Archive of Our Own

“Wake up,” Blue whispers, lips ghosting the shell of Gansey’s ear.

He blindly swings an arm out, a willow wind-caught, and tugs her down onto him by the crook of his elbow. She huffs as their chests thump, then presses a hand over his mouth and kisses it.

“I wasn’t asleep,” he says needlessly into her palm. “Where are you.” Eyes still closed, he gropes to catch her cheeks between his fingers. He squishes them; she obligingly makes a fart noise with her lips. “Come comely,” he murmurs, a little delirious. A strand of her hair pokes up his nose; he sneezes with a glorious flail. “Come Bluely. Closer, ever closer.” He noses her throat, searching pup. “And into the breach.”

“Keep your hands away from my breach,” Blue says, “we’re meant to leave in an hour.”

“Life, I say, is the pits,” he sighs. He opens his eyes. With only one hour to enjoy Blue’s all, he plans to take advantage of every second. So he raspberries her cheek, and he nudges the crown of her head, and he twists one of her springy, short curls around his finger. There is so much to touch. This moment is so nice. It is almost like before. “Good morning, dear.”

“Good morning, dear,” she replies. “Can I turn off your funny frequencies?”

The funny frequencies are Maura’s fault. Gansey now cannot sleep without them. They make his head quiet like Blue’s warmth curled at his back. By morning’s light, however, the sound makes his skin crawl. “Yes, dear.”

“Get up,” she reminds him. She plants a hand over his cheek and kisses it, his jaw and kisses it, his brow and kisses it. When he is thoroughly not-kissed, she rises, pulls the taped-down blackout fabric off the section of Monmouth’s fractalized face which gapes directly behind Gansey’s bed, and squirms her way into a pair of Gansey’s cargos and a ragged-cuffed zip-up. Gansey satisfies himself watching this, wiggling his toes and absent-mindedly scratching under his boobs.

“Do you reckon Ronan will be ready on time?” Gansey asks. “Never mind. That was a silly question. He will, indubitably, not be.” He rises, stretches with a mewl, and breathes through the chill of Monmouth’s floor on the pads of his feet. “Remind me why we invite him places?”

“Because you love his tiny ass and his funny ears?” Blue says.

“Ah, right. I almost forgot.”

She hucks a rugby shirt at him. It lands on his head; the world goes dark and cottony and purplish. He wrenches it off and drops it to the floor. It is not right today. She hums, opens another of his frankly disastrous drawers, and holds up a t-shirt Gansey got at a local wholesale outlet. It has an awful tag at the neck. She tries a henley he has worn half to death. The fabric is nearly translucent at the elbows. He looks at her. She knows him so very well.

“Want my yogurt bits?” she says.

He looks at her some more.

She gives a sly quirk of the lip, then magpies to the kitchen-bathroom, hip-swish and tuneless hum. Monmouth is golden-yellow where she steps.

“What are you up to?” Ronan says.

“Mm, nothin,” says Matthew.

The line is quiet.

“What will you be up to?” Ronan tries.

“Probly more nothin. Why?”

“No reason,” Ronan snaps. His bounce-back paddle ball hits him square in the nose then bobs like a corpse on its string. “Fuck and shit.”

“Do you got any more questions for me?” says Matthew edgily.

“You freak,” Ronan says. “You have plans? You said you’re up to nothin.”

“I’m holding in a poop right now, man. I’m turtling.”

“Aw, fuck,” Ronan says foully and hangs up the call. That serves him right. He uses his phone, especially to call either of his kinsmen, he hears about bowels. That’s all life is to the polar brothers Lynch: a hopscotch from one shit to the next. What misery.

Ronan tries at the paddle ball a little longer. Then he throws it harshly across the room. It smacks into one of his dresser drawers, which pops wide open, stoppered by a crush of hueless fleece and cotton.

Ronan sits up, arms crossed over his chest. He cannot speak to Matthew about any of this, but he hoped to speak to Matthew about anything but this. Now he is left with his head. With the reality of old Vic Frankenstein. How does God forgive himself when his creation hates him so rightfully.

He buries his face under a pillow. Without Declan pattering, Matthew breakdancing in the loft, cows hemming and hawing, the twitter of dreamt insects and jewel-toned birds swarming, the Barns yawn.

Gansey is waiting for him. He will not go.

Music will hurt. Sleep will hurt. This hurts, too.

Penance, that is.

Blue does not worry when Gansey falls quiet; a part of her sort of gets it. The rest of her does not, but she has never feared the unknown. How she loves to jump deeply into it with two feet and no chute. How she loves not knowing, and how she loves the satisfaction of coming to know. How she loves being alive, most especially in moments like these: with one hand in Gansey’s ass pocket.

“It’s sort of like awe,” she says, shoving her shoulder into his. The tomb-blue morning casts Gansey’s eyes into space. “Do you feel like you get it now? Can we… stop?”

A shake of the head, nearly imperceptible.

“But you understand, now,” Blue says. “You’ve seen it. Last week, it was four years old. The week before, it was—what, eight decades? Nine? This one is seventeen years old. Like us, har har. Um, sorry. That wasn’t funny.”

“Ha,” Gansey says, “ha.”

“Hey, there you are.” Blue pokes the corner of his mouth. She accidentally smears dirt there. “Whoops.” She sleeves it off.

“I can’t stop,” Gansey says. “Anyway, it’s just bones.”

When Blue found out, she made him careful. She researched first. No flowers, no pruning of weeds, or maybe let’s try a family that moved away. Young and barren stones are good, too.

“It’s—well,” Blue says. There are many uses for bones. Persephone would assert as much. “It’s just this feels an awful lot like something Nick Cave would write about.”

“I don’t understand,” Gansey says.

“Yes,” says Blue, “that seems to be the crux of this whole—thing.”

“I don’t understand yet,” Gansey says. He squats beside the open ground, fingering the edge of the pit. Detritus pings onto the shined wood below them. “I thought this time… but no.”

“I don’t think this will help it make sense,” Blue says carefully. “What happened to you is quite different.”

“Because I came back?” Gansey says.

“Yes,” she replies. “Because you came back.”

“I need to understand,” Gansey says. “Blue.” He grabs her ankle clumsily; the stiff material of her galosh contorts into a frown.

“I know you do,” she says. She tilts her face back to the sky. Its return gaze is heavy with judgment, oranged at the edges with time. “Okay, Gansey.” As long as this remains harmless. The thump of his boots on the lid of the casket and the scrape of his shovel, wet earth heady and hypnotizing, a trowel, a bundle of yellow chrysanthemums. The Pig hiccuping away, no one wiser. Absolutely no one wiser. She drops a hand on his head. He leans into it with palpable relief. “Are you done today?”

“Yes, okay,” he says. “Thank you for accompanying me. Your presence is a salve. Or—a weight, to balance a scale.”

“Okay, Gansey,” she says. “Let’s fill the grave back up now, okay?”

“Okay,” he says.

He stands. Together, they scrape the dirt back into place. Blue brings the shovels to the car while Gansey plants his flowers—an exchange, or a thanks, or balancing a scale.

He gets his hands on the Pig’s steering wheel and his hiking boot on the pedal. Her knee knocks steadily into the passenger door, the tulle layers of her skirt spilling over the edge of the seat.

“Pancakes?” he suggests.

“Sure,” she says.

The car coughs, then growls. The pebbled road grumbles to be disturbed at their heels.

The pancakes are good. Lots of syrup. Pecans. Cooked apples. He holds her hand under the table. She smooshes her shoes onto his.

It’s a nice date.

“What are you staring at?” Adam says without looking across the table at Gansey.

The truth is he’s looking at the white half-moons under Adam’s thumbnails. “The strange way you peel an orange,” says Gansey.

“I want the rind off in one piece.” Adam’s gaze meets his, then. “You eating?”

“Not hungry,” Gansey says. But when Adam holds a fruit segment out to him, he acquiesces so their fingertips can touch.

