Aidan stares at her for a long time. “Not me,” he says eventually, looking a little bit stunned.
“Exactly,” Clare says, satisfied.
“So… why don’t you just avoid the cute guy to begin with?”
“That’s not the point,” she says, though she can tell he’s only teasing her. “Wouldn’t you rather end things now, on our own terms, so we can at least still be friends?”
“I don’t want to be friends.”
“That’s all we’d be anyway, from that far away.”
He shakes his head. “That’s what you think?”
“I guess so.”
“God, Clare,” he says, his face darkening. “I hate how everything always has to be so black-and-white with you. Just because we wouldn’t get to… I mean, it’s not like we’d only be pen pals or anything.”
“I know, but—”
“This kind of thing doesn’t come along that often,” he says, his eyes flashing now. “And you want to just throw it away because it might get too hard. Or because you want to be free to meet someone new.”
“It’s not that,” she tells him, trying to keep the frustration out of her voice. “It’s just… we’re so young. It’s not that crazy to think we might not end up with the person we dated in high school.”
Aidan gives her a sour look. “We’re not your parents,” he says, picking up a small stone and tossing it out over the water, where it disappears into the gray chop of the waves. “This isn’t the same thing.”
Clare’s mom and dad had both been married before, each to their high school sweetheart. It wasn’t until after those other marriages had fizzled, after they’d both gotten divorced, that they were lucky enough to find each other.
To Clare, it seems like there must be a lesson in there somewhere.
“You don’t know that,” she says with a frown.
“I do, actually,” Aidan says, chucking another rock out into the lake, more forcefully this time. “Because they’re just one example. There are a million other couples who met in high school who are probably still ridiculously happy. You just refuse to see that, because you’ve already made up your mind.”
Clare gives him a wounded look. “That’s not fair.”
“Isn’t it?” Aidan says without meeting her eyes. “It’s like that time we carried that table down to the basement for your parents. We both had it, and it was going fine. And then you dropped your side of it, and the whole thing turned into this huge mess, with the drywall and the broken leaf and my shoulder—”
“I get it,” Clare says, stopping him short. “You think I’m giving up on this. But I’m not. I’m just trying to save us the trouble.”
“Well, maybe I don’t want to be saved,” he says, finally looking at her. “Maybe I believe in this enough for both of us.”
“You can’t wish this into working,” she says, feeling miserable even as she does. She can see the anger draining out of Aidan, his eyes going distant, and she wants to take it all back, to say something reassuring, to give him some thread of hope. But it’s too late for that. It wouldn’t be fair to either of them. Instead, she reaches for his hand, but he pulls it away, and she sighs. “I’m sorry, but believing isn’t enough.”
Aidan stares out over the water, his forehead crinkled. “How do you know unless you’ve tried?”
“I just know,” Clare says quietly. “I just have this feeling.”
“Well,” Aidan says, “so do I.”
She waits for him to say more, but he doesn’t. He lets out a long breath, running a hand over the top of his head, where his hair used to stick up in a way that Clare always found oddly charming, and her heart seizes at even this smallest of changes: his new college haircut. It’s hard not to think about how many more are still to come.
“I think I liked it better when we were avoiding talking about all this,” he says eventually, and Clare nods.
“Me too,” she admits. “But we have to figure it out. The clock is ticking.”
“You make it sound like a bomb,” he says. “You make us sound like a bomb.”
“Maybe we are.”
There’s nothing either of them can say to that; they don’t even bother to try. Instead, they look out toward the horizon, the last streaks of pink and the first few visible stars and the drowning robot, forever destined to flail hopelessly in the darkening water. Clare pulls her knees up to her chest, shivering a little, though she doesn’t feel cold.
After a moment, Aidan leans forward and picks up another small stone. “Your souvenir,” he says quietly as he hands it over to her.
“My collection,” she says, slipping it into her bag, “is gonna get pretty heavy.”
“I’ll help you carry it.”
“You won’t be there,” she tells him, blinking fast, willing herself not to cry.
“I will for now,” he says, reaching into her bag and taking out both rocks, then raising his eyebrows when he feels the Parmesan shaker. As he lifts it, some of the flakes go floating off in the breeze, and for a second it almost looks like snow.
“Okay,” she agrees. “For now.”
“For now,” he repeats, as if getting used to the sound of it, and then he leans forward to kiss her again, and this time there’s nothing showy about it; this time it’s just right: sad and sweet and heartbreakingly familiar.
“Much better,” she says, cupping his hands in hers.
