• Blue Sargent had forgotten how many times she’d been told she would kill her true love.
• Blue never grew tired of feeling particulary needed, but sometimes she wished needed felt less like a synonym for useful.
• “You missed World Hist. I thought you were dead in a ditch.”
“Did you get notes for me?”
“No. I thought you were dead in a ditch.”
• Unsympathetic, Ronan scratched at an old, brown scab beneath the five knotted leather bands he worry around his wrist. Last week, he and Adam had taken turns dragging each other on a moving dolly behind the BMW, and they both still had the marks to show it.
• “You’ll be there, right?”
Adam never needed an invitation. He and Ronan must’ve fought. Unsurprising. If it had a social security number, Ronan had fought it.
• Gansey had once told Adam that he was afraid most people didn’t know how to handle Ronan. What he meant by this was that he was worried that one day someone would fall on Ronan and cut themselves.
• Adam was very good at watching without being watched. Only Gansey ever seemed to catch him at it.
• Adam felt the familiar pang. Not jealousy, just wanting. One day, he’d have enough money to have place like this. A place that looked on the outside like Adam looked on the inside.
A small voice within Adam asked whetever he would ever look this grand on the inside, or if it was something you had to be born into. Gansey was the way he was because he had lived with money when he was small, like a virtuoso placed at a piano bench as soon as he could sit. Adam, a latecomer, a usurper, still stumbled over his clumsy Henrietta accent and kept his change in a cereal box under his bed.
• He knocked fists with Adam. Coming from Gansey, the gesture was at once charming and self-conscious, a borrowed phrase of a another language.
• He left out the midnight phone calls to Adam when he couldn’t sleep for obsessing about his search.
• Unlike most of the world, Gansey preferred Ronan to his elder brother Declan, and so the lines has been drawn. Adam suspected Gansey’s preference was because Ronan was earnest even if he was horrible, and with Gansey, honesty was golden.
• This way why Adam could forgive that shallow, glossy version of Gansey he’s first met. Because of his money and his good family name, because of his handsome smile and his easy laugh, because he liked people and (despite his fears to the contrary) they liked him back, Gansey could’ve had any and all of the friends that he wanted. Instead he chosen the three of them, three guys who should’ve, for three different reason, been friendless.
• “I’m not coming,” Noah said.
“Need some more alone time?” Ronan asked.
• But Gansey was already grabbing the car key to the Pig and stepping around his miniature Henrietta. Even though Ronan was snarling and Noah was sighing and Adam was hesitating, he didn’t turn to verify that they were coming. He knew they were. In three different ways, he’d earned them all days or weeks or months before, and when it came to it, they’d all follow him anywhere.
• The mere mention of Ronan Lynch’s name had scraped something raw inside Whelk. Because it was never Ronan by himself, it was Ronan as part of the inseparable threesome: Ronan Lynch, Richard Gansey and Adam Parrish. All of the boys in his class were affluent, confident, arrogant, but the three of them, more than anyone else, reminded him of what he’d lost. […] And at the end of the day Whelk, alone and haunted, never, ever able to forget that he was once one of them.
• “I am not a prostitute.”
[…] In the background, she caught a glimpse of Soldier Boy making a plane of his hand. It was crashing and weaving towards the table surface while Smudgy Boy gulped laughter down. The elegant boy held his palm over his face in exaggerated horror, fingers spread just enough that she could see his wince.
• From their father, the Lynch brothers had got indefatigable egos, a decade of obscure Irish music instrument lessons and the ability to box like they meant it. Niall Lynch had not been around very much, but when he had been, he had been an excellent teacher.
• The story of the Lynch family was this: once upon a time, a man named Niall Lynch had three sons, one of whom loved his father more than the others. Niall Lynch was handsome and charismatic and rich and mysterious, and one day, he was dragged from him charcoal-grey BMW and beaten to death with a tyre iron. It was a Wednesday.
On Thursday, his son Ronan found his body in the driveway.
On Friday, their mother stopped speaking and never spoke again.
On Saturday, the Lynch brothers found that their father’s death left them rich and homeless. The will forbade them to touch anything in the house — their clothing, the furniture. Their silent mother. The will demanded they immediately move into Aglionby housing. Declan, the eldest, was meant to control the funda and their lives until his brothers reached eighteen.
On Sunday, Ronan stole his deceased father’s car.
On Monday, the Lynch brothers stopped being friends.
• “Fine. He’s your dog, Gansey. You leash him. Keep him from getting kicked out of Aglionby. I wash my hands of him.”
“I wish,” snarled Ronan. His entire body was rigid underneath Gansey’s hand. He wore his hatred like a cruel second skin.
Declan said, “You’re such a piece of shit, Ronan. If dad saw—” and this made Ronan burst forward again.
• The last time Gansey had been in the Nino’s co-ed bathroom, it had smelled like vomit and beer. On one of the walls, a red Sharpie had scrawled the word BEEZLEBUB and Ronan’s number below.
• “I’m not saying you’re wrong, Declan. But you are not Niall Lynch, and you won’t ever be. And you’d get ahaed a lot faster if you stopped trying.”
Gansey released Ronan. Ronan didn’t move, though, and neither did Declan, as if by saying their father’s name, Gansey had cast a spell. They wore matching raw expressions. Different wounds inflicted by the same weapon.
• “I’ll never forgive you.”
“Wouldn’t mean much from you anymore.”
• “I don’t know what I want. I don’t know what the hell I am.”
• Tell me I’m doing the right thing with Ronan. Tell me this is how to find the old Ronan. Tell me I’m not ruining him by keeping him away from Declan.
But Adam had already told Gansey he thought Ronan needed to learn to clean up his own messes. It was only Gansey who seemed afraid that Ronan would learn to live in the dirt.
• The only thing was, she didn’t really want to see the future. What she wanted was to see something no one else could see or would see, and maybe that was asking for more magic that was in the world.