“You’d think magical rebirth might muddle your metabolic harmony,” Henry says, dropping his lunch tray on the table with a smack and rattle, “but Gansey seems proof otherwise.”

“Gansey’s metabolic harmony is an exposé in the intricacies intrinsic to a good piece of magic, in fact.” With juice-shiny fingers, Adam twists the tiny gold hoop pierced through his earlobe. “You look exhausted, Henry.”

“Was up with the boy-king.” He knocks his knee into Gansey’s. Gansey knocks his back, lips quirking. “Miniature models of one’s adopted mothertown are not rebuilt overnight, silly Parrish.”

“Henry is good at gluing,” Gansey says.

“Henry is excellent at gluing,” Henry corrects, gesturing with a limp pizza stick, “and pasting, and deciding which decorative craft scissors will give the closest effect of Fox Way’s wily winding ivy.”

“He showed me how to make—” Gansey mimes the motion with pinched fingers, “—fortune tellers, the folded paper ones.”

Adam sucks citrus juice off his thumb, pink lips pursed like an aging scar. “Lay it on me.”

Gansey pulls one he made in Stats out of his pocket and passes it over. Adam’s peaked hands are all bones and rugged avenues towards the campaniles of knowing. He asks Gansey for a color, a number. Gansey gives them. He asks for Gansey’s hand, and Gansey gives that too. Adam closes his eyes and presses his thumbs into Gansey’s palm. He pulls Gansey’s arm straight out, rests his chin against Gansey’s knuckles. The bob of his throat as he swallows christens Gansey’s static fingers.

“Got it,” says Adam.

His eyes open and his hands flex; he pulls up a tab and bestows Gansey’s fortune with the grandeur of fanfare: “Life, it reads,” and his brows, his tone, fall, “will end, and end, and then what?” He opens another tab. Another.

“No use,” Henry says. “They all say the same thing. He’s made—how many, Gansey?”

“Fourteen,” says Gansey, retrieving his hand from Adam’s and knuckling his glasses higher.

“He’s made fourteen since last night,” Henry says, “and every window of every one says the same thing.” He rakes a pizza stick through chunky marinara. It bends limply, flops as he raises it to his open mouth. Gansey wishes to neaten Henry’s tie.

Adam rolls a sad, small apple between his palms. “Is that so.”

“Keeps the hands busy,” Gansey says. “You’d know about that.”

“Maybe Maura should take you in, next. Give you some real training.”

“His fortunes have got good bones.”

“Sure, I mean, sure, no one can tell him this is wrong, per se.”

“Concerning, sure—”

“Sure.”

“—but wrong, no, not really.”

“Not really.”

“Are Cheng’s tits so enthralling? Gansey.”

He looks at Adam. “I wasn’t—I was looking at—”

“No matter. Leer to your heart’s content,” Henry says, shifting his boobs with two flattened palms. Marinara leaves a dark stain on his nylon jacket. “Cheng is free real estate for now but you’re my favored potential tenant.”

“Don’t tell Blue,” Adam says lightly.

“Jealousy is a terrible look on you, Parrish,” Henry says. “Gansey likes your knockers just fine.”

“I don’t discriminate,” Gansey says. “I like all knockers fine. Adam’s are a stand-out, sure.”

“Well, shucks,” says Adam. He gives Gansey his Aglionby-supplied cup of steamed corn like they’re flirting on the playground, dodging the tetherball to make eyes at each other around the pole, ducking swings, coming across the monkey bars from opposite ends to meet in the middle.

“Lame,” says Henry.

But it gets Gansey to eat some of the corn, so. Moot.

“Help me?” Adam says. “Ronan. Ronan. Ronan. Ronan.”

“Fuck off,” Ronan whines, smothering his face under a pillow. “Parrish, Mary and Joseph.” Adam does not grace this with a response; instead he yanks the blanket off Ronan’s bed. Ronan swears vigorously and shudders with cold. “How’d you get here? Did you drive Shitbox in the fucking hail, Adam. Look me in the eye. Did you drive Shitbox in the hail, Adam.”

Adam continues not answering. He does it well, a jaunty whistle just slipping onto his breath, neatening stacks of CDs and boxes of unused pens.

“You need me to dream something,” Ronan deduces.

“It’s, comparatively, a benign ask,” says Adam.

“This time.”

“This time. Ha. Yeah, this time it’s benign.”

“You know I’m not doing that anymore. Not by choice, anyway.”

“Dreaming?” Adam says. “Jesus, Ronan.”

“Would Doctor Frankenstein build the beast twice?”

Adam throws a balled-up takeout bag at Ronan’s head. “In what world is any Gansey capable of being a monster?”

Adam can hear the words perched flighty on Ronan’s tongue, so he throws an Ugg slipper next. Ronan bats it out of the air glaringly.

“He’s Gansey,” Adam says. “He’s—he’s still Gansey.”

“A mask,” Ronan says, “doesn’t change what you are underneath it.”

Adam rubs a hand over his mouth. “Will you just stop being Catholic about all this for five minutes.”

“I wouldn’t know how,” Ronan says. “You try to stop being a beaten kid, stop knowing how to make a car purr, stop blinking twice in a row, stop skipping the last step. Stop loving like a briefcase. Stop boiling your eggs ‘til they taste like Play Doh.”

With a sigh, Adam sits on the edge of Ronan’s mattress. He takes Ronan’s foot into his lap and holds it, feeling helpless.

“What do you want me to dream you, anyway,” Ronan says dismissively, which means something along the lines of anything, just say it, I’ll try.

“No,” says Adam demurely, “it was selfish of me to ask. After everything you’ve been through.”

“Yeah, Sherlock,” Ronan says, “so what is it?”

Adam retrieves the tossed blankets and crawls up the bed into Ronan’s arms. It is a nice place to be, a cave of body-warm comforter perfumed with soap bar. The freckles that pattern Ronan make for nice stargazing. Adam traces a finger over a triangle of them, again and again, and wishes for a weak moment this was the sort of conversation that could segue into putting his mouth there. “Gansey needs to sleep. I see the irony in asking.”

“He won’t take a pill.”

“I’ll drop it in his drink.”

“Your plan is to roofie Gansey? Man, that’s fucked up.”

“Then dream up something wonderful,” Adam says. “Something Gansey could never turn away.”

“Who knows what this Gansey likes,” says Ronan.

“He likes you,” says Adam. He shuts his eyes. To think on his best friend this way. “Or he would, if you’d let him.”

Ronan says nothing.

“He likes the Pig,” Adam says. “He likes his crafts. He likes to use the rowing machines in the weight room. He likes history class and Celebrity Jeopardy and Sucrets, Ronan, I wish you’d just give him a chance to show you—”

“I can’t stomach it,” says Ronan. “How could I look him in the face again.”

“With conviction,” says Adam, pushing up onto an elbow, “knowing you did your best.”

Ronan says nothing, but his eyes are red and bright. His mouth contorts as he breathes in low and out through his nose. They both know. Ronan’s best wasn’t good enough. Not for either of them, anyway.

“What’s left of Gansey,” says Ronan, “when you fuck up his soul? All he always was was spirit. He was a bitch, he was catty, he was fucking Excalibur. He was—fuck. Fuck.”

Adam drags the heel of his hand under Ronan’s eyes, then dries his palm on the sheets. “We owe it to what’s left of him. And maybe if he could sleep—if he could be healthy, if he could relax—more of him could… come to the surface.”

“Like oil on stock,” says Ronan. “Curds from whey.”

“I don’t think we can skim off the newnesses quite that easily,” Adam says.

“You’re good at pretending. Maybe he should try. You could teach him how he was.”

“Didn’t you just say something about masks? Stop musing. You need like an evil cat to pet when you muse. Doctor Doom.”

“Fuck. Fuck it all.”

“Just try,” Adam says. “That’s all I can ask.”

