Hello, Goodbye, and Everything in Between

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.”

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.