I am only my money. It is all anyone sees, even Adam.
Gansey shot back, "You think your plans are going to keep working when 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."
Without warning, Adam slammed a small box of nails off the ledge beside him. The sound it made on the concrete startled both of them.
Adam turned his back to Gansey, his arms crossed.
"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 it.
He went back to the Camaro and took his phone out to call Ronan, but the cell signal had completely disappeared, like it often did in Henrietta. Usually, Gansey took that as a sign that something supernatural was affecting the energy around the town, knocking down the cell signal and sometimes even the electricity.
Now, he thought it probably just meant he wasn’t getting through to anyone.
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. Behind Adam, he saw the figure of Mrs. Parrish watching from the porch.
Adam closed his eyes for a minute. Gansey could see his irises moving underneath the thin skin of his eyelids, a dreamer awake.
And then, in one easy movement, he’d slid into the passenger seat. Gansey’s mouth opened to form a question he didn’t ask.
"Let’s go," Adam said. He didn’t look at Gansey. His mother stared at them from the porch, but he didn’t look at her, either. "The psychic was the plan, right? We’re doing the plan."
"Yes. But —"
"I need to be back by ten."
Now Adam looked at Gansey. There was something fierce and chilling in his eyes, an unnamable something that Gansey was always afraid would eventually take over completely. This, he knew, was a compromise, a risky gift that he could choose to reject.
After a moment of hesitation, Gansey bumped knuckles with him over the gearshift. Adam rolled down the window and gripped the roof as if he needed to hold on.
As the Camaro headed slowly out of the single-track road, their path was blocked by a blue Toyota pickup truck, approaching from the other way. Adam’s breath stopped audibly. Through the windshield, Gansey met the eyes of Adam’s father. Robert Parrish was a big thing, colorless as August, grown from the dust that surrounded the trailers. His eyes were dark and small and Gansey could see nothing of Adam in them.
Robert Parrish spit out the window. He didn’t pull over for them to pass. Adam’s face was turned out to the cornfield, but Gansey didn’t look away.
"You don’t have to come," said Gansey, because he had to say it.
Adam’s voice came from far away. "I’m coming."
Jerking the wheel of the car, Gansey revved the engine up high. The Pig stormed off the road, clouds of dirt exploding from the tires, and slammed through the shallow ditch. His heart thudded with anticipation and danger and the desire to shout everything he thought about Adam’s father to Adam’s father.
As they charged back onto the driveway on the other side of the Toyota, Gansey could feel Robert Parrish’s stare follow them.
The weight of that gaze seemed like a more substantial promise of the future than anything a psychic might tell him.
Chapter 15
Of course, Gansey was not on time for his reading. The appointment time came and went. No Gansey. And, perhaps more disappointingly, no phone call from Adam. Blue pulled aside the curtains to glance up and down the street, but there was nothing but normal after-work traffic. Maura made excuses.
"Maybe he wrote down the wrong time," she said.
Blue didn’t think he’d written down the wrong time.
Ten more minutes slouched by. Maura said, "Maybe he had car trouble."
Blue didn’t think he had car trouble.
Calla retrieved the novel she’d been reading and started upstairs. Her voice carried down toward them. "That reminds me. You need to get that belt looked at on the Ford. I see a breakdown in your future. Next to that sketchy furniture store. A very ugly man with a cell phone will stop and be overly helpful."
It was possible she really did see a breakdown in Maura’s future, but it was also possible she was being hyperbolic. In any case, Maura made a note on the calendar.
"Maybe I accidentally told him tomorrow afternoon instead of today," Maura said.
Persephone murmured, "That is always possible," and said, "Perhaps I will make a pie." Blue looked anxiously to Persephone. Pie making was a lengthy and loving process, and Persephone did not like to be interrupted during it. She wouldn’t begin a pie if she really thought Gansey’s arrival would interrupt her.
Maura eyed Persephone as well before retrieving a bag of yellow squash and a stick of butter from the fridge. Now Blue knew precisely how the rest of the day was going to go. Persephone would make something sweet. Maura would make something with butter. Eventually, Calla would reappear and make something involving sausage or bacon. It was how every evening went if a meal hadn’t been planned in advance.
Blue didn’t think that Maura had told Gansey tomorrow afternoon instead of today. What she thought was that Gansey had looked at the clock on his Mercedes-Benz’s dashboard or Aston Martin’s radio and had decided that the reading interfered with his rock climbing or racquetball. And then he’d blown it off, just like Adam had blown off calling her. She couldn’t really be surprised. They’d done exactly what she expected from raven boys.
Just as Blue was getting ready to sulk upstairs with her needles and her homework, Orla howled from the Phone Room, her wordless wail eventually resolving itself into words:
"There is a 1973 Camaro in front of the house! It matches my nails!"
The last time Blue had seen Orla’s nails, they’d been a complicated paisley pattern. She wasn’t exactly sure what a 1973 Camaro looked like, but she was sure that if it was paisley, it must be impressive. She was also certain that Orla must be on the phone, or she would’ve been down here ogling.
