by Emily Layden
In the year since they’d last seen each other—since they’d met—his face has thinned out, a product of the several inches he has apparently grown in that same time. His skin is smooth and tanned, and he’s gotten a haircut. As she tries to parse all the things that are different about him from the Aidan she’d stored up in her memory and in her iPhone, it strikes her: he looks suddenly like a man.
He stands with two other boys, one about average height, the other still waiting for the growth spurt he’s long been promised, both with the distinct hunched-over thinness of runners, both in quarter-zip fleeces.
“Hey.”
“Hey.”
“This is Carter and Luke,” Aidan says, waving generally at the taller one and then the shorter one.
Chloe nods and smiles.
“Hey! I’m Brie,” her friend says, leaning forward and shaking Carter-and-Luke’s hands. Chloe marvels at her easy sociability. “So how was the drive?”
Brie guides them through the small talk: the drive was fine but long; the cross-country team is doing well but Carter is having an issue with his Achilles; they spent their summers on the Cape (Aidan) and the Vineyard (Luke) and in the Hamptons (Carter); they commiserate about SAT prep and the barely survivable workload of junior year. All the while, Chloe has the vague sense that Aidan is trying to catch her eye, trying to communicate something indelible to her and only her—she feels his eyes on her, the urgency of him, but is too nervous to meet his gaze. Or maybe—it seemed likely, even—she imagines it, because she has so inflated their non-relationship that she’s completely lost touch with reality.
But then Brie suggests they take a walk and Chloe stands from where she’s been sitting and slides in front of Aidan, who motions for her to go ahead of him and places his hand on the small of her back, gently, just for a second. She did not imagine it.
In the end it would seem obvious, like she should have pieced it all together: the lack of communication, the casual expectation, the furtive and hungry touching. And the way she never questioned it, never even threw a flirty-but-menacing barb his way; when she replayed the tape, later, the moment Aidan put his hand on her lower back, she’d turn and raise an eyebrow, as if to say, Excuse me? Even in her imagination, the best she could do was scowl.
As they wander through the food trucks and game stalls, balls clanging against tinny metal and carnival bells dinging, their fivesome naturally stretches out to a staggered line: Brie leading the way, chattering over her shoulder about the day, sometimes referencing her friend in the back (“Chloe always says these games are rigged—but that’s kind of the point, right?”); Carter and Luke behind her, mostly not talking but sometimes one of them holding up his phone in the cocked-elbow way boys do to add to their story; Chloe and Aidan bringing up the rear, Aidan a half step behind her but close enough for her to feel his warmth.
At some point—when they pause to take a picture, or as Brie is using her training as an Atwater tour guide to embellish upon the history of Fall Fest—Chloe stops short, and Aidan’s body bumps into hers. As he separates himself from her, Aidan takes her hips in his hands, gently placing them on the soft parts of her torso above the widest part of her pelvis.
“Whoops—sorry,” she mumbles over her shoulder, apologizing for the accidental touching but also just filling the space between them. She can still feel the exact places where his hands rested on her hips.
“My bad,” he says as she turns to look at him—still not squarely, still over her shoulder—and as they make eye contact he smiles with his lips shut. It is a smile that suggests that it was not his bad. “Hey, you want a cider?”
“Oh, yeah, I’d love one, thanks—”
Aidan’s body angles back toward the cider cart, as though he is motioning for them to walk in that direction together. “You aren’t going to make me walk back alone, are you?”
“What, you can’t carry two ciders?” Brie pops her head over Chloe’s shoulder, grinning widely. Chloe exhales for the first time since bumping into Aidan.
“Actually, no. I’m afraid this hand”—he holds up his left hand as though taking an oath—“is merely for show.”
Brie laughs. “Is that so?” Chloe has always been jealous of this, the way Brie can always play along, never missing a beat or filling her turn in the conversation with laughter instead of words.
“It’s true. It’s a rare congenital defect. My left hand is utterly incapable of carrying hot beverages.” He looks at Chloe sideways and raises an eyebrow. She feels herself smiling, almost automatically, as if Aidan’s smirk is itself infectious.
