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There were three of them, and if you didn’t like one, try another, because the Lynch brother others found too sour or too sweet might be just to your taste.
Their father, Niall, had been killed or murdered, depending on how human you considered him.
Declan made certain to practice a form of boring that suggested that, deep down inside, there was an even more boring version of him.
Like the other Lynch brothers, he was a regular churchgoer, but most people assumed he played for the other team.
Everything about him suggested he might take your wallet or drop your baby.
Monsters and machines, weather and wishes, fears and forests. Dreams are not the safest thing to build a life on.
What was one more tiny secret, he thought, in a life full of them. Boredom and secrets: an explosive combination. Something was going to burn.
The calico might not even be a cat at all. It was cat-shaped, but so were some birthday cakes.
He’d actually stabbed Ramsay with the crucifix from the hallway wall, which Ramsay found funny even during the act of it. Holy smokes, he’d said.
They shot him. A few times. Mistakes were expensive and bullets were cheap.
“Here’s the situation,” Declan said. This was a classic Declan way to start a conversation. Other hits included Let’s focus on the real action item and This is what it’s going to take to close this deal and In the interest of clearing the air.
Matthew, with his outstandingly ugly checked pants and cheerfully blue puffer coat.
Matthew had no interest in driving; he said if he didn’t have enough friends to drive him anywhere he wanted to go, he was living his life wrong. In any case, he’d failed his driver’s test three times.
Ronan’s dreaming wasn’t a secret to Matthew. Declan just liked everything better if it was a secret.
Two of them, Gansey and Blue, had invited him on their gap year cross-country road trip, but he hadn’t wanted to go anywhere then. Not when he had just gotten entirely wrapped up in— “… Adam yet?”
Adam. Ronan missed him like a lung.
It sounded like everyone else’s heartbeat, he thought. Just like Adam’s heart when his head was resting on his chest.
He could move to follow the guy he loved, like anyone else.
Does any part of you still look at the sky and hurt?
If you’ve ever looked into a fire and been unable to look away, it’s that. If you’ve ever looked at the mountains and found you’re not breathing, it’s that. If you’ve ever looked at the moon and felt tears in your eyes, it’s that. It’s the stuff between stars, the space between roots, the thing that makes electricity get up in the morning. It fucking hates us.
You are made of dreams and this world is not for you.
The other partygoers wore relaxed casual; Jordan didn’t believe in either relaxing or being casual. She wore a leather jacket and lace bustier, her natural hair pulled into an enormous kinky ponytail. The floral tattoos on her neck and fingers glowed bright against her dark skin and her enthusiasm glowed bright against the suburban night.
“I would say I didn’t mean to be late, but I think we should be honest with each other.”
Ronan’s attention stuck on his hands. Lovely boyish hands with prominent knuckles, gaunt and long like his unfamiliar face.
Ronan hadn’t known anything about who Adam was then and, if possible, he’d known even less about who he himself was, but as they drove away from the boy with the bicycle, this was how it had begun: Ronan leaning back against his seat and closing his eyes and sending up a simple, inexplicable, desperate prayer to God: Please.
They knew who they were. Adam, a scholar. Ronan, a dreamer.
Stunned quiet before an embrace on the stairs outside Adam’s dorm? Slowly growing grins before a kiss in a hallway? Ronan, said this imaginary Adam as his dorm room door fell open.
Adam glanced at his watch, and Ronan saw then that it was his watch, the elegant timepiece Ronan had dreamt him for Christmas, the watch that told the correct time for wherever Ronan was in the world. The ground steadied a little beneath him.
“This is fucking weird,” Ronan said, and Adam laughed in a haggard, relieved way. They hugged, hard. This was as Ronan remembered it. Adam’s ribs fit against his ribs just as they had before. His arms wrapped around Adam’s narrow frame the same way they had before. His hand still pressed against the back of Ronan’s skull the way it always did when they hugged.
