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“I don’t mean to be rude, ma’am, but I don’t know why this is worth learning.” Persephone wasn’t sure how he thought such a reasonable question could be impolite.
“Maybe I dreamt you,” he said. “Thanks for the straight teeth, then,” Adam replied.
“He’ll be a champ,” Blue said, punching Noah’s arm lightly. “I’ll be a champ,” repeated Noah.
Ladies and gentlemen, my trick for you today will be to take this 1973 Camaro — Removing the spare tire from the trunk, Gansey abandoned it beside a streetlight. The price of Malory’s visit. — and fit five people, a dog, and a hell of a lot of luggage inside. After performing this magic trick, he sank into the driver’s seat. The Dog was panting anxiously. Gansey knew how it felt.
“Blame the poets. It’s easier to stir people to rebellion if they think they’re on the side of a demigod or some chosen one. Never trust a poet.
“Malory. He’s always complaining about his hips or his eyes or the government or — oh, and that dog. It’s not like he’s blind or crippled or anything.” “Why couldn’t he have something normal like a raven?”
It was impossible to forget that all of these women were plugged into the past and tapped into the future, connected to everything in the world and to one another. Gansey didn’t so much visit as get absorbed. He loved it.
Blue was the natural result of a home like this: confident, strange, credulous, curious. And here he was: neurotic, rarified, the product of something else entirely.
On the bottom, Ronan’s handwriting labeled it merely: manibus. For your hands.
See, Adam Parrish is wantable, worthy of a crush, not just by anyone, someone like Ronan, who could want Gansey or anyone else and chose Adam for his hungry eyes.
“I’ve dreamt him a box of EpiPens. I dream cures for stings all the time. I carry one. I put them in the Pig. I have them all over Monmouth.”
Declan had left for college in D.C., but he still made the four-hour drive each Sunday to attend church with his brothers, a gesture so extravagant that even Ronan seemed forced to admit that it was kindness.
“I DIDN’T SAY I COULD SEE YOU, EITHER.” “But I’m not dead,” Blue pointed out. “BUT YOU ARE PRETTY SHORT.”
“I’ve never met someone else with a curse.” “WHAT’S YOURS?” “If I kiss my true love, he’ll die.” Jesse nodded as if to say yep, that’s a good one.
“What do we do now?” Gansey asked. From the other room, Calla bellowed, “GO BUY US PIZZA. WITH EXTRA CHEESE, RICHIE RICH.” Blue said, “I think she’s starting to like you.”
How appropriate it was that Ronan, left to his own devices, manifested beautiful cars and beautiful birds and tenderhearted brothers, while Adam, when given the power, manifested a filthy string of perverse murders.
“And I’m not sure that’s your place. Which is to say, carry on. I’m all for ranks of usurping women.”
Gansey thought of how strange it was to know these two young men so well and yet to not know them at all. Both so much more difficult and so much better than when he’d first met them. Was that what life did to them all? Chiseled them into harder, truer versions of themselves? “I told you,” Ronan said. “Magician.”
He wondered if he was going to go through each year of his life thinking about how stupid he’d been the year before.
They knew everything about him. What a lie unknowable was. The only person who didn’t know Adam was himself. What a proud idiot you have been, Adam Parrish.
For so long, he’d wanted Gansey to see him as an equal, but it was possible that all this time, the only person who needed to see that was Adam. Now he could see that it wasn’t charity Gansey was offering. It was just truth. And something else: friendship of the unshakable kind. Friendship you could swear on. That could be busted nearly to breaking and come back stronger than before.
It was amazing that she and Ronan didn’t get along better, because they were different brands of the same impossible stuff.
“It’s like, if someone said to you, ‘Nice sweater, dude!’ when you were in your Aglionby uniform.” “What?” “I wanted you to know why I got so angry at that old guy. I’ve been trying to think of a way to explain it. I know you don’t get it. But that’s why.”
How fragile they were, how easily abandoned and neglected and beaten and hated. Prey animals were born afraid. He had not known to be born afraid, but he’d learned.
Perhaps this cultural amnesia spared them all. Perhaps if they remembered everything, hope would die instead.
