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The Lynch brothers, the orphans Lynch. All of them had been made by dreams, one way or another. They were handsome devils, down to the last one.
Their mother, Aurora, had died the way some dreams did, gruesomely, blamelessly, unexpectedly. Their father, Niall, had been killed or murdered, depending on how human you considered him. Were there other Lynches? It seemed unlikely. Lynches appeared to be very good at dying. Dreams are not the safest thing to build a life on.
Declan, the eldest, courted safety by being as dull as possible. He was very good at it. In all things—school, extracurriculars, dating—he invariably chose the dullest option.
Declan was not invisible, because invisible had its own charm, its own mystery. He was simply dull. Technically he was a college student, a political intern, a twenty-one-year-old with his whole life ahead of him, but it was hard to remember that. It was hard to remember him at all.
Ronan, the middle brother, defended his safety by being as frightening as possible. Like the other Lynch brothers, he was a regular churchgoer, but most people assumed he played for the other team.
The Lynch brothers had many secrets.
Declan was a collector of beautiful, specific phrases that he would not let himself use in public, and the possessor of an illuminated, specific smile no one would ever see. Matthew had a forged birth certificate and no fingerprints.
Ronan had the most dangerous of the secrets. Like many significant secrets, it was passed down through the family—in this case, from father to son.
Dreams are not the safest thing to build a life on.
Declan grew more boring and Ronan grew more bored. Matthew tried not to let his feet take him someplace he didn’t understand. They all wanted more. One of them had to break, eventually. Niall had been a wild Belfast dreamer with fire biting at his heels, and Aurora had been a golden dream with the borderless sky reflected in her eyes. Their sons were built for chaos.
Boredom and secrets: an explosive combination. Something was going to burn.
Forces other than science held domain in this place.
They shot him. A few times. Mistakes were expensive and bullets were cheap.
They all cast their attention back to their prey—or their victim, depending on how human one found him.
“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. “I would have no problem with you driving my car if you would keep it under ninety.” “And I’d have no problem with riding in your car if you’d keep it over geriatric,” Ronan replied.
“Ultimately the decision is mine,” Declan said, “as it’s my car.” He didn’t add and also because I’m the oldest, although it hung in the air. Epic battles had been waged between the brothers over this understood sentiment. It represented considerable progress in their relationship that it remained unspoken this time. “Thank Jesus,” Ronan said. “No one else wants it.”
He loved the Barns, he was bored of the Barns, he wanted to leave, he wanted to stay.
“It’s my turn to pick the music,” Matthew said. “No,” Declan and Ronan agreed at once.
Adam. Adam Parrish was the destination of this road trip. Is there any version of you that could come with me to Cambridge? Adam had asked the day he left. Maybe. Ronan had visited him once since the semester began, but it had been spontaneous—he’d gotten in his car in the middle of the night, spent the day with Adam, and then left the city without closing his eyes for a second. He hadn’t really wanted to test himself. Plausible deniability. Ronan Lynch could make it in Cambridge until proven otherwise.
Adam. Ronan missed him like a lung.
Ronan wasn’t that different. Well, he could seem not that different. He could move to follow the guy he loved, like anyone else. He could live in a city, like anyone else. It could work.
Does any part of you still look at the sky and hurt?
We used to hear the stars, too. When people stopped talking, there was silence. Now you could shut every mouth on the planet and there’d still be a hum. Air-conditioning groaning from the vent beside you. Semi trucks hissing on a highway miles away. A plane complaining ten thousand feet above you. Silence is an extinct word.
The world’s killing you, but They’ll kill you faster. Capital-T They. Them. You don’t know Them yet, but you will.
You are made of dreams and this world is not for you.
All eyes in the DC-suburb McMansion were on Jordan, a young woman with eyes like a miracle and a smile like a nuclear accident. The other partygoers wore relaxed casual; Jordan didn’t believe in either relaxing or being casual.
