Gansey pulled up alongside and motioned for Blue to roll down her window.
An equally astronomical and glittering black-haired boy sat behind the wheel of the other car.
“You’re a chick,” he said to her, puzzled.
“Twenty points!” Blue replied tensely. “Heck, have thirty, because it’s late and I’m feeling generous.”
“Cheng. What’s going on?” Gansey said, leaning forward to see past her. His voice had changed immediately to his raven boy one, which made Blue suddenly annoyed to be seen in a car with him. It was like her anger from before had not been properly extinguished and now it only took the knowledge that she was a girl in a car with an Aglionby prince to reignite it.
Henry Cheng leapt out of his car to lean in the passenger window. Blue was distinctly uncomfortable to be this close to his sharp cheekbones.
He said, “I don’t know. It stopped.”
“Stopped how?” Gansey asked.
Henry replied, “It made a noise. I stopped it. It seemed angry. I don’t know. I don’t want to die. I have my whole future ahead of me. Do you know anything about cars?”
“Not electric ones. What kind of noise did you say it made?”
“One I don’t want to hear again. I can’t break it. I broke the last one and my father was pissed.”
“Do you want a ride back?”
“No, I want your phone. Mine’s dead and I can’t walk by the road or I’ll get raped by the locals.” Henry kneed the side of the Camaro and said, “Man, this is the way to do it. American muscle you can hear from a mile away. I’m not very good at this WASP thing. You, on the other hand, are a champion — only I think you have it backward. It’s supposed to be hanging with chicks during the day, boys at night. That’s what my halmeoni used to say, anyway.”
There was something terrible about the entire exchange. Blue couldn’t decide if it was because it didn’t require her, or because it was between two extremely rich boys, or because it was a concrete reminder that she had broken one of her most important rules. (Stay away from Aglionby boys.) She felt like a dusty and ordinary accessory. Or worse. She just felt — bad.
She mutely passed Gansey’s phone to Henry.
As the other boy returned to his shiny spacecraft to place the call, she said to Gansey, “I don’t like when your voice sounds like that, FYI.”
“Like what?”
She knew it wasn’t nice to say it, but her mouth said it anyway. “Your fake voice.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“The one you do with them,” she said. “With the other Aglionby bastards.”
“Henry’s all right,” Gansey said.
“Oh, whatever, ‘raped by the locals’?”
“That was a joke.”
“Ha ha ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. It’s a joke when someone like him says it, because he doesn’t have to actually worry about it. It’s just so typical.”
“I don’t understand why you’re being this way. He’s actually a little like you —”
Blue scoffed. “Oh ho!” She knew she was being over the top, but she couldn’t seem to stop. It was just something about their handsome faces and handsome hair and handsome cars and easy confidence with one another.
“I just think it’s probably a good thing that we can’t really — we’ll never —”
“Oh, is it?” Gansey asked, dangerously polite. “Why is that?”
“We’re just not in the same place, is all. We have very different priorities. We’re too far apart. It wouldn’t actually work.”
“Two seconds ago we were nearly kissing,” he said, “and now it’s all off because we stopped to let a guy use my phone?”
“It was never on!” She felt as furious as she had when she first woke up. More.
“Is this because I didn’t agree that Henry was a bastard? I’m trying to see things from your point of view, but I am having a very difficult time. Something about my voice?”
“Never mind. Forget it. Just take me home,” Blue said. Now she was really regretting — everything. She wasn’t even sure where her argument had taken her, only that now she couldn’t back down. “After he gives your phone back.”
Gansey studied her. She expected to see her anger mirrored on his face, but instead, his expression had cleared. It wasn’t happy, exactly, but he no longer looked confused. He asked, “When are you going to tell me what this is really about?”
This made her heave a great shuddered breath that was close to tears. “Never.”
Gansey woke up in a terrible mood. He was still tired — he had lost hours of sleep to playing and replaying the events inside the car, trying to decide if he had been wrong or right or if it even mattered — and it was drizzling, and Malory was whistling, and Noah was cracking pool balls against each other, and Ronan was pouring breakfast cereal from the box into his mouth, and Gansey’s favorite yellow sweater smelled too doggy to bear another wearing, and the Pig flooded and wouldn’t start, and so now they were headed off to get Blue and Adam in the soulless Suburban and a brown sweater that looked exactly on the outside like Gansey felt on the inside.
This cave wasn’t going to be anything but a cave, like they always were, so Gansey would have been fine staying in Monmouth for another four hours of sleep and doing it another day.
“It might as well be Wales out there with all this rain,” Malory said, not sounding very pleased about it. Beside him, Adam was silent, expression troubled in a way Gansey hadn’t seen in a while.
Blue, too, was sullenly quiet, with bags under her eyes to match Gansey’s. Last night his coat collar had still been scented with her hair; now, he kept turning his head in hopes of catching it, but like everything else in the wretched day, it had gone muted and dusty.
At the Dittley farm, Malory, the Dog, and Jesse settled in the house (Malory, unhopeful: “I don’t suppose you have any tea?” Jesse: “DO YOU WANT EARL GREY OR DARJEELING?” Malory: “Oh, sweet heavens!”) and the teens trekked across the damp field to the cave.
Adam asked, “Are you really bringing that bird into a cave?”
“Yes, Parrish,” Ronan replied, “I believe I am.”
There was no way to ask Blue about the night before.
He was too dull-edged to analyze it anymore. He just wanted to know. Were they still fighting?
Gansey remained in a bad mood as they applied their caving equipment and checked and double-checked their flashlights. Blue had acquired a used set of coveralls from somewhere and the sheer effort of not looking at her in them was taking what little concentration he could dredge up.
This wasn’t the way it was supposed to be, he thought. It wasn’t supposed to be crammed in between school events and Congressional tasks. It shouldn’t have been a murky fall day, too humid for the season. It should have been a day where he had slept enough to properly feel things. It wasn’t supposed to be any of the things that it was, and instead, it was all of them.
This was not, he thought as they descended, even how the cavern was supposed to look. Of course Glendower was underground — of course Gansey had known that he would have to be buried — but somehow he had imagined it lighter. This was just a hole in the ground like the rest. Dirt walls pressing in close, clawed and chiseled out when they grew too narrow to admit a coffin. A rabbit hole, down and down.