The Dream Thieves
“Ah, Blue.”
“Don’t ‘ah, Blue’ me.” Blue released her mother’s hand. “I just want to know when it stops being potential and starts being something more.”
Maura briskly shuffled the card back into her deck. “Do you want the answer you’re going to like, or the real one?”
Blue harrumphed. There was only one answer she ever wanted.
“Maybe you’re already something more. You make other psychics so powerful just by being there. Maybe the potential you bring out in other people is your something more.”
Blue had known her entire life that she was a rarity. And it was nice to be useful. But it wasn’t enough. It was not, her soul thought, something more.
Very coolly, she said, “I’m not going to be a sidekick.”
In the hallway, Orla repeated in Gansey’s Southern nectar: “I’m not gonna be a sidekick. You should stop hanging out with millionaires, then.”
Maura made an ill-tempered tsss between her teeth. “Orla, don’t you have a call to make?”
“It doesn’t matter. I’m going to work,” Blue said, trying to keep Orla’s words from digging in. But it was true that she looked a lot cooler at school than she did surrounded by psychics and rich boys.
No, she thought. no, it’s not about that. It’s about what I do, not what I am.
It felt a little feeble, though. It had been a lot easier when Adam, the poorest of the lot, had seemed more like her. Now she felt as if she had something to prove. The others were Team Power, and she was supposed to be Team Ingenuity, or something.
Her mother waved a card at her in farewell. “Bye. Will you be home for dinner? I’m making midlife crisis.”
“Oh,” Blue said, “I guess I’ll have a slice. If you’re making it already.”
When Blue got to Nino’s, she discovered that Gansey, Adam, Noah, and Ronan had already commandeered one of the big tables in the back. Because she couldn’t come to them, they’d brought the Glendower discussion to her.
Ha! she thought. Take that, Orla!
Adam and Gansey sat in a cracked orange booth along the wall. Noah and Ronan sat on chairs opposite. As an odd centerpiece, a wooden box rested in the spotlight provided by the hanging green light. A battalion of foreign language dictionaries surrounded it.
With effort, Blue compared her current image of the boys with the first time she’d seen them. They’d not only been strangers then, they’d been the enemy. It was hard to remember seeing them that way. Whatever her identity crisis was, it seemed to live at home, not with the boys.
She wouldn’t have predicted that.
Blue brought a pitcher of iced tea to the table. “What’s that?”
“Jane!” Gansey said joyfully.
Adam said, “It’s a wizard in a box.”
“It will do your homework,” Noah added.
“And it’s been dating your girlfriend,” Ronan finished.
Blue scowled. “Are you all drunk?”
They dismissed her question and instead excitedly demonstrated the principles of the wooden box. She was less surprised than most people would have been to discover it was a magical translating box. She was more surprised to discover the boys had possessed the forethought to bring the other dictionaries.
“We wanted to know if it was always right,” Gansey said. “And it seems to be.”
“Hold on,” Blue replied. She left the boys to take the drink orders of a couple at table fourteen. They both wanted iced tea. Nino’s was unfairly famous for its iced tea — there was even a sign in the window proclaiming that it had the best in Henrietta — despite the fact that Blue could attest to the teamaking process being completely unremarkable. Raven boys must be easy prey to propaganda, she thought.
When she returned, she leaned on the table beside Adam, who touched her wrist. She didn’t know what to do in response. Touch it back? The moment had passed. She resented her body for not giving her the correct answer. She asked, “What is that other language, by the way?”
“We don’t know,” Gansey said, around his straw. “Why is the tea so good here?”
“I spit in it. Let me see this thing.”
She accepted the box. It had some heft to it, as if one would find workings to all these dials inside. It felt, actually, a lot like Gansey’s journal on Glendower. It had been lavishly dreamt — not what she’d expected of Ronan.
Fingers careful on the smooth, cool dials, Blue moved the wheels on the English side of the box so that they read blue. Buttons sucked in and wheels turned on the other sides of the box, fluid and silent.
Blue turned it slowly to read each side: hyacinthus, , , celea. One side was blank.
Gansey pointed to each side for her. “Latin, Coptic, Sanskrit, something we don’t know, and . . . this is supposed to be Greek. Isn’t that funny that it’s blank?”
Derisively, Ronan said, “No. The ancient Greeks didn’t have a word for blue.”
Everyone at the table looked at him.
“What the hell, Ronan?” said Adam.
“It’s hard to imagine,” Gansey mused, “how this evidently successful classical education never seems to make it into your school papers.”
“They never ask the right questions,” Ronan replied.
At the front of the restaurant, the door opened. It would fall to Blue to seat the new party, but she lingered by the table, frowning at the box.
She said, “I have a right question. What is the language on this side?”
Ronan’s expression was petulant.
Gansey tilted his head. “We don’t know.”
Blue pointed at Ronan, who curled a lip. “He does. Somewhere in there. I know it.”
“You don’t know shit,” Ronan said.
There was the very briefest of pauses. It was true that this sort of venom was not unusual from Ronan. But it had been a very long while since it had been used so forcefully on Blue. She drew herself up, everything prickling.
Then Gansey said, very slowly, “Ronan, you’re never going to talk to Jane like that again.”
Both Adam and Blue stared at Gansey, who concentrated his gaze on his napkin. It wasn’t what he said but how he looked at no one when he said it that made the moment strange.
Blue, feeling oddly warm around the cheeks, told Gansey, “I don’t need you to stand up for me. Don’t you” — this was directed at Ronan — “think I’ll let you talk to me like that. Especially not just because you’re mad I’m right.”