“Whooooooooooo,” said Burton, one of the bank robbery boys, swivelling slowly. “Not Your Bitch has a date? Is that who roughed you up?”
Cody, the second of the bank robbers, stepped towards the kerb to gape at the Fisker. He asked Henry, “Is that a Ferrari?”
“No, it’s a Bugatti, man,” Henry said through the open passenger window. “Ha-ha, I’m kidding you, man. It’s totally a Ferrari. Sargent! Don’t keep me waiting!”
Half the bus line was looking at her. Until that moment, Blue had never really stacked up all of her public statements against gratuitous commercialism, offensive boyfriends, and Aglionby students in one place. Now that everyone was looking at Henry and then at her, though, she was eyeing the stack and finding it enormous. She was also seeing how every student was slowly labelling the stack BLUE SARGENT IS A HYPOCRITE.
There was no easy way to establish that Henry was not her boyfriend, and moreover, it seemed somewhat pointless in light of the fact that her secret boyfriend was only slightly less overwhelmingly Aglionby than the specimen currently in front of her.
Blue was filled with the uncomfortable certainty that she probably needed to label the stack BLUE SARGENT IS A HYPOCRITE in her own handwriting.
She stomped over to the passenger window.
“Don’t blow him here, Sargent!” someone shouted. “Make him get you steak first!”
Henry smiled sunnily. “Ho! The natives are restless. Hello, my people! Don’t worry, I’ll establish a higher minimum wage for you all!” Looking back at Blue, or at least turning his sunglasses towards her, he said, “Hi, hi, Sargent.”
“What are you doing here!” Blue demanded. She was feeling – she wasn’t sure. She was feeling a lot.
“I’m here to talk about the men in your life. To talk about the men in my life. I like the dress, by the way. Very boho chic or whatever. I was on my way home, and I wanted to find out if you had a good time at the toga party and also make sure that our plans for Zimbabwe were still on. I see you tried to claw your own eye out; it’s edgy.”
“I thought … I guess … it was Venezuela.”
“Oh, right, we’ll do that on the way.”
“God,” she said.
Henry inclined his head in humble acknowledgement.
“Graduation breathes on us, redneck lady,” he said. “Now is the time to make sure we have the strings to all the balloons we want to keep before they all float away.”
Blue looked at him cannily. It would have been easy to reply that she was not floating anywhere, that this balloon was going to slowly lose its helium and sink to the floor in the same place it had been born, but she thought of her mother’s predictions for her and didn’t. Instead she thought of how she wanted to travel to Venezuela and so did Henry Cheng, and that meant something in this minute, even if it didn’t mean something next week.
A thought occurred to her. “I don’t have to remind you I’m with Gansey, right?”
“Naturally not. I’m Henrysexual, anyway. Can I take you home?”
Stay away from Aglionby boys, because they are bastards.
Blue said, “I can’t get in this car. Do you see what’s happening behind me? I don’t even want to look.”
Henry said, “How about you give me the finger and shout at me now and withdraw with your principles?” He smiled winningly and held up three fingers. He counted to two with devil horns.
“This is incredibly unnecessary,” Blue told him, but she could feel herself smiling.
“Life’s a show,” he replied. He counted one with his middle finger, and then his face melted into exaggerated shock.
Blue shouted, “Drop dead, you bastard!”
“FINE!” Henry screamed back, with slightly more hysteria than the role required. He attempted to squeal out of the lot, stopped to take off the parking brake, and then limped out more sedately.
She had not even had time to turn to see the results of their play in three parts before she heard a very familiar rumble. Oh no –
But sure enough, before she could live down her last visitor, a bright orange Camaro pulled up to the kerb in front of her. The engine was bucking a little bit; it was not quite as happy to be alive as the vehicle that had previously occupied the fire lane, but it was doing its best. It was also just as obviously an Aglionby car holding an Aglionby boy as the one that had just left.
Before, Blue had had half of the bus line’s attention. Now she had all of it.
Gansey leaned across the passenger seat. Unlike Henry, he at least had the good grace to acknowledge the school’s attention with a grimace. “Jane, I’m sorry this couldn’t wait. But Ronan just called me.”
“He called you?”
“Yes. He wants us. Can you come?”
The letters BLUE SARGENT IS A HYPOCRITE were most certainly scrawled in her own handwriting. She felt she had some self-examination to do later.
There was relative silence.
The self-examination was happening now.
“Stupid raven boys,” she said, and got in the car.
No one could quite believe that Ronan had used his phone.
Ronan Lynch had many habits that irritated his friends and loved ones – swearing, drinking, street-racing – but the one that maddened his acquaintances the most was his inability to answer phone calls or send texts. When Adam had first met Ronan, he had found Ronan’s aversion to the fancy phone so complete that he assumed there must have been a story behind it. Some reason why, even in the press of an emergency, Ronan’s first response was to hand his phone to someone else. Now that Adam knew him better, he realized it had more to do with a phone not allowing for any posturing. Ninety per cent of how Ronan conveyed his feelings was through his body language, and a phone simply didn’t care.