Call Down the Hawk (Dreamer Trilogy #1)

by Maggie Stiefvater

Ronan knew all the Harvard statistics. After Adam had been accepted, he’d spent evening after evening at the Barns pulling apart every detail and fact he could find about the school. Ronan had spent weeks with two Adams: one certain he had earned his place at an Ivy and one certain the school would soon discover how worthless he truly was. Ronan endured it with as much grace as he could manage. Who else did Adam have to crow to, after all? His mother was a disconnected wraith and if his father had gotten his way, Adam might have been dead before he’d graduated high school. So Ronan absorbed the data and the anxiety and the anticipation and tried not to think about how he and Adam were stepping onto differing paths. He tried not to think about all the shining, educated, straightforward faces in the brochures that Adam Parrish might fall in love with instead of him. Sometimes Ronan thought about what might have happened if he’d finished high school and gone off to college this fall, too. But that was as impossible as imagining an Adam who had dropped out of high school and stayed in Henrietta. They knew who they were. Adam, a scholar. Ronan, a dreamer.