“I guess you’ve got to give the man a hand, Chloe.”
“Literally.”
“Hey,” Brie says, with mock severity, “don’t get any ideas.”
The boys laugh, and Chloe feels as though she missed the innuendo. Or maybe she was imagining it altogether.
Aidan motions toward the cart. “After you.”
It’s only awkward for a few steps, as Chloe runs through topics of conversation, abandoning each small-talk question as soon as it floats into her throat. She knows better than to bring up something they’ve texted about—nothing says I’m obsessed with you like quoting a nine-months-old text conversation. She takes her cues from Aidan’s own indifference.
The line at the cider cart is long, as it has been throughout the afternoon. At the end of the day, someone—the Dorm Parents, probably—will box up the leftover doughnuts and shuttle them around to the dorm common rooms, where they’ll stiffen and crumble and be picked over by dozens of noncommittal hands. It is almost enough to ruin cider doughnuts for a person.
“So,” he says as they sidle into the line, “where’ve you been?”
Chloe did not believe that boys actually said things like this, but here is one, saying it to her. She almost giggles; she bites the inside of her lower lip to halt the smile that threatens to crack across her face.
“What do you mean?”
He smiles and bumps his left hip gently into her right. “We stopped talking.”
She can’t help it. A single loud “Hah!” bursts from her mouth.
Aidan looks horrified. “What?”
“Nothing. I just—I guess it takes two to text.”
For the smallest of instants, Aidan’s eyes widen beneath raised eyebrows, and Chloe feels her face grow hot with the embarrassment of having said the wrong thing; of having been too loud and too aggressive and unvarnished.
“I just mean—” she begins, before Aidan holds up two hands.
“No, no, you’re right. My bad, too, I guess.” He smiles. “So can I buy you a doughnut and hear about all those texts you would have sent if I hadn’t been such a jerk?”
“Well, the doughnuts are free, so…” She trails off, feeling her heart quicken. Maybe she was getting it right, after all.
“Can’t sneak anything past you, can I?”
They grab their doughnuts and cider and make as if to head back toward their group, where Brie holds court among Aidan’s slouched-over friends, but as they walk Aidan tilts his chin across the Bowl in Whitney’s rough direction.
“You know, this is my third Atwater Fall Fest, and I’ve never had a tour. I don’t know what any of these buildings are.”
“Well, that one is Whitney—the upperclasswomen dorm. You’re not allowed in there, so don’t get any ideas.”
“Jeez, I didn’t think I was being so obvious.” He grins again, in that unnerving way of his: it seemed to tell Chloe she only thought she was in on the joke.
“You wouldn’t be the first visitor to make a beeline for Whitney,” she says, even though it isn’t exactly the truth, or at least not the truth based on Chloe’s experience.
“So how about an open-air tour, then? Exteriors only.”
For only the third or fourth time that afternoon, Chloe looks directly at Aidan, his dark hair gleaming in the perpetual gold of a fall day. There is something in the way he carries himself—the way he hunches his s
houlders but keeps his chin out and up—that makes her feel a little uneasy around him. But the truth is that Chloe always feels a little uneasy around boys, as if they can tell by looking at her that she has so little experience in the things that mattered.
But Chloe wants—needs—that experience, and the only way she is going to get it is by saying yes to a moment like this one, where she will be alone-but-not-really-alone with a boy she hardly knows for some extended period of time.
“Okay,” she says. “But you should know that it’s Brie who’s the official tour guide, not me.”
“I’ll keep my expectations low.”
As it turns out, Chloe is an okay tour guide. Somehow—certainly not by choice, certainly not intentionally—various Atwater trivia has seeped into her consciousness, so that she is able to embellish her tour with various historical and cultural anecdotes: there are the steam tunnels, long closed, of which there was originally only one, built so that women could sneak underground to the gym, which was originally built to look like a library so that visitors would never know that anything so untoward as women exercising was happening here; the arts building is named after a Gilded Age millionaire who, unburdened after her husband’s death, helped to finance the suffragists.
