Whelk took the liberty of going through Gansey’s locker before school the next day.
Gansey’s locker, one of the few in use, was only a couple doors down from Whelk’s old one, and the feeling of opening it brought back a rush of memory and nostalgia. Once upon a time, this had been him — one of the wealthiest kids at Aglionby, with whichever friends he wanted, whichever Henrietta girls caught his eye, whichever classes he felt like going to. His father had no compunction about making an extra donation here or there to help Whelk pass a class he’d failed to attend for a few weeks. Whelk longed for his old car. The cops here had known his father well; they hadn’t even bothered to pull Whelk over.
And now Gansey was a king here, and he didn’t even know how to use it.
Thanks to Aglionby’s honor code, there were no locks on any of the lockers, allowing Whelk to open Gansey’s without any fuss. Inside, he found several dusty spiral-bound notebooks with only a few pages used in each. In case Gansey decided to come into school two hours early, Whelk left a note in the locker (“Belongings have been removed while we spray for roaches”) and then retreated back to one of the unused staff bathrooms to examine his find.
Sitting cross-legged on the pristine but dusty tile beside the sink, what he found was that Richard Gansey III was more obsessed with the ley line than he had ever been. Something about the entire research process seemed … frantic.
What is wrong with this kid? Whelk wondered, and then immediately afterward felt strange that he had grown old enough to think of Gansey as a kid.
Outside the bathroom, he heard heels clicking down the hallway. The scent of coffee drifted under the doorway; Aglionby was beginning to stir.
Whelk flipped to the next notebook.
This one was not about the ley line. It was all historical stuff about the Welsh king Owen Glendower. Whelk was not interested. He skimmed, skimmed, skimmed, thinking it was unrelated, until he realized the case Gansey was making for tying the two elements together: Glendower and the ley line. Stooge or not, Gansey knew how to sell a story.
Whelk focused on one line.
Whoever wakes Glendower is granted a favor (limitless?) (supernatural?) (some sources say reciprocal/what does that mean?) Czerny had never cared about the ultimate outcome of the ley line search.
At first, Whelk hadn’t, either. The appeal had merely been the riddle of it.
Then one afternoon Czerny and Whelk, standing in the middle of what seemed to be a naturally formed circle of magnetically charged stones, had experimentally pushed one of the stones out of place. The resulting sizzle of energy had knocked them both off their feet and created a faint apparition of what looked like a woman.
The ley line was raw, uncontrollable, inexplicable energy. The stuff of legends.
Whoever controlled the ley line would be more than rich. Whoever controlled the ley line would be something that the other Aglionby boys could only hope to aspire to.
Czerny still hadn’t cared, not really. He was the most mild, ambitionless creature Whelk had ever seen, which was probably why Whelk liked to hang out with him so much. Czerny didn’t have a problem being no better than the other Aglionby students. He was content to trot along after Whelk. These days, when Whelk was trying to comfort himself, he told himself that Czerny was a sheep, but sometimes he slipped and remembered him as loyal instead.
They didn’t have to be different things, did they?
“Glendower,” Whelk said out loud, trying it out. The word echoed off the bathroom walls, hollow and metallic. He wondered what Gansey — strange, desperate Gansey — was thinking he’d ask for as a favor.
Climbing up off the bathroom floor, Whelk picked up all the notebooks.
It would only take a few minutes to copy them in the staff room, and if anyone asked, he’d tell them Gansey had asked him to.
Glendower.
If Whelk found him, he’d ask for what he’d wanted all along: to control the ley line.
