The Listeners

by Maggie Stiefvater

This was the nature of the average Avallon guest: people so high on the social ladder they had to duck for the sun to go overhead.

What was luxury? Nimble. In a drought, it was a glass of water; in a flood, a dry place to stand. Whatever made the Avallon luxurious a year ago would not be what made it luxurious now.

His backstory was tragic, but this was West Virginia, tragedy was cheap and plentiful.

June had long ago discovered that most people were bad listeners; they thought listening was synonymous with hearing. But the spoken was only half a conversation. True needs, wants, fears, and hopes hid not in the words that were said, but in the ones that weren’t, and all these formed the core of luxury. June had become a good listener.

January in West Virginia was raw, spare, objectively beautiful.

She just listened.

When you believed in one intangible thing, why not a second, why not a third. If God, then why not the listeners in the water, if the listeners in the water, why not ghosts, if ghosts, why not unicorns—

the unspoken words between his spoken words were noisy.

Kindness was a virtue, but in evil places, empathy punished the wearer.

She let him hold her gold apple-shaped pin. That’s right, he was back in West Virginia, home of the Golden Delicious apple.

These mountaineers would give you good if you gave them good, and they gave you ill if you gave them ill. They took a liking to some people and a hating to some others, but mostly kept to themselves. If they turned, a place would be ruined for years.

The Avallon had never been for those who deserved it. The Avallon had to present itself the same to everyone who came, or the entire illusion collapsed.

she had developed a system to keep herself from getting frustrated: she counted in her head. That way she knew how many seconds a task took. It was shocking how different her feeling of a task’s length was from the reality of it.

To have achieved notability but not be asked to perform it: that was a kind of luxury, too.

The perfect guest was not necessarily the perfect human.

The hotel wasn’t for those who deserved it. It was for those who came. The moment that illusion was broken, so, too, was the staff.

Good manners, said Mr. Francis in June’s head, are about making the world a more beautiful place. Sometimes that means you have an unbeautiful thought, but you don’t say it. Sometimes it means you have an unbeautiful need, but you don’t ask for it. The moment it leaves your head, it makes the world less beautiful, do you understand? The well-mannered will go to all kinds of trouble to make sure their unbeautiful thoughts are well hidden. They train in this skill for their entire lives. June: You’re going to tell me now it’s our job to guess what other fellers’ unbeautiful thoughts are so they don’t have to say them, is that it? Mr. Francis: Very good, June.

(Why do you say “unbeautiful” instead of “ugly”? Just because something isn’t beautiful doesn’t make it ugly. The necessary is very rarely beautiful.)

It was not the Gilfoyles’ wealth that intoxicated June. It was their trust in her.

Ramps were hard to explain to those from outside West Virginia. They were a wild, onion-like root found on hillsides, and pretty much every poor family in the state had subsisted on them at one time or another. They were not particularly palatable at first, but one got a taste for them, especially when there wasn’t much else. The problem with ramps, however, was that they began to make everything else smell like them, too. Those who ate ramps smelled like ramps. Clothing and bedsheets stored near ramps smelled like ramps. Hair, skin, breath, everything ramps. Garlic thought it was powerful until it had to do battle with ramps. It was a nostalgic odor, though. A proud odor. It was the smell of West Virginia.

You don’t get any more morally bankrupt than unquestioning luxury.

Every interaction has a social cost, Mr. Francis had said.

What a marvel that they had both begun in the same place. It was a typical West Virginia story, in its way, that they grew up here and ended up only a few miles away, down the mountain at the Avallon. It was only every single other part of their story that was different.

He was looking at one of the houses, little more than a rotted porch with half a dozen chairs toppled against each other. His nostrils flared. He was taking quick, small breaths, soaking his lungs with air before the dive. And then it was over and he turned away lightly. This, she understood, was the story that filled the years between his time here in Casto Springs and the day he had come to the Avallon. The story of learning to breathe again after drowning.

a good kiss erases doubt.

overcoming adversity successfully wasn’t the same as being unaffected by it.

He was one of them, but not one of them.

“Who you are? Right now, you are just performing a wonderful script for society, pretending they’ll have you one day. How long would you like to pretend for? Another decade? Two?” “Says the woman laden with diamonds.” “Darling, don’t you understand? I’m not society, either, I’m just rich. What is it you love to say?” Wealth isn’t luxury.

“I want to be what makes you smile when we come home to each other and I want to be what makes you settle under a full moon and I want to be what makes you wild when I’m gone and I want to be what makes you laugh when I’m inside you and I want to be what makes you weep when I die and I want to be everything else in between and I want to take you out into the world and see it with you, but if it has to be here, then here is where I land.”