Page 18 of The Raven King(The Raven Cycle 4)
Cabeswater had taken so long to come to his aid. Only a few weeks before, a heap of roofing tiles had fallen on top of him, and Cabeswater had swept instantaneously to save him. If that had happened today, he would have been dead.
The forest whispered at him in its language that was equal parts pictures and words, and it made him understand why it had been so slow to come to him.
Something had been attacking them both.
As Maura had already pointed out, being suspended was not a vacation, so Blue had her after-school shift at Nino’s as usual. Although the sun outside was overpowering, the restaurant was strangely dim inside, a trick of the thunderheads darkening the western sky. The shadows beneath the metal-legged tables were gray and diffuse; it was hard to tell if it was dark enough to turn on the lights that hung over each table or not. The decision could wait; there was no one in the restaurant.
With nothing to occupy her mind except for sweeping the Parmesan cheese from the corners of the room, Blue thought about Gansey inviting her to a toga party tonight. To her surprise, her mother had urged her to go. Blue had said that an Aglionby toga party went against everything she stood for. Maura had replied, “Private school boys? Using random pieces of fabric as apparel? That seems like exactly what you stand for these days.”
Shoof, shoof. Blue swept the floor aggressively. She could feel herself hurtling toward self-awareness, and she wasn’t sure she liked it.
In the kitchen, the shift manager chortled. Dissonant, clunky music warred with the electric guitar playing overhead; he was watching videos on his phone with the cooks. A loud ding sounded as the restaurant door opened. To her surprise, Adam stepped in and warily assessed the empty tables. His uniform was strangely bedraggled: the pants wrinkled and muddied, his white shirt smudged and damp in places.
“Wasn’t I supposed to call you later?” Blue asked. She eyed his uniform. Ordinarily it would have been impeccable. “Are you okay?”
Adam slid into a chair and touched his left eyelid cautiously. “I remembered I had Weights and Discovery after school and didn’t want you to miss me. Uh, phys ed and a scientific method extracurricular.”
Blue walked her broom over to his table. “You didn’t say if you were okay.”
He flicked his fingers irritably against one of the damp places on his sleeve. “Cabeswater. Something’s up with it. I don’t know. I have to do some work with it. I’ll need someone to spot me, I guess. What are you doing this evening?”
“Mom says I’m going to a toga party. Are you?”
Disdain dripped from Adam’s voice. “I’m not going to a party at Henry Cheng’s, no.”
Henry Cheng. Things made marginally more sense. In a Venn diagram where one circle held the words toga party and one held the words Henry Cheng, Gansey might possibly end up where they intersected. Blue’s mixed feelings returned in force. “What is the actual deal with you and Henry Cheng? And do you want some pizza? Someone placed a wrong order and we have extras.”
“You’ve seen him. I don’t have time for that. And yes, please.”
She fetched the pizza and sat opposite Adam as he inhaled it as politely as possible. The truth was that until he’d walked in the door, she’d forgotten that they had arranged a call to talk about Gansey and Glendower. She was feeling pretty short on ideas after discussing it with her family members in the bathtub. She admitted, “I should tell you I don’t really have any ideas about Gansey other than finding Glendower, and I don’t know what to do next about that.”
Adam said, “I didn’t get a lot of time to think about it today, either, because of—” He gestured to his rumpled uniform again, though she couldn’t tell if he meant Cabeswater or school. “And so I don’t have an idea, I only have a question. Do you think Gansey could order Glendower to appear?”
Something about this question neatly upended Blue’s stomach. It was not that she hadn’t thought about Gansey’s power of command; it was just that his uncanny authoritative voice was so closely allied with his ordinary bossy voice that it was sometimes difficult to convince herself that she had not imagined it. And then when she did admit that there was something there — for instance, when he had clearly magically dissolved the false Blues during their last visit to Cabeswater — it was still nonetheless somewhat difficult to think of in a magical sense. The knowledge slid sideways, pretending to be normal. Now that she thought of the phenomenon more firmly, though, holding on to the entirety of it as best she could, she realized that it was a lot like Noah’s appearing and disappearing, or like the dream logic of Aurora appearing through rock. Her mind was quite happy to let her believe that there was nothing magic about it; to sketchily rewrite it as simply Gansey being Gansey.
