The Last Day Together

Moving Apart

Jules found out on a Tuesday, which felt wrong. Bad news should at least have the decency to arrive on a Monday, when everything was already terrible anyway.

"We got the house!" Mom had said, bursting through the front door with her arms wide open like she'd just won something. And Jules supposed she had. The house had a big backyard and a garage that didn't leak and was closer to Mom's new job. It was also seventeen miles away, which meant a different zip code, a different grocery store, and—the part that made Jules's stomach drop straight through the floor—a different school.

Jules had smiled and said, "That's great, Mom," because it was great, and because sometimes you can feel two completely opposite things in your chest at the exact same time.

That had been eleven days ago.

Now it was Saturday morning, and Jules was biking to Aarav's house for what might be the forty-thousandth time, though nobody had kept count. The route was automatic—left on Maple, right on Clearwater, straight past the mailbox that was shaped like a fish, then up the driveway where the basketball hoop leaned slightly to the left because Aarav's dad had installed it "with confidence but without a level."

Aarav was already outside, sitting on the porch steps with two granola bars and an expression that looked carefully arranged to seem normal.

"Hey," said Jules, dropping the bike on the lawn.

"Hey," said Aarav.

They had been best friends for four years, seven months, and roughly twelve days, starting from the afternoon in second grade when Aarav had laughed so hard at Jules's impression of their teacher's sneezes that chocolate milk had come out of his nose. They had been inseparable ever since—not in the way adults say it, meaning they were always together, but in the real way, meaning that being apart never lasted long enough to feel like anything.

Until now.

"So," Aarav said, handing over a granola bar. "Different schools."

"Yep."

"That's… gonna be weird."

"Yep."

They chewed in silence. A squirrel ran across the yard like it had somewhere important to be.

"My mom said we can still have sleepovers," Jules offered.

"My mom said the same thing. She also said we'd 'make new friends,' and then she made that face—you know, the one where she's trying to be positive but she looks like she's solving a really hard math problem."

Jules laughed—a real one—and for a second, everything felt exactly the way it always did.

"Okay," Aarav said, standing up and brushing crumbs off his shorts. "I have a plan."

"You have a plan?"

"I always have a plan."

This was technically true. Aarav was the kind of person who made plans for everything. He'd once created a seventeen-step strategy for catching a frog, which had ended with zero frogs caught and both of them soaking wet in a ditch. But still—he made plans.

"Today," Aarav announced, "we do everything."

"Everything?"

"Everything we always do. Our whole… thing. All of it. One day."

Jules squinted. "Why?"

Aarav shrugged, but it wasn't a careless shrug. It was the kind of shrug people do when they know exactly why but aren't sure how to say it. "I just want to see if it all still works."

So they did everything.

First, they went to Donovan's Deli, where Mr. Donovan had been giving them free pickle slices since third grade. He said it was because they were "good kids," but Jules suspected it was actually because they were the only customers who genuinely liked his pickles, which were sour enough to make your eyes water.

"Two pickle slices, please," Aarav said.

"You got it, gentlemen," Mr. Donovan said, and called them "gentlemen" the way he always did, which made them feel approximately forty years old.

They ate their pickles on the bench outside, making the same ridiculous puckered faces they'd made every single time.

"Still good," Jules declared.

"Still disgusting," Aarav agreed, reaching for another.

Next, they went to the creek behind the library, where they'd spent approximately nine hundred afternoons throwing rocks at a specific log that stuck out of the water. They had named the log Gerald in fourth grade for reasons neither of them could remember.

"Think Gerald will miss us?" Jules asked, skipping a stone that bounced once and then sank.

"Gerald doesn't care about us," Aarav said. "Gerald is a log."

"Harsh."

"Accurate."

They threw rocks for a while, not talking much, just doing the thing they'd always done. Jules landed a perfect skip—five bounces—and Aarav whooped so loud that a woman walking her dog on the path above them jumped.

"Sorry!" they both shouted, which made them laugh harder.

After the creek, they biked to the school playground—their school, Westfield Elementary—and sat on top of the monkey bars the way they'd done since they were finally tall enough to climb up without help. The metal was warm from the sun.