• Noah didn’t say he would go along, and Gansey didn’t ask him to. Six months ago, the only time it had ever mattered, Noah had found Ronan in an introspective pool of his own blood, and so he was exempt from ever having to look again. Noah hadn’t gone with Gansey to the hospital afterwards, and Adam had been caught trying to sneak out, so it was only Gansey who’d been with Ronan when they stitched his skin whole again. It had been a long time ago, but also, it was no time at all.
Sometimes, Gansey felt like his life was made up of a dozen hours that he could never forget.
• He wasn’t naive; he carried no illusions that he’d ever recover the Ronan Lynch he’d known before Niall died. But he didn’t want to lose the Ronan Lynch he had now.
• “When I told you I didn’t want you getting drunk at Monmouth, I didn’t mean I wanted you drunk somewhere else.”
Ronan, with only a little slurring, replied, “Pot calling the kettle black.”
With dignity, Gansey said, “I drink. I do not get drunk.”
• “Where did it come from?”
Ronan’s fingers were a compassionate cage around the raven’s breast. It didn’t look real in his hands. “I found it.”
“People find pennies,” Gansey replied. “Or car keys. Or four-leaf clovers.”
“And ravens,” Ronan said. “You’re just jealous ’cause” — at this point, he had to stop to regroup his beer-sluggish thoughts — “you didn’t fine one, too.”
• “What if I implement a no-pets at the apartament?”
“Well, hell, man,” Ronan replied, with a savage smile, “you can’t just throw out Noah like that.”
• “Where did you say you found that bird again?”
“In my head.” Ronan’s laugh was a sharp jackal cry.
“Dangerous place,” commented Noah.
• At the sight of Gansey’s Aglionby jumper, Adam’s father had charged out, firing on all cylinders. For weeks after that, Ronan had called Gansey “the S.R.F.”, where the S stood for Soft, the R for Rich, and the F for something else.
• “I tried calling him at the house,” he said.
Ronan replied, “Well, Poor Boy needs a mobile.”
A few months earlier, Gansey had offered to buy Adam a mobile phone, and by so doing had launched the longest fight they’d ever had, a week of silence that had resolved itself only when Ronan did something more offensive that either of them could accomplish.
• “Lynch!” the call came again. “I’m going to fuck you up.”
Ronan still didn’t look up. He adjusted the strap on his shoulder and continued stalking across the grass.
“What’s that about?” Gansey demanded.
“Some people don’t take losing very well,” Ronan replied.
“ Was that Kavinsky? Don’t tell me you’ve been racing again.”
• “Why are you carrying that bag? Oh my God, you have that bird in there, don’t you.”
“She has to be fed every two hours.”
“Jesus, the internet, Gansey.”
• “You seem to have an extremely large bag today, Mr Lynch,” Whelk said.
“You know what they say about men with large bags,” Ronan replied. “Ostendes tuum et ostendam meus?”
• “Being a shit in Latin isn’t the way to an A,” Gansey said.
Ronan’s smile was golden. “It was last year.”
• “I’m going to see a friend.”
“The mean one, or the white trash one?”
She replied, “Sorry. I meant Captain Frigid or Trailer-Park Boy.”
• “Hey, Tiger,” Gansey said.
• Gansey knew he had to make a difference, had to make a bigger mark on the world because of the head start he’d been given, or he was the worst sort of person out there.
The poor are sad they’re poor, Adam had once mused, and turns out the rich are sad they’re rich.
And Ronan had said, Hey, I’m rich, and it doesn’t bother me.
• Success meant nothing to Adam if he hadn’t done it for himself.
• “So you won’t leave because of your pride? He’ll kill you.”
“You’ve watched too many cop shows.”
“I’ve watched the evenings news, Adam,” Gansey snapped. “Why don’t you let Ronan teach you to fight? He’s offered twice now. He means it.”
“Because then he will kill me.”
Adam said, “He has a gun.”
• “Come on, Adam,” said Gansey. Please. “We’ll make it work.”
[…] “It means I never get to be my own person. If I let you cover for me, then I’m yours. I’m his now, and then I’ll be yours.”
It struck Gansey harder that he thought it would. Some days, all that grounded him was the knowledge that his and Adam’s friendship existed in a place that money couldn’t influence. Anything that spoke to the contrary hurt Gansey more that he would have admitted out loud. With precision, he asked, “Is that what you think of me?”
“You don’t know, Gansey,” Adam said. “You don’t know anything about money, even you’ve got all of it. You don’t know how it makes people look at me and at you. It’s all they need to know about us. They’ll think I’m your monkey.”
I am only my money. It is all anyone sees, even Adam.
Gansey shot back, “You think your plans are going to keep working whe you miss school and work because you let your dad pound the shit out of you? You’re as bad as her. You think you deserve it.”
“Don’t pretend you know,” he said. “Don’t come here and pretend you know anything.”
Gansey told himself to walk away. To say nothing else. Then he said, “Don’t pretend you have anything to be proud of, then.”
As soon as he said it, he knew that it wasn’t fair, or even if it had been fair, it wasn’t right. But he wasn’t sorry he’d said that.
• Closing his eyes, he thought about the bruise on Adam’s face, with its spreading, soft edges, and the hard red mark over his nose. He imagined coming here one day and finding that Adam wasn’t here, but in the hospital, or worse, that Adam was here, but that something important had been beaten out of him.
Even imagining it made him feel sick.
The car jerked then, and Gansey’s eyes came open as the passenger door groaned.
“Wait, Gansey,” Adam said, out of breath. He was all folded over to be able to see inside the car. His bruise looked ghastly. It made his skin seem transparent. “Don’t leave like”
Sliding his hands off the wheel and into his lap, Gansey peered up at him. This was the part where Adam was going to tell him not to take what he'd said personally. But it felt personal.
“I’m only trying to help.”
“I know,” Adam told him. “I know. But I can’t do it that way. I can’t live with myself that way.”
Gansey didn’t understand, but he nodded. He wanted it to be over; he wanted it to be yesterday, when he and Ronan and Adam were listening to the recorder and Adam’s face was still unmarked.
