Chapter Text
It is Noah’s corpse-cold hand on her hip, under her shirt, and it is her startling into the window pane over her head and choking on lung-fry.
“Is that Guava Ice?” Noah inquires, like she isn’t curling herself over Gansey’s pursed body: one knee on the seat of the bay window, one foot on the floor, and head and shoulders shunted over the parking lot and quad outside the library.
“Shit, Noah,” Gansey says. She coughs some more. She doesn’t say that no one else comes up to the silent study floor; this is understood. Noah knew she’d find her here. That is why her chin is on Gansey’s besweatervested shoulder and her arms are draped around Gansey’s torso and her mouth is curling.
“Can I steal a hit?” Noah says. She thumbs Gansey’s lower lip for her. “There. Now you can think about it.”
Gansey does. “Did you kill that Lava yet?”
They exchange technicolor vapes and pour sweet-smelling smoke over the courtyard, nearly a hundred yards above the heads of the girls below. Velvet hairbands. Scrunchies. Curls and braids and buns. And all of them in an array of charcoal-grey and black uniforms. Raven Girls flocking. Cracking laughter. Staring and singing and eating sweets from aluminum packets. Studying and knocking around soccer balls and hackey sacks. Exchanging jackets. Touching each other’s hair and cheeks and shirts, always in motion.
The lunch bell rings. Noah and Gansey return their crutches to their rightful owners. They put on their faces. They pull on each other’s hair, just a little. Gansey so likes that thin film of dark roots at the top of Noah’s head, an anti-halo. She likes it better knowing Noah will ask her to lighten it any day now.
“Later?” Noah says.
“Always,” Gansey replies.
They part ways, Gansey to Calc, Noah to God knows where. Gansey walks backwards so she can watch Noah go, untucked shirt and crooked skirt and rolled socks and patent leather shoes. She throws a look over her shoulder before she rounds the corner—dark shadow on her cheekbone, dark makeup smudged under her eyes. A toothy, ebullient smile. And then she is gone.
So Gansey goes to math, heart a wild bird. The thing about spirits is the haunting. The thing about ghosts is they’re all, every one, a love story.
“Will you—? Okay, shit, be careful.” Adam drags one heel against the pebbling pavement in a bid to keep her and Ronan upright. “Stop leaning. Stop—licking my neck, you freak.” Ronan snickers in her ear. “How am I meant to steer us out of traffic when you’re—?”
“That’s half the fun.” Ronan slips her hot hands around Adam’s thighs, just under the pleats of her skirt. Bitten, blunt fingernails catch on her tights. “Not for you. I know. So I’ll only fuck around when we’re at intersections.”
“I do not trust me to do this,” Adam says. “I do not trust you not to kill us both.”
“Don’t you want to go out feeling good?”
“I want—what I want is. Oh, fuck.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“Ronan.”
“Say it again.”
“Fuck off!” Adam laughs breathily, leaning her head back onto Ronan’s shoulder. It’s a good thing she’s the only one stupid or broke enough to ride a bike to school, or there’d be a flock of raven girls watching Ronan—watching them. She drags a hand back over Ronan’s thigh, pressing it tighter against hers. “Stop. Stop now before I—”
“Have a nervous breakdown? Fine. Drive us back.”
“Are you going to hold on.”
“Tightly, baby! Oooh so tightly!”
Adam rolls her eyes and shoves the bike forward, her loafers finding the pedals with practiced comfort, Ronan’s hands finding her ribs with the same ease. Warm breath on Adam’s ear, Ronan’s mouth is macerated fruit and Adam sees it in dreams. One finger curled over the handle-break. Bruised knees beaming to the sky under skirt, before sock. They skim downhill, towards the street, Adam’s hair whipping behind her, Ronan’s breath giving chase against her spine.
The last few feet, Adam loosens her grip on the brake. They coast, catching speed. Ronan curses, exhilarated. Adam lets out a shaky breath through a shakier smile. Two by two, they pedal towards Monmouth, their great and Ganseyish ark.
Gansey knows Adam as someone who cannot afford to share much—secrets, real smiles, homework answers—for fear she will pull the wrong string and the neat tapestry she has designed will unravel entirely.
“I suppose it would slow down the car too much, anyway,” Gansey sighs. She is a miserable failure at not sounding too deeply involved. She is even more of a failure at not being personally slighted by all things. “It’s just, I don’t know. I’d like you to be there.”
“You’d like it,” Adam repeats. She’s leaning forward, elbows on splayed knees, braids dangling over her chest, and Gansey wants to lick her. It’s inconvenient.
