The Raven Boys

Robert Parrish spit out the window. He didn’t pull over for them to pass. Adam’s face was turned out to the cornfield, but Gansey didn’t look away.

"You don’t have to come," said Gansey, because he had to say it.

Adam’s voice came from far away. "I’m coming."

Jerking the wheel of the car, Gansey revved the engine up high. The Pig stormed off the road, clouds of dirt exploding from the tires, and slammed through the shallow ditch. His heart thudded with anticipation and danger and the desire to shout everything he thought about Adam’s father to Adam’s father.

As they charged back onto the driveway on the other side of the Toyota, Gansey could feel Robert Parrish’s stare follow them.

The weight of that gaze seemed like a more substantial promise of the future than anything a psychic might tell him.

Chapter 15

Of course, Gansey was not on time for his reading. The appointment time came and went. No Gansey. And, perhaps more disappointingly, no phone call from Adam. Blue pulled aside the curtains to glance up and down the street, but there was nothing but normal after-work traffic. Maura made excuses.

"Maybe he wrote down the wrong time," she said.

Blue didn’t think he’d written down the wrong time.

Ten more minutes slouched by. Maura said, "Maybe he had car trouble."

Blue didn’t think he had car trouble.

Calla retrieved the novel she’d been reading and started upstairs. Her voice carried down toward them. "That reminds me. You need to get that belt looked at on the Ford. I see a breakdown in your future. Next to that sketchy furniture store. A very ugly man with a cell phone will stop and be overly helpful."

It was possible she really did see a breakdown in Maura’s future, but it was also possible she was being hyperbolic. In any case, Maura made a note on the calendar.

"Maybe I accidentally told him tomorrow afternoon instead of today," Maura said.

Persephone murmured, "That is always possible," and said, "Perhaps I will make a pie." Blue looked anxiously to Persephone. Pie making was a lengthy and loving process, and Persephone did not like to be interrupted during it. She wouldn’t begin a pie if she really thought Gansey’s arrival would interrupt her.

Maura eyed Persephone as well before retrieving a bag of yellow squash and a stick of butter from the fridge. Now Blue knew precisely how the rest of the day was going to go. Persephone would make something sweet. Maura would make something with butter. Eventually, Calla would reappear and make something involving sausage or bacon. It was how every evening went if a meal hadn’t been planned in advance.

Blue didn’t think that Maura had told Gansey tomorrow afternoon instead of today. What she thought was that Gansey had looked at the clock on his Mercedes-Benz’s dashboard or Aston Martin’s radio and had decided that the reading interfered with his rock climbing or racquetball. And then he’d blown it off, just like Adam had blown off calling her. She couldn’t really be surprised. They’d done exactly what she expected from raven boys.

Just as Blue was getting ready to sulk upstairs with her needles and her homework, Orla howled from the Phone Room, her wordless wail eventually resolving itself into words:

"There is a 1973 Camaro in front of the house! It matches my nails!"

The last time Blue had seen Orla’s nails, they’d been a complicated paisley pattern. She wasn’t exactly sure what a 1973 Camaro looked like, but she was sure that if it was paisley, it must be impressive. She was also certain that Orla must be on the phone, or she would’ve been down here ogling.

"Well, here we go," Maura said, abandoning her squash in the sink. Calla reappeared in the kitchen, exchanging a sharp look with Persephone.

Blue’s stomach dropped to her feet.

Gansey. That’s all there is.

The doorbell rang.

"Are you ready?" Calla asked Blue.

Gansey was the boy she either killed or fell in love with. Or both. There was no being ready. There just was this: Maura opening the door.

There were three boys in the doorway, backlit by the evening sun as Neeve had been so many weeks ago. Three sets of shoulders: one square, one built, one wiry.

"Sorry that I’m late," said the boy in front, with the square shoulders. The scent of mint rolled in with him, just as it had in the churchyard. "Will it be a problem?"

Blue knew that voice.

She reached for the railing of the stairs to keep her balance as President Cell Phone stepped into the hallway.

Oh no. Not him. All this time she’d been wondering how Gansey might die and it turned out she was going to strangle him. At Nino’s, the blare of the music had drowned out the finer points of his voice and the odor of garlic had overwhelmed the scent of mint.

But now that she put two and two together, it seemed obvious.

In their hallway, he looked slightly less presidential, but only because the heat had made him messily roll up the sleeves of his button-down shirt and remove his tie. His dusty brown hair was mussed, too, in that way that Virginia warmth always managed. But the watch was still there, large enough to knock out bank robbers, and he still had that handsome glow. The glow that meant that not only had he never been poor, but his father hadn’t, nor his father’s father, nor his father’s father’s father. She couldn’t tell if he was actually tremendously good-looking or merely tremendously wealthy. Perhaps they were the same thing.

Gansey. This was Gansey.

And that meant that the journal belonged to him.

That meant that Adam belonged to him.

"Well," Maura said. It was clear her curiosity overruled all rules of scheduling. "It’s not too late. Come into the reading room. Can I get some names?"

Because of course President Cell Phone had brought most of his posse from Nino’s, everyone but the smudgy boy. They filled the hallway to overflowing, somehow, the three of them, loud and male and so comfortable with one another that they allowed no one else to be comfortable with them. They were a pack of sleek animals armored with their watches and their Top-Siders and the expensive cut of their uniforms. Even the sharp boy’s tattoo, cutting up the knobs of his spine above his collar, was a weapon, somehow slicing at Blue.

"Gansey," President Cell Phone said again, pointing to himself. "Adam. Ronan. Where do you want us? There?"

He pointed a hand toward the reading room, palm flat, like he was directing traffic.

"In there," Maura agreed. "This is my daughter, by the way. She’ll be present for the reading, if you don’t mind."