Hello, Goodbye, and Everything in Between

Stella lifts her shoulders. “I’m right here.”


“No, you’re not,” Clare says, shaking her head. “Not really. And it’s too late, anyway.”

“Hey, I’m sorry if—”

“Forget it,” Clare says, cutting her off. She blinks at her friend, feeling a lump rise in her throat. Because this isn’t the way their last night was supposed to go. She and Stella have been inseparable since they were little. They’d sat together in kindergarten, learned to ride bikes the same day, thrown joint birthday parties as kids. They’d shared books and lunches, stickers and clothes—at least until eighth grade, when Stella had decided that black was her color. They’d shared pretty much everything.

All this time, they’d been running a marathon together. And now, with only yards left to go, Stella has fallen away, and Clare can’t for the life of her figure out why.

“You haven’t been there,” she says, trying to keep her lip from trembling. “You were supposed to be there.”

“Clare.”

“No, it’s fine,” she says, giving Stella a hard look. “This is just part of it, right? I guess we’re supposed to be moving on.”

“Not like this.”

Clare shrugs, and a few pieces of popcorn fall to the floor. “Starting next week, none of this will matter, anyway. We’ll each have a whole new group of friends.…”

“What, like Beatrice St. James?” Stella asks, arching an eyebrow.

“Well, yeah,” Clare says. “Maybe. Probably.”

“Clare, come on.”

“No, maybe it’s better this way. Maybe we just have to learn to stop needing each other so much.”

She waits for Stella to disagree, or to tell her she’s being stupid, but she doesn’t. Instead, her shoulders slump, and she stares down at the drinks in her hands for what feels like a very long time. Then, finally, she looks right at Clare.

“Maybe you’re right,” she says, entirely blank-faced, and then, without another word, she brushes right past her, hurrying down the steps to the lanes.

Clare stands there, watching her go, her feet strangely heavy. After a moment, she takes a shaky breath.

Fine, she thinks. One less goodbye.

It’s supposed to make her lighter, this thought, but all she feels is hollow as she starts to walk in the direction of her friends, picking her way around the discarded shoes that litter the sticky floor.

As she approaches the last lane, she can see that the rest of the guys—Noah and Mike and Kip—are messing around with the scoreboard, picking ridiculous names for everyone, and Scotty is staggering around with a hot-pink bowling ball under his arm, doubled over in laughter.

Only Aidan is standing apart, still scowling at nothing in particular, and when Clare tries to catch his eye, he just folds his arms across his chest and looks off toward the six pins still upright at the end of the lane.

“Hey, Stells,” Scotty says, swaying slightly in the way that he does when he’s drunk. Clare raises her eyebrows at the nickname, but Stella only rolls her eyes at him as he attempts to spin the bowling ball on his finger like a basketball. It falls to the floor with a bone-rattling thud. “I’ve got a joke for you.”

“What is it?” Clare asks when nobody else does. With both Aidan and Stella acting like jerks, she feels a sudden surge of affection for Scotty. He looks so eager, standing there in his red-and-blue bowling shoes, which he bought last year, even though he’s a truly terrible bowler. He ended up loving them so much that he started wearing them to school, sliding up and down the linoleum hallway floors between classes.