Blue Lily, Lily Blue (The Raven Cycle, #3)

by Maggie Stiefvater

They each wore Blue Sargent’s face.

Blue was perfectly aware that it was possible to have a friendship that wasn’t all-encompassing, that wasn’t blinding, deafening, maddening, quickening. It was just that now that she’d had this kind, she didn’t want the other.

There was no point telling himself not to fight with Ronan. They would fight again, because Ronan was still breathing.

“Democracy’s a farce,” Ronan said, and Adam smirked, a private, small thing that was inherently exclusionary. An expression, in fact, that he could’ve very well learned from Ronan.

Gansey spared Henry a pitying glance. “Sorry, he didn’t get enough exercise today. Or there’s something wrong with his diet. I’ll take him away now.”

Ronan said, “Matthew’s mine. He’s one of mine.” Adam didn’t understand. “I dreamt him, Adam!”

“I hear if you want magic done,” he said, “you ask a magician.”

And the dress, it turned out, had a hidden zipper, and came off very easily. Piper left the knee pads on. Afterward, Greenmantle realized he had forgotten the dog was there, which seemed vaguely distasteful.

“Jesus Christ,” Gansey said, to hide the sound of every hair on his body standing up and both of his testicles retreating.

When he wasn’t trying to look like an asshole, his face looked very different, and for a tilting moment, Adam felt the startling inequality of their relationship: Ronan knew Adam, but Adam wasn’t sure he knew Ronan, after all.

In the background, the Kinks played gently, the sound of Mr. Gray’s soul.

It was amazing that she and Ronan didn’t get along better, because they were different brands of the same impossible stuff.

Maybe it was good that the world forgot every lesson, every good and bad memory, every triumph and failure, all of it dying with each generation. Perhaps this cultural amnesia spared them all. Perhaps if they remembered everything, hope would die instead.

“No?” She had her shooting-people face on — which was to say, the face that she wore all the time.