The Raven Boys

"I’m surprised your jalopy got you here," his father said. "Why don’t you take the Suburban back?"

"The Camaro’s okay."

"Smells like gasoline."

Now Gansey could imagine his father pecking around the Camaro where it was parked in front of the garage, his hands behind his back as he sniffed for fluid leakage and observed nicks in the paint.

"It’s fine, Dad. It’s exemplary."

"I doubt that," his father said, but amiably. Richard Gansey II was rarely anything but. A lovely man, your father, people told Gansey. Always smiling. Nothing flaps him. Such a character. This last bit was because he collected strange old things and looked in holes in walls and had a journal of things that had happened on the fourteenth of April every year since history began. "Do you have any idea why your sister purchased that hideous bronze plate for three thousand dollars? Is she angry at your mother? Is she trying to play a practical joke?"

"She thought Mom would like it."

"It’s not glass."

Gansey shrugged. "I tried to warn her."

For a moment they sat there. His father asked, "Do you want to start it up?"

Gansey didn’t care, but he found the key in the ignition and turned it. The engine turned over immediately, springing to obedient life, nothing like the Camaro.

"Bay four, open," his father said, and the garage door in front of them began to power open. When he saw Gansey’s glance, he explained, "I had voice controls installed. The only difficulty is that if you shout very loudly outside, the door closest to you will open. Obviously, that is detrimental to security. I’m working on that. We did have an attempted break-in a few weeks ago. They only made it as far as the front gate. Installed a weight-based system out there."

The garage door opened on the Camaro, parked directly in front of them, blocking their exit. The Pig was low and defiant and rough around the edges in comparison to the demure, self-contained, always smiling Peugeot. Gansey felt a sudden and irrepressible love for his car. Buying it was the best decision of his life.

"I never get used to that thing," Gansey’s father said, eyeing the Pig without malice.

Once, Gansey had overhead his father saying, Why in the world did he even want that car? and his mother replying, Oh, I know why. One day he would find an opportunity to bring up that conversation with her, because he wanted to know why she thought he had bought it. Analyzing what motivated him to put up with the Camaro made Gansey feel unsettled, but he knew it had something to do with how sitting in this perfectly restored Peugeot made him feel. A car was a wrapper for its contents, he thought, and if he looked on the inside like any of the cars in this garage looked on the outside, he couldn’t live with himself. On the outside, he knew he looked a lot like his father. On the inside, he sort of wished he looked more like the Camaro. Which was to say, more like Adam.

His father asked, "How are you doing in school?"

"Great."

"What’s your favorite class?"

"World History."

"Good teacher?"

"Perfectly adequate."

"How’s your scholarship friend doing? Finding the classes harder than public school?"

Gansey turned the driver’s side mirror so that it reflected the ceiling. "Adam’s doing well."

"He must be pretty smart."

"He’s a genius," Gansey said, with certainty.

"And the Irish one?"

Gansey couldn’t bring himself to make up a convincing lie for Ronan, not so soon after the call with Pinter. Just then, it felt very weighty to be Gansey the younger. He replied, "Ronan is Ronan. It’s hard for him without his father."

Gansey, Sr., didn’t ask about Noah, and Gansey realized he couldn’t remember him ever doing so. In fact, he couldn’t remember ever mentioning Noah to his family at all. He wondered if the police would call his parents about him finding the body. If they hadn’t already, it seemed unlikely that they would. They’d given Gansey and Blue cards with the number of a counselor on it, but Gansey thought they both probably needed help of a different variety.

"How’s the ley-line hunt going?"

Gansey considered how much to say. "I’ve actually made some breakthroughs that I hadn’t expected. Henrietta is looking promising."

"So things aren’t going badly? Your sister said you seemed a little melancholy."

"Melancholy? Helen’s an idiot."

His father clucked his tongue. "Dick, you don’t mean that. Word choice?"

Gansey turned off the engine and exchanged a look with his father. "She bought Mom a bronze plate for her birthday."

Gansey, Sr., made a little hm noise, which meant that Gansey, Jr., had a point.

"Just so long as you’re happy, and keeping busy," his father said.

"Oh," Gansey said, retrieving his phone from the dash. Already his mind was churning over how to crunch three months of study into Ronan’s brain, how to return Noah to his former self, how to convince Adam to leave his parents’ house even though Henrietta no longer seemed like such a dead end, what cunning thing he could say to Blue when he saw her next. "I’m keeping busy."

Chapter 32

When Blue knocked on the door of Monmouth Manufacturing after school, Ronan answered the door.

"You guys weren’t waiting outside," Blue said, feeling a little self-conscious. After all this time, she’d never been inside, and she felt a little like a trespasser merely by standing in the decrepit stairwell. "I thought maybe you weren’t here."

"Gansey’s partying with his mother," Ronan said. He smelled like beer. "And Noah’s f**king dead. But Parrish is here."

"Ronan, let her in," Adam said. He appeared at Ronan’s shoulder. "Hey, Blue. You’ve never been up before, have you?"

"Yeah. Should I not —"

"No, come —"

There was a bit of a fumble and then Blue was inside and the door was shut behind her and both of the boys were watching her reaction carefully.

Blue gazed around the second floor. It looked like the home of a mad inventor or an obsessed scholar or a very messy explorer; after meeting Gansey, she was beginning to suspect that he was all of these things. She said, "What’s the downstairs look like?"

"Dust," Adam replied. He used his foot to discreetly move a pair of dirty jeans, boxers still tucked inside them, out of Blue’s direct line of sight. "And concrete. And more dust. And dirt."