• Oh no. Not him. All this time she’d been wondering how Gansey might die and it turned out she was going to strangle him.
• “What happened to your face?” Blue asked.
Adam shrugged ruefully. Either he or Ronan smelled like a parking garage. His voice was self-deprecating. “Do you think it makes me look tougher?”
What it did was make him look was more fragile and dirty, somehow, like a teacup unearthed from the soil, but Blue didn’t say that.
Ronan said, “It makes you look like a loser”
• “I don’t have a brother, ma’am,” Adam replied. But Blue saw his eyes dart to Gansey.
• When Gansey was polite, it made him powerful. When Adam was polite, he was giving power away.
• “A secret killed your father and you know what it was.”
• “Ah,” said Calla, in a very, very knowing way. “Now I see.”
“Don’t psychoanalyse me,” her mother said.
“I already have. And I say, again, ‘ah’.”
• “There’s so much coming out of him, it shouldn’t be possible. Do you remember that woman who came in who was pregnant with quadruplets? It was like that, but worse.”
• “I thought we were clear on what a closed door meant,” Ronan said. He held a pair of tweezers in one hand.
“I thought we were clear that night was for sleeping.”
• Noah withdrew, but Gansey remained. For several minutes, he watched the raven slurp down grey slime while Ronan cooed at her. He was not the Ronan that Gansey had grown accustomed to, but neither was he the Ronan that Gansey had first met. It was clear now that the instrument wailing from the headphones was the Irish pipes. Gansey couldn’t remember the last time Ronan had listened to Celtic music. Niall Lynch’s music. All at once, he, too, missed Ronan’s charismatic father. But more than that, he missed the Ronan that had existed when Niall Lynch had still been alive. This boy in front of him now, fragile bird in his hands, seemed like a compromise.
• “What’s going on with your face, by the way?”
Gansey rubbed his chin, rueful. His skin felt reluctantly stubbled. He knew he was being diverted, but he allowed it.
“Dude, you aren’t really going to do that beard thing, are you? I thought you were joking. You know that stopped being cool in the fourteenth century or whenever it was that Paul Bunyan lived.” Ronan looked over his shoulder at him. He was sporting the five o’clock shadow that he was capable of growing at any time of the day. “Just stop. You look mangy.”
“It’s irrelevant. It’s not growing. I’m doomed to be a man-child.”
“If you keep saying things like ‘man-child’, we’re done,” Ronan said. “Hey, man. Don’t let it get you down. Once your balls drop, that beard’ll come in great. Like a fucking rug. You eat soup, it’ll filter out the potatoes. Terrier style. Do you ha hair on your legs? I’ve never noticed.”
Ronan’s voice was just behind him, the timbre of it strange and initially unrecognizable. Gansey didn’t turn around. The wasp had just twitched its wings, nearly lifting off.
“Shit, man!” Ronan said. There were three footsteps, very close together, the floor creaking like a shot, and then the shoe was snatched from Gansey’s hand. Ronan shoved him aside and brought down the shoe on the window so hard that the glass should’ve broken. After the wasp’s dry body had fallen to the floorboard, Ronan sought it out in the darkness and smashed it once more.
“Shit,” Ronan said again. “Are you stupid?”
Gansey didn’t know how to describe how it felt, to see death crawling centimetres from him, to know that in a few seconds, he could have gone from “a promising student” to “beyond saving”.
• “What’s this about you and Parrish leaving?”
It wasn’t what Gansey had expected. He wasn’t sure how to speak without hurting Ronan. He couldn’t lie to him.
“You tell me what you heard and I’ll tell you what’s real.”
“Noah told me,” Ronan said, “that if you left, Parrish was going with you.”
He had let jealousy sneak into his voice and that made Gansey’s response cooler than it might have been. Gansey tried not to play favourites. “And what else did Noah have to say?”
With visible effort, Ronan pulled himself back, sorted himself out. None of the Lynch brothers liked to appear anything other than intentional, even if it was intentionally cruel. Instead of answering, he asked, “Do you not want me to come?”
Something stuck in Gansey’schest. “I would take all of you anywhere with me.”
• “I catch you staring at a wasp again, though, I’m going to let it kill you. Screw that.”
• I hope you still want me to call. — Adam
• Today, Blue thought, is the day I stop listening to the future and start living in instead.
• Ronan shoved himself from beneath the car and stared up at Adam. He’d let his five o’clock shadow become a multiday shadow, probably to spite Gansey’s inability to grow facial hair.
• “What is your plan with these things anyway?” Adam asked.
Ronan smiled his lizard smile. “Ramp. BMW. The goddamn moon.”
This was so like Ronan. His room inside Monmouth was filled with expensive toys, but, like a spoiled child, he ended up playing outside with sticks.
“The trajectory you’re building doesn’t suggest the moon,” Adam replied. “It suggests the end of your suspension.”
“I don’t need your back talk, science guy.”
• “To the psychic’s? You know what that place was?” Ronan asked. “A castration palace. You date that girl, you should send her your nuts instead of flowers.”
“Sometimes you sound just like Gansey,” Ronan said.
Noah laughed his breathy, nearly soundless laugh. Ronan spit on the ground beside the BMW.
“I didn’t even realize that ‘midget’ was the Adam Parrish type,” he said.
• Two years earlier, Adam had made his decision to come to Aglionby, and, in his head, it was sort of because of Ronan. His mother had sent him to the grocery store with her bank card — all that had been on the conveyer belt was a tube of toothpaste and four cans of microwave ravioli — and the cashier had just told him there were insufficient funds in her bank account to cover the purchase. Though it was not his failing, there was something peculiarly humiliating and intimate about the moment, hunched at the head of a shopping line, turning out his pockets to pretend he might have the cash to cover instead. While he fumbled there, a shaved-headed boy at the next register moved swiftly through, swiping a credit card and collecting his things in only a few seconds.