Ronan studies him. It still makes Adam want to squirm. But he can’t help himself from touching Ronan’s bare shoulder, the corner of his jaw. His wimpy peach fuzz.

“You make me crazy,” Ronan says, lips catching on Adam’s thumb. He takes it between his teeth. Adam swears delightedly. “Knock it off. Mm. You’ll stay?”

“I’ll stay,” Adam confirms.

“You’ll tire me out so I can sleep good?” Ronan says.

A grin crawls across Adam’s face. “Well, gee,” he says. “I’ll sure do my best.”

The kettle shrieks; Blue startles violently, nearly upending her stool, but catches herself on the edge of the dining table.

“Fruity,” Calla chants, “fruity, fruit-y, fruit-y!”

“Footy,” Maura counters, “footy, foot-y, foot-y!”

They yell over each other while Blue pours out three large mugs of boiled water. She infuses hers and Calla’s with a sweeter blend, deigns to drop a hideously mulchy bag in her mother’s, and they all sip together, only after clinking the rims of their cups. With Maura and Calla spread across the mismatched couch and loveseat, Blue stakes her claim on the edge of the coffee table, burying her nose in the sweet steam. Peach and berry, lemon and ginger and something like dew. Picking at a punch bowl full of leftover Halloween candy, the distant sound of Orla’s hicksville country music playing with the curled edges of their psyches, Calla reads Maura’s palms and Blue reads a book for class.

She flips pages, skims passages, blinks, coffin. New chapter, sticky note, she’s ready to annotate, she gets the pen in hand, she’s drawn a tombstone. A crypt. A mausoleum shelf. Altar, offering, shovel struck through stiff earth, mums wilting miserably.

“Your fate line is a fate curlicue,” says Calla. “It looks like Russian cursive.”

“It’s psychedelic, right,” Maura grins around a cream soda sucker.

Calla tosses Maura’s hand down. “Not the word I would choose.”

“No?”

“No.”

“What would—?”

“—I choose? Bungled. Flubbed. Loused up, screwed, piffled—”

Blue shoots to her feet. “Can I borrow the car? Please. Pretend I said please sooner, pretend I said it three times. Four, even.”

Maura frowns, then tosses some Tootsie Roll fruit chews at her. “Cheer up, Charlie.”

“I just,” Blue says, peeling the vanilla one she caught, “have something to check.”

“You know where the keys are,” says Calla with a shrug. Blue is half-gone by the time she adds, “Keep your fog lights on, be careful of deer,” and something about the dangers of sitting too close to the steering wheel which the creak and slam of the front door muffles.

He is not at Saint Agnes. He is not at Catherine of Siena, Lady of Sorrows, or Saint Joe’s. Pulled over beneath a sputtering street lamp, she scours an aged map, tracing her finger along country roads and brooks and highways. She swipes frustrated tears away, shoves the car into drive, and goes on, just looking, just instincts. It’s an hour until she sees the beacon of light pointed at a moldering sign: ANTHONY THE GREAT WILL / SHEPHERD YOU / TOWARDS KNOWLEDGE.

She wrenches the steering wheel and nearly flips to avoid the curb. She curses violently, clapping a hand over her mouth, and cries harder as she shakily pulls into the lot, where the Pig sits like an expectant dog, what took you so long?

She throws herself out of the car. Runs behind the church, tossing a limp wooden gate aside because she sees his silhouette, the absence of light. Bone is ultrawhite under a late-November sky like this one.

“Gansey,” she calls, voice breaking. “What have you done.”

“Jane,” he says without looking. “Thank you for coming.”

She mops her eyes. “Ut incepit fidelis sic permanet.”

His cheek curves with an absent smile. “Adam taught you that.”

“He did,” she says. “Gansey?” He looks at her, and the lenses of his glasses are pitch. “What have you done?”

He puts down the bone in his hand—a long one, something from the leg. “Looking,” he says. “No—rather, learning. You can come closer, we don’t have to yell across this—”

“Graveyard,” Blue says. “Gansey, you dug up a grave and you opened the coffin.”

“It took a few tries,” Gansey says, “but I found an unsealed one eventually. This place is properly old so it was just a matter of perseverance. Then I had to gauge: old enough to be bones, not enough to be dust and grave wax.”

Blue finds her legs beneath her and stumbles over the loose, damp earth to Gansey’s side. A drizzle more like a fog dampens her coat and his glasses. She looks into the wide, jagged hole, into the coffin, at the remains. Gansey is handling another limb, skin pulled tight over hands she had not realized are skinnier than they once were. His touch is satin.

“We have to go home now,” Blue says. She mops her nose on her sleeve. “It’s cold and your jacket is real thin. It’s late and we’ve got school in the morning. It’s a body and you moved it from its resting place.”

“I’ll put it back,” Gansey says. “Would you like to wait in the car?”

“No, I’ll stay,” she says, because it is preferable to him pocketing a finger.

She stays longer than he does, actually, with a palm on the tombstone after they have filled the hole. After Gansey leaves his yellow chrysanthemums. 1878-1945.

“Sorry,” she whispers, and shudders. Chill after chill passes over her. She retrieves her hand before she accidentally calls a ghost forth. “Sorry,” she says, and hurries to the Pig, where Gansey is closing the trunk over his shovel and gear. “Come to Fox Way for the night. Please.”

Gansey frowns. “But I’m a boy.”

“You’re my boy.”

“Where will I sleep?”

“Next to me.” She hiccups; he goes to wipe her face, then stops, distracted by his own dirty hand, like he forgot.

“Okay, Jane,” he says. “It’s alright, you know. I’m not sad tonight. I like to learn.”

“And what did you learn? Gansey.”

He rubs mud from between two fingers onto his cargo pants. “I learned about the great equalizer,” he says, refreshed. “I wonder if I could die.”

“Okay,” Blue says, “okay. Please get into my car. We’ll come get the Pig tomorrow. Is that okay?”

“Sure. I enjoy watching you drive.”

“Okay. I’m glad. Please let’s go.”

“It’s something about the way you tilt your head just so and lean back into the seat.”

“Okay, Gansey.”

“I’ve kept talking. I’m sorry, let’s away. You must be tired.”

“You too,” she says. “You must be beat.”

“On the contrary.” He smiles with many teeth. “I’ve never been so alive.”

He fiddles with the radio while she drives. Her jaw grinds to the tune of Fleetwood Mac, Justin Timberlake, Madonna, the showtune station, The Fray. Tightness radiates from her driving hip. Each stray beam of light drags her eyes from the pavement. Every catch of her tires on the shoulder makes her flinch.

They hit a deer turning onto Fox Way.

She screams. He doesn’t move a muscle. The car jerks, and the deer runs, limping.

The headlights flicker, one cracked. Blue white-knuckles the steering wheel.

“Are you alright?” Gansey asks.

“No,” she sobs. “I hit a deer.”

“I know.”

“How could I be alright. Nothing is alright.”

“Objectively that is incorrect,” Gansey says, nudging his glasses higher. “I do, however, recognize that there is now deer hide caught in your grille.”

“Can you tell my mom?” she says miserably.

“Yes, Jane,” he says. She is finally able to drive the last half mile home. “You just go on up to bed now.”

In this dark, she can pretend to know him. “Thanks.”

He touches her hand. She squeezes his back, then drags herself out the car, up the stairs, past Maura and Calla watching movies in the dim den, Orla’s head in the latter’s lap. She ignores their inquiries. She goes into the bathroom, strips, and showers. Then she sits on the closed toilet lid with a towel under her pits and cotton t-shirt in a cone over her creamed-up hair.

Gansey soon comes to find her. He closes the door behind him. “Maura says she’s just happy we’re safe.”

“I knew she would,” says Blue.

“Calla said she told you so.”

“I knew she would.”

“She also said I look like a corpo-seco, whatever that means.”

“Ha,” says Blue, “ha. Oh, please don’t ask.”

