Hey, Parrish,” Gansey said.
The Camaro was parked in the shade of the walk-way just outside the glass hospital doors. As Gansey had waited for Adam to emerge, he’d watched them open and close for invisible patients. Now he sat behind the wheel as Adam lowered himself into the passenger seat. Adam was strangely unmarked; usually after encounters with his father, there were bruises or scratches, but this time, the only thing Gansey could see was a slight reddening of his ear.
“They told me you didn’t have insurance,” Gansey said. They’d also told him Adam would probably never hear out of his left ear again. This was the hardest thing to internalize, that something permanent but invisible had happened. He waited for Adam to say he’d find a way to pay for it. But Adam just turned his hospital bracelet around and around on his wrist.
Gansey added carefully, “I took care of it.”
This was where Adam always said something. Where he got angry.
Where he snapped, No, I won’t take your damn money, Gansey. You can’t buy me. But he just turned that paper bracelet around and around and around.
“You win,” Adam said finally. He rubbed a hand through his uneven hair.
He sounded tired. “Take me to get my stuff.”
Gansey had been about to start the Camaro, but he took his hand away from the ignition. “I didn’t win anything. Do you think this is how I wanted it?”
“Yes,” Adam replied. He didn’t look at him. “Yes, I do.”
Hurt and anger warred furiously inside Gansey. “Don’t be shitty.”
Adam picked and picked at the uneven end where the paper bracelet sealed. “I’m telling you that you can say ‘I told you so.’ Say ‘if you left
earlier, this wouldn’t have happened.’”
“Did I say that before? You don’t have to act like it’s the end of the
world.”
“It is the end of the world.”
An ambulance pulled in between them and the hospital doors; the lights weren’t on, but the paramedics leapt out of the cab and hurried to the back to attend to some silent emergency. Something behind Gansey’s breastbone felt red-hot. “Moving out of your dad’s place is the end of the world?”
“You know what I wanted,” Adam said. “You know this wasn’t it.”
“You act like it’s my fault.”
“Tell me you’re unhappy about how this is going down.”
He wouldn’t lie; he wanted Adam out of that house. But there had never been a part of him that wanted him hurt to accomplish that. There had never been a part of him that wanted Adam to have to run instead of march triumphantly out. There had never been a part of him that wanted Adam to look at him like he was looking at him now. So it was the truth when he replied, “I’m unhappy about how this is going down.”
“Whatever,” Adam shot back. “You’ve wanted me to move out forever.”
Gansey despised raising his voice (in his head, his mother said, People shout when they don’t have the vocabulary to whisper), but he heard it happening despite himself and so, with effort, he kept his voice even. “Not like this. At least you have a place to go. ‘End of the world’ … What is your problem, Adam? I mean, is there something about my place that’s too repugnant for you to imagine living there? Why is it that everything kind I do is pity to you? Everything is charity. Well, here it is: I’m sick of tiptoeing around your principles.”
“God, I’m sick of your condescension, Gansey,” Adam said. “Don’t try to make me feel stupid. Who whips out repugnant? Don’t pretend you’re not trying to make me feel stupid.”
“This is the way I talk. I’m sorry your father never taught you the meaning of repugnant. He was too busy smashing your head against the wall of your trailer while you apologized for being alive.”
Both of them stopped breathing.
Gansey knew he’d gone too far. It was too far, too late, too much.
Adam shoved open the door.
“Fuck you, Gansey. Fuck you,” he said, voice low and furious.
Gansey closed his eyes.
Adam slammed the door, and then he slammed it again when the latch didn’t catch. Gansey didn’t open his eyes. He didn’t want to see what Adam was doing. He didn’t want to see if people were watching some kid fight with a boy in a bright orange Camaro and an Aglionby sweater. Just then he hated his raven-breasted uniform and his loud car and every three- and four-syllable word his parents had used in casual conversation at the dinner table and he hated Adam’s hideous father and Adam’s permissive mother and most of all, most of all, he hated the sound of Adam’s last words, playing over and over.
He couldn’t stand it, all of this inside him.
In the end, he was nobody to Adam, he was nobody to Ronan. Adam spit his words back at him and Ronan squandered however many second chances he gave him. Gansey was just a guy with a lot of stuff and a hole inside him that chewed away more of his heart every year.
They were always walking away from him. But he never seemed able to walk away from them.
Gansey opened his eyes. The ambulance was still there, but Adam was gone.
It took Gansey a few moments to locate him. He was already several hundred yards away, walking across the parking lot toward the road, his shadow a small, blue thing beside him.
Gansey leaned across the car to roll down the passenger window, and then he started the Pig. By the time he circled around the loading area to get to the lot, Adam had made it out to the manicured four-lane divided highway that ran by the hospital. There was some traffic, but Gansey pulled up along where Adam walked, making the cars in the right lane pass him, some honking.
“Where are you going?” he shouted out. “Where do you have to go?”
Of course Adam knew he was there — the Camaro was louder than anything — but he just kept walking.
“Adam,” Gansey repeated. “Just tell me not back there.”
Nothing.
“It doesn’t have to be Monmouth,” Gansey tried a third time. “But let me
take you wherever you’re going.”
Please just get in the car.
Adam stopped. Climbing in jerkily, he pulled the door shut. He didn’t do
it hard enough, so he had to try two more times. They were silent as Gansey pulled back into traffic. Words pressed against his mouth, begged to be said, but he kept silent.
Adam didn’t look at him when he said, finally, “It doesn’t matter how you say it. It’s what you wanted, in the end. All your things in one place, all under your roof. Everything you own right where you can see …”
But then he stopped. He dropped his head into his hands. His thumbs worked through the hair above his ears, over and over, the knuckles white.
When he sucked in his breath, it was the ragged sound that came from trying not to cry.
Gansey thought of one hundred things that he could say to Adam about how it would be all right, how it was for the best, how Adam Parrish had been his own man before he’d met Gansey and there was no way he’d stop being his own man just by changing the roof over his head, how some days Gansey wished that he could be him, because Adam was so very real and true in a way that Gansey couldn’t ever seem to be. But Gansey’s words had somehow become unwitting weapons, and he didn’t trust himself to not accidentally discharge them again.
So they drove in silence to get Adam’s things, and when they left the trailer park for the last time, his mother watching from behind the kitchen window, Adam didn’t look back.
