Hello, Goodbye, and Everything in Between

“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.

“He’s an idiot,” she says after a minute or so. “But I also sort of get it.”

Clare turns to her. “Yeah?”