"Well, here we go," Maura said, abandoning her squash in the sink. Calla reappeared in the kitchen, exchanging a sharp look with Persephone.
Blue’s stomach dropped to her feet.
Gansey. That’s all there is.
The doorbell rang.
"Are you ready?" Calla asked Blue.
Gansey was the boy she either killed or fell in love with. Or both. There was no being ready. There just was this: Maura opening the door.
There were three boys in the doorway, backlit by the evening sun as Neeve had been so many weeks ago. Three sets of shoulders: one square, one built, one wiry.
"Sorry that I’m late," said the boy in front, with the square shoulders. The scent of mint rolled in with him, just as it had in the churchyard. "Will it be a problem?"
Blue knew that voice.
She reached for the railing of the stairs to keep her balance as President Cell Phone stepped into the hallway.
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. At Nino’s, the blare of the music had drowned out the finer points of his voice and the odor of garlic had overwhelmed the scent of mint.
But now that she put two and two together, it seemed obvious.
In their hallway, he looked slightly less presidential, but only because the heat had made him messily roll up the sleeves of his button-down shirt and remove his tie. His dusty brown hair was mussed, too, in that way that Virginia warmth always managed. But the watch was still there, large enough to knock out bank robbers, and he still had that handsome glow. The glow that meant that not only had he never been poor, but his father hadn’t, nor his father’s father, nor his father’s father’s father. She couldn’t tell if he was actually tremendously good-looking or merely tremendously wealthy. Perhaps they were the same thing.
Gansey. This was Gansey.
And that meant that the journal belonged to him.
That meant that Adam belonged to him.
"Well," Maura said. It was clear her curiosity overruled all rules of scheduling. "It’s not too late. Come into the reading room. Can I get some names?"
Because of course President Cell Phone had brought most of his posse from Nino’s, everyone but the smudgy boy. They filled the hallway to overflowing, somehow, the three of them, loud and male and so comfortable with one another that they allowed no one else to be comfortable with them. They were a pack of sleek animals armored with their watches and their Top-Siders and the expensive cut of their uniforms. Even the sharp boy’s tattoo, cutting up the knobs of his spine above his collar, was a weapon, somehow slicing at Blue.
"Gansey," President Cell Phone said again, pointing to himself. "Adam. Ronan. Where do you want us? There?"
He pointed a hand toward the reading room, palm flat, like he was directing traffic.
"In there," Maura agreed. "This is my daughter, by the way. She’ll be present for the reading, if you don’t mind."
Gansey’s eyes found Blue. He’d been smiling politely, but now his face froze in the middle of the smile.
"Hi, again," he said. "This is awkward."
"You’ve met?" Maura shot a poisonous look at Blue. Blue felt unfairly persecuted.
"Yes," Gansey replied, with dignity. "We had a discussion about alternative professions for women. I didn’t realize she was your daughter. Adam?"
He shot a nearly as poisonous look at Adam, whose eyes were large. Adam was the only one not in uniform, and his palm was spread across his chest as if his fingers would cover his faded Coca-Cola T-shirt.
"I didn’t know, either!" Adam said. If Blue had known he was coming, she might not have worn her baby blue top with the feathers sewn into the collar. He was staring at it. To Blue, he said, again, "I didn’t know, I swear."
"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."
"Ronan," said Gansey.
"I need everyone to sit down!" shouted Maura.
It was such an alarming thing to hear Maura shout that nearly everyone did, sinking or throwing themselves into the mismatched furniture in the reading room. Adam rubbed a hand over his cheekbone as if he could remove the bruise from it. Gansey sat in an armchair at the head of the table, his hands stretched over either arm like chairman of the board, one eyebrow raised as he looked at Steve Martin’s framed face.
Only Calla and Ronan remained standing, and they regarded each other warily.
It still felt like there had never been this many people in the house, which was utterly untrue. It was possibly true that there had never been this many men in the house before. Certainly never this many raven boys.
Blue felt as if their very presence robbed something from her. They’d made her family dingy just by coming here.
"It is," Maura said, "too damn loud in here." The way she said it, though, holding one finger to her pulse, just under her jawbone, told Blue that it was not their voices that were too loud. It was something she was hearing inside her head. Persephone, too, was wincing.
"Do I need to leave?" Blue asked, though that was the last thing she wanted.
Gansey, misunderstanding, immediately asked her, "Why would you have to leave?"
"She makes things louder for us," Maura said. She was frowning over all of them as if she was trying to make sense of it. "And you three are … very loud already."
Blue’s skin was hot. She could imagine herself heating like an electrical conduit, sparks from all parties traveling through her. What could these raven boys have going on under their skins that could deafen her mother? Was it all of them in conjunction, or was it merely Gansey, his energy screaming out the count-down to his death?
"What do you mean, very loud?" Gansey asked. He was, Blue thought, very clearly the ringleader of this little pack. They all kept looking to him for their cues of how to interpret the situation.
"I mean that there is something about your energies that is very …" Maura trailed off, losing interest in her own explanation. She turned to Persephone. Blue recognized the look exchanged between them. It was, What is going on? "How do we even do this?"