All the while, Aidan listens attentively, and Chloe is both unnerved and emboldened by his attention. She has never before had a boy really listen to her, and Aidan makes eye contact and nods his head at the appropriate times and asks questions that flow logically from the things Chloe has just said. As they walk, she notices that Aidan never once slips his hands into his pockets; he keeps them dangling at his side, and in her mind he is keeping them available—she imagines herself slipping her hand into his fleetingly, with the kind of panicked horror she sometimes imagines doing something wildly inappropriate in class, like shouting out in the middle of a test.
As they round the Bowl by Lathrop—and near the inevitable conclusion of their tour—Aidan’s walking slows until he brings them both to a stop. It is a natural moment to descend back into the heart of Fall Fest; ahead of them, the columned facade of Trask glows in the autumn light; to their right, a shadowed stretch of pavement leads to the head’s residence. Long, low piles of fallen leaves line the road like dunes, and Chloe thinks that she likes that they leave them there for Fall Fest. Later in the day, as golden hour sets in, girls will flock to Head’s Road for its highly Instagrammable background.
They are in the middle of a comfortable kind of silence, the sort of sleepy and satisfied quiet she shares with Brie on a Sunday afternoon, when Aidan suggests it: “Want to do the corn maze?”
He motions with a slight tilt of his head and shoulders across the road, where they can see the top of the corn beyond the fence. When she focuses her attention, Chloe can hear a vague chorus of shouts and squeals filtering up the hill from among the stalks. Here it is, she thinks, and she has to once again control a burst of crazed laughter—it was so easy. She wonders if this could be enough; she starts crafting the story she’ll tell herself later, after they walk back to their group, the one she’ll work up to legend, the one that will fit the narrative she’d created with Brie this year: he wanted to go in the maze with her; he definitely wanted to hook up; there was a reason he didn’t want to go back for their friends.
To her right, Aidan nudges her gently. “Don’t tell me you already did it. I heard that some of the girls race through it as soon as it’s finished.”
Chloe looks at him with mock horror. “Only the freshmen do that. How uncool do you think I am?”
Aidan laughs, and as he does so he wraps an arm around Chloe’s waist, squeezing her briefly. “Come on. Let’s give it a go.”
The sun has drifted low enough in the afternoon sky to bathe Atwater in a soft orange filter. It will feel like dusk inside the maze, where the corn is tall and dense enough to push time hours ahead. She checks her phone to see that it is a few minutes after three.
“Got somewhere better to be?” It occurs to her that Aidan is a little overeager about a stupid corn maze, but this will be something that sharpens only in hindsight.
“It’s supposed to be a surprise”—Chloe’s words come slowly, carrying the weight of all that she is debating—“but some of the girls are doing a flash mob at four. I don’t want to miss it.”
“How long do you think this will take us?!”
His joking puts her at ease. She is being stupid, doing what she always does: avoiding being alone with a guy not because she doesn’t want to be but because she is nervous. Her nervousness—her embarrassing lack of experience, she thinks with a hot stomach flip—is forever getting in the way. The only way past it is through it.
“Should we race?”
Aidan grins. “No way. It’s way more fun to argue about directions.” Like a real couple, Chloe thinks.
The air is cooler among the corn, and quieter, too—the walls on either side of them muffle the noise and flex gently with the breeze, bowing in and out above them. Chloe imagines the maze during the day, empty except for the occasional freshmen duo who race through it: How pure the labyrinth must be. For a while the maze presents no choices—left, then right, then left again—until they are what seems like a comfortable distance in, and an intersection appears.
They speak for the first time. “We’ll take turns?” Aidan offers.
“Seems fair.”
“Ladies first.”