Even the way the other boy had moved, Adam recalled, had struck him: confident and careless, shoulders rolled back, chin tilted, an emperor’s son. As the cashier swiped Adam’s card again, both of them pretending the machine might have misread the magnetic stripe, Adam watched the other boy go out to the kerb to where a shiny black car waited. When the boy opened the door, Adam saw the other two boys inside wore raven-breasted jumpers and ties. They were despicably carefree as they divvied up the drinks.
He’d had to leave the cans and the toothpaste on the conveyer belt, eyes hot with shamed tears that wouldn’t fall.
He’d never wanted to be someone else so badly.
In his head, that boy was Ronan, but in retrospect, Adam thought it couldn’t have been. He wouldn’t have been old enough to have his driver’s licence yet. It was just some other Aglionby student with a working credit card and exquisite car. And also, that day wasn’t the only reason he’d decided to fight to come to Aglionby. But it was the catalyst. The imagined memory of Ronan, careless and shallow but with pride fully intact, and Adam, cowed and humiliated while a line of old ladies waited behind him.
He still wasn’t that other boy at the register. But he was closer.
• “Why did you want my number?”
Adam kept walking, but he didn’t look away. He seemed shy until he didn’t. “Why wouldn’t I?”
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” Blue replied. Her cheeks felt a little warm, but she was well into this conversation and she couldn’t back down now. “Because I know you’re going to think I feel bad about it, and I don’t.”
“Because I’m not pretty. Not in the way that Aglionby boys seem to like.”
“I go to Aglionby,” Adam said.
Adam did not seem to go to Aglionby like other boys went to Aglionby.
“I think you’re pretty,” he said.
“Pshaw,” she said finally. […] “But thanks. I think you’re pretty, too.”
He laughed his surprised laugh.
• “If magic exists, I just want to see it. Just once.”
“Safe as life,” Gansey replied.
• “There she is,” Helen’a voice reported directly into Gansey’s ears; in the helicopter, they all wore headsets to allow them to converse through the ceaseless noise of the blades and the engine. “Gansey’s girlfriend.”
Ronan’s snort barely made it through his headset, but Gansey had heard it often enough to know it was there.
Blue said, “She must be pretty big to see her from up here.”
“Henrietta,” Helen replied. She peered to the left of the helo as she banked. “They’re getting married. They haven’t set a date yet.”
“If you’re going to embarrass me, I’ll throw you out and fly myself,” Gansey said from the seat beside her.
• There was nothing particulary intimate about the way they sat, but something about the scene made Gansey feel strange, like he’d heard an unpleasant statement and later forgotten everything about the words but the way they had made him feel.
• “Tell me why we’re negotiating with terrorists?” Ronan asked.
• “The line across Virginia is the one that connects us to the UK. The United Kingdom.”
She rolled her eyes dramatically enough that he caught the gesture without turning his head. “I know what the UK is, thanks. The public school system isn’t that bad.”
• Ronan demanded, “Saw him where?”
“While I was sitting outside with one of my half aunts.”
This seemed to satisfy Ronan as well, because he asked, “What’s the other half of her?”
• Ronan said, “I’m always straight.”
Adam replied, “Oh, man, that’s the biggest lie you’ve ever told.”
“He’s a pit bull,” Adam said.
“I know some really nice pit bulls.”
“He’s the kind of pit that makes the evening news. Gansey’s trying to retrain him.”
• “Haven’t you heard of being hung, drawn and quartered?”
Blue asked, “Is it as painful as conversations with Ronan?”
• “You’re the table everyone wants at Starbucks,” Gansey mused as he began to walk again.
• “Helen,” Adam said warningly. Ronan had rejoined them and both boys looked in the direction of the helicopter.
“I said this is interesting,” Gansey repeated.
• His eyes dropped to where Adam held Blue’s hand. Again, his face was somehow puzzled by the fact of their hand-holding. Adam’s grip tightened, although she didn’t think he meant for it to.
This was a worldless discussion, too, though she didn’t think either of the boys knew what they were trying to say.
• Gansey looked up to them and she saw in his face that he loved this place. His bald expression held something new: not the raw delight of finding the ley line or the sly pleasure of teasing Blue. She recognized the strange happiness that came from loving something without knowing why you did, that strange happiness that was sometimes so big that it felt like sadness. It was the way she felt when she looked at the stars.
Just like that, he was a little bit closer to the Gansey that Blue had seen in the churchyard and she found she couldn’t bear to look at him.
• “I think they’re here because I thought they ought to be here,” Gansey said.
Blue replied sarcastically, “OK, God.”
• When she opened her eyes, she was both in her body and watching it, nowhere near the cavity of the tree. The Blue that was before her stood close to a boy in an Aglionby jumper. There was a slight stoop to his posture, and his shoulders were spattered darkly with rain. It was his fingers that Blue felt on her face. He touched her cheeks with the backs of his fingers.
Tears coursed down the other Blue’s face. Through some strange magic, Blue could feel them on her face as well. She could feel, too, the sick, rising misery she’d felt in the churchyard, the grief that felt bigger than her. The other Blue’s tears seemed endless. One drop slid after another, each following an identical path down her cheeks.
The boy in the Aglionby jumper leaned his forehead against Blue’s. She felt the pressure of his skin against hers and suddenly she could smell mint.
It’ll be OK, Gansey told the other Blue. She could tell that he was afraid. It’ll be OK.
Impossibly, Blue realized that this other Blue was crying because she loved Gansey. And that the reason Gansey touched her like that, his fingers so careful with her, was because he knew that her kiss could kill him. She could feel how badly the other Blue wanted to kiss him, even as she dreaded it. Though she couldn’t understand why, her real, present day memories in the tree cavity were clouded with other false memories of their lips nearly touching, a life this other Blue had already lived.
OK. I'm ready — Gansey’s voice caught, just a little. Blue, kiss me.
• “I want you to know,” Adam whispered furiously, “I would never do that. It wasn’t real. I’d never do that to him.”
• “Is Blue a nickname? Not that it’s not a cool name. Just that it’s… unusual.”
Blue replied, “Unfortunately, it’s nothing normal. Not like Gansey.”