From up there, you could see the soccer field, the parking lot, the mural of a rainbow that the fifth graders had painted two years ago. Jules had done a section of the orange stripe. It was slightly crooked. Nobody had ever fixed it, and somehow that made Jules like it more.

"You're gonna be at Lincoln, right?" Aarav asked, staring out at the field.

"Yeah. Lincoln Middle."

"I looked it up. They have a robotics club."

"I don't know anything about robotics."

"You didn't know anything about frogs either, and you still helped me try to catch one."

"We didn't catch one."

"That's not the point, Jules."

They sat there, and the quiet between them wasn't empty—it was full of the kind of things you don't say out loud because you don't have the words yet. Things like: What if we change? What if I'm different there and you're different here and one day we just… don't get each other anymore?

Instead, Jules said, "What if it's not the same?"

Aarav didn't ask what it was. He knew.

He was quiet for a moment, swinging his legs so his sneakers tapped against the metal bar with a soft clang, clang, clang.

"Remember when I broke my arm?" Aarav said.

"Yeah. You cried in the nurse's office."

"I did not—okay, I did, but that's not the point. The point is, when I came back to school with my cast, you were the first person to sign it."

"I wrote 'This guy smells like pickles.'"

"And it was the best thing anyone wrote on that entire cast." Aarav paused. "Six weeks I was out. And when I came back, we just… picked up. Right where we were. Like nothing happened."

Jules turned this over. It was true. It had been easy, the way some things just are.

"Yeah, but six weeks isn't—"

"I know. It's not the same." Aarav looked at Jules. "But we're the same. That's gotta count for something, right?"

They spent the rest of the afternoon doing every remaining item on what Aarav had started calling the Master List of Jules and Aarav Things. They got slushies from the gas station—blue raspberry, always. They raced their bikes down Hilltop Drive, which wasn't a hill at all but a very gentle slope that felt fast if you pedaled hard enough. They sat in Aarav's backyard and tried to identify clouds, a hobby they'd invented one boring Sunday and never abandoned.

"That one looks like a dog," Aarav said.

"That one looks like Gerald," Jules said.

"Everything looks like Gerald to you."

"Gerald has a very distinctive shape."

By the time the sun was turning the sky orange and pink, they were lying on their backs in the grass, full of slushie and slightly sunburned. Jules's bike was still on its side by the driveway. Fireflies were just starting to flicker at the edges of the yard.

"So?" Jules said. "Did it work? Your plan?"

"What do you mean?"

"You said you wanted to see if everything still works. Does it?"

Aarav propped himself up on one elbow and looked around—at the yard, the leaning basketball hoop, the sky—like he was taking inventory of the whole day.

"The pickles were good. Gerald was there. Slushies were perfect. Cloud identification remains an elite hobby." He flopped back down. "Yeah. It all works."

"But I won't be here next Saturday," Jules said quietly. "Or the one after that. Not like this."

Aarav was quiet. A firefly blinked near his knee, then drifted away.

"Maybe not every Saturday," Aarav finally said. "But some Saturdays. And we've got phones. And bikes."

"It's seventeen miles."

"So we'll get really strong legs."

Jules smiled up at the sky. One of the clouds—the one Aarav had said looked like a dog—had stretched and shifted and now looked like something completely different. But Jules could still see the dog in it, if you tried. It was still in there, just rearranged.

"Hey, Aarav?"

"Yeah?"

"If I join the robotics club, I'm blaming you."

"You should. It was my idea."

"And if I build a robot, I'm naming it Gerald."

"Obviously."

They lay there until Aarav's mom called them in for dinner—both of them, because of course both of them—and Jules sat at the familiar table in the familiar kitchen with the familiar smell of Aarav's mom's dal, and everything was the same as it had always been.

Not forever. Jules knew that. Things were going to change—big things, soon, in ways that probably couldn't fit on any of Aarav's plans. There would be new hallways and new faces and lunch tables where nobody saved a seat.

But right now, tonight, there was dal and there was laughter and there was a best friend across the table who had chocolate milk come out of his nose in second grade and had been right there ever since.

Jules took a bite and decided that was enough to hold onto.

For now, and for whatever came next.