He shrugs, then strips, dropping his pants to the tiled floor, his shirt, binder, boxers. He climbs into the shower; she watches him rinse his hair, his face, soap his body, sniff her conditioner and prod at Jimi’s many unlabeled bottles.

When he gets out, he shakes his hair like a dog. He drapes the towel Blue offers around his waist. Then he takes both hands to the bundle on her head, looses it, and lightly runs the opened fabric over her curls, drying.

With half-hearted pomp, he shakes the t-shirt out, then drapes it over her shoulders. He uses a corner of it to pat her eyes and catch a drip off the edge of her jaw. “All done,” he says.

She tugs him onto her lap, side-saddle, and wraps her arms around him tightly. One of his hands finds her neck and rests there. The other fiddles with the lobe of one of her ears.

They brush their teeth. She melts estradiol under her tongue. They retire to bed, him in sweatpants borrowed from Orla, her in boxers and socks and misery in a cape at her heels, catching on her shoulders, knees, hips as she climbs under the sheets. Blue has never been one for discontent.

But Gansey, beside her, flat on his back with chin to the ceiling, seems built for it. The sallow dip of his cheeks. The craters his eyes hide in. Unsleeping, not attempting.

She thinks he is extinguished. She thinks this is their fault, all of theirs. She thinks they are torturing him.

She grabs his phone from the nightstand. She turns on his funny frequencies.

With one of his hands skimming through her hair, she falls uneasily into sleep, where even in dreams she is only selfish, selfish.

Saint Agnes is not a particularly large church, nor is it particularly lavish.

The white marble statues, shallowly-carved and vague-featured, watch Gansey as he pads behind the back pews from one end of the hall to the other. Momentarily taken with the knowing flint of tabernacle raised on altar platform, Gansey pauses, one hand limp on the wooden bench nearest to him, the other buried in the pocket of his rain parka. Time clicks at the rate of water slicking down the column of his coat to rest on the tiles.

Then he returns to motion, released.

He treks up the narrow, creaking staircase and knocks twice on the wall at the top.

Adam opens the door with his brows low. He is not surprised. “Hi.”

“Ostensibly Ronan sees me as an unholy horror which is why he won’t talk to me,” Gansey says.

Adam steps aside, gesturing with a resigned sweep for Gansey to enter.

The room is peculiarly arranged with neat, pressed bedsheets and piles of Quaker Chewy Bar wrappers on all surfaces. Adam is peculiarly arranged in a denim shirt with corduroy at the collar and elbows and a hat like Holden Caulfield’s, only lavender.

Gansey strides to the small window at the far wall and looks onto the church grounds, sodden and limp beneath the pounding rain. A single street lamp paints a perfect orb of light like a bittersweet song, like a yellow bud.

Gansey whips around, smile in place. “What are we up to?”

Adam blinks slowly. “Nothing.”

“Nothing?” Gansey turns back to the window and squeezes the sill bracingly, the divots and edges of the crowned design digging into his palms. “Nothing, he says.”

“Why, what are you up to?” says Adam. “Gansey?”

Gansey faces Adam, then seizes his spindly hands. “Nothing, dear boy. I’m up to nothing at all.”

“When did your nails get dirty like that?” Adam asks. “And your—palms, and your clothes, Gansey.”

Gansey considers Adam, which is to say he considers phonies.

“Kick rocks, Holden,” he says. He hugs Adam tightly, so briefly that Adam does not have a chance to push him off, then storms out the door and down the stairs and onto the church grounds, where rain pings off his glasses and soaks his hair through. November coaxes white from his mouth and sets his roots trembling.

“Gansey,” Adam calls. He has wrenched his window open and hangs half out of it. The sodden slope of his hat is sapped of color by the street lamp. “I’m not scared of you.”

Gansey presses a fist over his heart. He blows a smacked kiss upwards; it hits a crosswind and is caught just in time by Adam, reaching, haloed by soft yellow and speared through by the jutted steeple.

Gansey has never been much for solitude.

In fact, he crossed the world in an effort to escape it.

Someone like him. A king of kings, a death-defyer. A sleeper.

He hadn’t realized then that he is the sleeper. That his eyes would soon open to a world unrecognizable. That he would go to school and study for AP Human Geography and come home to make boxed mashed potatoes and cough up tiny pink buds shaped like screaming then scour the internet to know, ah, yes, the Eastern Redbud is in fact native to Virginia. To prod the blood-sodden petals and recognize them from hikes through Cabeswater.

He was dead. He is now past death and truly one with this place.

“Really,” he says, walking faster, but Henry keeps pace well, elbows stuck out like bumpers, “you don’t have to hang to me every second of the day. Oh, Lord, excuse him.”

Henry does not pause to pick up the freshman he has decked. “I’m not hanging. We’re friends, yes? You volunteered to be my friend, knowingly. Now you must reckon with the consequences.”

“I don’t mean you specifically.” Gansey stops at his locker. “Excuse me,” he says to the couple sharing spit against it. Once they move, hardly separated, Gansey fiddles the dial of his lock. “Does no one fear the spread of germs through human saliva? Anyway, I mean all of you. Blue, Adam. Well, I just mean Blue and Adam and you, but that’s neither here nor there.”

“You’re our friend,” Henry says, leaning against the locker beside Gansey’s. With his typically-jubilant hair dangling dejectedly into his eyes, a crooked tie, and one strange but purportedly fashionable sneaker untied, he is in more disarray than Gansey has yet to see him.

“But I’m the clinger,” Gansey says, opening his locker to hide Henry’s exhaustion before he does something like push Henry’s hair behind his ears or loop a finger in his waistband. Stranger he may be, but some part of him remembers being a teenage boy. “It’s me who visits Adam at the garage, who holds to your sleeve in the hallway. I buy Blue scraps of fabric from the craft store. I invite you all with me to the grocery and—and wherever. The woods. To get cream soda. To the library.”

Henry seems not to know how to answer this, but his eyes are smoldering when Gansey peeks around the locker door at him.

“Just,” says Henry, “can you trust us? Can you trust that we want what’s best for you?”

“Yes,” Gansey says immediately. Then he thinks. “Yes,” he says again.

“So come play Smash with me,” Henry says.

“Fine,” Gansey replies, because he hates a fight.

He is thusly passed from keeper to keeper, unwilling rugby ball in the match of life. To Fox Way to braid bracelets with Orla. To Koh’s away game with Henry (and for gelato with the team after they lose). To Saint Agnes to study cell respiration with Adam. To Nino’s to beat a level of Super Mario DS for Blue while she works. To Henry’s bed, where he ends up folding a truly monstrous pile of Henry’s laundry. Dog-walking with Blue. To a college fair with Adam. To cook kala chana for Henry’s stoned roommates.

He does not see Ronan because Ronan hates him now. He pretends this is not killing him by letting Adam help him build the Barns out of cereal boxes and cardboard trays which once held the pounds of pears he bought from a local orchard. Between the lot of them, they ate half or so. Maura, Calla, and Jimi cooked up another quarter into pear preserves and almond cakes. But the last bunch moldered in a bowl on the dining table for weeks before someone, likely Adam, caved and threw them away.

Gansey likens himself a fine pretender. He wears a good and cheery face. Then he goes to graveyards at night, rattles the locks of crypts and wanders through the rows of dead infants, thinks about the dead grandparents, forgotten lineages, coats of arms on stone, families he knows, how many he never will. He thinks about Maura and Blue sitting on a short wall, asking names of shades and fingerprints, and making lists. He thinks of spindly boughs as November turns to December and the last lingering jack-o-lanterns gnarl with rot, the street cats start to hide, Virginia gets an early snow-coat. He thinks about all the afterlife stories he reads, and he thinks about this.

He hides beneath his bed. It is a long time before Blue finds him.

“Gansey.” She lays flat on her stomach to see him.

“I want to be alone.”

Blue says, “No you don’t.”

