Hello, Goodbye, and Everything in Between(6)

“How many?” he asks, raising one eyebrow.

Aidan coughs, straightening up again. “Five,” he says. “Please.”

Oscar skulks off toward the oven without another word, and Scotty reaches over and gives Aidan’s arm one last thump. “Thanks, man.”

“I feel like I should start some sort of charity pizza fund for you before I go,” he says. “I’m worried you’ll starve without me.”

“I’ll manage,” Scotty tells him, pushing up his thick-framed glasses. His dark eyes move between Aidan and Clare. “So,” he says, “this is it, huh?”

Aidan nods. “Last night.”

“For a little while, anyway,” Scotty says.

Clare gives him a reassuring nod. “Just for a little while.”

“And you two are, uh, doing okay?” he says, though it’s clear what he’s really asking is: Have you two decided what to do yet?

“We’re fine,” Clare says, exchanging a look with Aidan.

“Who’s fine?” Stella asks, appearing at their side. She’s wearing all black, as usual, from her boots to her jeans to her shirt and all the way up to her earrings, two feathery-looking things that get lost against her jet-black hair. She always manages to look as if she’s preparing for a burglary, and Clare can’t help feeling conspicuous next to her in spite of the fact that she’s wearing a completely normal spectrum of colors: a blue sundress with a green cardigan.

“Where’ve you been?” Clare asks. “I thought you were coming over this afternoon.”

“Oh,” Stella says, twisting her mouth up at the corners. “Yeah. Sorry about that. I got caught up with something.”

“With what?” she asks, but Stella’s eyes have drifted over to Scotty, who is busy pouring oregano directly into his mouth. Most of it lands down the front of his Batman T-shirt, and he coughs and pounds on his chest, his eyes watering as he attempts to swallow the rest.

“It’s like watching a toddler try to figure out how food works,” Stella says, shaking her head. Scotty glares at her as he wipes the flakes from his shirt, and as always, Stella glares right back. She has a couple of inches on him in the staggeringly high heels she always insists on wearing, and after a moment, Scotty just shrugs and returns to the oregano.

The fact that the two of them have never gotten along usually isn’t a problem. But with most of their friends off to school already, their crew has been whittled down to an awkward foursome: Scotty and Stella, already sniping over things that don’t really matter, and Aidan and Clare, still at odds over all the many things that do.

Clare turns back to Stella. “You do realize I’m leaving tomorrow morning, right?”

“Uh, yeah,” Stella says after a second. “And I’m leaving the next day.”

“So where have you been?”

She frowns. “What do you mean?”

“Where’ve you been the last few days?” Clare repeats, ignoring Scotty and Aidan, who are looking back and forth between them as if watching a tennis match. At the moment, she doesn’t care. All she wants is for Stella to snap out of whatever it is that’s been going on with her lately. Because this is a big deal—leaving for college—and Clare could really use her best friend right now.

This is part of the job description, after all: the unspoken contract between all best friends. Clare is required to be there for Stella—to help her with college essays or tag along during endless thrift-shop excursions, to listen to her complain about the lack of interesting guys at their school, or her trio of exhausting younger brothers—and in return, Stella is supposed to be there for Clare, too. Even if it means giving her a hard time.

“You do know,” she’d said once, earlier in the summer, interrupting one of Clare’s frequent musings over what to do about Aidan, “that you’re gonna break up with him eventually, right?”

They were in the car on their way to a movie, and Clare had flicked her eyes away from the road to meet Stella’s, surprised. “Why do you say that?”

“Because,” Stella said, propping a foot on the dashboard, “it’s the truth. If it doesn’t happen at the end of the summer, it’ll happen a few weeks later, or at Thanksgiving, or Christmas, or next summer. It’s inevitable.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do,” Stella said, sounding maddeningly confident. “And meanwhile, you’ll spend your whole freshman year sitting around watching your idiot roommate—”

“Beatrice,” Clare said, exasperated. The moment she’d received her new roommate’s contact information, Stella—who had herself requested a single room—immediately decided she didn’t like the sound of her. And once they started texting, it only got worse. Stella insisted on scrutinizing every message that popped up on Clare’s phone, rolling her eyes at the steady stream of band names and tour dates Beatrice was constantly mentioning.

“Fine,” Stella said. “You’ll be sitting around watching your idiot roommate, Beatrice, getting ready to go out to all those totally dope shows she likes so much while you’re stuck back at the dorm in your flannel pajamas reading a book because you don’t want to have any fun without Aidan, who—by the way—will be out in California getting convinced by his idiot roommate—”