He dragged his coat closer by the arm and retrieved two candy bars from the pocket. He chucked one onto Adam’s lap and peeled the other for himself.
Adam badly wanted to eat it, but he put it aside to eat during his break at work tomorrow evening. “It’ll keep me up.” He liked the notion that Gansey’s elegant older sister found him handsome. The impossibility of her rendered it merely a pleasant ego stroke. “Are you going?”
“I don’t know. If I do, will you come?”
Adam felt an instinctive pang of nerves. Muscle memory, from the last time he had traveled to a Gansey political event. “Better invite Blue, too. She reamed me out for not getting invited to the last one.”
Gansey blinked up, eyes startled behind his glasses. “Because I didn’t invite her?”
“No, me. But she’ll want to go. Trust me. She was something fearful.”
“I believe you. Oh, Jesus, I just imagined her meeting the governor. I have a slideshow of her questions playing in my head.”
Adam grinned. “He deserves all of them.”
Gansey ran a pencil down his homework, checking it against Adam’s, although Adam could see that he had done number four quite adequately before he arrived. Adam eyed the candy bar and rubbed the backs of his hands. Every winter they chapped hideously despite his best efforts, and they had already begun to dry. He realized the tapping had ceased, and when he looked up, he saw that Gansey was frowning into space.
“Everyone says, Just find Glendower,” Gansey said suddenly, “but all around me the cave walls are crumbling.”
It was not the cave walls that crumbled. Now that Adam had heard Gansey’s anxiety in the cave, he was acutely attuned to its reappearance now. He looked away to give Gansey a chance to compose himself and then he asked, “What does Malory say to do next?”
“He seems enthused about Giant’s Grave for no reason I can fathom.” Gansey had indeed taken the moment Adam granted him to carefully school his tone; anxiety transubstantiated to wry deprecation in an oft-practiced ritual. “He’s talking about visual cues and energy readings and how they all point there. How he adores our ley line, he says. He’s all starry-eyed over it.”
“You were once,” Adam reminded him. They both had been. How ungrateful they’d become, how greedy for better wonders.
Gansey tapped his pencil in wordless agreement.
In the quiet, Adam heard whispers from the direction of the bathroom. From experience, he knew they came from the water that dripped from the tap and that the language was gibberish to him. Ronan might have been able to identify a word or two; he had his puzzle box that translated whatever the old language was. But Adam still listened, waiting to hear if the voices would ascend or ebb, waiting to hear if the ley line was surging or if Cabeswater was trying to communicate.
He realized Gansey was looking at him, brow furrowed. Adam wasn’t sure what his expression had been or how long he had been focused on something Gansey couldn’t hear. From Gansey’s face, a while.
“Is Malory trapped in Monmouth all day?” Adam quickly asked.
Gansey’s face cleared. “I’ve given him the Suburban to drive around in. God help us; he drives like he walks. Oh, but I can tell he doesn’t like Monmouth.”
“Treason,” said Adam, because he knew it would please Gansey, and he saw that it did. “Where’s Ronan at?”
“To the Barns, he said.”
“You believe him?”
“Probably. He took Chainsaw,” Gansey said. “I don’t think he’ll mess with Greenmantle — Mr. Gray was very persuasive. And what else would he get into? Kavinsky’s dead, so — Jesus Christ, listen to me. Jesus Christ.”
The cave walls crumbled yet more; the ritual before had been imperfect. Gansey sat back against the wall and closed his eyes. Adam watched him swallow.
Again he heard Gansey’s voice in the cave.
“It’s okay,” Adam said. He did not care that Joseph Kavinsky was dead, but he liked that Gansey did. “I know what you meant.”
“No, it’s not. It’s disgusting of me.” Gansey didn’t open his eyes. “Everything has gotten so ugly. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.”
Everything had begun ugly for Adam, but he knew what Gansey meant. His noble and oblivious and optimistic friend was slowly opening his eyes and seeing the world for what it was, and it was filthy, and violent, and profane, and unfair. Adam had always thought that was what he wanted — for Gansey to know. But now he wasn’t sure. Gansey wasn’t like anyone else, and suddenly Adam wasn’t sure that he really wanted him to be.
“Here,” Adam said, standing, fetching their history text. “Do the reading. Out loud. I’ll take notes.”
An hour passed this way, Gansey reading out loud in his lovely old voice, and Adam jotting in his overambitious hand, and when Gansey reached the end of the assignment, he closed the text carefully and set it on the upside-down plastic bin Adam used as a bedside table.
Gansey stood and put on his coat.
“I think,” he said, “that if — when — we find Glendower, I will ask him for Noah’s life. Do you think that would work?”
It was such a non sequitur from the previous conversation topic that Adam didn’t immediately answer. He merely looked at Gansey. Something was different about him; he’d changed while Adam’s back had been turned. The crease between his eyebrows? The way he ducked his chin? The tighter set to his mouth, perhaps, as responsibility tugged the corners down.
Adam couldn’t remember how they had managed to fight so continuously over the summer. Gansey, his best friend, his stupid and kind and marvelous best friend.
He replied, “No. But I think it is worth asking.”
Gansey nodded, once. Twice. “Sorry for keeping you up late. See you tomorrow?”
“First thing.”
After Gansey had gone, Adam fetched the hidden letter. In it was his father’s rescheduled court date. A remote part of Adam marveled that the mere sight of the words Robert Parrish could twist his stomach in a muddy, homesick way.
Eyes forward, Adam. Soon it would be behind him. Soon this school year, too, would be behind him. Soon they would find Glendower, soon they would all be kings. Soon, soon.
The next day after school, Blue sat at the table with a spoon in one hand and Lysistrata, the play she’d chosen to analyze for English, in the other. (It’s not easy, you know, for women to get away. One’s busy pottering about her husband; poking the servant awake; putting her child asleep or washing the brat or feeding it.) Gray drizzle pressed against the windows of the cluttered kitchen.
Blue was not thinking about Lysistrata. She was thinking about Gansey and the Gray Man, Maura and the cave of ravens.
Suddenly, a shadow the exact size and shape of her cousin Orla fell across the table.
“I get that Maura is away, but that is no reason to go around being a social tard,” Orla said by way of hello. “Also, when was the last time you ate a food that wasn’t yogurt?”
Sometimes Blue couldn’t take Orla. This was one of those times. She didn’t look up. “Don’t be offensive.”
“Charity told me that T.J. asked you out today and you just stared at him.”