The Raven Boys

"Thanks," she replied. Then, fast, before she could lose her nerve, "Why did you want my number?"

Adam kept walking, but he didn’t look away. He seemed shy until he didn’t. "Why wouldn’t I?"

"Don’t take this the wrong way," Blue replied. Her cheeks felt a little warm, but she was well into this conversation and she couldn’t back down now. "Because I know you’re going to think I feel bad about it, and I don’t."

"All right."

"Because I’m not pretty. Not in the way that Aglionby boys seem to like."

"I go to Aglionby," Adam said.

Adam did not seem to go to Aglionby like other boys went to Aglionby.

"I think you’re pretty," he said.

When he said it, she heard his Henrietta accent for the first time that day: a long vowel and pretty like it rhymed with biddy. In a nearby tree, a cardinal went wheek. wheek. wheek. Adam’s sneakers scuffed on the sidewalk. Blue considered what he had said, and then she considered it some more.

"Pshaw," she said finally. She felt like when she’d first read his card with the flowers. Weirdly undone. It was like his words had spun tight some sort of thread between them, and she felt like she ought to somehow ease the tension. "But thanks. I think you’re pretty, too."

He laughed his surprised laugh.

"I have another question," Blue said. "Do you remember the last thing my mother said to Gansey?"

His rueful face made it clear that he did.

"Right." Blue took a deep breath. "She said she wouldn’t help. But I didn’t."

After he’d called, she’d hastily scrawled an unspecific map to the unnamed church where she’d sat with Neeve on St. Mark’s Eve. It was just a few scratched parallel lines to indicate the main road, some spidery named cross streets, and finally, a square labeled only THE CHURCH.

She handed Adam this map, unimpressive on a wrinkled piece of notebook paper. Then, from her bag, she handed him Gansey’s journal.

Adam stopped walking. Blue, a few feet ahead of him, waited as he frowned at the things in his hands. He held the journal very carefully, like it was important to him, or perhaps like it was important to someone who was important to him. Desperately she wanted him to both trust her and respect her, and she could tell from his face that she didn’t have much time to accomplish either.

"Gansey left that at Nino’s," she said quickly. "The book. I know I should’ve given it back at the reading, but my mom … well, you saw her. She doesn’t normally — she isn’t normally like that. I didn’t know what to think. Here’s the thing. I want to be in on this thing, that you guys are doing. Like, if there really is something supernatural going on, I want to see it. That’s all."

Adam merely asked, "Why?"

With him, there was never any option but the truth, said as simply as possible. She didn’t think he would stand for anything else. "I’m the only person in my family who’s not psychic. You heard my mom; I just make things easier for people who are psychic. If magic exists, I just want to see it. Just once."

"You’re as bad as Gansey," Adam said, but he didn’t sound as if he thought that was very bad at all. "He doesn’t need anything but to know it’s real."

He tilted the notebook paper this way and that. Blue was instantly relieved; she hadn’t realized how still he’d been until he’d begun to move again, and now it was like tension had been bled out of the air.

"That’s the way to the corpse ro — the ley line," she explained, pointing at her scratchy map. "The church is on the ley line."

"You’re sure?"

Blue gave him a deeply withering look. "Look, either you’re going to believe me or not. You’re the one who asked me along. ‘Exploring’!"

Adam’s face melted into a grin, an expression so unlike his usual one that his features needed to completely shift to accommodate it. "So you don’t do anything quiet, do you?"

The way he said it, she could tell that he was impressed with her in the way that men were usually impressed with Orla. Blue very much liked that, especially since she hadn’t had to do anything other than be herself to earn it. "Nothing worth doing."

"Well," he said, "I think you’ll find I do pretty much everything quiet. If you can be all right with that, I guess we’ll be fine."

It turned out that she had walked or biked past Gansey’s apartment every single day of the year, on the way to school and to Nino’s. As they walked toward the massive warehouse, she spotted the fiendishly orange glint of the Camaro in the overgrown parking lot and, only a hundred yards away, a glistening navy blue helicopter.

She hadn’t really believed the part about the helicopter. Not in a way that prepared her for seeing an actual, life-sized helicopter, sitting there in the lot, looking normal, like someone would park an SUV.

Blue stopped in her tracks and breathed, "Whew."

"I know," Adam said.

And here, again, was Gansey, and again Blue had a strange shock of reconciling the image of him as a spirit and the reality of him beside a helicopter.

"Finally!" he shouted, jogging out toward them. He was still wearing those idiotic Top-Siders she’d noticed at the reading, this time paired with cargo shorts and a yellow polo shirt that made it look as if he were prepared for any sort of emergency, so long as the emergency involved him falling onto a yacht. In his hand he held a container of organic apple juice.

He pointed his no-pesticides juice at Blue. "Are you coming with?"

Just as at the reading, Blue felt cheap and small and stupid just by being in his presence. Clipping her Henrietta vowels as best as she could, she answered, "Coming along in the helicopter you just happen to have at your beck and call, you mean?"

Gansey slung a burnished leather backpack over his burnished cotton shoulders. His smile was gracious and inclusive, as if her mother hadn’t recently refused to assist him in any way, as if she hadn’t just been borderline rude. "You say that like it’s a bad thing."

Behind him, the helicopter began to roar to life. Adam stretched out the journal to Gansey, who looked startled. Just a tiny bit of his composure slid, enough for Blue to see once more that it was part of his President Cell Phone mask.

"Where was it?" yelled Gansey.