Hello, Goodbye, and Everything in Between(17)
“Hi, Clare,” she says, a little breathless. “It’s nice to see you, sweetie.”
“Hi,” Clare says, searching for something to follow this. “We just…” She trails off, hoping for Aidan to fill the space, but he’s just standing there beside her with his head bent, his hands shoved into the pockets of his jeans. Nobody says anything, and Clare looks around at each of them in turn, completely lost.
“Aidan,” Mr. Gallagher says eventually, rubbing his forehead wearily with the heel of his hand. “I think we need a couple of minutes.”
Clare is so busy trying to work out what’s going on—the mysterious undercurrent of anger to the room and the feeling that everyone else knows something she doesn’t—that it takes a second for the words to register. When they do, she glances once at Aidan, who gives a little nod without meeting her eyes, then lifts her hand in an awkward wave to his parents.
“Sure, yeah,” she says, overly agreeable. “I’ll just go up and let Riley know we’re here.”
She hurries through the open door of the kitchen without a backward glance, then out into the front hallway, where she lingers for a minute, tempted to stay and listen. But the voices from the next room are low and hard to make out, and there’s a painting of St. Patrick gazing down at her with disapproval, so she turns to head up the stairs, taking them two at a time.
At the top, she pauses in front of Aidan’s room out of habit, taking in the familiar terrain: the piles of dirty clothes and the unmade bed, the teetering stacks of books and the collection of lacrosse sticks leaning like brooms in the corner. One of his Chicago Cubs T-shirts is twisted in a lump on the floor at her feet, and she stoops down to pick it up, burying her face in it, memorizing the smell of him, missing him already, though he’s just downstairs. She thinks about taking it with her, another souvenir for her collection, but she knows it’s one of his favorites, so instead, she folds it neatly and lays it gently on the edge of his bed, then continues down the hall to Riley’s room.
“Come in,” Riley calls brightly when Clare knocks, and she peeks her head around the door to find the younger girl sprawled out on her bed with a well-worn copy of the sixth Harry Potter book. She has the same auburn hair as her brother, but it’s long, even longer than Clare’s, and her red-framed glasses make her face look very thin. She’s only two years behind them in school, but she’s so slight and willowy, so earnest and enthusiastic, that she often seems much younger than that.
“Hey,” she says, scrambling up when she sees that it’s Clare. “Sorry, I didn’t realize you guys would be here so soon.” She grabs a gray corduroy bag from the floor and starts throwing things into it. “I’ll be ready in a minute, I swear.”
“It’s okay,” Clare says, closing the door behind her. “I think we’ve got some time, actually.”
Riley stops what she’s doing and looks up. “Oh,” she says, her face growing serious. “Yeah. I guess we probably do, huh?”
Clare takes a seat on the edge of her bed, which is covered in an old purple quilt. “Do you know what’s going on?” she asks. “They seem really mad. It can’t still be about UCLA, can it?”
“Sort of,” Riley says, then changes her mind and shakes her head. “Well, no, actually. Not really. I mean… it’s about Harvard.”
Clare frowns at her, surprised. All talk of Harvard—which had once been a constant source of conversation around the Gallagher house—seemed to have died out after Aidan’s rejection. Not long after he’d broken the news to his father—who’d been stunned into a restless, disappointed silence that had stretched out for days—Aidan had gotten his acceptance to UCLA and a few other schools on the West Coast. And so, it had seemed, there was nothing left to discuss.
“He must be at least a little bit happy for you, right?” Clare had asked Aidan at the time. Her own parents—who were the greatest of cheerleaders, supportive to an extent that was sometimes a little suffocating—would have been encouraging even if Clare had announced she was dropping out of school altogether. So it was sometimes hard for her to understand Mr. Gallagher, with his lofty expectations for his son, who had—in spite of getting rejected from Harvard—been accepted to three other very good universities. And yet he still couldn’t seem to muster the appropriate level of enthusiasm. “UCLA’s such a great school. And the lacrosse team—”
“He doesn’t care about lacrosse,” Aidan had said, giving her an impatient look, though nothing could hide the joy in his eyes whenever the subject of UCLA came up. He was practically giddy at the thought of it, and there was a new lightness to him—a dizzy, expansive relief—that Clare couldn’t help but find amusing. All those years of Harvard expectations gone in an instant, replaced by a sense of reprieve so big it seemed to fill every inch of him.
“Besides,” he was saying, “he’s still too gutted about Harvard to notice anything else. But it’s over now. So he’ll either get past it or he won’t.”
“He will,” Clare had insisted. “He’ll get past it.”
But Aidan only shrugged. “Or he won’t.”
Now Riley is leaning forward in her chair, her eyes wide and owlish behind her glasses, which she pushes up on her nose with one finger. “The thing is,” she says, her voice just a whisper, “it turns out he never even applied.”