Hello, Goodbye, and Everything in Between(18)

Clare stares at her, genuinely shocked. “What?”

“I know,” Riley says, looking half-horrified by the news and half-thrilled at being the one to deliver it. “Dad’s been really upset all summer, but lately he’s gotten kind of weirdly obsessive about Harvard again. I think it’s because Aidan’s about to leave, and he’s having a hard time watching him pack up for another school. He’s been trying to get over it—he really has—but the other night, he asked to see the rejection letter, I guess just for closure maybe, or I don’t know why. But none of us had ever actually seen it.…”

“Me neither,” Clare admits. They’d only shown each other their acceptances, because the idea of handing over a stack of failures—even just to Aidan—was too much for Clare. She’d stuffed all of hers in the trash within minutes of receiving them, burying all the so-sorrys and thanks-for-tryings beneath coffee grounds and banana peels, as if somehow that were enough to strike them from the record. There were plenty of others to celebrate. So that’s what they did.

“Well, he said he threw it away, but he was being sort of weird about it, so I guess Dad finally decided to call the admissions office today—”

“Why?”

Riley grinned. “I don’t know. Probably to give them a piece of his mind. But it turns out they don’t have any record of the application.”

“I can’t believe he would do that,” Clare says, still reeling. But there’s something else at the edge of her surprise, something dark and unsettling that she can’t quite place until Riley comes right out and says it for her.

“So he really never told you?”

She shakes her head.

“I thought he told you everything.”

“Apparently not,” Clare says, her voice tight.

“Well, anyway,” Riley says, twirling a pen between her fingers, “Dad’s really mad at him now. As you can probably imagine.”

Clare nods, but her mind is elsewhere. She can’t believe Aidan wouldn’t have told her. They tell each other everything. Not just the big stuff, but the little things, too: when Clare decided to switch toothpastes, and when Aidan discovered a penny in his shoe; whenever Clare has a dream about clowns, or whenever Aidan remembers to floss. It doesn’t matter what it is, whether it’s good or bad, hugely important or completely insignificant: The reward for doing pretty much anything, for surviving it or conquering it or just plain getting through it, is getting to tell Aidan about it afterward.

She always thought it was the same for him.

But now she isn’t so sure.

Downstairs, they hear a door slam, and then a few muffled voices. Riley glances up at the clock above her desk, which is shaped like an old-fashioned teapot.

“I told my friends I’d be there by now,” she says. “I wonder how much longer this is gonna take.”

“Maybe we should try to go rescue him,” Clare suggests with more conviction than she feels, and Riley casts a cautious glance at her bedroom door before standing up with a little nod.

They walk downstairs quietly, their footsteps softened by the nubby gray carpet, then tiptoe through the dining room, where the voices from the kitchen become clearer.

“We’re just disappointed,” Mrs. Gallagher is saying, her tone placating. “You can understand that.…”

“You would have been disappointed either way,” Aidan says, and there’s a hard edge to his voice. “Even if I’d gotten in, it’s not like I was ever gonna go. It’s what you wanted, not me. I was just trying to save us all the trouble of fighting about it.”

There’s a short pause, and then Mr. Gallagher clears his throat. “That’s all fine,” he says, though from the tone of his voice, there doesn’t seem to be anything fine about it. “But the way you did it, in the sneakiest, most cowardly way possible—”

“It was the only way—” Aidan says, but his father interrupts him.

“You think you’re so grown up, heading off to college, but you’re not—not yet. A real man wouldn’t have lied. A real man wouldn’t have taken the easy way out.” He pauses, letting out a long sigh. “But you made your decision. There’s nothing that can be done about it now. It was your choice, and now you’re the one who has to live with it.”

Beside Clare, Riley shifts her weight, and a floorboard groans beneath her. Before they can do anything, the door swings open, and they’re faced with Mrs. Gallagher, whose lips are pressed into a thin line.

“Sorry,” Riley says quickly. “It’s just that Aidan promised to drive me—”

“I’m not sure we’re quite—” she says, but Mr. Gallagher cuts her off.

“It’s fine,” he says, and there’s something wrenching and final in his voice when he turns to Aidan, who is staring at him with a stubborn expression that Clare knows well, his jaw hard and his eyes blazing. “We’re all done here.”

But Aidan doesn’t move. Nobody does.

“We’ll be waiting outside,” Riley says after a moment, then she spins around, and Clare follows her back through the dining room and out the front door, where they stumble into the cool evening air, relieved to be out of the house.

Clare takes a seat on the steps, hugging her knees to her chest. It’s almost entirely dark now, and the yard is throbbing with the sound of crickets, the neighborhood otherwise quiet all around them. Riley sits down beside her and adopts a similar pose.