• He smiled tolerantly at her. Rubbing his smooth chin with its recently assassinated chin hairs, he studied her. She barely came up to Ronan’s shoulder, but she was every bit as big as he, every bit as present. Gansey had a sense of incredible rightness, then, with everyone assembled by the Pig. Like Blue, not the ley line, was the missing piece that he’d been needing all these years, like the search for Glendower wasn’t truly under way until she was part of it. She was right like Ronan had been right, like Adam had been right, like Noah had been right. When each of them had joined him, he’d felt a rush of relief, and in the helicopter, he’d felt exactly the same way when he’d realized it was her voice on the recorder.
Of course, she could still walk away.
She won’t, he thought. She has to feel it, too.
• He said, “I’ve always liked the name Jane.”
Blue’s eyes widened. “Ja — what? Oh! No, no. You can’t just go around naming people other things because you don’t like their real name.”
“I like Blue just fine,” Gansey said. He didn’t believe she was really offended; her face didn’t look like it had at Nino’s when they’d first met, and her ears were turning pink. He thought, possibly, he was getting a little better at not offending her, although he couldn’t seem to stop teasing her. “Some of my favourite shirts are blue. However, I also like Jane.”
“I’m not answering to that.”
• But that wasn’t what happened. What happened was they drove to Harry’s and parked the Camaro next to an Audi and a Lexus and Gansey ordered flavours of gelato until the table wouldn’t hold any more bowls and Ronan convinced the staff to turn the overhead speakers up and Blue laughed for the first time at something Gansey said and they were loud and triumphant and kings of Henrietta, because they’d found the ley line and because it was starting, it was starting.
• From the passenger seat, Ronan began to swear at Adam. It was a long, involved swear, using every forbidden word possible, often in compound-word form. As Adam stared at his lap, penitent, he mused that there was something musical about Ronan when he swore, a careful and loving precision to the way he fit the words together, a black-painted poetry. It was far less hateful sounding than when he didn’t swear.
Ronan finished with, “For the love of... Parrish, take some care, this is not your mother’s 1971 Honda Civic.”
Adam lifted his head and said, “They didn’t start making the Civic until ‘73.”
• Noah appeared beside Blue. He looked joyful and adoring, like a Labrador retriever. Noah had decided almost immediately that he would do anything for Blue. […] Blue permitted Noah to pet the crazy tufts of her hair.
• “We have to be back in three hours,” Ronan said. “I just fed Chainsaw but she’ll need it again.”
“This,” Gansey replied, “is precisely why I didn’t want to have a baby with you.”
• Adam wasn’t certain what came first with Blue — her treating the boys as friends, or them all becoming friends. It seemed to Adam that this circular way to build relationships required a healthy amount of self-confidence to undertake. And it was a strange sort of magic that it felt like she’d always been hunting for Glendower with them.
• “Gas. Give it more gas.”
Ronan punched Gansey’s right leg down, his palm on Gansey’sknee. The engine wailed high and caught. Gansey drily thanked Ronan for his assistance.
• “Are we invited?” Adam asked.
“I think,” Noah replied, “you invite yourself.”
• “There’s a joke,” Ronan answered finally, not looking away from the words, “in case I didn’t recognize my own handwriting.”
• “How do I ask why you can’t hear them?”
“God, Gansey. If you paid attention in—”
• “Coincidence,” Adam said. Of couse meaning that it wasn’t.
• “I’m not entirely happy that you’re getting in a car without air bags.”
“Our car doesn’t have air bags,” Blue pointed out.
• “If you don’t tell me not to see them, I don’t have to disobey you,” Blue suggested.
“This is what you get, Maura, for using your DNA to make a baby,” Calla said.
• “You could at least say sorry,” Maura said. “Pretend like I have some power over you.”
“I’m sorry. I should’ve told you I was going to do what you didn’t want me to do.”
Maura said, “That was not as satisfying as I imagined it would be.”
• Blue tried not to look at Gansey’s boat shoes; she felt better about him as a person if she pretended he wasn’t wearing them.
• Gansey’s voice, when he replied, was a little rough, “Well, if you killed Adam, I’d be quite upset.”
• “I heard a voice. It was a whisper. I won’t forget what it said. It said: ‘You will live because of Glendower. Someone else on the ley line is dying when they should not, and so you will live when you should not.’”
• “Gansey,” Blue said, voice flat. “This was a kid. This was a kid from Aglionby.”
• The face on the driver’s licence was Noah’s.
• “Open his door,” Gansey ordered. “Tell me what’s in there.”
“It looks like a nunnery as usual,” Ronan said. “All the personality of a mental facility. What am I looking for? Drugs? Girls? Guns?”
• He stroked Chainsaw’s head with a single finger and she tilted her beak up in response. It was a strange moment in a strange evening, and if it had happened the day before, it would’ve struck Adam that he rarely saw such thoughtless kindness from Ronan.
• “You’re really dead, aren’t you?”
Noah’s voice was plaintive. “I told you.”
• “Shit, man,” Ronan said, finally. A little desperate. “All those nights you gave me grief about keeping you awake and you don’t even need to sleep.”
• “You’re looking for a god. Didn’t you suspect that there was also a devil?”
• Part of Adam wanted to lure Ronan out of his room for company, but most of him realized that Ronan was, in his unappealing and unspoken way, grieving for Noah.
• “Where’s Gansey?” Declan demanded.
Adam didn’t like to be accused of lying. He usually had better ways of getting what he wanted. “He went home for his mother’s birthday.”
Adam shrugged. “Yeah. I am.”
• “He’s getting kicked out,” Declan said, stuffing the envelope towards Adam. “Gansey promised me he would turn his grades around. Well, that hasn’t happened. I trusted Gansey, and he let me down. When he gets back, let him know he’s got my brothet kicked out.”
This was more than Adam could stand.
“Oh no,” he said. He hoped Ronan was listening. “Ronan did that all by himself. I don’t know when you both are going to see that only Ronan can keep himself in Aglionby. Some day, he had to pick for himself. Until then, you’re both wasting your time.”