The Gallaghers’ House
8:40 PM
They’re nearly back to the car when Aidan pauses to fish his phone out of his back pocket. He stands for a moment in the middle of the parking lot, his face lit by the bluish light of the screen, before looking up at Clare with a sigh.
“I don’t suppose my house was on the list, was it?”
“Not other than meeting you there,” she says as they reach the car. “But we can definitely stop by again. I should probably say goodbye to your parents, anyway. How come?”
“Riley needs a ride to the bowling alley,” he says, leaning against the trunk. There’s a Harvard sticker on the bumper that’s peeling at the corner, and he chips at it with the heel of his sneaker.
“That’s totally fine,” she says. “Bowling is on the list anyhow.”
“Next?”
“No, but we can switch around the order. I mean, it doesn’t really matter, right?”
He smiles. “Look at you, being so flexible.”
“That’s me,” she says, bending down to brush the sand from her legs, and then opening the passenger-side door. “Rolling with the punches. Come what may. Easy breezy.”
“Oh, yeah,” he says, grinning at her over the top of the car. “Super breezy.”
By the time they turn onto Aidan’s street, it’s fully dark, and as usual, the whole block is already lit up, the windows blazing. When he pulls into the driveway, they sit there for a minute, the engine still ticking, and then he turns to Clare with a weary smile.
“Let’s make this really quick, okay?”
She nods. “Hi and bye.”
“I like that,” he says. “Hi and bye. Quick and painless.”
As they walk up the stone path that leads to the side door, Clare remembers the first time she ever came over. It was just before Christmas, and she’d assumed the giant gold cross and elaborate nativity scene set up on a table in the foyer were seasonal decorations. She’d been wrong. As it turned out, they lived there all year, alongside an impressive collection of cross-stitched prayers in delicate frames and pillows with Irish blessings and shamrocks all over them.
“May the road rise to meet you…” she’d whispered as she read one of them on that first visit, standing in the front hallway with Aidan, the smells of Mrs. Gallagher’s pot roast drifting in from the kitchen.
“And the wind be always at your back,” he finished, stepping up beside her. “Except when my mother is cooking, in which case you have to hope the wind shifts somewhere else entirely.”
They’d only been together a m
onth or so at that point, and she’d been caught off guard by the feel of the place, so crowded and close, and so different from Aidan, who was clumsy and loud, far too big for a house so cluttered.
Even then, he seemed ready to break free.
Now, as they near the side door, they can hear a swell of voices from inside. Clare glances at Aidan, but it’s impossible to tell what he’s thinking. Above them, a cluster of light-drunk bugs make pinging noises as they bump up against the glass bulb, and a car rushes past on the quiet street, a few people whooping out the window.
“If you hadn’t put so much pressure on him…” Aidan’s mother is saying from inside, her voice rising in a way Clare has never heard before. There’s a clatter of something metal being set down hard, and then footsteps moving across the kitchen, which is just on the other side of the door.
“And you don’t care that he lied to us?” his dad shouts back. Clare looks at Aidan with alarm, but his eyes are fixed on the straw mat at their feet, the words CEAD MILE FAILTE stamped across it: A HUNDRED THOUSAND WELCOMES in Gaelic.
Usually, that’s the way it feels here. His parents might be a little intense, but they’re also generally friendly and polite. They have high expectations for their kids, and their house rules are a lot stricter than at Clare’s (whose parents are so trusting that she’s sometimes relieved she doesn’t have a sibling, on the off chance the kid wouldn’t have turned out to be as responsible as she is). But the Gallaghers have always been more than welcoming, offering drinks and snacks, making room at the table, asking about her classes whenever Clare comes over—which isn’t very often, since Aidan usually insists they go to her house.
“Your parents play music and make tacos and tell jokes and watch shows other than the news,” Aidan explained when she asked why they didn’t go to his place more often. They’d been dating about six months at that point—which felt like a lifetime to Clare—yet she’d been to his house only a handful of times. “Besides,” he’d continued, “your parents actually like you. And me.”
“Your parents like you,” Clare had said uneasily, but Aidan only shook his head.
“Do you know what my dad does? He trades in futures.”
“I don’t even know what that means.”
“It’s a stock thing. I don’t really know, either. But it’s kind of ironic, right? All he cares about is my future. He doesn’t care about who I am now. All he wants for me is Harvard and grad school and a big job with a suit and tie.”
“Maybe that just means he cares enough to—”
“No,” Aidan said, cutting her off. “All it means is that he’s used to betting big. But he doesn’t realize I’m a bad bet.”
“You don’t know—”
“Yeah,” he said, “I do. Trust me, I know. I don’t want any of that stuff. I wish he’d just realize I’m a lost cause already and move on to Riley. She actually wants to go to Harvard. That pretty much makes her the automatic favorite in the Gallagher household.”
