The Raven Boys

"Where are you going?" he shouted out. "Where do you have to go?"

Of course Adam knew he was there — the Camaro was louder than anything — but he just kept walking.

"Adam," Gansey repeated. "Just tell me not back there."

Nothing.

"It doesn’t have to be Monmouth," Gansey tried a third time. "But let me take you wherever you’re going."

Please just get in the car.

Adam stopped. Climbing in jerkily, he pulled the door shut. He didn’t do it hard enough, so he had to try two more times. They were silent as Gansey pulled back into traffic. Words pressed against his mouth, begged to be said, but he kept silent.

Adam didn’t look at him when he said, finally, "It doesn’t matter how you say it. It’s what you wanted, in the end. All your things in one place, all under your roof. Everything you own right where you can see …"

But then he stopped. He dropped his head into his hands. His thumbs worked through the hair above his ears, over and over, the knuckles white. When he sucked in his breath, it was the ragged sound that came from trying not to cry.

Gansey thought of one hundred things that he could say to Adam about how it would be all right, how it was for the best, how Adam Parrish had been his own man before he’d met Gansey and there was no way he’d stop being his own man just by changing the roof over his head, how some days Gansey wished that he could be him, because Adam was so very real and true in a way that Gansey couldn’t ever seem to be. But Gansey’s words had somehow become unwitting weapons, and he didn’t trust himself to not accidentally discharge them again.

So they drove in silence to get Adam’s things, and when they left the trailer park for the last time, his mother watching from behind the kitchen window, Adam didn’t look back.

Chapter 39

When Blue first arrived at Monmouth Manufacturing that afternoon, she thought it was empty. Without either car in the lot, the entire block had a disconsolate, abandoned feeling. She tried to imagine being Gansey, seeing the warehouse for the first time, deciding it would be a great place to live, but she couldn’t picture it. No more than she could imagine looking at the Pig and deciding it was a great car to drive, or Ronan and thinking he was a good friend to have. But somehow, it worked, because she loved the apartment, and Ronan was starting to grow on her, and the car …

Well, the car she could still live without.

Blue knocked on the door to the stairwell. "Noah! Are you here?"

"I’m here."

She was unsurprised when his voice came from behind her instead of from the other side of the door. When she turned, she seemed to see his legs first, and then, slowly, the rest of him. She still wasn’t sure he was actually all there, or if he had been there all along — it was hard to make a decision about existence and Noah these days.

She allowed him to pet her hair with his icy fingers.

"Not so spiky as usual," he said sadly.

"I didn’t get much sleep. I need sleep for quality spikes. I’m glad to see you."

Noah crossed his arms, then uncrossed them, then put his hands in his pockets, then removed them. "I only ever feel normal when you’re around. I mean, normal like I was before they found my body. That still wasn’t like what I was when I was …"

"I don’t believe that you were really that different when you were alive," Blue told him. But it was true that she still couldn’t reconcile this Noah with that abandoned red Mustang.

"I think," Noah said cautiously, remembering, "that I was worse then."

This line of discussion seemed in danger of making him vanish, so Blue asked quickly, "Where are the others?"

"Gansey and Adam are getting Adam’s stuff so he can move in," Noah said. "Ronan went to the library."

"Move in! I thought he said … wait — Ronan went where?"

With lots of pauses and sighs and staring off into the trees, Noah described the previous night’s events to her, ending with, "If Ronan had gotten arrested for punching Adam’s dad, he would’ve been out of Aglionby no matter what happened. No way they’d let an assault charge ride. But Adam pressed charges so Ronan would get off the hook. ’Course that means Adam has to move out because his dad hates him now."

"But that’s awful," Blue said. "Noah, that’s awful. I didn’t know about Adam’s dad."

"That’s the way he wanted it."

A place for leaving. She remembered how Adam had referred to his home. And now, of course, she remembered his awful bruises and a dozen comments between the boys that had seemed inexplicable at the time, all veiled references to his home life. Her first thought was a strangely unpleasant one — that she hadn’t been a good enough friend for Adam to share this with her. But it was fleeting, and replaced almost immediately with the horrific realization that Adam had no family. Who would she be without hers?

She asked, "Okay, wait, so why is Ronan at the library?"

"Cramming," Noah said. "For an exam on Monday."

It was the nicest thing Blue had ever heard of Ronan doing.

The phone rang then, clearly audible through the floor above them.

"You should pick that up!" Noah said abruptly. "Hurry!"

Blue had lived too long with the women at 300 Fox Way to question Noah’s intuition. Jogging quickly to keep up with him, she followed him into the stairwell and then up the stairs to the doorway. It was locked. Noah made a series of incomprehensible gestures, more agitated than she’d seen him.

He burst out, "I could do it if —"

If he had more energy, Blue thought. She touched his shoulder at once. Immediately fortified by her energy, Noah leaned against the latch, wiggling the lock open and throwing the door free. She hurled herself at the phone.

"Hello?" she gasped into the receiver. The phone on the desk was an old-fashioned black rotary number, completely in keeping with Gansey’s love of the bizarre and barely functional. Knowing him, it was possible he had a landline merely to justify having this particular phone on his desk.

"Oh, hello, dear," said an unfamiliar voice at the other end of the line. Already she could hear a significant accent. "Is Richard Gansey there?"

"No," replied Blue. "But I can take a message."

This, she felt, had been her role in life so far.

Noah prodded her with a cold finger. "Tell him who you are."