Chloe scans her options. There is, of course, no telling which way is the right way. She tries to imagine herself above the maze—in the clock tower, she thinks—looking down on the road and the entrance and the exit. She has never been very good with directions; she remembers reading once that women tend to give directions by landmarks—left at the church, right by the drugstore, that kind of thing—whereas men tend to use street names and distances. She wonders which applies here.
They turn right.
“Interesting choice.”
Chloe raises a single eyebrow in his direction. “Would you have chosen differently?”
“Well, we went left, right, left. This right is heading deeper into the maze. If we had taken the left, we’d be doubling back, turning in on ourselves.”
She can barely follow what he says. Again, she has never been great with directions. “Do you want to go back?” It came out with more edge than she’d intended.
Aidan reaches out and brushes her hand, so quickly Chloe considers that he’s been looking for an opportunity to do it. “No. Let’s keep going.” He does not mention the hand touching, and does not linger that way for long.
Aidan chooses the next turn—left—and at a four-way intersection Chloe chooses straight, mostly because she doesn’t want to choose right and give Aidan the satisfaction of dictating her choices. The deeper they spiral into the maze, the quieter it becomes—the occasional shout or laugh rings out like a gunshot on a still-clear day—and the more time expands, filling the spaces between the stalks of corn, distorting Chloe’s sense of it. It feels simultaneously as though they have been wandering for thirty seconds and an hour. She is hyperaware of the boy next to her, the way he consumes the narrow pathways so that she has to walk slightly behind him or slightly ahead of him and the way he seems so much taller: she has the frenzied idea that he could just jump a few times and determine the correct direction.
Their conversation slows, winnowing to brief exchanges about progress. It seems natural. Chloe admires his focus. At the next intersection—is it the fifth or tenth?—Aidan gestures forward, through another straight. Like in the woods, sun sets inside the maze faster than it sets outside it, but Chloe is reasonably sure that straight leads to a dead end fifty yards ahead. She says so.
“No, I think it turns to the left. See the shadow?”
Chloe peers, and no, she doesn’t really see the shadow, but she recognizes the half smile on Aidan’s face and, anyway, she isn’t stupid. She knows why they came into this maze alone together, why neither of them had pushed to wait for their fri
ends. She feels the same cold-but-sweating flush she has come to expect when she is nervous, and stiffens against the light shaking that will set in.
“I think you’re wrong,” she says, in a tone she hopes is both firm and coy. She teeters on the knife’s edge.
“Only one way to know.”
Chloe sighs and shakes her head dramatically before stomping ahead of Aidan, affecting her annoyance to hide her nervousness. Within a few feet of the end, she turns and swings her arm in the direction of the alleged left turn. “See?”
Aidan slows his walk to a gentle sort of lumber. He is close, then closer, until his body is inches from hers. “See what?”
She almost laughs—she feels the giant ha! swell inside her chest—because it is so ridiculous how obvious he is now, his face almost slack with the other thing he’s interested in. She has the wild thought that she probably could have just asked Aidan to kiss her as soon as they got away from their friends, that she didn’t have to do this whole elaborate charade, that this was what he wanted all along.
The kiss is sloppy, teeth bumping, and once or twice Chloe tries to pull away but maybe doesn’t do it quite the right way and so Aidan thinks she is doing the thing they do in the movies, the pull-apart-teasing thing. He looks at her without really looking at her before lunging at her again. She moves her face against his until her jaw aches, until she can hear the hinges cracking at the back of her throat, and then places her hands gently on Aidan’s chest, one flat palm against each pectoral muscle, and pushes away.
He smiles at her. “That’s it?” He reaches for her waist, prodding her gently at her hip, then wrapping his hand more firmly around the softness above her pelvic bone.
“We’ve still got half a maze to get through,” Chloe whispers, and Aidan’s nose is against hers again, and this time there is less teeth and more tongue, both of them a little better with the rhythm but also, mostly—and Chloe thought this was the case but she couldn’t be sure, she hadn’t kissed enough boys to know—Aidan opens his mouth so wide, pushing his tongue so deeply inside hers, that there isn’t any risk of their teeth knocking. He is too busy trying to devour her.