The Raven Boys

"Shit, man!" Ronan said. There were three footsteps, very close together, the floor creaking like a shot, and then the shoe was snatched from Gansey’s hand. Ronan shoved him aside and brought down the shoe on the window so hard that the glass should’ve broken. After the wasp’s dry body had fallen to the floorboard, Ronan sought it out in the darkness and smashed it once more.

"Shit," Ronan said again. "Are you stupid?"

Gansey didn’t know how to describe how it felt, to see death crawling inches from him, to know that in a few seconds, he could have gone from "a promising student" to "beyond saving." He turned to Ronan, who had painstakingly picked up the wasp by a broken wing, so that Gansey wouldn’t step on it.

"What did you want?" he asked.

"What?" Ronan demanded.

"You came out for something."

Ronan chucked the wasp’s small body into the waste basket by the desk. The trash was overflowing with crumpled papers, so the body bounced out and forced him to find a better crevice for it. "I can’t even remember."

Gansey merely stood and waited for Ronan to say something else. Ronan fussed over the wasp for another few moments before he said anything, and when he finally did, he didn’t look at Gansey. "What’s this about you and Parrish leaving?"

It wasn’t what Gansey had expected. He wasn’t sure how to speak without hurting Ronan. He couldn’t lie to him.

"You tell me what you heard, and I’ll tell you what’s real."

"Noah told me," Ronan said, "that if you left, Parrish was going with you."

He had let jealousy sneak into his voice, and that made Gansey’s response cooler than it might have been. Gansey tried not to play favorites. "And what else did Noah have to say?"

With visible effort, Ronan pulled himself back, sorted himself out. None of the Lynch brothers liked to appear anything other than intentional, even if it was intentionally cruel. Instead of answering, he asked, "Do you not want me to come?"

Something stuck in Gansey’s chest. "I would take all of you anywhere with me."

The moonlight made a strange sculpture of Ronan’s face, a stark portrait incompletely molded by a sculptor who had forgotten to work in compassion. He did his smoker’s inhale, heavy on the intake through the nostrils, light on the exhale through his prison of teeth.

After a pause, he said, "The other night. There’s something —"

But then he stopped without saying anything else. It was a full stop, the sort that Gansey associated with secrets and guilt. It was the stop that happened when you’d made up your mind to confess, but your mouth betrayed you in the end.

"There’s what?"

Ronan muttered something. He shook the wastebasket.

"There’s what, Ronan?"

He said, "This thing with Chainsaw and the psychic woman, and just, with Noah, and I just think there’s something strange going on."

Gansey couldn’t keep the exasperation from his voice. "‘Strange’ doesn’t help me. I don’t know what ‘strange’ means."

"I don’t know, man, this sounds crazy to me. I don’t know what to tell you. I mean strange like your voice on that recorder," Ronan replied. "Strange like the psychic’s daughter. Things feel bigger. I don’t know what I’m saying. I thought you would believe me, of all people."

"I don’t even know what you’re asking me to believe."

Ronan said, "It’s starting, man."

Gansey crossed his arms. He could see the dark black wing of the dead wasp pressed against the mesh of the wastebasket. He waited for Ronan to elaborate, but all the other boy said was, "I catch you staring at a wasp again, though, I’m going to let it kill you. Screw that."

Without waiting for a reply, he turned away and retreated back to his room.

Slowly, Gansey picked up his shoe from where Ronan had left it. When he straightened, he realized Noah had drifted from his room to stand near Gansey. His anxious gaze flickered from Gansey to the wastebasket. The wasp’s body had slipped down several inches, but it was still visible.

"What?" Gansey asked. Something about Noah’s uneasy face reminded him of the frightened faces surrounding him, hornets on his skin, the sky blue as death above him. A long, long time ago, he’d been given another chance, and lately, the weight of needing to make it matter felt heavier.

He looked away from Noah, out the wall of windowpanes. Even now, it seemed to Gansey that he could feel the aching presence of the nearby mountains, like the space between him and the peaks was a tangible thing. It was as excruciating as the imagined sleeping countenance of Glendower.

Ronan was right. Things felt bigger. He may not have found the line, or the heart of the line, but something was happening, something was starting.

Noah said, "Don’t throw it away."

Chapter 17

Several days later, Blue woke up sometime well before dawn.

Her room was cluttered with jagged shadows from the hall night-light. As they had every night since the reading, thoughts about Adam’s elegant features and the memory of Gansey’s bowed head crowded into her mind as soon as sleep relinquished its hold. Blue couldn’t help replaying the chaotic episode over and over in her mind. Calla’s volatile response to Ronan, Adam and Gansey’s private language, the fact that Gansey was not just a spirit on the corpse road. But it wasn’t just the boys that she was concerned with, though, sadly, it didn’t seem likely that Adam would ever call now. No, the thing that seized her the most was the idea that her mother had forbidden her to do something. It pinched like a collar.

Blue pushed off the covers. She was getting up.

She bore a grudging fondness for the weird architecture of 300 Fox Way; it was a sort of halfhearted affection born of nostalgia more than any real feeling. But her feelings for the yard behind the house were anything but mixed. A great, spreading beech tree sheltered the entire backyard. Its beautiful, perfectly symmetrical canopy stretched from one fence line to the other, so dense that it tinted even the hottest summer day a lush green. Only the heaviest rain could penetrate the leaves. Blue had a satchelful of memories of standing by the massive, smooth trunk in the rain, hearing it hiss and tap and scatter across the canopy without ever reaching the ground. Standing under the beech tree, it felt like she was the beech, like the rain rolled off her leaves and off the bark, smooth as skin against her own.