Gansey says, “Mens regnum bona possidet.” Then he says, “I need to die properly.”

“You don’t.”

“I need to know.”

“Come out from under the bed.”

“My existence is a mistake.”

“Come out, please.”

He does, to satisfy her. She plucks dust clumps from his hair and his sweater. She blows some off his nose. With her so close, Gansey can count her curly eyelashes and feel the seismic quiver of her lip.

“Don’t,” he says gently.

“I won’t,” she says, and tilts their foreheads together. She smells so like candles and cold mornings, like fruity tea and jam, and his hands skim her waist, up to hold her ribs. Hers find the skin beneath his jaw, fingers creeping towards his ears. And he wants her with such devastating, immediate clarity that he crawls closer, onto her hips, and lowers her to the floor, one hand cushioning her skull, one tightening on her waist. “Gansey, oh,” she says, and their noses hook like they’re going to, so she turns her head, so he drags his chin to her throat where his breath alone makes her buck, one leg hitched up, one locked with his.

“Damn,” he breathes, hands all over her. “Damn it all. Blue.”

Her palms are hot under his shirt, feeling up the length of him, a naturalist studying. Her fingers dip under his waistband and deeper. His ride the hills of her thighs down to where she’s hard and she curses brokenly, head thrown back against the floor.

“Gansey,” she gasps.

“I want your mouth,” he says, and realizes he’s crying. “I need to kiss you. Blue.”

She cradles his head with both arms. He tries to steady his breath into her safe neck, and she whispers, a lullaby, “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.”

“I know,” he says. He collects himself, grip skipping on every hitch of his breath. “I should never ask that. I’m sorry I did.”

It’s true they don’t know if her kiss can kill him again. It’s also true that Gansey wants for one truth more than the other.

“I can’t risk that,” she says. She smothers his brow with her palm and kisses her knuckles hard and long, like she hopes he can sort of feel it through all her layers of skin and stuff.

“I know,” he says.

Blue says, “I’m sorry.”

Gansey says, “Me too, Jane.”

What would Gansey prefer. This? This? he asks himself. A life of this.

All mistakes seem to do is twinge.

“Do you,” says Henry, “remember Noah?”

Gansey looks up from the ice cream shop in his hands. “I don’t think so,” he says, “Noah who?”

Henry puts his paintbrush down, careful not to smear purple onto the battered hardwood. “I remember him,” he says. “It’s a shame that it’s me who does, since I only knew him at his worst. Gansey, I’ve only known you at your worst. Have you ever thought that?”

“Yes,” Gansey says.

“You don’t need to know everything,” Henry says. “You’re scared. We are, too. Blindingly, shit-softeningly so.”

“How do you live with it?” Gansey asks. “How can you be scared like this and not… do something?”

“Like your mint?” says Henry. “Like your journal? Like keeping your hands busy?”

“But now,” Gansey says. “That was well and good before, but what is there for me now? That fear was,” he knuckles his glasses up, cocks his head, academic, “singular, or specific. This one is,” a more loose hand gesture, like forming a world between his palms, “existential.”

Henry considers himself. He also considers his hunt: for meaningful connection, for acceptance, which is to say for Gansey. “So you make yourself a rope.”

“A rope,” Gansey says. His paint-streaked hands sit palms up on either of his crossed knees. In the light casted by the shadeless lamp beside them, he is gilded. A memorial.

“Duh, a rope,” says Henry. “And you use it to climb above the fear. And when you are good and high up, you gloat at the fear. Perhaps make scary faces at it. And more than that, you lean on the people you love. You’re honest with them. For me, that person was Marina Diamindis. I can tell from your expression you don’t know who that is.”

“I’m sure she’s lovely,” says Gansey.

Henry presses his ankle to Gansey’s. “You have to let the people who love you help you.”

Gansey says, “You love me?”

Henry says, indulgently, “I’m devoted to you, my liege.”

Gansey’s eyes are soft and bright like a treasured memory. “That doesn’t scare me. That is, I think—yes, it’s one of the few things in my life that doesn’t scare me at all.”

“So lean into it,” says Henry. “Lean into me.”

“And if I fall?”

Henry smiles slyly. “We’ve been in the pits together before. We’ll climb back out again.”

Gansey seems to consider this. When he scratches his jaw, he smears green paint there.

Then he returns to his ice cream shop.

Later, when Gansey has miraculously nodded off to The Monkees, Blue bustles into Monmouth with leftover pizza by the slice in a box and a truly inconvenient key ring exploding in her hand. Key after key pings to the floor and she flails to catch them on her long skirt, to turn the open carabiner skyward, to not drop the pizza, to curse as fluently as she can.

Henry helps: he saves the pizza.

“Fucker,” Blue grits, “cunt bag—”

“Gansey’s finally assed,” Henry warns.

“—butt face,” she hisses, craning hopefully to find Gansey’s eerily quiet form.

Henry bows his head in acknowledgement. “Did you get my Hawaiian?”

“Go choke. Yes, I got your Hawaiian.” Blue sits heavily on the ground, shifting the layers of crinkly fabric that collect around her to find the dozen variegated keys she’s lost.

“My dear magpie.” Once the pizza is safely on the pool table, he deigns to help her. “Work was wonderful, I take it?”

“Just peachy.”

“You are braver than any knight,” says Henry, gesturing with a bronze key, “any fabled heroine. You’re just like Joan of Arc.”

“Joan of Arc would’ve taken the torch out of her killer’s hands and said Allow me, if she had spent even one day working in the food service industry.”

Henry pushes a curl off Blue’s forehead. She looks up at him, all tired eyes and downturned lips.

“I’ll warm you a slice.” Henry takes her hand and presses keys into her palm, then closes her fingers around them. “Preference?”

“White with green stuff,” she says. He feels her eyes on him as he rises, as he ferries the pizza to the bathroom-microwave, as he paper-plates and paper-towels a feast for them to share.

They sit on the pool table to eat, one of her legs dangling over the edge. She hunches over her plate, hand below her chin to catch dripping cheese, there is grease on her cheek and mascara crumbling near her nose and Henry has much on his mind, so he has nothing worthwhile to say. Instead he speaks of his latest Call of Duty successes and asks her opinion on a pair of patchwork pants he wants to purchase on Etsy. He talks about Henry Two’s asphyxiation couture cologne and the weather in Burma and Blue is sucking oil off her thumb when Henry finally falls silent, watching her.

She pauses, finger in her mouth. Something sly curls around her lips. And so she knows.

“You smell like oregano,” Henry says.

“You smell like preschool crafts,” Blue says.

They bundle together on the couch, beneath a horrid throw blanket of Gansey’s that itches like purgatory or eczema or a dirty bus seat, hip to hip and knee to knee. He drops his head on her shoulder and they breathe off beat with Gansey’s restless whines. They watch him toss and snore. The Monkees sing about daydream believers and homecoming queens.

Blue says, “How do you make someone want to live?”

“We can’t even bring him to a shrink,” says Henry. “What if he’s like Ronan’s field of Camaros, or the nightmare bird things, or what if he’s all tree roots instead of veins and branches instead of bones?”

“Sometimes he seems so normal. Or—not normal, but Ganseylike.”

“Ah, to be Ganseylike,” Henry sighs. Blue runs fingers through the feathered ends of his hair; chills trash up his neck to meet her touch. “Bluebird, Blue’s Clues, Blue jeaned baby.”

“Henry,” she replies simply. It’s just as fond.

Eventually they sleep, laid out from either end of the couch. Henry doesn’t know what wakes Blue, but for him, it’s the acrid scent of paint. After he blinks his eyes open, knuckles them, stretches, he finds Gansey sitting right below them on the floor, coating his carefully-constructed church in a wash of black.

“Gansey-Man,” says Henry.

His movements are mechanical. Brush strokes up and down. There is nothing of him behind his eyes.