“Certainly. I’d like you there. Specifically and generally.”
“In English?”
“I’d like you with me when I’m grocery shopping, pushing the cart. When I’m studying, as your single-minded focus makes me want to commit to the topic at hand. When I’m trying to hang a frame on the wall. Do you remember that time I hammered my finger?”
“Of course I remember. I stole your tool kit to keep you from doing it again.”
“I thought you might’ve,” Gansey says ruefully. She prods Adam’s shin with her sock foot. “You don’t have to come.”
“But you want me to.”
“Did I not confirm that already?”
“You’re—you know, Gansey? You’re something else.”
“I know you’re not working,” Gansey eggs. She is proud to have memorized Adam’s schedule for the week. “Now, if you want to spend those hours relaxing, I would not argue with that. Of course I wouldn’t. But if you plan on studying for the Gov quiz—that, I feel no compunctions about stealing you away from.”
“The Federalist papers,” Adam says wistfully.
Gansey’s day brightens. “So that’s a yes?”
“Fine,” Adam says, which means she intended to agree all along. Gansey smiles at her in a way which makes Adam turn, shielding her eyes. “If you’ve gotta do this racing in the street thing, I’ll come. I’ll be your damn second.”
“You’ll be my damn first,” Gansey says, near delirious with joy. “Adam Parrish. Adam Parrish.” She holds Adam’s face in her hands so she can knock their brows together. “My damn first.”
Adam pinches Gansey’s waist to make her shriek and let go. They scuffle only a little, a headlock, an arm around a wrist, a knee against a thigh against a hip, both of them with their muscles and their jeering, prodding and pulling pieces until they fit against each other.
It’s a beautiful night. Deep purple over clean streets, potholes aside. The lane dividers are a stairway straight to heaven.
They’re not racers, neither of them. But Gansey has been called to action on behalf of something epically necessary: Ronan’s honor. Of course Adam intended to come all along.
“Parrish,” Ronan says blankly when she sees them approaching. She spat beer down her front with the shock; the wet patch of her white tank top goes see-through and brownish, clinging to her bony chest. “Dick, don’t do this.”
“I must,” Gansey says. She knuckles beer off Ronan’s mouth, then sucks it off her finger. “What’s a king who doesn’t defend the respect of her knights?”
Ronan swears under her breath, looking between them with a furrow in her brow. “Did you dress like morons on purpose? They’re gonna kill and eat you.”
Gansey looks at the enormous leather jacket she stole from Ronan’s room. Her favorite cargo pants. She thought she looked butch and ready for a fight. She pushes her glasses up her nose. “What about this qualifies as moronic, exactly?”
Roman shakes her head. “You’re something else.”
“So I hear,” Gansey says.
There’s a bang. A whoop. And some fire.
“We’d better take our places,” Adam says.
“Don’t talk to me like I’m a—Ethel Merman.”
Adam herds her away, but Gansey throws a look back at Ronan over her shoulder, at the bottle between her fingers, the longboard rocking under the soles of her beaten One Stars. And while Gansey is stupid with her words, Adam is not: Adam says, “She’ll still be waiting for you when we’re done,” and that is that.
“They could study this moment in a Sociology class,” Gansey mutters, climbing into the Pig.
“You don’t even know what Sociology is.”
“Well. You don’t even know what a bain marie is, so it’s moot.”
“Oh, my God. Gansey, Anthony Bourdain is not going to fuck you no matter how many times you read about the good quality offset serrated knife you need for your adult kitchen.”
Gansey shivers, thrilled. The Pig purrs beneath them. Adam is hollowed and haunted with red from the Molotov cocktail Kavinsky holds aloft, between the two snarling cars, her bone-thin body draped in next to nothing as she brings her arms down, like the wasted circus conductor, like Go.
They shoot onward. Adam clings to the open window, the dashboard, her seatbelt, Gansey’s bicep. The wind whips through their hair as Gansey winds and wheels and cuts off the competitor, some WASPy Catherine-or-Cait who called Ronan a girlfag and transsexual, which is true but nonetheless unacceptable to Gansey.
“Why don’t you ever take me anywhere nice?” Adam shouts to be heard.
Gansey laughs delightedly, even as she falls behind at a curve. She swears, leaning forward as Adam does, as the Pig coughs. “Come on, come on!” she cries, white-knuckling the wheel. “And all the king’s horses and all the king’s men!”
The engine rents and wails. The huge moon opens to stare them down, the Pig’s hood smoking as they inch infinitesimally closer to it.
