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 month 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 about 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.

“Besides,” he was saying, “he’s still too gutted about Harvard to notice anything else. But it’s over now. So he’ll either get past it or he won’t.”

“He will,” Clare had insisted. “He’ll get past it.”

But Aidan only shrugged. “Or he won’t.”

Now Riley is leaning forward, her eyes wide and owlish behind her glasses, which she pushes up on her nose with one finger. “The thing is,” she says, her voice just a whisper, “it turns out he never even applied.”

Clare stares at her, genuinely shocked. “What?”

“I know,” Riley says, looking half-horrified by the news and half-thrilled at being the one to deliver it. “Dad’s been really upset all summer, but lately he’s gotten kind of weirdly obsessive about Harvard again. I think it’s because Aidan’s about to leave, and he’s having a hard time watching him pack up for another school. He’s been trying to get over it—he really has—but the other night, he asked to see the rejection letter, I guess just for closure maybe, or I don’t know why. But none of us had ever actually seen it.…”

“Me neither,” Clare admits. They’d only shown each other their acceptances, because the idea of handing over a stack of failures—even just to Aidan—was too much for Clare. She’d stuffed all of hers in the trash within minutes of receiving them, burying all the so-sorrys and thanks-for-tryings beneath coffee grounds and banana peels, as if somehow that were enough to strike them from the record. There were plenty of others to celebrate. So that’s what they did.

“Well, he said he threw it away, but he was being sort of weird about it, so I guess Dad finally decided to call the admissions office today—”

“Why?”

Riley shrugged. “I don’t know. Probably to give them a piece of his mind. But it turns out they don’t have any record of the application.”

“I can’t believe he would do that,” Clare says, still reeling. But there’s something else at the edge of her surprise, something dark and unsettling that she can’t quite place until Riley comes right out and says it for her.

“So he really never told you?”

She shakes her head.

“I thought he told you everything.”

“Apparently not,” Clare says, her voice tight.

“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?”

“It’s not that he’s a coward. He’s just realistic, you know?”

“I know,” Clare says, because this is true. Aidan is an optimist at heart, but he’s careful about it. He would never spend the time or energy to go after something he had no interest in having. He’s much too practical for that, far too economical about his hopes and dreams. If he were going to try for something, it would be for one of two reasons: Either he was certain he could get it or he was certain it was worth it.

“But he’s still an idiot,” Riley says, giving her a shy smile, “’cause if he’d gone to Harvard, he could have been closer to you.”

Clare closes her eyes. It’s been a long time since she’s allowed herself this same thought: the two of them shuttling back and forth between Harvard and Dartmouth, a mere two-hour drive, spending weekends skiing in Vermont or picking apples in New Hampshire, going to museums in Boston and watching the boats slip by on the Charles.

She knows this person she’s been trying so hard to keep from imagining—the one with the winter coat and clunky snow boots, bundled up and red-cheeked during those cozy New England winters—isn’t Aidan. It’s not who he is or what he wants. But it still hurts to know that it was never even a possibility, and sitting here in the early darkness of this suburban night, it only makes her feel like it’s already here, this looming distance between them, like they’ve already been set adrift.

“I’m going to miss him,” Clare says with a suddenness that startles them both. She gives a helpless shrug, and Riley nods.

“I know,” she says. “Me too.”

Clare bumps her gently with her shoulder. “And I’ll miss you, too.”

“Yeah?” Riley asks, her face lighting up.

“Yeah. You’d better keep in touch.”

“I will,” she says. “I swear. Even if you and Aidan break up.”

Clare flinches at the words. This is the whole point of the night, of course, its inevitable end. But still, it sends a little shock through her to hear it said out loud.

Behind them, the door opens, casting a wedge of light over the front stoop, and Aidan steps outside. They both twist to look up at him, and he stands there for a long moment, his eyes distant and blank, rubbing his hands together, though it’s not very cold.

Finally, he tips his head down to face them with a smile that’s full of effort. “So much for quick and painless,” he says with a sheepish expression. “New rule for tonight. No more unscheduled stops.”

Clare nods. “Deal.”

His face softens when their eyes meet, but his words snap like firecrackers in the dark. “Hi and bye,” he says, and she has to swallow the knot in her throat before she can respond.

“Hi and bye.”