Blue slides to the floor beside him and holds his elbow. He does not stop painting. Henry sits at his other side, wraps an arm around his shoulders. He does not stop painting.

So they hold him through it. It seems all either of them can think to do.

Gansey has always and acutely known nothing can last forever.

When the groundskeeper catches him in a broken-locked crypt with shovel and pail by his feet, plyers and work gloves and a tire iron, swathes of soft fabric and a duffel bag for transport, in the middle of it all an open coffin, he thinks it is about time.

The man pauses to take in the scene.

Gansey considers what he should say. What he needs to say. And what the truth is. Some of these things rise to his mouth easier than others, out of habit.

But what he admits to the man is this: “I needed to understand.”

The groundskeeper tugs his collar. It strikes Gansey as an Adamish gesture. “This’ll be your kin then, boy?”

“They’re mine,” Gansey says. “They’re just like me.”

Gansey hates to leave the Pig in graveyard after graveyard, night after night, but when the groundskeeper offers to take Gansey home, to speak to his guardians, and then to forget this ever happened… well. Gansey has collected Ronan from the sheriff’s station enough times now that he knows this sentence is too kind.

They’re waiting at the door when the groundskeeper knocks.

Maura, Calla, Blue, Jimi, and Orla, that is.

Blue shepherds Gansey inside as the adults exchange low words. She helps unbutton his coat. She watches him line his top-siders neatly beside the avalanche of boots and sneakers by the door. When he straightens, she opens her mouth, then shuts it.

Opens it again, then turns on her heel, retreating to the kitchen.

“Come on,” Jimi says lowly, with a tap to Gansey’s elbow. “Into the living room.”

“I’m sorry for the trouble,” Gansey calls over his shoulder to the groundskeeper, whose returning look remains perturbed. Alarmed.

Jimi leads him into the living room, which is explosive with dangling beads and a massive signed poster of Vashti Bunyan. There are no lights on but many candles lit. One of the Grey Man’s records sits on the open player. Throw blankets are draped and woodland creature figurines watch him from trinket-crowded shelves and the TV murmurs with M*A*S*H*, all in medias res; time does not stop here. It flickers on and on, headstrong and righteous.

Orla has followed. Calla, too. Murmuring continues from the entryway.

Maura: his gilded guard. He thinks he should be miserable with guilt.

“Sit,” says Jimi. “Not there. There.”

Calla watches him sink into the couch, then pull his knees to his chest, her keen gaze cutting.

“You used to have fight,” she says. “You used to have grit. Now you are grit. Kicked off someone’s shoe. Left to get caught up in all the other grit and forgotten before you’re even of age.”

The front door shuts with a bang. Gansey closes his eyes. When looking into blackness, he hears the hush of wind in leaves.

“You were cuter when there was light in your eyes,” Orla agrees. She tilts his chin with two fingers, examining. “Without it, there’s nothing to make you different. You know? Like, you’re fine-looking and all, but there needs to be something unusual to make someone attractive. For you, it was that you seemed to love being alive or whatever. You were, like, jolly. Now what are you?”

“I’m claustrophobic,” Gansey says when Orla lounges too close. “Please can you keep your legs tucked in.”

“Gansey,” Blue calls from the kitchen. “C’mere.”

Maura and Blue wait like the face of Abu Simbel on their mismatched dining chairs. Nearly identical features, dark brown skin and one arched brow. Hands folded on the tabletop. With long white candles leaning crooked on burnished before them, with a lacy runner dripping over either end of the mahogany wood, they are present and future.

Gansey scratches his ear. Shifts his weight. Wrangles with the memories of himself. Scrapes for a scrap of himself to arrange his face into.

“Ah, shit,” Maura mutters. She drops her face into a hand. “Just… go to bed.”

“Mom!” Blue cries, dismayed.

“How can I lecture him? I’m not his mother. And he looks like a wet cat.”

“Oh my God.”

“It’s not the most illegal thing you’ve all done, when it comes down to it!” And to Gansey: “Were those really family of yours?”

“I never said they were. I said they’re like me.”

“He means dead,” says Blue edgily.

“Thanks, I couldn’t have deduced that alone,” Maura says. She takes Blue’s head in her hands and raspberries her crown. “Go clean up upstairs.”

“Gansey?” Blue says.

“I’ll follow,” he assures. “Just… a moment.”

As Blue heads upstairs, shooting looks over the banister at him all the while, Gansey pulls out the orange folding chair across Maura’s.

“I cannot thank you enough,” Gansey says, “or apologize so sincerely.”

“Where is your mother?” Maura says. Gansey drops his gaze to the table. “Your sister. Who is here for you?”

“I should be killed,” Gansey says. It’s incredible to him, the cutting precision with which it can be said. He looks at Maura directly. She is expressionless. “Shouldn’t I? Miss Sargent, something is awfully wrong with this. The sword of Damocles is hanging by a thread. I’m tired of waiting for it. I’d say it’s killing me but that would be too hopeful.”

She is no longer blank-faced. There is pity like pith and honey turning her mouth. “That is a very weighty thing to insist,” she says, “for a seventeen year old in slacks patterned with tiny lobsters.”

He looks at his khakis. He remembers liking them.

He stands. “It’s strange to me, how no one understands.”

“It’s strange to me,” she says, “how you’re running up every avenue you know, to everyone you love, and begging them to call you an alien. Why can’t you trust that you’re still you? Why can’t your view have changed, your point of perspective, but not you? Why are you acting like you’re nothing without your hunt?”

He wants her to stop.

“Why do you look a gift in its mouth,” Maura says, “and count its teeth?”

“I’m sorry,” Gansey says. Maura is looking at his hands; he self-consciously stops wringing the ends of his scarf between them. End this. End this. “I didn’t know who else to call tonight. But I won’t be a stray to you all.”

Maura looks at him for a long while, head cocked. She says, “I’m sorry the horrors of life have wounded you so deeply. Richard: You are no stray. You are where you’re meant to be. You just need practice. To lose your sea-legs.”

His eyes burn. He turns, blinking, and is certain when he looks back to her, gives her a curt nod, that his expression is smooth.

Blue is waiting for him at the top of the stairs. Furious. Which is something she has not been with him. Not of late.

“You don’t want to be a stray?” she says. “So call your old man and your dog. Pull your pack back together.”

Gansey thinks of dogs. Of him and Ronan and Parrish. Adam. Arm’s length.

“I,” says Gansey, dizzy, “cannot.”

“You want them,” Blue says. She clutches the banister, bloodless-knuckles. Gansey sees the wounded deer. The lurch of the car. “Go get them.”

“I’m sorry,” he says, “truly. I am so sorry for not being who you loved anymore.”

Her anger dies. It is colder here without it. “Do you miss being yourself?” she asks.

Gansey considers. “I miss myself how teachers must miss their old students. I think… I was a bird, always. Trapped in this body beside this self. And I always knew that young and sprightly me would leave the—” he drags a finger over his ribs, “—the nest, as it were.”

“No,” Blue says.

He looks at her.

“No,” she says again. “No, that’s not right. Why do you refuse to see reason? Silly question: because you’re Gansey. Still. Always.” She grabs his wrist with a warm hand. Her bracelets knock his ulna, and he reverberates. “I still see you, sometimes. When everything is quiet and you hum to yourself. When you do that funny swimming stretch for your shoulders. When you flourish like a lord while you do your buttons, I dunno, and when you grind your teeth like you think you’re chewing mint, when you doodle on your notes, when you hold my hand or do that stupid knuckle-touch with Adam or look at Henry like you want to eat him after he’s just about read your mind,” she cranes her head to meet his eyes as he ducks away, “I see you, Gansey. I see you in there. And like you’d do for any of us, I’m gonna stay. And I’m gonna make you feel safe and good and normal enough that I can coax you out again. Because you’re alive,” she folds him into her arms and he stoops there, hooking his chin over her shoulder, “and you deserve to be. And we’re glad you are. And we want you real bad. Okay? Gansey?”

