The Unexpected Everything

But Bertie didn’t seem to pick up on any of this, and as I took a step closer, he did a little leap into the air and galloped out of the room. When Clark did Bertie’s inner thoughts—in a voice Bri had told me sounded like a decent Jimmy Stewart impression—he always said, “The game, Andie. It’s afoot!” when Bertie jumped like that and went running off. Normally, this routine cracked me up, since Bertie always seemed so pleased with himself, like he was sure he was getting something over on us. But today it was just irritating me.

“Stupid dog,” I muttered as I walked into the kitchen, getting his leash from the cupboard and making sure I had enough plastic bags with me, then slamming the cupboard door harder than I needed to.

“Hi, you,” Clark said, standing in the kitchen doorway. He had the rumpled, unfocused look that I had learned meant he’d been writing all day, his eyes bleary behind his smudged glasses.

I made myself look away from him, back down to Bertie’s leash, which I was coiling in a loop. “Hey.”

“How are you doing?” Clark asked, walking over to me. He wasn’t asking it in the rhetorical way, where you don’t even really expect an answer. He asking it in the careful way you ask people who’ve just suffered a loss or undergone a trauma. After all, he knew the bare bones of what was happening—I’d texted him the situation that morning.

I shrugged, then shook my head. “Not so good.” Clark reached out for my hand, but I took a step back from him and picked up Bertie’s leash. “I have to take him out,” I said, looking away from Clark. “Bertie, now,” I yelled, willing the dog to listen to me just this once.

“Hey,” Clark said, taking a step toward me. He wrapped his arms around me, and for a moment I leaned against them and let my eyes close. There was a piece of me, a big one, that just wanted to let everything out. To hug him back, to cry on his shoulder, to tell him everything and talk about it together—things always seemed a little better once I’d talked to Clark about them—and he’d tell me that everything was going to be okay. But that thought jerked me out of the fantasy, as appealing as it was. Because everything very possibly wasn’t going to be okay.

I broke away from him and picked up Bertie’s leash. I saw a flash of hurt cross Clark’s face, but I made myself look away from it. I took a breath to yell for Bertie again at the moment he came barreling into the kitchen, nails scrabbling on the wooden floors. Clark reached out for him and so did I, and we managed to corral him between the two of us. I snapped on his leash, then straightened up. “See you in a few,” I said, realizing that it would probably be best to put some distance between us, just so I could try to get my emotions under control and stop this powder-keg feeling that was getting stronger by the minute.

“I’ll come with you,” Clark said, giving me a full-dimple smile. “I could use a break anyway.”

I didn’t know how to tell him that I wanted to be alone, especially since I wasn’t sure that was what I wanted. After all, I’d been alone all afternoon and had hated it. So I gave him something between a shrug and a nod and headed out the front door, half running behind Bertie, who was straining as hard as he could against the leash. We stepped outside, and I was about to pull out my keys, but Clark was already locking the door with his set. I saw him reach down for my hand and quickly transferred Bertie’s leash to that hand. I was feeling that if I really let Clark touch me for too long, if I let myself feel everything I was feeling, I would be venturing into dangerous territory, where if I started to cry in front of him, I wasn’t sure when I’d stop.

“So what’s been happening?” he asked after we’d walked for a few seconds in silence, Bertie bounding ahead, trying to sniff four things at once, then doubling back to smell what he might have missed. “Any change?”

“No,” I said, feeling the weight of the word even as I said it, like a bowling ball dropping into my stomach. I took a shaky breath, then let it out. “I’m not sure,” I started, then had to make myself go on, say the rest of the sentence. “I’m not sure we’re going to come back from this.”

Clark looked over at me, a furrow appearing between his brows. “Of course you are,” he said, but I could hear the worry creeping into his voice as well. “I mean . . . you guys are best friends. You’re not going to fall apart over this. You’ll get past it.”

“We might not, okay?” I snapped, and my voice was sharp and spiky. I bit my lip. “I’m sorry,” I said, looping Bertie’s leash around my wrist and then unlooping it. “I’m just . . .” Taking it out on you flashed through my head before I could stop it.

“So,” Clark said, looking over at me, and I could see the same realization I’d been having all morning was dawning for him, as well, and he looked just as happy about it as I was. “It’s just over? All of us this summer? It’s just—gone?”

I could hear the hurt in his voice, and I knew that he was also losing his friends. But he’d known them for two months, not years and years, and there was a piece of me that didn’t want to accept that he would be hurt by this too. I shook my head, not trusting myself to speak just then. Bertie stopped by his favorite tree, and Clark stopped as well, reaching out for my other hand.

“Andie, I’m here. It’s okay.”