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Magic. It’s a cheap word now. Put a quarter in the slot and get a magic trick for you and your friends. Most people don’t remember what it is. It is not cutting a person in half and pulling a rabbit out. It is not sliding a card from your sleeve. It’s not are you watching closely? 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
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As they passed, Adam’s expression was all contradictions: intense and wary, resigned and resilient, defeated and defiant.
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.
“Adam Parrish and the Crying Club, like a band,” Fletcher said. “He has a nose for us. Like a superhero. Somewhere on the Harvard campus someone is hidden in a stairwell crying right now, and Adam is on his way to find them and comfort them and give them someone to play cards with on a Friday night.”
Ronan spent a fraught few seconds trying to reconcile the standoffish Adam he knew with this description. The Adam he knew was a silent observer. A cataloguer of the human experience. A look don’t touch. The idea of him being something else, something Ronan didn’t know, felt as unsettling as realizing that Adam’s new friends weren’t awful. 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. And Ronan
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“What are you playing at, Adam?” Ronan asked. “You sitting there at that table with a bunch of rich kids playing a card game where the punch line’s poverty, pretending you left some Brady Bunch bull back home?”
“Is it so bad?” Adam asked. “Is it so bad to start over? Nobody knows me here. I don’t have to be the kid from the trailer park or the kid whose dad beats him. Nobody has to feel sorry for me or judge me. I can just be me.” “That’s some pretty fucked-up shit.”
“I want it too much,” Adam said.
Ronan Lynch’s subconscious was a jungle.
“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.”
The French horn had gone silent and all that was left was the sound of the city that would slowly kill Ronan if he let it. He stood up. It was over.
You are made of dreams and this world i...
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If you could dream a life out of nothing, should you? On weekdays, he gave in to the impulse of adding to his strange herds. On weekends, he spent Mass regretfully apologizing to God for his hubris.
“Ink on your skin means you’re hiding things,” he told Ronan. “That’s what breathing means,” Ronan replied.
This was dreamlike, too, this casual admission of her criminality, said in the same bland tone Declan said everything. But this used to be Declan’s world, Ronan reminded himself. Before the gray town house, before the gray suit, before gray tone of voice, before invisibility, before their father’s murder, Declan Lynch came to these often enough to be recognized. Sometimes Ronan wasn’t sure he knew any of his family.
A man in a purple slicker on his way out asked Declan, “Do you have the time?” “Not today,” Declan replied, as if answering an entirely different question.
“There’s a thing Soulages said. ‘A window looks outside, but a painting should do the opposite—it should look inside of us.’”
was. And part of him tucked away the way the man spoke, too. Declan’s private collection of words and phrases was free and forever secret, a perfect hobby.
A truth, given away. A truth, transcribed forever. He hated it. So much softer to lie. So much easier to just put down the painting and what it promised and walk away.
“A fucking single-celled organism is the simplest organism,” Ronan said. “And there are three of us.” Declan looked at him heavily. “As if I don’t think about that every single day.”
“You can believe him, but nothing says I have to. Earlier today you had a gun on me. I’m just asking you give him the same shake as me.”
Again, just as when Ronan had been holding the gun on Adam, there was no distress, no anger. Adam would never judge someone else for their skepticism. His default setting was mistrust.
It was one o’clock in the morning. He was very awake. This was a side effect of not taking his sleeping pill. This was a side effect of Jordan Hennessy calling him at midnight. This was a side effect of him being a fool. The entire place had the feeling only achievable at one o’clock in the morning, when everyone has joined a club, the club of people who are not in bed. A club defined not by being with the other members of the club but rather against everyone else.
