple-making moment. Did we? When Zander and I got together we had a talk. A really awkward talk that was way too long and was all my fault. Because I needed to know that we were making the jump from friends to a couple. That something official had happened when he kissed me that day. I needed confirmation that I wasn’t going to show up to school in two days and find him making out with some other girl in the hallway. But there’s nothing that makes me want to interrogate Aiden or ask him for a label. A tiny little voice in the back of my head reminds me that we don’t need one anyway, because I’m leaving in four weeks.

Unless something changes.