“Come on,” Clare said. “You know he loves you both.”
“I don’t know about that. He definitely likes the idea of me. And he likes my potential. But I don’t think he actually likes me all that much.”
Clare wasn’t sure what to say to that. “What about your mom?”
“Well, she works in an antiques shop,” he said. “So if we’re sticking with the whole futures analogy, that probably means she liked me better when I was little.”
“You were probably a lot less trouble then.”
He flashed her a grin. “I’ve always been trouble, baby.”
Clare couldn’t help laughing. “You know, if you spent some more time over there, maybe they’d get to know the actual, present-tense you a little better.”
But Aidan just smiled. “I think I’d rather spend more time here with the actual, present-tense you.”
Now, as they stand listening at the door, Clare glances down at the words on the mat again, feeling like they must be at least a few thousand welcomes short at the moment.
“That’s not the point,” Mrs. Gallagher is saying from inside, and to Clare’s surprise, Mr. Gallagher roars back at her: “Of course it’s the point!”
Aidan leans back from the door, lifting his eyes to meet Clare’s. “Still feeling breezy?” he asks with a grim smile, and then, before she can ask what they’re talking about, before she can figure out what’s going on, he turns the knob and pushes open the door.
As soon as he does, his parents both fall abruptly silent, whirling to face them. Mr. Gallagher—an even taller, thicker version of his son—is red-faced, his hands balled into fists. And beside him, Mrs. Gallagher—small and slight and as freckled as her kids—stares at them with glassy eyes.
“Hi, Clare,” she says, a little breathless. “It’s nice to see you, sweetie.”
“Hi,” Clare says, searching for something to follow this. “We just…” She trails off, hoping for Aidan to fill the space, but he’s just standing there beside her with his head bent, his hands shoved into the pockets of his jeans. Nobody says anything, and Clare looks around at each of them in turn, completely lost.
“Aidan,” Mr. Gallagher says eventually, rubbing his forehead wearily with the heel of his hand. “I think we need a couple of minutes.”
Clare is so busy trying to work out what’s going on—the mysterious undercurrent of anger in the room and the feeling that everyone else knows something she doesn’t—that it takes a second for the words to register. When they do, she glances once at Aidan, who gives a little nod without meeting her eyes, then lifts her hand in an awkward wave to his parents.
“Sure, yeah,” she says, overly agreeable. “I’ll just go up and let Riley know we’re here.”
She hurries through the open door of the kitchen without a backward glance, then out into the front hallway, where she lingers for a minute, tempted to stay and listen. But the voices from the next room are low and hard to make out, and there’s a painting of St. Patrick gazing down at her with disapproval, so she turns to head up the stairs, taking them two at a time.
At the top, she pauses in front of Aidan’s room out of habit, taking in the familiar terrain: the piles of dirty clothes and the unmade bed, the teetering stacks of books and the collection of lacrosse sticks leaning like brooms in the corner. One of his Chicago Cubs T-shirts is twisted in a lump on the floor at her feet, and she stoops down to pick it up, burying her face in it, memorizing the smell of him, missing him already, though he’s just downstairs. She thinks about taking it with her, another souvenir for her collection, but she knows it’s one of his favorites, so instead, she folds it neatly and lays it gently on the edge of his bed, then continues down the hall to Riley’s room.
“Come in,” Riley calls when Clare knocks, and she peeks her head around the door to find the younger girl sprawled out on her bed with a well-worn copy of the sixth Harry Potter book. She has the same auburn hair as her brother, but it’s long, even longer than Clare’s, and her red-framed glasses make her face look very thin. She’s only two years behind them in school, but she’s so slight and willowy, so sweet and enthusiastic, that she often seems much younger than that.
“Hey,” she says, scrambling up when she sees that it’s Clare. “Sorry, I didn’t realize you guys would be here so soon.” She grabs a gray corduroy bag from the floor and starts throwing things into it. “I’ll be ready in a minute, I swear.”
“It’s okay,” Clare says, closing the door behind her. “I think we’ve got some time, actually.”
Riley stops what she’s doing and looks up. “Oh,” she says, her face growing serious. “Yeah. I guess we probably do, huh?” She sits down.
Clare takes a seat on the edge of her bed, which is covered in an old purple quilt. “Do you know what’s going on?” she asks. “They seem really mad. It can’t still be about UCLA, can it?”
“Sort of,” Riley says, then changes her mind and shakes her head. “Well, no, actually. Not really. I mean… it’s ab
out Harvard.”
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.