• “He’s moving out,” Declan said. “Remind Gansey of that. No Aglionby, no Monmouth.”
Then you’ve killed him, Adam thought, because he couldn’t imagine Ronan living under a roof with his brother. He couldn’t imagine Ronan living under a foof without Gansey, period.
• Gansey always felt as if there were two of him: the Gansey who was in control, able to handle any situation, able to talk to anyone, and then, the other, more fragile Gansey, strung out and unsure, embarrassingly earnest, driven by naive longing.
• “Mr Gansey, I appreciate your concern for your frie—”
“Brother,” Gansey interrupted. “Really, I’ve come to see him as a brother. And to my parents, he’s a son.”
• A car was a wrapper for his its contents, he thought, and if he looked on the inside like any of the cars in this garage looked on the outside, he couldn’t live with himself. On the outside, he sort of wished he looked more like the Camaro. Which was to say, more like Adam.
“He must be pretty smart.”
“He’s a genius,” Gansey said, with certainty.
• “Gansey’s partying with his mother,” Ronan said. He smelled like beer. “And Noah’s fucking dead. But Parrish is here.”
• She said, “What’s the downstairs look like?”
“Dust,” Adam replied. He used his foot to discreetly move a pair of dirty jeans, boxers still tucked inside them, out of Blue’s direct line of sight. “And concrete. And more dust. And dirt.”
“Also,” said Ronan, moving off towards a pair of doors at the other end of the floor, “dust.”
Adam’s mouth was very set. “A place made for leaving.”
“That’s not really an answer.”
“It’s not really a place.”
• “Do you want to hold her?” Ronan asked.
• Ronan accepted the bird and stroked the feathers on the back of her head.
“You look like a supervillain with your familiar,” Adam said.
Ronan’s smile cut his face, but he looked kinder than Blue had ever seen him, like the raven in his hand was his heart, finally laid bare.
• “I want you to know,” Noah said, pressing the carved bone against his Adam’s apple, hard, as if it would squeeze the words from him, “I was… more… when I was alive.”
Adam chewed his lip, looking for a response. Blue thought she knew what he meant, though. Noah’s resemblance to the crookedly smiling photo on the driver’s licence Gansey had discovered was akin to a photocopy’s resemblance to an original painting. She couldn’t imagine the Noah she knew driving that tricked-out Mustang.
“You’re enough now,” Blue said. “I missed you.”
With a wan smile, Noah reached over and petted Blue’s hair, just like he used to. She could barely feel his fingers.
• Ronan said, “Hey, man. All those times you wouldn’t give me notes because you said I should go to my classes. You never went to classes.”
“But you did, didn’t you, Noah?” Blue interrupted, thinking of the Aglionby badge they’d found with his body. “You were an Aglionby student.”
“Were,” Ronan said. “You don’t go to classes.”
“Neither do you,” Noah replied.
“And he’s about to be a were, too,” Adam broke in.
• It was dark by the time Gansey left his parents’ house. He was full of the restless, dissatisfied energy that always seemed to move into his heart after he visited home these days. It had something to do with the knowledge that his parents’ house wasn’t truly home anymore — if it had ever been — and something to do with the realization that they hadn’t changed; he had.
• “Wait, you think my mother is still in love with — does he have a name?”
“Puppy,” replied Calla, and Persephone giggled, clearly recalling memories of Maura insensible with love.
“I refuse to believe Mom ever called some man puppy,” Blue said.
“Oh, but she did. Also lover.” Calla picked up an empty bowl. There was a crust in the bottom, as if it had once held a liquid with some body to it. Like pudding. Or blood. “And butternut.”
“You are making that up.” Blue was ashamed for her mother. […] “Why would you even call someone—”
Turning to Blue with extremely jagged eyebrows, Calla said, “Use your imagination”, and Persephone exploded into helpless laughter.
• Orla came down for the gossip but stared so admiringly at Ronan that Calla yelled at her to leave and give everyone more space.
• “Handing him a pair of scissors, Persephone remarked, “Blue, I did tell you about putting your thumb outside of your fist if you were going to hit someone.”
“You didn’t tell me to tell him,” Blue retorted.
• “His name wasn’t really Butternut, was it?” Gansey asked Adam in a low voice.
• “Man, you don’t have to get out here,” Ronan said.
Adam didn’t comment on that; it wasn’t helpful. Instead he asked, “Don’t you have homework to do?”
But Ronan, as the inventor of sly remarks, was impervious to them. His smile was ruthless in the glow from the dash. “Yes, Parrish. I believe I do.”
• “I kept thinking about what would’ve happened if Whelk had shot Gansey today.”
Adam hadn’t let himself dwell on that possibility. Every time his thoughts came close to touching on the near miss, it opened up something dark and sharp edged inside him. It was hard to remember what life at Aglionby had been like before Gansey. The distant memories seemed difficult, lonely, more populated with late nights where Adam sat on the steps of the double-wide, blinking tears out of his eyes and wondering why he bothered. He’d been younger then, only a little more than a year ago. “But he didn’t.”
“Lucky you taught him that hook.”
“I never taught him to break his thumb.”
“That’s Gansey for you. Only learns enough to be superficially competent.”
“Loser,” Ronan agreed, and he was himself again.
• “Do not ignore me,” his father growled. And then, inexplicably, he turned his head from Adam, and he shouted, “What do you want?”
“To do this,” Ronan Lynch snarled, smashing his fist into the side of Robert Parrish’s face.
• Adam’s vision shifted and cleared, shifted and cleared. He could make out Ronan, dimply. Appalled, he asked, “Is he being cuffed?”
This can’t happen. He can’t go to jail because of me.
• His mother stood on the porch, watching him and the cop, her eyes narrowed. Adam knew what she was thinking, because they’d had the conversation so many times before: Don’t say anything, Adam. Tell him you fell down. It really was a little your fault, wasn’t it? We’ll deal with it as a family.
If Adam turned his father in, everything crashed down around him. If Adam turned him in, his mother would never forgive him. If Adam turned him in, he could never come home again.
