Helen, Gansey’s older sister, called right as Gansey got to the Parrishes’ dirt road. Accepting phone calls in the Pig was always tricky. The Camaro was a stick shift, to start with, and as loud as a semitruck, to end with, and in between those two things were a host of steering problems, electrical interferences, and grimy gearshift knobs. The upshot was that Helen was barely audible and Gansey nearly drove into the ditch.
“When is Mom’s birthday?” Helen asked. Gansey was simultaneously pleased to hear her voice and annoyed to be bothered by something so trivial.
For the most part, he and his sister got along well; Gansey siblings were a rare and complicated species, and they didn’t have to pretend to be something they weren’t around each other.
“You’re the wedding planner,” Gansey said as a dog ripped out of nowhere. It barked furiously, trying to bite the Camaro’s tires. “Shouldn’t dates be your realm of expertise?”
“That means you don’t remember,” Helen replied. “And I’m not a wedding planner anymore. Well. Part-time. Well. Full-time, but not every day.”
Helen did not need to be anything. She didn’t have careers, she had hobbies that involved other people’s lives.
“I do remember,” he said tensely. “It’s May tenth.” A lab mix tied in front of the first house bayed dolorously as he passed. The other dog continued to worry at his tires, a snarl ascending with the engine note. Three kids in sleeveless shirts stood in one of the yards shooting milk jugs with BB guns; they shouted Hey, Hollywood! and affably aimed guns at the Pig’s tires.
They pretended to hold phones by their ears. Gansey felt a peculiar stab at the three of them, their camaraderie, their belonging, products of their
surroundings. He wasn’t sure if it was pity or envy. Everywhere was dust.
Helen asked, “Where are you? You sound like you’re on the set of a Guy
Ritchie movie.”
“I’m going to see a friend.”
“The mean one, or the white trash one?”
“Helen.”
She replied, “Sorry. I meant Captain Frigid or Trailer-Park Boy.”
“Helen.”
Adam didn’t live in a trailer park, technically, since every house was a double-wide. Adam had told him that the last of the single-wide trailers had been taken out a few years ago, but he had said it ironically, like even he knew that doubling the size of the trailers didn’t change much.
“Dad calls them worse things,” Helen said. “Mom said one of your weird New Age books was delivered to the house yesterday. Are you coming home anytime soon?”
“Maybe,” Gansey said. Somehow seeing his parents always reminded him of how little he’d accomplished, how similar he and Helen were, how many red ties he owned, how he was slowly growing up to be everything Ronan was afraid of becoming. He pulled in front of the light blue double- wide where the Parrishes lived. “Maybe for Mom’s birthday. I have to go.
Things might get ugly.”
The cell phone speaker made Helen’s laugh a hissing, pitchless thing.
“Listen to you, sounding all badass. I bet you’re just listening to a CD called ‘The Sounds of Crime’ while you cruise for chicks outside the Old Navy in your Camaro.”
“Bye, Helen,” said Gansey. He clicked END and climbed out.
Fat, shiny carpenter bees swooped at his head, distracted from their work of destroying the stairs. After he knocked, he looked out across the flat, ugly field of dead grass. The idea that you had to pay for the beauty in Henrietta should have occurred to him before then, but it hadn’t. No matter how many times Adam told him he was foolish about money, he couldn’t seem to get any wiser about it.
There is no spring here, Gansey realized, and the thought was unexpectedly grim.
Adam’s mother answered his knock. She was a shadow of Adam — the same elongated features, the same wide-set eyes. In comparison to Gansey’s
mother, she seemed old and hard-edged.
“Adam’s out back,” she said, before he could ask her anything. She glanced to him and away, not holding his gaze. Gansey never failed to be amazed at how Adam’s parents reacted to the Aglionby sweater. They knew everything they needed to about him before he even opened his mouth.
“Thanks,” Gansey said, but the word felt like sawdust in his mouth, and in any case, she was already closing the door.
Under the old carport behind the house, he found Adam lying beneath an old Bonneville pulled up onto ramps, initially invisible in the cool blue shadows. An empty oil pan protruded from under the car. There was no sound coming from beneath the car, and Gansey suspected that Adam wasn’t working so much as avoiding being in the house.
“Hey, tiger,” Gansey said.
Adam’s knees bent as if he were going to scoot himself out from under
the car, but then he didn’t.
“What’s up?” he said flatly.
