Mac shut her eyes. “I’m so sorry.”
Claire sat down at the kitchen table and started fiddling with a cello-shaped salt shaker. “I’ve had a lot of time to think. And I realized . . .” Claire looked up at her, almost seeming embarrassed. “. . . I’m not sure I even want to go to Juilliard.”
Mac frowned. Surely Claire was just saying that to make herself feel better. Or maybe she was just high on the pain pills the doctors had given her.
Claire clacked the cello salt shaker with a violin pepper shaker. “It sounds crazy, I know. But I think I’ve realized that I only wanted to go because”—she let out a sheepish little chuckle—“because you did. I just wanted to beat you. But then I thought about what I really wanted. And you know what? Oberlin sounds cool. Maybe I’ll study music. Maybe not. I have all these choices now, which I never had before when it was always just cello cello cello, you know?”
Mac wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry. After all the stress and sacrifices, all the years of band camp and orchestra, the endless practicing, the deception and lies, the heartbreak with Blake . . . Claire didn’t even want the final prize. It was like a bad joke with a stupid punch line.
Mac was astonished, too, how willingly Claire had admitted that she’d wanted to beat her. Then again, if she thought about it, wasn’t she the same way? For as long as she could remember, Mac had been intensely, blindly driven to be the best cello player, to practice more than Claire, to nail every performance when Claire fumbled, to snatch back first chair when Claire had it. She did truly want to go to Juilliard, but that was almost beside the point. Mac had been equally as competitive, equally as willing to go to the ends of the earth to get what she wanted. Hadn’t she proven that by putting Claire’s name on the film studies list?
Suddenly, and probably inappropriately, Mac burst out in a fit of hysterical giggles. “I’m sorry,” she blurted. “It’s so not funny. I don’t know why I’m laughing.”
Except that Claire started laughing, too. At first it was tentative, but then her shoulders shook, and tiny squeaks came out of their mouths.
“I’m really sorry,” Mac said again. “I have to stop.”
“Me too,” Claire gasped.
But they both kept laughing. It was like the old way they used to laugh together: doubled over, clutching their stomachs, cackling so hard there were tears streaming down their faces. Mac laughed so hard her glasses fogged up. It brought back so many good memories: of Claire and Mac at music camps, or of weekend sleepovers after orchestra practice, or of the colossal giggle fit they’d had in the orchestra pit at Carnegie Hall over the conductor’s open fly. Mac never thought she’d share this sort of moment with Claire again—or that she even wanted to. But it felt so good.
Only after Mac had cleared their pizza plates, sliding them into the dishwasher, did they manage to maintain a straight face. “So I wanted to tell you,” Claire said, squeezing the fingertips of her left hand, which were just barely exposed at the bottom of her cast, to get some circulation going. “I’m really sorry about that Facebook post of you and Oliver. It was shitty of me. I was just so jealous.”
Mac just shrugged. It felt so in the past now. “Whatever,” she said softly.
“What actually happened with Oliver? I lied when I said I wasn’t into him. Are you together?”
Mac could tell she genuinely wanted to know. The question rang so familiar in Mac’s ears—it was the way they used to talk about boys, long before Blake changed everything between them. “No,” Mac replied, feeling a little sad for how she’d just let Oliver dangle for so long. “We didn’t . . . click.”
Claire nodded, a knowing look suddenly on her face. “Of course you didn’t.”
“He’s nice, though.” Mac gave her a genuine smile, too. “You should go for him. I’ll put in a good word.”
And then, as if on cue, Mac’s phone began to vibrate in her pocket, and before she could silence it, it began to play a Bruno Mars song—a very familiar Bruno Mars song. Shit. She had never changed the ringtone she had long ago assigned to Blake. And Claire knew it.
She quickly covered the screen with her hand and looked up at Claire, suddenly panicked that all of this laughing and being honest and feeling close would all come to an end. But Claire was grinning. “It’s okay. You can answer it.” She tilted her head toward the phone in Mac’s hand. “He always loved you, you know.”
Mac sucked in her breath and went very still. The phone kept ringing.