The Raven Boys

Calla reached out, enclosing Blue’s wrist with her fingers, and dragged her onto the mint green love seat. Her glass was already mostly empty. "It’s a Sunday. What else would we do?"

"I have to go walk dogs," Blue said.

From her blue-striped chair across the room, Maura sipped her screwdriver and made a wild face. "Oh, Persephone. You make them with far too much vodka."

"My hand always slips," Persephone said sadly from a wicker bench in front of the window.

When Blue started to rise, Maura said, a thinly veiled iron behind her tone, "Sit with us a moment, Blue. Talk to us about yesterday. And the day before. And the day before. And — oh, let’s just talk about these past few weeks."

Blue realized then that Maura was furious. She had seen her furious only a few times before, and having it directed at her made her skin go instantly clammy.

"Well, I was …" She trailed off. A lie seemed pointless.

"I’m not your dungeon master," interrupted Maura. "I’m not going to bolt you in your room or send you to a convent, for crying out loud. So you can just stop all the sneaking around stuff right now."

"I wasn’t —"

"You were. I have been your mother since you’ve been born and I promise you, you were. So I take it you and Gansey get along, then?" Maura’s expression was annoyingly knowing.

"Mom."

"Orla told me about his muscle car," Maura continued. Her voice was still angry and artificially bright. The fact that Blue was well aware that she’d earned it made the sting of it even worse. "You aren’t planning on kissing him, are you?"

"Mom, that will never happen," Blue assured her. "You did meet him, didn’t you?"

"I wasn’t sure if driving an old, loud Camaro was the male equivalent of shredding your T-shirts and gluing cardboard trees to your bedroom walls."

"Trust me," Blue said. "Gansey and I are nothing like each other. And they aren’t cardboard. They’re repurposed canvas."

"The environment breathes a sigh of relief." Maura attempted another sip of her drink; wrinkling her nose, she shot a glare at Persephone. Persephone looked martyred. After a pause, Maura noted, in a slightly softer voice, "I’m not entirely happy that you’re getting in a car without air bags."

"Our car doesn’t have air bags," Blue pointed out.

Maura picked a long strand of Persephone’s hair from the rim of her glass. "Yes, but you always take your bike."

Blue stood up. She suspected that the green fuzz of the sofa was now adhered to the back of her leggings. "Can I go now? Am I in trouble?"

"You are in trouble. I told you to stay away from him and you didn’t," Maura said. "I just haven’t decided what to do about it yet. My feelings are hurt. I’ve consulted with several people who tell me that I’m within my rights to feel hurt. Do teenagers still get grounded? Did that only happen in the eighties?"

"I’ll be very angry if you ground me," Blue said, still wobbly from her mother’s unfamiliar displeasure. "I’ll probably rebel and climb out my window with a bedsheet rope."

Her mother rubbed a hand over her face. Her anger had completely burned itself out. "You’re well into it, aren’t you? That didn’t take long."

"If you don’t tell me not to see them, I don’t have to disobey you," Blue suggested.

"This is what you get, Maura, for using your DNA to make a baby," Calla said.

Maura sighed. "Blue, I know you’re not an idiot. It’s just, sometimes smart people do dumb things."

Calla growled, "Don’t be one of them."

"Persephone?" asked Maura.

In her small voice, Persephone said, "I have nothing to add." After a moment of consideration, she added, however, "If you are going to punch someone, don’t put your thumb inside your fist. It would be a shame to break it."

"Okay," Blue said hurriedly. "I’m out."

"You could at least say sorry," Maura said. "Pretend like I have some power over you."

Blue wasn’t sure how to reply to this. Maura had all sorts of control of Blue, but it wasn’t usually the sort that came with ultimatums or curfew. So she just said, "I’m sorry. I should’ve told you I was going to do what you didn’t want me to do."

Maura said, "That was not as satisfying as I imagined it would be."

Calla caught Blue’s wrist again, and for a moment Blue was worried that Calla would sense the level of strangeness surrounding Gansey’s quest. But she merely swallowed the last of her drink before purring, "What with all this running around, don’t forget our movie night on Friday, Blue."

"Our — movie — night —" Blue repeated.

Calla’s eyebrows hardened. "You promised."

For a shapeless moment, Blue tried to remember when she had ever talked about a movie night with Calla, and then she realized what this was really about: the conversation from days and days ago. About tossing Neeve’s room.

"I forgot that was this week," Blue replied.

Maura swirled her drink, which still looked mostly full. She always preferred watching other people drink to doing it herself. "Which movie?"

"Even Dwarfs Started Small," Calla replied immediately. "In the original German: Auch Zwerge haben klein angefangen."

Maura winced, though Blue couldn’t tell if it was at the movie or at Calla’s accent. She said, "Just as well. Neeve and I are out that evening."

Calla raised an eyebrow and Persephone picked at a string on her lace stockings.

"What are you doing?" Blue asked. Looking for my father? Scrying in pools?

Maura stopped swirling her drink. "Not hanging out with Gansey."

At least Blue could still be certain that her mother would never lie to her.

She just wouldn’t say anything at all.

Chapter 28

"Why the church?" Blue asked from the passenger seat of the Camaro. She’d never ridden in the front before, and in the passenger seat, the sensation of the car being a few thousand parts flying in uneasy formation was even more pronounced.

Gansey, installed comfortably behind the wheel with expensive sunglasses and Top-Siders, took his time answering. "I don’t know. Because it’s on the line, but it’s not as … whatever Cabeswater is. I have to think more about Cabeswater before we go back."