Hello, Goodbye, and Everything in Between(20)

But now, after a completely silent fifteen-minute drive to the bowling alley, she’s starting to worry that this night—which was supposed to be all about conversation, all about discussion and dialogue and debate—might already be sunk.

In the quiet of the car, she plays with one of her rings, sliding it off her finger and then back on again, waiting for him to do something first: to speak or get out or drive away again. But as the minutes stretch between them with no end in sight, she finally looks over at him.

“Aidan,” she says, and he doesn’t react. His face is pale in the glow of a nearby streetlamp, and his forehead is creased. “You should’ve told me.…”

When he still doesn’t respond, she wonders if he could possibly be thinking they won’t talk about what happened, if his plan is just to roll the whole thing up like a pair of socks and tuck it away.

“I would’ve understood,” she says, pressing on, and he leans his head back against the seat, his eyes pinned to the shadowy ceiling of the car.

“Like you do now?” he asks in a flat tone that doesn’t even sound like him.

They’re not accustomed to fighting, and when they’ve done so, it’s always had a slightly playful edge to it, more sparring than actual combat. They’d once made a pact to differentiate between Petty High School Dramas and Big Life Issues, swearing that they’d only ever argue when it was something important, something that really mattered. But now that they’re here, now that the stage is bigger and the discussion has widened and they can’t seem to find their way through, Clare wonders if maybe they’re not equipped for the Big Life Issues after all. Maybe they never were.

“That’s not fair,” she says in a voice that sounds way too reasonable. “We haven’t even talked about it yet.”

“Yeah, but I know you, Clare Rafferty,” he says, still without looking at her. “I know you like things a certain way. You would’ve loved to be the girl at Dartmouth with the Harvard boyfriend.”

“That’s not—”

He shakes his head. “I know you’ve been great about UCLA. You have. But if Harvard had been an option—a real on-the-table option—I honestly don’t know whether you would’ve been on my side.”

Clare stares at him, stung by this. “Of course I would have,” she says, even as a part of her wonders if that’s true. The fact that he didn’t even try to get in—not to mention that he didn’t tell her—feels like a kind of rejection.

But what if he had been accepted? If there was a chance for them to be closer next year—if he could have chosen Harvard, chosen the East Coast, chosen her, but didn’t—isn’t it possible she would’ve felt differently?

Last fall, when Aidan was constantly complaining about Harvard, Clare had made him a deal. “If you stop moaning and groaning about being forced to apply to the best academic institution in the country,” she said, “I’ll put in an application for somewhere I don’t want to go, either.”

It had turned into a game, the two of them poring over heavy books filled with rankings and seemingly endless online lists. Aidan’s first suggestions were all jokes, places that were much too close (the community college that Scotty’s now attending), or much too far (universities in Moscow and Tokyo and Beijing), much too technical (MIT), or not technical enough (a college of “living wisdom” where you could actually major in yoga).

But once Clare had nixed all of those, Aidan got serious.

“All your others are on the East Coast,” he pointed out. “So maybe we should find you something out west to balance things out.”

“I like that,” she’d said. “That way, we’ll sort of be mirroring each other, since you’re all West Coast except for Harvard.”

After that, it was easy. Finding the closest thing to Harvard on the West Coast meant one thing: Stanford. And so she’d applied.

When her rejection arrived, Clare didn’t mind. She’d never expected to get in, nor had she ever seriously considered going there, but she was surprised to see a flicker of disappointment in Aidan’s eyes when she told him.

“Well, there goes our safety school.”

Clare had frowned. “Stanford wasn’t my safety. Not by a long shot.”

“Yeah,” he said, smiling, “but it was mine.”

“You applied?” she asked, staring at him, and he shook his head.

“There was just something kind of cool about knowing we might be on the same coast,” he told her. “Kind of like a safety net… you know, for us.”

“Well, there’s always Harvard,” she said, expecting that to cheer him up a bit, but instead, she saw something shut down behind his eyes, and he only shrugged.

“We’ll see.”

Clare doesn’t mind that he didn’t end up applying. Not really. She knows that Aidan’s best and worst quality is this: that he wants everyone to be happy. He’s always bending over backward, doing cartwheels and flips and somersaults in an effort to make sure he doesn’t offend anyone. So she can understand his logic. If he’d applied and gotten into Harvard, there’s no way he could have chosen another school without causing a huge rift with his father. But if he fixed the odds himself, making sure it wasn’t even a possibility, there was a chance he could get out of the trap that had been set for him his entire life with barely a scratch.