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 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. “Did you think you’d lost everything when Cabeswater died?” “Yes,” Adam had whispered, and 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.

“I can’t hold it all in my head at the same time,” he’d said once. “What I want it to be. I can’t make a new one without the old one to help me focus. What’s the phrase for that?” “Self-defeating,” Adam had replied. “Fuck you. Catch-22. That’s what I meant.” “You dreamt the first Cabeswater without a Cabeswater.” “I just need it to not suck.” “I feel like there are more useful parameters. Like the amount of dream charge it could focus for you versus the amount of attention it draws.” “Good thought, Parrish. We need to dream you a new car, after all.” Opal, eavesdropping, had not quite followed the gist of the conversation — she was still better in the old dream language that waking Ronan never spoke — but she could tell that Adam liked it when Ronan talked like this. 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.

On one of her trips back from watching the cloud lady, Opal encountered Adam. Shockingly, brilliantly, he seemed to be arriving at the Barns on foot. People did not come to the Barns on foot. They came by cars that would smash her flat and not feel bad about it so stay out of their way, according to Ronan. But here was Adam on just his legs, slowly coming into view through the mist rolling down the dark tunnel of trees out to the road. Opal was delighted to discover him traveling in the same way she did. She met him halfway down the long driveway and frolicked all around him as he put one foot in front of the other while the last of the late afternoon’s light dappled over both of them. He said nothing as she grabbed his hand and then danced around to grab his other hand.

“You are. And a shitfoot. Where are your shoes?” “Still under the table.” “Opal, could you get them for him?” Opal could not, because it was too boring to go back to the house when they were out here being exciting in the dark. What she could get them was that jar of twenty fireflies, which she released in Adam’s face as she scampered by him. He reared back while Ronan enjoyed the scenery. “She’s so useful,” Adam said. Opal preened.

Good: Ronan spent less time in the long barn doing dreamstuff and instead spent time repairing other outbuildings and cleaning the house and typing away at the computer the lady had looked at, which meant Opal often got full days of him, only having to share with Chainsaw, who Opal resented hugely and sometimes daydreamed of eating.

Twice Ronan got a phone call from his Ganseyfriend and both times he did not say anything to the phone, just listened to the ebullient patter on the other end and made grunting sounds in response. Both times after this Ronan went and lay down, once in his own room and once in Aurora’s room; the first time, he was very quiet for a long time, and the second time he held his parents’ photograph and cried a little without making any sound.