Opal (The Raven Cycle, #4.5)

by Maggie Stiefvater

Adam did not live at the Barns, much to Opal’s disappointment. He was always kind to her and sometimes would show her how things worked and also she would have liked to sit in the dark room and watch him sleep. But instead he came and went according to no schedule that she could discern. When he did sleep at the Barns, it was often during the day, when she felt certain she would be caught spying. She had to content herself with stolen glimpses through cracked doors, slender one-inch views of duvet and sheets piled like thunderheads, Adam and sometimes Ronan pillowed among them.

Opal came to understand that Adam’s car was supposed to be more like Ronan’s, but there was something wrong with it called shitbox. Ronan kept offering to dream a cure for shitbox, but Adam was intent on fixing it “the right way.”

Ronan was the only person Opal had ever known who had both animalness and the dreamstuff-fuzzy-noise. At first she thought this was just because she hadn’t met very many people, but later she realized this was part of the reason why Ronan was also a little bit of a secret.

“I didn’t think I’d be able to, now that I’m not tied to the line anymore.” “I was never tied to it,” one of the ladies had replied, “and I’ve always felt it.” “But you’re a psychic.” “Exactly.” Adam had laid out his words as carefully as they’d put down their cards on the table. “Am I?” “Of course,” one of the other ladies had said.

Opal had felt a rush of love for him. She loved him the best when he was very sad or very serious or very happy. Something about his voice breaking filled her with feeling, and something about the vacancy of his expression when he was thinking hard felt like she was looking at a dream with nothing bad in it, and something about when Ronan made him laugh so hard that he couldn’t stop made her love him so hard that she felt sad because one day he would get old and die because that was what things with animalness did.

Ronan had told her what he was working on in the long barn. He was making a new dreamplace like Cabeswater, like where she had come from, did she remember? Yes, she remembered the trees, the fearful trees, and she remembered the night horrors, and she remembered the black, bleeding ground. “Not like it was at the end,” he had said crossly, as if it had been any better before its dying moments. He had always been dying in his dreams, or getting small pieces cut off him, or being pitted against faceless gunmen. Nuclear bombs exploded in his hands and fish broke through windows to ruin sofas and myriad bodies showed up in myriad driveways. Not all of his dreams were terrible, but that made them collectively worse, not better. Opal was never prepared for when things would go wrong. She just had to be afraid all the time.

He was very concerned with the concept of having an area in the new Cabeswater where it would always have that sort of rain that makes you feel happy and sad at the same time and also he was interested in having an area that did not suck. He seemed to regard this as his primary job, to dream of not sucking. Even though Opal thought Ronan was good at dreaming — after all, he had dreamt her, and she was excellent — he complained a lot about this.

“You dreamt the first Cabeswater without a Cabeswater.” “I just need it to not suck.” “I feel like there are more useful parameters.

Sometimes they would stop talking and instead begin kissing, and Opal would eavesdrop on this as well. Her capacity for voyeurism was boundless and incorrigible. They were always coming together in surprising moments, going from easygoing to urgent in the space of a few breaths. She watched them kiss messily in the car in the driveway and she watched them tangle around each other in the laundry room and she watched Adam unbuckle Ronan’s belt and slide his hand against skin. With intellectual curiosity, she watched ribs and hips and arms and legs and spines. She had no lust, because Ronan hadn’t dreamt any for her, but she also had no shame, because Ronan hadn’t dreamt any of that for her, either.

For a moment Opal, hidden, had thought they were going to kiss. But instead, Ronan pressed his face against Adam’s neck and Adam quietly put his head on top of Ronan’s head and they did not move for a long time.

Unlike a dream, the animal world was strict. She liked this. The animal world had narrow rules, and once you learned those rules, it was much less surprising than a dream, which could change itself at any time.

Ronan came home and demanded what the hell is wrong with you like seriously, she told him that she was bored of being secret. He said, “Aren’t we all!”

Ronan and Adam were both gone in Ronan’s car, and a lady who Opal had not seen before came to the house. She was dark-haired and pale-skinned with furious light blue eyes that Opal at first thought were all white except for the pupil. Ronan was not there to tell Opal it was all right for this visitor to see her, so Opal hid herself and watched the lady stalk through the mist to the back door. The lady tried the doorknob and the doorknob shook its head no, but then she opened her purse and did something else to the doorknob and the door said yes and opened for her. The lady stepped inside and Opal hurried to follow her. She could not go as fast as she liked because hooves were noisy on the wood floor, so she had to drop to her hands and knees to crawl. To her surprise, once she was close, she could feel that this lady had dreamstuff in her. She was not all dreamstuff — in fact, she seemed to be very little dreamstuff. She was mostly animalness. This was the first person Opal had met beside Ronan who shared both.

To Opal’s relief, the lady did not eat anything, but she did sit on the edge of the bed and look at the framed portrait of Ronan’s father and mother for a long time. Her face did not seem to have an expression on it, but eventually, she told the portrait, “Damn you.”

Even if the bad dream was too intense for Opal to change it, she could still often rescue Ronan from harm by making things in the dreams do things they wouldn’t have thought to do on their own. She could make a rock into a snake and throw it at a monster or she could make a sword out of some dirt or she could build Ronan’s sadness into a raft when he was drowning in quicksand. There were no rules in dreams so you could try anything.

“It’s not the only place you applied,” Ronan said, continuing an earlier conversation. “But it was what I wanted the most.

“You’ll get into one of the others,” Ronan told Adam eventually. “You’re not going to have to make another list. It won’t be what you imagined, but it’ll be just as good.” “Remind me of that later.” “Count on it.”

Opal did not want to swim but Adam taught her until she was fearless, and then Ronan threw buoyant objects for her to fetch until he got tired of being on the shore.

Ronan and Adam had more and more conversations about whether or not they’d find the cure for shitbox before Adam went away for the fall and whether or not Adam should just take Ronan’s car. Even though Opal went away herself plenty, she did not like the idea of Adam going someplace because he might get old and die without coming back.

Sometimes bad ideas were so bad they looped right around until they became good ideas.

“I’m coming back,” he said. She tore up some more grass, but she felt a little less wobbly having heard him say it. “I don’t want to go, but I do — does that make sense?” he asked her. It did, especially if she thought about how some of her dreamthing’s happy-sadness might have rubbed off on him because they were sitting so close. “It’s just that it’s finally starting. You know. Life.”

“Sometimes I don’t even know if I’m a real thing. Why isn’t there anyone else like me?” “Your dad. Kavinsky.” “I meant living people. Unless the takeaway is that we’re all just really good at being dead.”