“Okay, Blue,” he says, arms loose at his sides. “Whatever you say.”

Blue opens the door of Fox Way to a rain-soaked Henry.

He demands of her, “What will be left when Gansey goes?”

Lightning cracks behind him. They both startle, turning to face it; a curse tumbles over his lips.

She pulls him inside, shucks his coat, sits him down, has him pull off his sodden sneakers. He shakes delicately, struggling with the laces. She helps. She pulls off his socks, too. Carefully, touching his wrists, his elbows, his waist, his throat, removes his damp hoodie.

And his eyes are still wild, now hot. His hands are still trembling, now grasping.

So Blue kisses him.

What will be left when Gansey goes?

Us, she tells him, you and me. So they scramble up the stairs, her backwards, awkward with desperate craning, mouths pulling and pulling, his hand low on her back, hers crawling from throat to breast to waist, her foot catches on a step, Henry catches her with knee and banister and open arms.

They kiss into her bedroom. Into a bookcase, into an open closet door, and down onto her bed. He rips away to kick the door closed, and when he’s looking at her again, it’s an eclipse face, his hands on her cheeks, his smart mouth.

Every second of comfort, every quick phone call or drive-by, every quip and his hands teaching hers to play Xbox, hers guiding his across a skein of fabric, something she had convinced herself she couldn’t want for.

“Let me take care of you,” he says, breath hot on her throat. She thrashes beneath him, straining closer. “It’s you and me, Blue. The world will end and you and I will be left. That’s all we’ve ever learned. That we’re cockroaches. Or. Have you ever had a prickly pear?”

“Take my pants off.”

“Don’t mind if I do. That’s you in a nutshell, Blue Sargent. Under the skin, you’re all sweet.”

“Oh, God.”

He is fascinated by the starburst of black hair on her lower stomach. He leaves bruises along her thighs, her hips, and she burns, moaning, unable to look away from him. Unable to unlink her legs from his neck.

She thinks vaguely she should tease him. Who taught him to suck dick like this. Who’s he getting practice with. But there is no posturing here. For once, there is no sharp reply to be had.

When the wave has kissed the shore, and she has kissed him just as well, he wanders around her room, good and naked, dragging fingers over her art and her trinkets like assuring himself they’re here and he is, too. A suncatcher paints him a dozen colors, all of them light. He looks at her over his shoulder.

“Can I do something for you?” he asks.

“You just did,” says Blue. “Okay, sorry. Don’t put your shirt on! I’m sorry, Henry, what do you want to do for me? You are the drama.”

“I want,” he says valiantly, “to make something for you.”

He does put his shirt on, then, and Blue’s boxers, and marches bravely down the stairs without waiting for her to dress and follow.

When she finds him, he is sifting through their kitchen cabinets, legs and arms on display. Orla watches him approvingly. Blue shoos her, cackling like a carrion bird, away. This is a moment for her and Henry, and they will have it.

He puts things in a pot: dried kelp, headless dried anchovies. Parts of a green onion. The kitchen is perfumed with it—savory and deep. He hums a little as he cooks, wiggling his head to a tune that exists only between and behind his teeth. Blue cannot help going to him, catching him, and they dance, smiling into each other’s mouths. It is a perfect happiness, isolated to this small open space, framed by the yellow curtains knotted not to fall in the sink, the shiny red fridge, the black cat stalking across the counter to sniff at the rumbling pot.

When they have exhausted the tune behind Henry’s smiling mouth, Henry moves her under his arm, serves up some of his—“What is it called?”

“Yuksu,” he says. Blue kisses his hooked brow, his hollow cheek. “I’d say I’m shocked you had the ingredients on hand, but this is a house of premonitions. It was ready for this.”

“For us,” says Blue.

Henry is always trying to turn them on to all he likes, look at what I love, you are what I love, now you love this too. It is the way he tells secrets.

Blue blows steam off the mug of broth and sips; warmth builds in her belly and she stokes it, keeps it licking live.

The frantic, furious knock on the front door makes Ronan start on his bed. The scramble-scratch of a key in the lock makes him return his headphones to their place; must be Adam. He arranges himself in an artfully thoughtless sprawl that will show off his jaw and a curl of tattoo, then waits for Adam with his eyes closed.

The hand that wrenches his headphones off is not Adam’s—that much is clear immediately. It’s too square, for one, and wearing a leather glove.

“Who let you in, Gansey,” Ronan says stupidly. He is mussed, glasses crooked, pajamas and fleece pullover. He took his shoes off before coming upstairs. Ronan’s heart swells to such sizes that he cannot speak.

“Dream a dead body for me,” Gansey says.

Ronan turns his music off.

Gansey says it again. “Dream a dead body for me. I can’t go digging them anymore and I need to know. I need to find the difference.”

“That is not what Parrish told me to do,” says Ronan. He scoffs, then shoves himself upright. “Did you just fucking say digging them up anymore?”

“Better yet,” Gansey stalks to Ronan’s window, wrenches the shades back, and the room is washed in abrasive morning light, “dream me after death. Let me poke it. Let me find the difference. Do this for me.”

“Gansey,” Ronan says warily. These months have been long. Gansey doesn’t smell like mint anymore. And the love they have for each other—it has gone strange.

“What did Adam ask you to dream for me?” Gansey stands before the window, an anonymous silhouette.

Ronan says, “You seem like yourself. They all said you’re not the same, but you’re raging and nagging and that seems pretty fucking close.”

Gansey whips his gloves off. Tosses them onto Ronan’s crowded dresser with some old trophies, some broken dreams. “What did Adam ask you to do. Ronan.”

And when his name is said like that, in Gansey’s voice? “Something to help you. And I’m—fucking failing, man. I can’t think of anything you’ll love or even want from me. I can’t think of what I want you to have.”

“Do you hate me this much?” Gansey says. “Your dreams try to kill you: You want to die. Your dreams keep me alive: You want me to suffer.”

“Fuck off,” Ronan says. He slips off his bed. “Fuck. Fuck.” Something rises in his chest; it is awful and black. He picks up a cracked alarm clock and throws it at the far wall. It explodes with screws and raven feathers. He knuckles an itching drip of nightwash off his cheek. “That’s the worst thing you’ve ever said to me.”

“The truth?” Gansey says.

“You want like need,” Ronan says. “I don’t know this—Gansey, this whatever, I don’t get you well enough anymore to know what you need. And anyway, why would you want anything from me again.”

Something in Gansey’s face changes. “I’m alone,” he says.

Ronan, unsettled, says, “The fuck?”

“I’m alone.” It is a horrible, simple thing said with the crystal certainty of blue sky. Ronan never imagined it was in Gansey’s lexicon. “There is nothing like me in the world. There is no sleeping king. There is no court of magicians. There is no life after death. Everything ends but me. I am here to be its witness.”

“Fuck,” Ronan breathes. He rubs a hand over his mouth. This is nameless, whatever this is. The feeling. The great undoing of Richard Campbell Gansey, The Third. And Ronan has left him, this Gansey-faced thing, to reckon with a world that he does not know yet.

He thinks of Chainsaw. Of his Orphan Girl.

Of Cabeswater. And of Gansey’s wonder. His love for Ronan’s dreamt things.

“I’m alone,” Gansey says. His arms hang limp at his sides. “I’m awful.”

“No, man,” Ronan says. “Nothing that was ever Gansey could be awful.”

“I’m alone,” Gansey says. “I’m a beast. I’m a mutation.”

“Stop saying that.”

“I’m—well, you must think I’m an unholy creature.”

“You gotta think I am.”

“I think you’re Ronan,” says Gansey. “Still Ronan. Strange and wonderful. With a head full of magic.”

Ronan’s eyes burn horribly. “You’re still Gansey.” The reality, the idea of a world without Gansey—Ronan flinches away from it physically—he steps closer to his oldest friend. The one person who has seen him before and after and who sticks with him still. And how did Ronan repay that debt? “You’re still Gansey. You’re Gansey.”

