Hello, Goodbye, and Everything in Between

Around them, everyone is shouting, though it’s hard to tell whether they’re egging them on or trying to get them to stop. Clare catches a quick glimpse of Stella’s panicked face on the other side of the circle, her eyes flashing in the yellow light that’s spilling out from the kitchen. And then Scotty takes another swing, and before she can think better of it, Clare’s moving in their direction.

“Aidan,” she shouts as she comes up behind him, but he doesn’t respond. He doesn’t even look at her. He’s too busy staggering toward Scotty again. But Clare charges forward anyway, skidding to a stop right behind Aidan and reaching out to grab his arm, determined to end this before it can get any worse.

He shakes her off without even turning in her direction, his entire focus on Scotty, and so on her second try, Clare—still shouting for him to stop, determined to make him listen, though he’s so clearly unable or unwilling to hear her—loops both arms around his waist in a kind of backward bear hug, then yanks back hard.

Her only thought is to get him out and away, to break them up before one of them gets seriously hurt, but everything is dark and blurry and confused, and just as she starts to tug on him, a bright flare of pain explodes above her right cheek, and she stumbles backward in shock, her hands cupped around her eye.

There are a few seconds when nobody reacts; Aidan and Scotty stop to stare at her, and the rest of the crowd looks on dumbly, as if they’ve forgotten they’re not watching this on a screen, that they’re here and now and part of this, too. It’s so quiet they can hear the neighbor’s dog barking to go out, a car pulling into the driveway, the sound of glassed-in laughter from the living room.

But then the moment snaps, and everything happens fast.

Even before Clare can fully register what happened—that she got popped in the eye, either by Scotty’s fist or else Aidan’s elbow, it’s hard to know—Stella is there, taking her by the arm and leading her toward the kitchen.

Behind her, she can hear a flurry of panicked and excited voices, but above all the rest of them, Aidan and Scotty are shouting at each other.

“It was you,” Aidan yells, his voice filled with fury.

“Was not,” Scotty growls back at him, and then a few other people chime in, breaking them up yet again.

By the time they reach the kitchen, which Andy is busy clearing of people, Aidan and Scotty have trailed in behind Clare, their eyes full of worry as they hurry to her side, apologizing again and again.

“Get back,” Stella snaps at them as she guides Clare over to a chair at the blocky wooden table—still strewn with cards from an abandoned game—and they obey. Aidan retreats to the doorway just behind Clare, so that she can’t see him, and Scotty sinks miserably into a chair across from her, gingerly removing his broken glasses.

She can see now that one of his eyes is pink and puffy, his lip split wide open, and she twists to see if Aidan is hurt, too, but when she does, she feels the pain flare again behind her own eye, and Stella puts a hand on her shoulder, steadying her. Clare tries to mumble a few words of thanks, but Stella just shakes her head.

“Don’t move,” she says, then looks up at Andy, who is busy rooting around in the freezer. “Can you please hurry up?”

“There are no peas,” she calls out, looking only vaguely concerned about the situation at hand. She’s thrown enough parties to have dealt with just about everything, and this is not the first fight that’s happened here by a long shot.

“Any steaks?” Scotty asks.

“No,” Andy says, holding up a frozen pizza box. “Just this.”

Stella rolls her eyes and crosses the space from the table to the fridge in three long strides. “Regular ice cubes are fine,” she says, grabbing a bag of cups from the counter and dumping out the contents.

When she returns with the bag of ice, Clare still has a hand clapped firmly over her eye, which feels huge and bulging, like her palm is the only thing holding it in place. The whole side of her face is throbbing, and her eyelid feels thick and gluey, but she only registers all this in a distant way, numb and detached. She’s still too shocked to be truly in pain.