It was a uniform-free day in honor of the school’s win at a regional quiz bowl, and the lack of uniforms somehow made Gansey’s anxiety worse. His classmates sprawled across the historic campus in down vests and plaid pants and brand-name pullovers. It reminded him that he was existing now and no other time. The other students had marked themselves as unmistakable inhabitants of this century, this decade, this year, this season, this income bracket. Human clocks. It wasn’t until they all returned to the identical navy V-neck sweaters that Aglionby slipped out of time and all times started to feel like they were in fact the same time.
Sometimes Gansey felt as if he had spent the last seven years of his life chasing places that made him feel like this.
Greenmantle.
Every morning this week had begun with Greenmantle standing at the front of their Latin class, eternally smiling. Ronan stopped coming to first period. There was no way he would graduate if he failed Latin, but could Gansey blame him?
The walls crumbled.
Adam had asked why Gansey needed to go to the office. Gansey had lied. He was done fighting with Adam Parrish.
“Ganseeeeeeey!”
The night before, Mr. Gray had told Ronan, “Dream me a Greywaren to give Greenmantle.”
And Ronan had replied, “You want me to give that bastard the keys to Cabeswater? Is that what you’re asking?”
So they were at an impasse. “Gansey boy! DICK.”
Ronan whirled and walked backward to face the shouter. He spread his arms wide. “Not now, Cheng. The king’s a little busy.”
“I wasn’t talking to you, Lynch. I need someone with a soul.”
The light that glinted off Ronan’s snarl caught Gansey’s eye, bringing him back to the present. He checked his stride and his watch before doubling back to Henry, who sat at a card table situated between columns. His hair looked like pitch-black fire.
The two boys exchanged a comradely handshake over the table. They had some things in common: Before quitting last fall, Gansey had once been the captain of the crew team, and Henry had once signed up for the crew team at breakfast before scratching out his name by dinnertime. Gansey had been to Ecuador; Henry had once done a modeling photo shoot with a racehorse named Ecuador in Love. Gansey had once been killed by hornets; Henry’s family business was on the cutting edge of designing robotic drone bees.
The two boys were friendly, but not friends. Henry ran with the Vancouver crowd, and Gansey ran with dead Welsh kings.
“What can I do for you, Mr. Cheng?” Gansey asked pleasantly.
Henry threw a hand at him. “Do you see, Ronan? That is the way you talk to a man. I’m. Glad. You. Asked, Gansey. Look, I need your help. Sign this.”
Gansey observed this. The wording was rather official but it seemed to be a petition to establish a student-chosen student council. “You want me to vote for the right to vote?”
“You’ve grasped the salient point of my position much faster than the rest of our peers. I see why you’re always in the newsletter.” Henry offered him a pen, and when Gansey didn’t immediately take it, a Sharpie, and then a pencil.
Instead of accepting a writing tool, Gansey tried to decide if signing the petition promised any of his time.
Rex Corvus, parate Regis Corvi.
“Gansey, come on,” Henry said. “They’ll listen to you. Your vote counts double because you’re a Caucasian with great hair. You’re Aglionby’s golden boy. The only way you could score more points is if your mom gets that seat.”
Ronan smirked at Adam. Gansey rubbed a thumb over his lower lip, unpleasantly aware that Henry hadn’t said anything untrue. He would never know how much of his place here was fairly earned and how much had been bequeathed with his gilded pedigree. It used to bother him, a little.
Now it bothered him a lot.
“I’ll sign, but I want to be exempt from nominations.” Gansey accepted a pen. “My plate’s full.”
Henry rubbed his hands together. “Sure thing, old man. Parrish?”
Adam merely shook his head. He did it in a remote, cool way that didn’t invite Henry to ask again.
Henry said, “Lynch?”
Ronan flicked his gaze from Adam to Henry. “I thought you said I didn’t have a soul.”
He didn’t look at all Aglionby just then, with his shaved head and black biker jacket and expensive jeans. He looked altogether very grown-up. It was, Gansey thought, as if time had carried Ronan a little more swiftly than the rest of them this summer.
Who are these two? Gansey wondered. What are we doing?
“It turns out politics have already eroded my principles,” Henry said.
Ronan selected a large-caliber marker and leaned deep over the petition. He wrote ANARCHY in enormous letters and then tossed the instrument of war at Henry’s chest.
“Hey!” Henry cried as the marker bounced off him. “You thug.”
“Democracy’s a farce,” Ronan said, and Adam smirked, a private, small thing that was inherently exclusionary. An expression, in fact, that he could’ve very well learned from Ronan.
Gansey spared Henry a pitying glance. “Sorry, he didn’t get enough exercise today. Or there’s something wrong with his diet. I’ll take him away now.”
“When I get elected president,” Henry told Ronan, “I’m making your face illegal.”
Ronan’s smile was thin and dark. “Litigation’s a farce.”
As they headed back down the shadowed colonnade, Gansey asked, “Do you ever consider the possibility that you might be growing up to be an asshole?”
Ronan kicked a piece of gravel. It skittered across the bricks in front of them before skipping off into the grassy courtyard. “Rumor has it that his father gave him a Fisker for his birthday and he’s too afraid to drive it. I want to see it if he has it. Rumor has it he biked here.”
“From Vancouver?” Adam asked.
Gansey frowned as a pair of impossibly young ninth graders ran across the courtyard — had he ever been that small? He knocked on the headmaster’s door. Am I doing this? He was. “Are you waiting out here for me?”
“No,” said Ronan. “Parrish and I are going for a drive.”
“We are?” Adam asked.
“Good,” Gansey said. He was relieved that they would be doing something, not thinking about the headmaster, not wondering if Gansey was, after all, behaving like a Gansey. “I’ll see you later.”
And before they could say anything else, he let himself in and shut the door.
Ronan took Adam to the Barns.
Ever since the disastrous Fourth of July party, Ronan had taken to disappearing to his family home, returning late without an explanation. Adam would have never pried — secrets were secrets — but he couldn’t deny that he’d been curious.
Now it seemed he would find out.
He had always found the Barns disconcerting. The Lynch family property might not have carried the patina of lush wealth that the Gansey house did, but it more than made up for it with a sense of claustrophobic history. These barn-studded fields were an island, untouched by the rest of the valley, seeded by Niall Lynch’s imagination and grazed by his dreams.
It was another world.
Ronan navigated the narrow driveway. The gravel cut through an embankment and a tangle of twisted trees. Cherry-red leaves of poison ivy and blood-spikes of raspberry vines flashed between the trunks. Everything else was green here: canopy dense enough to block out the afternoon sun, grass rippling up the banks, moss clinging damply.