“What?”
“T.J. asked you out. You just stared at him. Ringing bells?” Orla had long since graduated from Mountain View High, but she was still friends or ex-girlfriends with her entire class, and the collective power of all of those younger siblings served to provide Orla with a view, somewhat incomplete, of Blue’s current high school life.
Blue looked up (and up, and up) at her tall cousin. “At lunch, T.J. came over to my table and drew a penis on the unicorn on my binder. Is that the incident Charity is referring to?”
“Don’t Richard Gansey the Third at me,” Orla replied.
“Because if that’s what she meant, then yes, I just stared at him. I didn’t realize it was a conversation because penis.”
Orla flared her nostrils magnificently. “Here’s some advice: Sometimes people are just trying to be friendly. You can’t expect everyone to be profound all the time. There’s just chatting.”
“I chat,” Blue retorted. The T.J. incident hadn’t offended her, although she’d preferred her unicorn non-gendered. It had just made her feel wearily older than everyone in the school. “Do you mind? I’m trying to get this done before Gansey gets here.” (O Zeus, what throbbing suffering!)
“You can be just friends with people, you know,” Orla said. “I think it’s crazy how you’re in love with all those raven boys.”
Orla wasn’t wrong, of course. But what she didn’t realize about Blue and her boys was that they were all in love with one another. She was no less obsessed with them than they were with her, or one another, analyzing every conversation and gesture, drawing out every joke into a longer and longer running gag, spending each moment either with one another or thinking about when next they would be with one another. Blue was perfectly aware that it was possible to have a friendship that wasn’t all-encompassing, that wasn’t blinding, deafening, maddening, quickening. It was just that now that she’d had this kind, she didn’t want the other.
Orla snapped her fingers in between Blue and her book. “Blue. This is what I was just talking about.”
Blue folded her finger in the pages to keep her place. “I didn’t ask for any advice.”
“No, but you should,” Orla said. “What do you think’s going to happen in a year? All of your boys are going to go off to fancy schools, and where will you be? Here in Henrietta with the people you didn’t chat with.”
Blue opened her mouth and closed it, and Orla’s eyes flashed with victory. She knew she’d dug down to marrow.
Outside, the familiar grumble of an old Camaro sounded, and Blue leapt up. She dumped her spoon in the sink. “My ride’s here.”
“Temporary ride.”
Blue exploded, hurling her yogurt container into the recycling bin. “What is it, Orla? Jealousy? Or what? You just don’t want me to like them as well as I do because … you’re trying to save me from being hurt? You know what else is temporary? Life.”
“Oh, please, don’t you think you’re taking this a bit —”
“So maybe I should have spread my love out through some other mothers, too!” Blue snatched up her jacket and stormed down the hall toward the door. “If I didn’t love her as much, then it wouldn’t feel so bad when she was gone! I could have some fallback parents, each containing a tiny piece of my affection so that when one goes away, I barely notice! Or maybe I should just not love anyone or anything! That makes it the easiest, really, because then I’ll never get let down! I will build a tower for my heart!”
“Oh, calm your ass down,” Orla said, clomping after Blue in her platform clogs. “That wasn’t what I meant.”
“You know what I think, Orla? I think you’re a big, fat bully —” Blue barreled right into Gansey, who had stepped inside the front hall. For a moment she smelled mint, felt the solidness of his chest, and then she wheeled back.
Gansey untangled his watch from Blue’s crochet jacket. “Hi. Oh, Orla.”
“Oh, Orla,” echoed Orla, not pleasantly. It was not at him, but he didn’t know that; he flinched.
From upstairs, Calla roared, “SHUT UP!”
“You’ll remember this conversation later and say sorry to me,” Orla told Blue. “You forget who you are.” She whirled with as much grace as she could manage on her long legs and massive shoes.
Gansey was too gracious to inquire after the source of the argument.
“Get me out of here,” Blue said.
Outside, it was a miserable day, soggy and cool, late fall come too early. Malory was already installed in the Pig’s front seat; Blue was at once regretful and glad that he was along. He would keep her from doing something stupid.
Now she sat beside the Dog, looking out the backseat window as they passed Mole Hill on the way to Coopers Mountain, feeling her bad mood leach into the gray. This was a very different part of the world than Henrietta. Rural, but less wild. More cows, fewer woods. And very poor. The houses that lined the highway were smaller than single-wide trailers.
“I’m not hopeful about this,” Gansey was saying to Malory. He plucked at his left shoulder; rain was coming in through his window, though it was rolled up. Water also dripped onto the dash beneath the rearview mirror. Malory shook water off the map in his hands. “I crawled all over this mountain a year ago and saw no cave. If there is one, it’s someone else’s secret.”
Blue leaned forward; so did the Dog. She said, “There’s this super clever way that folks in the country find out someone else’s secrets. We ask them.”
Gansey met her eyes, and then the Dog’s, in the rearview mirror. “Adam keeps his secrets pretty close.”
“Oh, not Adam’s sort of country people.”
Blue had discovered that there were two distinct stereotypes for the rural population of her part of Virginia: the neighbors who loaned one another cups of sugar and knew everything about everyone, and the rednecks who stood on their porches with shotguns and shouted racist things when they got drunk. Because she grew up so thoroughly entrenched in the first group, she hadn’t believed in the second group until well into her teens. School had taught her that the two kinds were almost never born into the same litter.
“Look,” she said. “When we get there, I’ll show you the houses to stop at.”
Coopers Mountain turned out to be more of a mountainette than a proper mountain, impressive mostly because of its sudden appearance in the middle of sparsely populated fields. A small neighborhood lay on one side. Widely flung farmhouses dotted the rest of the surrounding area. Blue directed Gansey past the former and toward the latter.
“People in neighborhoods only know about people in neighborhoods,” she said. “No caves in neighborhoods. Here, here, this one’s good! You better wait in the car with your fancy face.”
Gansey was too aware of his face’s fanciness to protest. He minced the Camaro down a long gravel drive that ended at a white farmhouse. A shaggy dog of no breed or all breeds burst out to bark at her as she climbed out into the rain.
“Hey, you,” Blue greeted it, and the dog retreated immediately under the porch. At the door, an older woman holding a magazine answered her knock. She looked friendly. In Blue’s experience, everyone who lived in remote tired farmhouses generally looked friendly, until they didn’t.