Adam sticks her head out the window. Braids whipping, eyes wide, and laughing, she is a miraculous thing. Gansey wants to never stop. To never return her home. Drive right off the edge of the world so Adam can look like this forever.
“Tonight, tonight,” Adam wails, “the strip’s just right!”
Gansey caterwauls with her. They cut a sharp corner, burnt rubber, and Adam yells about traction, about repairs. Gansey cannot imagine such earthly things.
“Tramps like us!” Gansey shouts. “Sing to me, oh muse, the wrath of a Gansey scorned.”
“Scorched earth!”
“Ronan!” Gansey yells to the sky. They round the final corner, neck in neck with the Diplomat beside them. “Ronan Lynch!”
“Ronan!” Adam echoes, fervent. They cry her name like little deaths and lose, but deliciously. With fortitude. And when they climb out of the car, Ronan is obsidian or flint. She yanks Gansey’s head back by the hair and kisses her hard.
It is so easy for her to set Gansey on fire.
“Scenes from a girlhood,” Gansey postulates, and Blue laughs louder, shoving her foot against Gansey’s elbow just as she was starting to feel good about her eyeliner. “Jane! Why would you do that.” She slumps, forearms on the sink rim, with a sigh. Grabs a clip and twists her hair up, sweating down her neck and under her layers of vibrantly-patterned silk. Monmouth’s many windows complicate summertime. “I was almost ready. Now this whole eye is ruined.”
“You could’ve just let me do it from the beginning.” Blue, perched between Gansey and the mirror, complicates makeup application. Mostly because she has sweat on her temples and upper lip, and the juxtaposition of her mold-colored skirt and dark legs makes Gansey wonder about the texture of Blue’s tongue. “But you said no. And now you must deal with the consequences of your hubris.”
“I am excellent at makeup application, thank you very much.”
“So this is like, a Scarface look?”
Gansey has to pinch Blue’s mouth shut to stop her laughing at her own joke.
“You can’t even see, anyway!” Blue says. Knocking their foreheads together, in her gravest tone, “I will be your hands. I will be your eyes.”
They look at each other in silence for an anxious moment.
Just as Blue seems ready to apologize, fiddling with the drape of Gansey’s visiting family patola saree, Gansey bursts into laughter. The hooting sort she can’t hold back. She runs her fingers all over Blue’s responsorial smile like digging into a song.
“Fuck,” says Ronan. “Shit.”
“Don’t look at me,” says Noah.
“She’ll blame whoever she wants for her mistakes, as long as it isn’t her,” says Blue.
“Any one of you could’ve stopped her,” says Henry.
“You could’ve, too,” Noah notes.
“I certainly could not have,” says Henry. “In what way would that have benefited me?”
“It’s almost a modern art piece,” says Blue. “A declaration on what happens when dyslexia is ignored by teachers and parents.”
“Fuck off,” says Ronan. She’s of the pale ilk capable of blushing from hairline to navel and, though she wears a bandana over her nose, with her shirt so open and her pants so low on her narrow hips, most of that furious crimson is visible. Henry occasionally wants to pick her teeth with Ronan’s spinal column. “Will someone start fucking covering it up.”
Henry snags the joint from Noah and smokes deeply. She unfurls, a moon-blossom, and saunters to grab the paint canister from Ronan’s fist. It’s a nice midnight blue, deep trench. She shakes it, starting to smile as it rattles, then sprays. It takes a few layers to block out Ronan’s lethal yellow accents, but it’s a good base. A practical, workable design.
Blue shoves up next to her, wiping sweaty palms on destroyed overalls. “Me next.”
She adds pink, noxious pink, and something takes shape.
Noah takes the joint, almost to the roach, and swings her arm in wide arcs, adding green.
“Now you go, Ronan,” Noah says softly, and Ronan kicks her for being kind. “Ow! Ow!” They scuffle, Ronan with one of Noah’s pig-tails in her fist, Noah trying to dig a knee into Ronan’s ribs. “Ronan!”
“Children,” Blue mutters. Henry pointedly does not look at Blue’s lady bug-patterned galoshes. “Ronan, hurry up, my finger is going numb.”
“I don’t see you stepping up to fill it in,” Ronan snarls. Then, “Fuck!” as Noah taps her balls.
Henry moves gravely forward. The area is not huge: it’s a one-word space, Monmouth’s dumpster. But Henry has an image, and Ronan is not the only one who sees things and makes them real.
“I’m glad you got me into this,” Blue says, admiring their work. “Tagging. It’s the perfect intersection of my interests.”
“I thought so, too,” Henry says, pride lifting her chin.
When Gansey is away, when Adam is working, there is very little else for them to do.