Across the lot, one of the officers put his hand on the back of Ronan’s head, guiding him down into the police car.
Even without the hearing in his left ear, Adam heard Ronan’s voice clearly. “I said I’ve got it, man. Do you think I’ve never been in one of these before?”
Adam couldn’t move in with Gansey. He had done so much to make sure that when he moved out, it would be on his own terms. Not Robert Parrish’s. Not Richard Gansey’s.
On Adam Parrish’s terms, or not at all.
• “Ronan was defending me.” Adam’s mouth was dry as the dirt around them. The officer’s expression focused on him as he went on. “From my father. All this... is from him. My face and my...”
His mother was staring at him.
He closed his eyes. He couldn’t look at her and say it. Even with his eyes closed, he felt like he was falling, like the horizon pitched, like his head tilted. Adam had the sick feeling that his father had managed to knock something crucial askew.
And then he said what he couldn’t say before. He asked, “Can I… can I press charges?”
• Except that Gansey would never have been a good target; the manhunt for his killer would be monumental. Really, the Parrish kid would have been a better bet. No one would miss a kid born in a trailer. He always turned his homework in on time, though.
• This was where Adam always said something. Where he got angry. Where he snapped, No, I won’t take your damn money, Gansey. You can’t buy me. But he just turned that paper bracelet around and around and around.
“You win,” Adam said finally. He rubbed a hand through his uneven hair. He sounded tired. “Take me to get my stuff.”
Gansey had been about to start the Camaro, but he took his hand away from the ignition. “I didn’t win anything. Do you think this is how I wanted it?”
“Yes,” Adam replied. He didn’t look at him. “Yes, I do.”
Hurt and anger warred furiously inside Gansey. “Don’t be shitty.”
Adam picked and picked at the uneven end where the paper bracelet sealed. “I’m telling you that you can say ‘I told you so’. Say ‘if you left earlier, this wouldn’t have happened’.”
“Did I say that before? You don’t have to act like it’t the end of the world.”
“It is the end of the world.”
“Moving out of your dad’s place is the end of the world?”
“You know what I wanted,” Adam said. “You know this wasn’t it.”
“You act like it’s my fault.”
“Tell me you’re unhappy about how this is going down.”
He wouldn’t lie; he wanted Adam out of that house. But there had never been a part of him that wanted him hurt to accomplish that. There had never been a part of him that wanted Adam to have to run instead of march triumphantly out. There had never been a part of him that wanted Adam to look at him like he was looking at him now. So it was the truth when he replied, “I’m unhappy about how this is going down.”
“Whatever,” Adam shot back. “You’ve wanted me to move out for ever.”
Gansey despised raising his voice (in his head, his mother said, People shout when they don’t have the vocabulary to whisper), but he heard it happening despite himself and so, with effort, he kept his voice even. “Not like this. At least you have a place to go. ‘End of the world’… What is your problem, Adam? I mean, is there something about my place that’t too repugnant for you to imagine living there? Why is it that everything kind I do is pity to you? Everything is charity. Well, here it is: I’m sick of tiptoeing around your principles.”
“God, I’m sick of your condescension, Gansey,” Adam said. “Don’t try to make me feel stupid. Who whips out repugnant? Don’t pretend you’re not trying to make me feel stupid.”
“This is the way I talk. I’m sorry your father never taught you the meaning of repugnant. He was too busy smashing your head against the wall of your trailer while you apologized for being alive.”
Both of them stopped breathing.
Gansey knew he’d gone too far. It was too far, too late, too much.
Adam shoved open the door.
“Fuck you, Gansey. Fuck you,” he said, voice low and furious.
Adam slammed the door, and then he slammed it again when the latch didn’t catch. Gansey didn’t open his eyes. He didn’t want to see what Adam was doing. He didn’t want to see if people were watching some kid fight with a boy in a bright orange Camaro and an Aglionby jumper. Just then he hated his raven-breasted uniform and his loud car and every three-and four-syllable word his parents had used in casual conversation at the dinner table and he hated Adam’s hideous father and Adam’s permissive mother and most of all, most of all, he hated the sound of Adam’s last words, playing over and over.
He couldn’t stand it, all of this inside him.
In the end, he was nobody to Adam, he was nobody to Ronan. Adam spit his words back at him and Ronan squandered however many second chances he gave him. Gansey was just a guy with a lot of stuff and a hole inside him that chewed away more of his heart every year.
They were always walking away from him. But he never seemed able to walk away from them.
• Adam didn’t look at him when he said, finally, “It doesn’t matter how you say it. It’t what you wanted, in the end. All your things in one place, all under your roof. Everything you own right where you can see…”
But then he stopped. He dropped his head into his hands. His thumbs worked through the hair above his ears, over and over, the knuckles white. When he sucked in his breath, it was the ragged sound that came from trying not to cry.
Gansey thought of one hundred things that he could say to Adam about how it would be all right, how it was for the best, how Adam Parrish had been his own man before he’d met Gansey and there was no way he’d stop being his own man just by changing the roof over his head, how some days Gansey wished that he could be him, because Adam was so very real and true in a way that Gansey couldn’t ever seem to be. But Gansey’s words had somehow become unwitting weapons, and he didn’t trust himself to not accidentally discharge them again.
• She tried to imagine being Gansey, seeing the warehouse for the first time, deciding it would be a great place to live, but she couldn’t picture it. No more than she could imagine looking at the Pig and deciding it was a great car to drive, or Ronan and thinking he was a good friend to have. But somehow, it worked, because she loved the apartment, and Ronan was starting to grow on her, and the car.…
Well, the car she could still live without.
• She allowed him to pet her hair with his icy fingers.
“Not so spiky as usual,” he said sadly.
• “Gansey and Adam are getting Adam’s stuff so he can move in,” Noah said. “Ronan went to the library.”
“Move in! I thought he said… wait — Ronan went where?”
[…] She asked, “OK, wait, so why is Ronan at the library?”
“Cramming,” Noah said. “For an exam on Monday.”
