"What’s all this?" Calla asked. She made it sound as if the flowers were an unwanted kitten.
"This is for …" The woman fumbled for a card.
"Orla?" guessed Blue.
Orla was always getting sent flowers by various lovelorn men from Henrietta and beyond. It wasn’t just flowers they sent. Some sent spa packages. Others sent fruit baskets. One, memorably, sent an oil portrait of Orla. He’d painted her in profile, so that the viewer could fully see Orla’s long, elegant neck; her classic cheekbones; her romantic, heavy-lidded eyes; and her massive nose — her least favorite feature. Orla had broken up with him immediately.
"Blue?" the woman asked. "Blue Sargent?"
At first, Blue didn’t understand that she meant that the flowers were for her. The woman had to thrust them toward her, and then Calla had to take back one of her bags in order for Blue to be able to accept them. As the woman headed back to her car, Blue turned the arrangement in her hand. It was just a spray of baby’s breath around a white carnation; they smelled prettier than they looked.
Calla commented, "The delivery must’ve cost more than the flowers."
Feeling around the wiry stems, Blue found a little card. Inside, a woman’s scrawl had transcribed a message:
I hope you still want me to call. — Adam
Now the tiny bunch of flowers made sense. They matched Adam’s frayed sweater.
"And you’re blushing," Calla said disapprovingly. She held a hand out for them, which Blue smacked. With sarcasm, Calla added, "Whoever it is went all out, did they?"
Blue touched the edge of the white carnation to her chin. It was so light that it didn’t feel like she was touching anything at all. It was no portrait or fruit basket, but she couldn’t imagine Adam sending anything more dramatic. These little flowers were quiet and sparse, just like him. "I think they’re pretty."
She had to bite her lip to keep a foolish smile inside. What she wanted to do was hug the flowers and then dance, but both seemed insensible.
"Who is he?" asked Calla.
"I’m being secretive. Take your bags back." Blue stretched out her arm so that Calla’s brown bag and canvas bag slid down to Calla’s open hands.
Calla shook her head, but she didn’t look displeased. Deep down, Blue suspected she was a romantic.
"Calla?" Blue asked. "Do you think I should tell the boys where the corpse road is?"
Calla gazed at Blue for as long as a Neeve gaze. Then she said, "What makes you think I can answer that question?"
"Because you’re an adult," Blue replied. "And you’re supposed to have learned things on your way to old age."
"What I think," Calla said, "is that you’ve already made up your mind."
Blue dropped her eyes to the ground. It was true that she was kept awake at night by Gansey’s journal and by the suggestion of something more to the world. It was also true that she was dogged by the idea that maybe, just maybe, there was a sleeping king and she would be able to lay her hand on his sleeping cheek and feel a centuries-old pulse beneath his skin.
But more important than either of those was her face on that page of cups card, a boy’s rain-spattered shoulders in the churchyard, and a voice saying, Gansey. That’s all there is.
Once she’d seen his death laid out for him, and seen that he was real, and found out that she was meant to have a part in it, there had never been a chance she would just stand by and let it happen.
"Don’t tell Mom," Blue said.
With a noncommittal grunt, Calla wrenched open the door, leaving Blue and her flowers on the step. The blossoms weighed nothing at all, but to Blue, they felt like change.
Today, Blue thought, is the day I stop listening to the future and start living it instead.
"Blue, if you get to know him —" Calla started. She was standing half-in, half-out of the doorway. "You’d better guard your heart. Don’t forget that he’s going to die."
Chapter 20
At the same time that his flowers were being delivered to 300 Fox Way, Adam arrived at Monmouth Manufacturing on his somewhat pathetic bicycle. Ronan and Noah were already out in the overgrown lot, building wooden ramps for some unholy purpose.
He tried twice to persuade his rusted kickstand to hold his bike up before laying it down on its side. Crabgrass poked up through the spokes. He asked, "When do you think Gansey will get here?"
Ronan didn’t immediately answer him. He was lying as far beneath the BMW as he could, measuring the width of the tires with a yellow hardware-store ruler. "Ten inches, Noah."
Noah, standing next to a pile of plywood and four-by-fours, asked, "Is that all? That doesn’t seem like very much."
"Would I lie to you? Ten. Inches." 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. Now he looked like the sort of person women would hide their purses and babies from. "Who knows. When did he say?"
"Three."
Ronan climbed to his feet and they both turned to watch Noah working with the plywood for the ramps. Working with really meant staring at. Noah had his fingers held ten inches apart and he looked through the space between them to the wood below, perplexed. There were no tools in sight.
"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."
He probably didn’t. Ronan didn’t need physics. He could intimidate even a piece of plywood into doing what he wanted. Crouching by his bike, Adam messed over the kickstand again, trying to see if he could pry it free without breaking it entirely.