Gansey knew what this meant, this failure to immediately come out from beneath the car, and anger and guilt drew his chest tight. The most frustrating thing about the Adam situation was that Gansey couldn’t control it. Not a single piece of it. He dropped a notebook on the worktable. “Those are notes from today. I couldn’t tell them you were sick. You missed too much last month.”
Adam’s voice was even. “What did you tell them, then?”
One of the tools under the car made a halfhearted scraping sound.
“Come on, Parrish. Come out,” Gansey said. “Get it over with.”
Gansey jumped as a cold dog nose shoved into his dangling palm — the mutt that had so savagely attacked his tires earlier. He reluctantly fondled one of her stumpy ears and then jerked his hand back as she leapt at the car, barking at Adam’s feet when they started to move. The ripped knees of Adam’s camo cargo pants appeared first, then his faded Coca-Cola T-shirt, then, finally, his face.
A bruise spread over his cheekbone, red and swelling as a galaxy. A darker one snaked over the bridge of his nose.
Gansey said immediately, “You’re leaving with me.”
“It will only make it worse when I come back,” Adam told him.
“I mean for good. Move into Monmouth. Enough’s enough.”
Adam stood up. The dog pranced delightedly around his feet as if he’d been gone to another planet instead of merely underneath a car. Wearily, he asked, “And what about when Glendower takes you away from Henrietta?”
Gansey couldn’t say it wouldn’t happen. “You come with.”
“I come with? Tell me how that would work. I lose all the work I put in at Aglionby. I have to play the game again at another school.”
Adam had once told Gansey, Rags to riches isn’t a story anyone wants to hear until after it’s done. But it was a story that was hard to finish when Adam had missed school yet again. There was no happy ending without passing grades.
Gansey said, “You wouldn’t have to go to a school like Aglionby. It doesn’t have to be an Ivy League. There are different ways to be successful.”
At once, Adam said, “I don’t judge you for what you do, Gansey.”
And this was an uneasy place to be, because Gansey knew it took a lot for Adam to accept his reasons for chasing Glendower. Adam had plenty of reasons to be indifferent about Gansey’s nebulous anxiety, his questioning of why the universe had chosen him to be born to affluent parents, wondering if there was some greater purpose that he was alive. Gansey knew he had to make a difference, had to make a bigger mark on the world because of the head start he’d been given, or he was the worst sort of person out there.
The poor are sad they’re poor, Adam had once mused, and turns out the rich are sad they’re rich.
And Ronan had said, Hey, I’m rich, and it doesn’t bother me.
Out loud, Gansey said, “Fine, then. We’d find another good school. We play the game. We make up a new life for you.”
Adam reached past him to find a rag and began to wipe between each greasy finger. “I would have to find jobs, too. This didn’t happen overnight.
Do you know how long it took me to find these?”
He didn’t mean working in the carport outside his father’s double-wide.
That was merely a chore. Adam held down three jobs, the most important of which was at the trailer factory just outside Henrietta.
“I could cover you until you found something.”
There was a very long silence as Adam continued scrubbing his fingers.
He didn’t look up at Gansey. This was a conversation they’d had before, and entire days of arguments were replayed in the few moments of quiet. The words had been said often enough that they didn’t need to be said again.
Success meant nothing to Adam if he hadn’t done it for himself.
Gansey tried his best to keep his voice even, but a bit of heat crept in. “So you won’t leave because of your pride? He’ll kill you.”
“You’ve watched too many cop shows.”
“I’ve watched the evening news, Adam,” Gansey snapped. “Why don’t you let Ronan teach you to fight? He’s offered twice now. He means it.”
With great care, Adam folded the greasy rag and draped it back over a toolbox. There was a lot of stuff in the carport. New tool racks and calendars of topless women and heavy-duty air compressors and other things Mr.
Parrish had decided were more valuable than Adam’s school uniform.
“Because then he will kill me.”
“I don’t follow.”
Adam said, “He has a gun.”
Gansey said, “Christ.”
Laying a hand on the mutt’s head — it drove her insane with happiness — Adam leaned out of the carport to look down the dirt road. He didn’t have to tell Gansey what he was watching for.
“Come on, Adam,” said Gansey. Please. “We’ll make it work.”
A wrinkle formed between Adam’s eyebrows as he looked away. Not at the double-wides in the foreground, but past them, to the flat, endless field with its tufts of dry grass. So many things survived here without really living.
He said, “It means I never get to be my own person. If I let you cover for me, then I’m yours. I’m his now, and then I’ll be yours.”