Jordan was attending this party as Hennessy. No one here knew the real Hennessy, so there was no one to say she wasn’t. Even TJ knew her as Hennessy. Jordan was accustomed to wearing identities that weren’t hers—it would’ve felt stranger, in fact, for someone to know her by her actual name.
They were still friends, though. Or at least as close as people could be when one of them was pretending to be someone else.
“What does your own art look like?” Feinman asked. Jordan didn’t know. She spent all her time painting other people’s.
“I’m doing you a favor,” Feinman said. She cast a last look at the Mona Lisa. “You might not know it yet, but you’re meant for originals, Hennessy.” If only any part of that sentence had ever been true.
What a pair the two of them were. Gansey, searching desperately for meaning, Ronan, sure that he wouldn’t find any. Voted most and least likely to succeed, respectively, at Aglionby Academy, their shared high school.
Adam’s expression was all contradictions: intense and wary, resigned and resilient, defeated and defiant.
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.
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.
Eliot flinched at his tone, although Ronan hadn’t thought he’d been any more terse than usual. Possibly his usual was enough. The first thing breezy Eliot had said when they met Ronan was “Oh, you’re scarier than I expected!” Fucking nice to meet you, too, Ronan had thought.
“Poverty sucks,” Fletcher mused, smoothing his sweater. “Anecdotally,” Gillian said wryly. Ronan shot a glance at Adam. Adam, who’d grown up in a trailer; Adam, who even now wore that secondhand tweed vest Gansey’s father had given him years ago; Adam, who had never spared words about the entitled students at the private school he’d worked three jobs to attend.
To the outside eye, there was no reason why Ronan shouldn’t move: his parents were dead, he had no job, he wasn’t going to college, and the Barns could run wild and unattended until he returned to visit his brothers for holidays. To the outside eye, Ronan Lynch was a loser.
The Adam he knew was a silent observer. A cataloguer of the human experience. A look don’t touch.
He and Adam had been making the same memories for so long that he’d forgotten that it didn’t always have to be like that. Adam was here having a new life, becoming a new person, growing from something beaten down into whoever he was meant to be.
“I envy him. I wish I had his family.” Eliot’s fingers paused in their texting. “Yeah. I wish my dad could meet his dad. I hate my father.” Record scratch, freeze-frame, stop the press.
Once upon a time, Ronan Lynch had punched Adam Parrish’s father in front of the Parrish trailer. Once upon a time, Ronan Lynch had been there when Adam Parrish’s father had beaten the hearing out of his left ear for good. Once upon a time, Ronan Lynch had helped move Adam Parrish’s stuff into a shitty rented room so that he wouldn’t have to live with his parents ever again.
He could remember it like it had happened yesterday. No, like it had happened minutes ago. No, like it was still happening, always happening, kept fresh in a perfect, savage memory: Adam on his hands and knees outside the trailer, swaying, disoriented, broken, the light from the porch cut into fragments by his strange shadow. His father standing over him, trying to convince Adam it was his fault, always his fault. At the time it had only flooded Ronan with boiling, bursting, non-negotiable rage. But now it made him feel sick.
This was too much; Adam wasn’t allowed ownership of hardship.
You have your brothers. I’ve got no one, okay?” Adam said.
For Adam, it was what it always was: a fight between Adam and himself, between Adam and the world. For Ronan, it was what it always was, too: a fight between truth and compromise, between the black and white he saw and the reality everyone else experienced.
“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 was a forest, or rather, it was a thing that was forest-shaped for now. Ronan had an idea that it had existed somewhere else for a very long time, and only now whispered its way into the world this time in the shape of a forest. It knew him, and he knew it, insofar that they could be known, both of them full of mysteries, even to themselves.
If you dream a fiction and wake with that fiction in your hands, it becomes fact. Do you understand? For you, reality is not an external condition. For you, reality is a decision. Still you long for what reality means to everyone else, even if it makes your world smaller. Maybe because it makes your world smaller.
First box: What is real. First box: Ask your brother about the Fairy Market. First box: They’ll be whispering my name. Proof? It will have to do. You make reality.