His voice was missing his accent, but now it sounded properly like him as he murmured into Ronan’s skin: “You smell like home.” Home.
Friends were serious business for Ronan Lynch. He was slow to acquire them, slower to lose them. The list was small, both because secrets made relationships complicated and because friends, for Ronan, were time-consuming. They got all of him. You could not, Ronan thought, give all of yourself away to many people, or there would be nothing left.
“Hey, Scary,” said Eliot. “Scary Spice.” “Lynch, it’s your turn,” added Adam.
“This is how this works, right?” he asked as he plucked a king of hearts out of Fletcher’s lot to add to his own lot of nineteen cards he’d assembled in front of him, making it an even twenty. “God, it is, God, I hate you,” Fletcher moaned operatically. “Who are you to come to our lands and take our women,” murmured Gillian. “We don’t like your boyfriend, Adam,” Benjy said.
“Just a second,” Adam told Ronan. Leaning in close, he added, “Don’t kill anyone.” The words were only an excuse to breathe in Ronan’s ear; it made a marvel of his nerve endings.
They were also more openly and gleefully queer than any Aglionby student Ronan had ever met. Ronan, who’d spent most of his high school years assuming other people were rich assholes and being the only gay person he knew, found these developments somewhat unsettling.
They stepped into Adam’s room; they made it no farther. In the dark, they tangled in each other for several minutes, and finally broke off when stubble had made lips sore.
“I missed you,” Adam said, voice muffled, face pressed against Ronan’s neck.
“What’s the face for?” “I want it too much,” Adam said. That sentence, Ronan thought, was enough to undo all bad feeling he might have had meeting Adam’s Harvard friends, all bad feeling about looking like a loser, all bad feeling about feeling stuck, all bad feeling, ever. Adam Parrish wanted him, and he wanted Adam Parrish. “It’ll work,” Ronan told him. “It’ll work.”
His eyes were open, looking at nothing. Adam was slotted between him and the wall, mouth parted with abandon, hair wild against the pillow.
Ronan needed another dreamer like he needed a shit-ton of murder crabs in his bed.
The force of the movement sent the board rocketing across the room, a floating crab taxi, before it hit the wall and dislodged them all. “Oh God,” Adam said.
He had been sleeping, not dead, and now his face reflected the truth: that he’d woken to a hell-room of crustacean roommates. “God, Ronan, God! What did you do?” “I’m fixing it.” Ronan slid out of bed.
All of the Myrtles had long faces with tiny eyes, and even when at their most benevolent, they had the look of something that might creep out of the dark to eat your body after you died.
The first thing he saw was the gun, now pointing at his face, a Walther with the word D!PLOMACY sharpie-d on the barrel.
At the very least they all stood like her, like they would fuck you or fuck you up.
Adam wiped one tear from Ronan’s right eye. He showed the finger to Ronan. It glistened damply with the single tear. Then he reached out and wiped the tear from Ronan’s left eye. He showed this finger to Ronan, too. It was smeared darkly with black. Nightwash.
It felt like sadness was like radiation, like the amount of time between exposures was irrelevant, like you got a badge that eventually got filled up from a lifetime of it, and then it just killed you.
“Tell me to go to school closer to you and I will,” Adam said in a rush, the words piled together. “Just say it.” Ronan pressed the heel of his hand against his eye, checking for nightwash, but it wasn’t bad yet. “I’m not that big of an asshole.” “Oh, you are,” Adam said, trying for humor. Failing. “Just not about that.”
You need a routine, Declan had demanded. I have a routine. I thought you said you never lied. 7:15 A.M.: GET DRESSED AND SHAVE THAT BEAUTIFUL BALD HEAD.
Don’t wear dirty socks twice in a row, Ronan. Don’t swear, Ronan. Don’t drink yourself into oblivion, Ronan. Don’t hang out with those using losers, Ronan. Don’t kill yourself, Ronan.