“I don’t know,” Blue said. “If he could, wouldn’t he have tried it before now?”
“Honestly —” Adam started, and then stopped. His face changed. “Are you going to the party tonight?”
“I guess so.” Too late, she got the sense that the question meant more than the words she’d heard. “Like I said, Mom told me I was going, so …”
“With Gansey.”
“Yeah, I guess. And Ronan, if he’s going.”
“Ronan won’t go to Henry’s.”
Carefully, Blue said, “Then, yeah, I guess, with Gansey.”
Adam frowned at the edge of the table, looking at his own hand. He was taking his time with something, measuring the words, testing them before he said them. “You know, when I first met Gansey, I couldn’t figure out why he was friends with someone like Ronan. Gansey was always in class, always getting stuff done, always a teacher’s pet. And here was Ronan, like a heart attack that never stopped. I knew I couldn’t complain, ’cause I hadn’t come first. Ronan had. But one day, he’d done some stupid shit I don’t even remember, and I just couldn’t take it. And I asked why Gansey was even friends with him if he was such an asshole all the time. And I remember Gansey told me that Ronan always told the truth, and the truth was the most important thing.”
It was not at all difficult to imagine Gansey saying such a thing.
Adam looked up to Blue then, and he pinned her with his gaze. Outside, the wind chucked leaves against the glass. “Which is why I wanna know why you two won’t tell me the truth about you two.”
Now her stomach turned over the other direction. You two. Gansey and her. Her and Gansey. Blue had imagined this conversation dozens of times. Endless permutations of how she brought it up, how he reacted, how it ended. She could do this. She was ready.
No, she wasn’t.
“About us?” she said. Lamely.
His expression, if possible, turned more disdainful than it had over Henry Cheng. “Do you know what hurts the most? What this means you think of me. You didn’t even give me the chance to be okay with it. You were just so sure I’d be eaten by jealousy. That’s how you see me?”
He wasn’t wrong. But he had been a rather more brittle version of himself back when they’d first made the decision to not t
ell him. Saying this out loud felt rather unsporting, though, so she just tried, “You — things — were different then.”
“ ‘Then’? How long has it been going on?”
“Going on isn’t exactly what is happening,” Blue said. A relationship that was squeezed into stolen glances and secret phone calls was so drastically less than what she wanted that she refused to consider it dating. “And it’s not exactly like starting a new job. ‘The start date was x!’ I can’t tell you precisely how long it’s been going on.”
“You just said ‘going on,’ ” Adam said.
Blue’s mental state surfed the crest of a wave that divided empathy and frustration. “Don’t be impossible. I’m sorry. It wasn’t supposed to be something, and then it was, and then I didn’t know how to say anything. I didn’t want to risk messing up our friendship.”
“So even though I might have been decent about it, some part of you thought I’d be so shittily in constant competition with Gansey that you figured it was better to just lie?”
“I didn’t lie.”
“Sure, Ronan. Lying by omission is still lying,” Adam said. He was sort of half-smiling, but in that way people did when they were annoyed rather than when anything was funny.
Outside, a couple paused by the door to read the menu attached to it; both Blue and Adam waited in irritated silence until they moved on, leaving the restaurant empty. Adam opened his hands as if he expected her to tip a satisfactory explanation into them.
The fair part of Blue was well aware that she was in the wrong and so it was her job to defuse his legitimate hurt, but the prideful part of her still would’ve preferred to point out how difficult he had been back when she and Gansey had first realized they had feelings for each other. With some effort, she went with a middle ground. “It wasn’t as calculated as you make it sound like it was.”
Adam rejected the middle ground. “But I saw you guys trying to hide it. The crazy thing is — like, I’m right here. I’m with you guys every day. Do you think I didn’t see it? He’s my best friend. You think I don’t know him?”
