“Do you need to go?” Blue asked. She meant go for ever, but she couldn’t say it out loud.
He whispered, “Not yet.”
Blue wiped a tear from her face with the heel of her hand, and he wiped a tear from her other cheek with the heel of his. His chin dimpled in that way that comes before tears, but she put her fingers against it and it resolved.
They were wheeling towards the end of something, and they both knew it.
“Good,” said Gwenllian. “I hate liars and cowards.”
Without pause, she began to climb the tree once more. Blue turned back to Noah, but he was gone. Possibly he had gone before Gwenllian had spoken; just as with his arrival, it was hard to tell the exact moment of his leaving. Blue’s brain had already rewritten all of the seconds around his disappearance.
Blue’s school suspension felt like a faded dream. What was real? This was real.
The kitchen window groaned open, and Jimi shouted out, “Blue! Your boys are out front, looking like they’re fixing to bury a body.”
Again? Blue thought.
When Blue climbed into Gansey’s black Suburban, she discovered that Ronan was already installed in the backseat, his head freshly shaven, boots up on the seat, dressed for a brawl. His presence in the backseat instead of in his usual passenger-seat throne suggested that trouble was afoot. Adam – in a white T-shirt and a pair of clean work coveralls rolled down to the waist – had his seat instead. Gansey sat behind the wheel, wearing both his Aglionby uniform and an electric expression that startled Blue. It was wide-awake and glittering, a match struck just behind his eyes. She’d seen this vivid Gansey before, but usually only when they were alone.
“Hello, Jane,” he said, and his voice was as bright and intense as his eyes. It was hard not to be captured by this Gansey; he was both powerful and worrisome in his tension.
Don’t stare – too late. Adam had caught her at it. She averted her eyes and busied herself tugging up her thigh-highs. “Heya.”
Gansey asked, “Do you have time to run an errand with us? Do you have work? Homework?”
“No homework. I got suspended,” Blue replied.
“Get the fuck out,” Ronan said, but with admiration. “Sargent, you asshole.”
Blue reluctantly allowed him to bump fists with her as Gansey eyed her meaningfully in the rearview mirror.
Adam swivelled the other way in his seat – to the right, instead of to the left, so that he was peering around the far side of the headrest. It made him look as if he were hiding, but Blue knew it was just because it turned his hearing ear instead of his deaf ear towards them. “For what?”
“Emptying another student’s backpack over his car. I don’t really want to talk about it.”
“I do,” Ronan said.
“Well, I don’t. I’m not proud of it.”
Ronan patted her leg. “I’ll be proud for you.”
Blue cast a withering look in his direction, but she felt grounded for the first time that day. It was not that the women in 300 Fox Way weren’t her family – they were where her roots were buried, and nothing could diminish that. It was just that there was something newly powerful about this assembled family in this car. They were all growing up and into each other like trees striving together for the sun. “So what’s happening?”
“If you can believe it,” Gansey said, still in his chilly, super-polite tone that meant he was annoyed, “I was originally planning on coming over to talk to Artemus about Glendower. But Ronan has decided to change all that. He has different ideas for our afternoon. More important uses of our time.”
Ronan leaned forward. “Tell me, Dad, are you mad that I fucked up, or are you just mad that I skipped school?”
Gansey said, “I think those both count as fuckups, don’t you?”
“Oh, don’t,” Ronan retorted. “It just sounds vulgar when you say it.”
As Gansey sent the vehicle off from the kerb at a brisk speed, Adam gave Blue a knowing look. His expression said, Yes, they’ve been at this awhile. Blue was strangely grateful for this nonverbal exchange. After their fractious breakup (had they even been dating?), Blue had reconciled herself to Adam being too hurt or uncomfortable to be good friends with her. But he was trying. And she was trying. And it seemed to be working.
Except that she was in love with his best friend and hadn’t told him.
Blue’s feeling of calm immediately dissolved, replaced by the exact same sensation that she had experienced right before she had shaken out Holtzclaw’s backpack over the hood of his car. All emotions fuzzing to white.
She really needed to find some coping mechanisms.
“GANSEY BOY!”
They all startled at the cry through Gansey’s open window. They’d pulled up to the stoplight adjacent to Aglionby’s main gate; a group of students stood on the pavement holding placards. Gansey reluctantly offered the group a three-fingered salute, which provoked further cries of Whoop, whoop, whoop!
The sight of all the boys in their uniforms immediately provoked an unpleasant emotion in Blue. It was a long-held, multiheaded sensation formed from judgement, experience and envy, and she didn’t care for it. It wasn’t that she necessarily thought that her negative opinions on raven boys were wrong. It was just that knowing Gansey, Adam, Ronan and Noah complicated what she did with those opinions. It had been a lot more straightforward when she’d just assumed that she could despise them all from the thin air of the moral high ground.
Blue craned her neck, trying to see what the signs said, but none of the boys were doing a very good job pointing them towards the road. She wondered if Blue Sargent, Aglionby student, would have been Blue Sargent, placard holder. “What are they protesting?”