It was the nicest thing Blue had ever heard of Ronan doing.
• “Blue. My name’s Blue Sargent.”
“Oh, Jane! I thought that you were saying Blue for some reason.”
• Gansey didn’t turn his head, so his voice remained mulled. “My words are unerring tools of destruction, and I’ve come unequipped with the ability to disarm them. Can you believe I’m only alive because Noah died? What a fine sacrifice that was, what a fine contribution to the world I am.” He made another little twirling hand gesture without removing his face from his pillow. It was probably meant to make it look as if he was merely joking. He went on, “Oh, I know I’m being self-pitying. Ignore me. So Malory thinks it is a bad idea to wake the ley line? Of course he does. I enjoy dead ends hugely.”
“You are being self-pitying.” But Blue sort of liked it. She’d never seen anything like the real Gansey for so long at one time. It was too bad he had to be miserable to make it happen.
“I’m nearly done. You don’t have much more of this to bear.”
“I like you better this way.”
For some reason, admitting this made her face go hot right away; she was very glad that he still had his face pressed into his pillow and the other boys were still in Noah’s room.
“Crushed and broken,” Gansey said. “Just the way women like ’em.”
• Ronan, taking in Blue’s posture and Gansey below, observed, “If you spat, Blue, it would land right in his eye.”
• Adam said, “I don’t care about the risk.”
Ronan picked his teeth. “Me neither.”
“You have nothing to lose,” Gansey said, pointing at Adam. He looked at Ronan. “And you don’t care if you live or die. That makes you both bad judges.”
• “Sometimes,” Adam said, “I don’t know how you live with yourself.”
• “I’m only going to say this once and then I’m going to be done with it,” she said. “But I think you’re awfully brave.”
• “I don’t want to hurt you,” she said.
“I’m already all hurt up.”
• “No, you should listen to me.”
Adam’s hastily constructed smile was thin enough to break. “And what do you say?”
Blue was suddenly afraid for him. “Keep being brave.”
• Then he remembered where he was, in Noah’s room with its close walls and soaring ceilings. A new wave of misery washed over him and he could identify its source very precisely: homesickness. For uncountable minutes, Adam lay there awake, reasoning with himself. Logically, Adam knew that he had nothing to miss, that he effectively had Stockholm syndrome, identifying with his captors, considering it a kindness when his father didn’t hit him. Objectively, he knew that he was abused. He knew the damage went deeper than any bruise he’d ever worn to school. He could endlessly dissect his reactions, doubt his emotions, wonder if he, too, would grow up to hit his own kid.
But lying in the black of the night, all he could think was, My mother will never speak to me again. I’m homeless.
• He was full of so many wants, too many to prioritize, and so they all felt desperate. To not have to work so many hours, to get into a good college, to look right in a tie, to not still be hungry after eating the thin sandwich he’d brought to work, to drive the shiny Audi that Gansey had stopped to look at with him once after school, to go home, to have hit his father himself, to own an apartment with granite worktops and a television bigger than Gansey’s desk, to belong somewhere, to go home, to go home, to go home.
If they woke the ley line, if they found Glendower, he could still have those things. Most of them.
But again, he saw Gansey’s wounded form, and he saw, too, Gansey’s wounded face from earlier today, when they’d fought. There just wasn’t a way that Adam would put Gansey in peril.
• Gansey didn’t want to say it. If he said it out loud, it was real, it had really happened, Adam had really done it. It wouldn’t have hurt if it was Ronan; this was the sort of thing he’d expect from Ronan. But it was Adam. Adam.
I did tell him, right? I did say that we were to wait. It’t not that he didn’t understand me.
Gansey tried several different ways to think of the situation, but there wasn’t any way he could paint it that made it hurt less. Something kept fracturing inside him.
“Rituals. Are you messing around with drugs?”
• Cabeswater was as literal as Ronan.
He had not let himself think it once in the past seven years. He had tried instead to convince himself of Czerny’s uselessness. Tried to remind himself of the practicality of the death instead.
But instead, he remembered the sound Czerny made the first time he hit him.
• Stepping forward, leaning over the hood of the car, Ronan pressed his finger to the windscreen, and while they watched, he wrote:
• “Why Noah?” he asked. “Why not someone horrible?”
• But Adam knew what sacrifice meant, more than he thought Whelk or Neeve had ever had to know. He knew that it wasn’t about killing someone or drawing a shape made of bird bones.
When it came down to it, Adam had been making sacrifices for a very long time, and he knew what the hardest one was.
On his terms, or not at all.
Being Adam Parrish was a complicated thing, a wonder of muscles and organs, synapses and nerves. He was a miracle of moving parts, a study in survival. The most important thing to Adam Parrish, though, had always been free will, the ability to be his own master.
This was the important thing.
It had always been the most important thing.
This was what it was to be Adam.
Kneeling in the middle of the pentagram, digging his fingers into the soft, mossy turf, Adam said, “I sacrifice myself.”
Gansey’s cry was agonized. “Adam, no! No.”
On his terms, or not at all.
I will be your hands, Adam thought. I will be your eyes.
• There was a crushing sadness to Gansey’s face as he looked at Adam. That was the first clue Blue got that something was inherently different, irretrievably altered. If not about the world, then about Cabeswater. And if not about Cabeswater, then about Adam.
“Why?” Gansey asked Adam. “Was I so awful?”
Adam said, “It was never about you.”
• Adam, with probable help from Ronan, moved from Monmouth Manufacturing to a room belonging to St Agnes Church, a subtle distance that affected both boys in a different way.
• “Tell them I’m sorry I drank her birthday schnapps,” Noah whispered.
• When they ran back to the BMW, giddy and breathless with their crime, Ronan told Gansey, “This will all come out and bite you in the ass, you know, when you’re running for Congress.”
• “Well,” said Ronan, “I hope he likes it. I’ve pulled a muscle.”
Gansey scoffed, “Doing what? You were standing watch.”
• “I guess now would be a good time to tell you,” he said. “I took Chainsaw out of my dreams.”
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