"What’s your malfunction, anyway?" Ronan asked.
"I’m trying to decide when I should call Blue." Saying it out loud was inviting ridicule from Ronan, but it was one of those facts that needed to be acknowledged.
Noah said, "He sent her flowers."
"How did you know?" Adam demanded, more mortified than curious.
Noah merely smiled in a far-off way. He kicked one of the wooden boards off the plywood, looking triumphant.
"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."
"You’re a Neanderthal."
"Sometimes you sound just like Gansey," Ronan said.
"Sometimes you don’t."
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.
He wasn’t being serious, but Adam was, all at once, fatigued with Ronan and his uselessness. Since the day of the fistfight at Nino’s, Ronan had already gotten several notices in his student box at Aglionby, warning him of the dire things slated to befall him if he didn’t begin to improve his grades. If he didn’t begin attempting to get grades. Instead, Ronan was out here building ramps.
Some people envied Ronan’s money. Adam envied his time. To be as rich as Ronan was to be able to go to school and do nothing else, to have luxurious swaths of time in which to study and write papers and sleep. Adam wouldn’t admit it to anyone, least of all Gansey, but he was tired. He was tired of squeezing homework in between his part-time jobs, of squeezing in sleep, squeezing in the hunt for Glendower. The jobs felt like so much wasted time: In five years, no one would care if he’d worked at a trailer factory. They’d only care if he’d graduated from Aglionby with perfect grades, or if he’d found Glendower, or if he was still alive. And Ronan didn’t have to worry about any of that.
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 curb to where a shiny black car waited. When the boy opened the door, Adam saw the other two boys inside wore raven-breasted sweaters and ties. They were despicably carefree as they divvied up the drinks.
He’d had to leave the boxes 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 license 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.
Adam looked at his battered old watch to see how late Gansey was. He told Ronan, "Give me your phone."
With a raised eyebrow, Ronan retrieved the phone from the roof of the BMW.
Adam punched in the psychic’s number. It rang just twice, and then a breathy voice said, "Adam?"
Startled at the sound of his name, Adam replied, "Blue?"
"No," the voice said. "Persephone." Then, to someone in the background, "Ten dollars, Orla. That was the bet. No, the caller ID doesn’t say anything at all. See?" Then, back to Adam, "Sorry about that. I’m terrible when there’s competition involved. You’re the Coca-Cola T-shirt one, right?"
It took Adam a moment to realize that she meant the shirt he’d worn to the reading. "Oh, um. Yeah."
"How wonderful. I’ll go get Blue."
There was a brief, uncomfortable moment while voices murmured in the background of the telephone. Adam swatted at gnats; the parking lot needed to be mowed again. The asphalt was hard to see in some places.
"I didn’t think you’d call," Blue said.
Adam must not have truly expected to get Blue on the phone, because the surprise he felt when he heard her voice made his stomach feel hollowed out. Ronan was smirking in a way that made him want to punch his arm.
"I said I would."
"Thanks for the flowers. They were pretty." Then she hissed: "Orla, get out of here!"
"It seems busy there."
"It’s always busy here. There are three hundred and forty-two people who live here, and they all want to be in this room. What are you doing today?" She asked it very naturally, like it was the most logical thing in the world for them to have a conversation on the phone, like they were already friends.
It made it easier for Adam to say, "Exploring. Do you want to come with?"
Ronan’s eyes widened. No matter what she said now, the phone call had been worth it for the genuine shock on Ronan’s face.
"What sort of exploring?"
Shielding his eyes, Adam lifted his eyes to the sky. He thought he could hear Gansey coming. "Mountains. How do you feel about helicopters?"
There was a long pause. "How do you mean? Ethically?"
"As a mode of transportation."
"Faster than camels, but less sustainable. Is there going to be a helicopter in your future today?"
"Yeah. Gansey wants to look for the ley line, and they’re usually easier to spot from the air."
"And of course he just … got a helicopter."
"He’s Gansey."
There was another long pause. It was a thinking pause, Adam thought, so he didn’t interrupt it. Finally, Blue said, "Okay, I’ll come. Is this a … What is this?"
Adam replied truthfully, "I have no idea."
Chapter 21
It was remarkably easy to disobey Maura.
Maura Sargent had very little experience disciplining children, and Blue had very little experience being disciplined, so there was nothing to stop Blue from going with Adam when he met her in front of the house. She didn’t even feel guilty, yet, because she had no practice in that, either. Really, the most remarkable thing about the entire situation was how hopeful she felt, against all odds. She was going against her mother’s wishes, meeting with a boy, meeting with a raven boy. She should’ve been dreading it.
But it was very difficult to imagine Adam as a raven boy as he greeted her, his hands neatly in his pockets, scented with the dusty odor of mown grass. His bruise was older and therefore more dreadful looking.