Ronan put his feet down.
Gansey turned back to Adam. “Ronan told you all about the Pig, then.”
“Ronan told me nothing.”
“I told you about the pissing,” Ronan said.
Adam ignored him. “What about the car?”
Gansey glanced around at Borden House as if he expected to see that it had changed over the summer. Of course it had not: navy carpet over everything, baseboard heating on too early in the year, bookshelves crowded with elegantly tattered books in Latin and Greek and French. It was your favorite aunt who smelled when you hugged her. “Last night we went out for bread and jam and more tea in the Pig, and the power steering went out. Then the radio, the lights. Jesus. Ronan was singing that awful murder squash song the whole damn time and he only made it through half a verse before I had absolutely nothing. Had to wrestle it out of the road.”
“Alternator again,” Adam observed.
“Right, yes, yes,” Gansey said. “I opened up the hood and saw the alternator belt just hanging there ragged. We had to go get another one, and it was just an absolute zoo to find one in stock for some reason, like there was a run on this precise size. Of course, putting on the new belt by the side of the road was the fast part.”
He said it in the most offhanded way, like it was nothing to have thrown on a new belt, but once upon a not-very-long time ago, Richard Gansey III had only one automotive skill: calling a tow truck.
Adam said, “You were smart to figure it out.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Gansey replied, but it was clear he was proud. Adam felt like he had helped a bird hatch from an egg.
Thank God we’re not fighting thank God we’re not fighting thank God we’re not fighting how can I keep it from happening again—
Ronan said, “Keep it up, and you just might be a mechanic after you graduate. They’ll put that in the alumni magazine.”
“Ha and —” Gansey swiveled in his seat to watch as the new Latin teacher made his way to the front.
Every student watched him.
In his glove box, Adam kept a cutout advertisement for inspiration. The photo featured a sleek gray car made by happy Germans. A young man leaned against the vehicle in a long coat of black virgin wool, collar turned up against the wind. He was confident and snub-nosed, like a powerful child, with lots of dark hair and white teeth. His arms were crossed over his chest like a prizefighter.
That was what their new Latin teacher looked like.
Adam was badly impressed.
The new teacher swept his dark coat off as he observed Ronan’s handiwork on the whiteboard. Then he turned his gaze on the seated students with the same confidence as the man in the car advertisement.
“Well, look at you,” he said. His eyes lingered on Gansey, on Adam, on Ronan. “America’s youth. I can’t decide if you are the best or the worst thing I’ve seen this week. Whose work is this?”
Everyone knew, but no one copped to it.
He clasped his hands behind his back and took a closer look. “Vocabulary’s impressive.” He tapped a knuckle against a few of the words. He was kinetic. “But what’s going on with the grammar in here? And here? You’d want a subjunctive here in this fear clause. ‘I fear that they may believe this’— there should be a vocative here. I know what’s being said here because I already know the joke, but a native speaker would’ve just stared at you. This is not usable Latin.”
Adam didn’t have to turn his head to feel Ronan simmering.
Their new Latin teacher turned, swift and compact and keen, and again Adam felt that rush of both intimidation and awe. “Good thing, too, or I’d be out of a job. Well, you little runts. Gentlemen. I’m your Latin teacher for the year. I’m not really a fan of languages for the sake of languages. I’m only interested in how we can use them. And I’m not really a Latin teacher. I’m a historian. That means I’m really only interested in Latin as a mechanism to — to — rifle through dead men’s papers. Any questions?”
The students eyed him. This was the first period of the first day of school and nothing could make Latin class less full of Latin. This man’s fervent energy sank uselessly into moss-covered stones.
Adam put up his hand.
The man pointed at him.
“Miserere nobis,” Adam said. “Timeo nos horrendi esse. Sir.”
Have mercy on us — I’m afraid we are terrible.
The man’s smile widened at sir. But he had to know that students were to address teachers as sir or madam to show respect.
“Nihil timeo,” he replied. “Solvitur ambulando.”
The nuances of his first statement — I fear nothing! — escaped most of the class, and the second statement — an idiom embracing the merit of practice, blew by the rest.
Ronan smiled lazily. Without raising his hand, he said, “Heh. Noli prohicere maccaritas ad porcos.”
Don’t throw pearls before swine.
He did not add sir.
“Are you pigs, then?” the man asked. “Or are you men?”
Adam wasn’t eager to watch either Ronan or their new Latin teacher run out to the end of their respective ropes. He asked quickly, “Quod nomen est tibi, sir?”
“My name” — the man swept out a big swath of Ronan’s bad grammar with the edge of an eraser and used the space to replace it with efficient letters of his own — “is Colin Greenmantle.”
Here we are, living among the provincials!” Colin Greenmantle leaned out the window. Down below, a herd of cows looked up at him. “Piper, come look at these cows. This one asshole is looking right at me. ‘Colin,’ says this cow, ‘you are really living among the provincials now.’ ”
Piper said, “I’m in the bath.”
Her voice was coming from the kitchen, though. His wife (although he didn’t like to use that word, wife, because it made him think that he was now over thirty, which he was, but still, he didn’t need to be reminded, and anyway, he still had his boyish good looks; in fact, the cashier at the grocery store had flirted with him just last night, and even though it could have been the fact that he was overawingly overdressed for a cheese-cracker run, he thought it was probably his aquamarine eyes because she had been virtually swimming in them) was taking the move to Henrietta better than he had expected. So far, the only act of rebellion Piper had performed had been to wreck the rental car by driving it aggressively through a shopping center sign to demonstrate just how unsuited she was for living in a place where she couldn’t walk to shops. It was possible she hadn’t done it on purpose, but there was very little Piper did by accident.
“They are basically monsters,” Greenmantle said, although now he was thinking less of the cows and more of his new pupils. “Accepting handouts all day long, but they’d eat you in a second, if they had the right teeth for it.”
They’d only just moved into their “historic” rental on a cattle farm. Greenmantle, who had made plenty of history, doubted the farmhouse’s historic claim, but it was charming enough. He liked the idea of farming; in the most basic linguistic sense, he was now a farmer.
“They’ll be here for your blood on Friday,” Piper called.