It struck Gansey harder than he thought it would. Some days, all that grounded him was the knowledge that his and Adam’s friendship existed in a place that money couldn’t influence. Anything that spoke to the contrary hurt Gansey more than he would have admitted out loud. With precision, he asked, “Is that what you think of me?”
“You don’t know, Gansey,” Adam said. “You don’t know anything about money, even though you’ve got all of it. You don’t know how it makes people look at me and at you. It’s all they need to know about us. They’ll think I’m your monkey.”
I am only my money. It is all anyone sees, even Adam.
Gansey shot back, “You think your plans are going to keep working when you miss school and work because you let your dad pound the shit out of you? You’re as bad as her. You think you deserve it.”
Without warning, Adam slammed a small box of nails off the ledge beside him. The sound it made on the concrete startled both of them.
Adam turned his back to Gansey, his arms crossed.
“Don’t pretend you know,” he said. “Don’t come here and pretend you know anything.”
Gansey told himself to walk away. To say nothing else. Then he said, “Don’t pretend you have anything to be proud of, then.”
As soon as he said it, he knew that it wasn’t fair, or even if it had been fair, it wasn’t right. But he wasn’t sorry he’d said it.
He went back to the Camaro and took his phone out to call Ronan, but the cell signal had completely disappeared, like it often did in Henrietta. Usually, Gansey took that as a sign that something supernatural was affecting the energy around the town, knocking down the cell signal and sometimes even the electricity.
Now, he thought it probably just meant he wasn’t getting through to anyone.
Closing his eyes, he thought about the bruise on Adam’s face, with its spreading, soft edges, and the hard red mark over his nose. He imagined coming here one day and finding that Adam wasn’t here, but in the hospital, or worse, that Adam was here, but that something important had been beaten
out of him.
Even imagining it made him feel sick.
The car jerked then, and Gansey’s eyes came open as the passenger door groaned.
“Wait, Gansey,” Adam said, out of breath. He was all folded over to be able to see inside the car. His bruise looked ghastly. It made his skin seem transparent. “Don’t leave like —”
Sliding his hands off the wheel and into his lap, Gansey peered up at him.
This was the part where Adam was going to tell him not to take what he’d
said personally. But it felt personal.
“I’m only trying to help.”
“I know,” Adam told him. “I know. But I can’t do it that way. I can’t live with myself that way.”
Gansey didn’t understand, but he nodded. He wanted it to be over; he wanted it to be yesterday, when he and Ronan and Adam were listening to the recorder and Adam’s face was still unmarked. Behind Adam, he saw the
figure of Mrs. Parrish watching from the porch.
Adam closed his eyes for a minute. Gansey could see his irises moving underneath the thin skin of his eyelids, a dreamer awake.
And then, in one easy movement, he’d slid into the passenger seat.
Gansey’s mouth opened to form a question he didn’t ask.
“Let’s go,” Adam said. He didn’t look at Gansey. His mother stared at them from the porch, but he didn’t look at her, either. “The psychic was the
plan, right? We’re doing the plan.”
“Yes. But —”
“I need to be back by ten.”
Now Adam looked at Gansey. There was something fierce and chilling in his eyes, an unnamable something that Gansey was always afraid would eventually take over completely. This, he knew, was a compromise, a risky gift that he could choose to reject.
After a moment of hesitation, Gansey bumped knuckles with him over the gearshift. Adam rolled down the window and gripped the roof as if he needed to hold on.
As the Camaro headed slowly out of the single-track road, their path was blocked by a blue Toyota pickup truck, approaching from the other way.
Adam’s breath stopped audibly. Through the windshield, Gansey met the eyes of Adam’s father. Robert Parrish was a big thing, colorless as August, grown from the dust that surrounded the trailers. His eyes were dark and small and Gansey could see nothing of Adam in them.
Robert Parrish spit out the window. He didn’t pull over for them to pass.
Adam’s face was turned out to the cornfield, but Gansey didn’t look away.
“You don’t have to come,” said Gansey, because he had to say it.
Adam’s voice came from far away. “I’m coming.”
Jerking the wheel of the car, Gansey revved the engine up high. The Pig stormed off the road, clouds of dirt exploding from the tires, and slammed through the shallow ditch. His heart thudded with anticipation and danger and the desire to shout everything he thought about Adam’s father to Adam’s father.
As they charged back onto the driveway on the other side of the Toyota, Gansey could feel Robert Parrish’s stare follow them.
The weight of that gaze seemed like a more substantial promise of the future than anything a psychic might tell him.