“One of a kind, freak of nature. Zombie. Thing from hell.”

Ronan is pulled ever closer by—fury. Something stronger. “You’re Gansey.”

“You couldn’t bear to look at me. You still hardly can.”

“You’re damn fucking right,” says Ronan.

“You don’t come to Monmouth. I’m alone and your room is empty.”

“Shit, Gansey.”

“You can’t even look at me.” There are tears in his eyes now. There: That is Gansey. Ronan could frame him. Ronan could cage him. Ronan feels every minute of his life intimately.

“Jesus Mary,” Ronan says. “Don’t make that face. Please don’t look like that. You’re killing me.”

“Then put me down,” Gansey says. “Be merciful enough to do it. I’m the freak, I’m—unbalancing, this isn’t right. Undo it. Love this me how you loved the old me: enough to blaspheme nature. But don’t be a coward. Don’t put us both through hell and pretend we’re atoning. We’re procrastinating the inevitable. Love me, Ronan. Kill me.”

Ronan seizes the back of Gansey’s skull and knocks their crowns together. “I’ll spend the night,” he says, “I’ll come to Monmouth and I’ll stay with you. I’m not going anywhere, dumbshit. You—fuckin’ dumbshit.” His other hand takes Gansey’s cheek firmly. Thumb scrapes along the proud cut of Gansey’s bones. “Get over here.” He brings Gansey to him sharply, temples pressed like a glass to a wall two ways. The hug is ferocious. Ronan is terrified.

“I bought frozen pierogies,” Gansey says, “the ones you liked. And there is cottage cheese, with little pockets of pineapple goop. And there are green apples in a bowl. And there are Club crackers. And tins of sardines.”

“What are you gonna do with sardines, big guy.”

“I’m not sure. Stare at them. Ruminate. Become Mike Goldberg.”

Ronan’s voice is pained. “I know, Gansey. I know you keep room for me with you.”

“I’m alone, Ronan.”

“You’re not.”

“It’s just me.”

“It’s fucking not.”

“No one is like me.”

Ronan’s hand skims Gansey’s neck. The manic thrash of Gansey’s pulse pummels him. “This is both of us. S’long as I’m here, you’re not—”

“I am.”

“Fucking dammit, Gansey. Listen to me, not whoever’s talking shit in there.” He knuckles Gansey’s temple, then drags his mouth to the spot, breath caught between their skin as he says, “You listen to me. Heard?”

“Held,” says Gansey, shutting his eyes. “Yes, I mean. Heard.”

“I’ll stay with you, okay?” Ronan says. “Okay. I’ll stay with you. I don’t know how to do this, Gansey. This is your side.”

“There is something Newtonian about the whole situation.”

“There’s something Newtonian about your balls. Fuck.”

“Well, that hasn’t changed.”

“Just let me,” says Ronan, smoothing his hands over Gansey’s sideburns, and instead of naming what Gansey must allow, he kisses Gansey on the mouth. Once, twice, again, and on, and Gansey cries, but Ronan muffles the sounds. Pushes Gansey against the bedroom door and holds him.

There is a particular blue shade to Ronan which comes out with his fear, and it is the clearest most crystalline sky, the driest day, the crispest 7-a.m. ever felt. It is dew on rain boots and a dog walk and the sun caught bare-faced but rebellious between a pair of boughs.

“You’re going to stay with me,” Gansey says, and the relief in his voice could grow a hundred daisies, sunflowers, redwoods straining for the perfect symbiosis of bare arm and cool embrace of eternal sky.

“I found a bird’s nest in one of my dad’s old work boots yesterday morning,” Ronan says.

Gansey’s knee bumps his.

From his other flank, Adam drops a palm onto Gansey’s abdomen.

“There was just. The littlest fucking bird in it.” Ronan straightens his legs, crosses his ankles. Gansey’s mattress squeaks beneath their combined weight. “It was so bald and ugly. Nothing like Chainsaw. I took the whole shoe and put it on a shelf in one of the barns, where the sleeping cows can watch it. And the awake chickens. And no weird foxes can eat it before I figure out how to take care of it properly.”

“You probably could’ve handled that better,” says Adam.

“Sure. But your intentions were in the right place,” says Gansey.

Ronan turns his head on the pillow and finds himself nose to nose with Gansey. He turns the other way and his forehead chips Adam’s.

Adam runs a thumb over one of Ronan’s brows. Gansey puts one of his feet between Ronan’s.

Ronan looks at the ceiling with its dents from a billiards-cue war, its watermarks from a blow-up pool explosion. This bed is full of bare, boyish limbs and moving parts for a moment in cooperative style. All of it chess-boarded with light. Better—anointed.

Overwhelmed, Ronan shuts his eyes.

“Goober!”

Gansey holds a hand out to Matthew, who smacks it, then taps his fist against it to make a turkey. “Hi, Magoo,” Gansey says.

They hug; Matthew makes a happy noise and scrunches Gansey closer. Gansey sort of pats Matthew’s enormous backpack with a chuckle—this, at least, familiar to him.

“How’s stuff?” Matthew asks.

“Good,” says Gansey. “Okay. Bad, generally. You?”

“Oh, I’m chillin.” Leaning in conspiratorially, “I found something way cool in this huge dumpster outside the community center the other day, do you wanna see?”

“Gansey does not want to see your non-functional Atari, Matthew.”

And there is Declan, like a photo from a time Gansey can’t quite remember. He knows he loved to live it, but he cannot imagine himself, as he is now, doing all they did then.

He looks good. Hospital corners and pocket square. He’s trying a beard thing; it’s awful. His cologne is the same as it always was: Light Blue. His daytime hair is unchanged as well: abrasively lifeless.

Gansey has always had a hard time telling when Declan is lying. It is, Gansey thinks, why choosing Ronan was never something to deliberate. Ronan, if nothing else, tells the truth with enormous and ferocious aching which translates into everything he does from the explosive jaunt of his cuffed hems to the stilted and weary way he touches.

Gansey holds his hand out. Declan shakes it once; their palms fit familiarly. It is like sprinklers in May and hay bales in the outer barns, the smell of things so full of life and so soon to die.

They walk without direction. Gansey is not new to the D.C. area, considering Declan is living the life Gansey’s mother wishes he would live and attempts at every chance to foist upon him. It is funny how they would both rather die than wear Declan’s fancy shoes, but here they are. And with his business emails, with his thirty-second phone calls, always apologizing to Gansey for his rudeness before picking up, Declan gives quite a show of being anything but a dead man walking.

Matthew tells Gansey about their life here. Takeout dinners, Declan’s wailing alarm clock, the smell of coffee in the morning. Public transport. No more Aglionby uniform. The old woman whose groceries Matthew carries and who, in exchange, gives Matthew twisted desserts he doesn’t know the name for and requests he call her Baba.

“We’re dropping Matthew at soccer practice,” Declan informs Gansey eventually. He checks his watch; their elbows knock. Gansey tucks his arms closer to his sides. “You won’t be late, Matthew, that’s a relief. Your coach rode my ass to the moon last week, as if the onus is on me when you forget a shin guard.”

“You’re the one who made us take the long way back to the apartment because you don’t like the red line.”

“I prefer to skip the red line, yes, but that’s because—”

“Deklo, how many times are you going to tell the pee story.”

“—the pee, Matthew, it will never be sanitary to me again. I’ve lost all faith in the narrative of prophylactic public transport. Irish Setter at two o’clock. Your two o’clock, Matthew.”

“Ooh!” Matthew runs to pet the dog. There is a lot of merry laughter and yipping, and then they keep marching.

“Are we walking all the way to—wherever it is we’re going?” Gansey asks.

Declan says, “Wish you brought your hiking shoes, Indiana?”

Gansey has to look away; the sun is behind Declan, maybe, or there is something that sharp in his face, his flinty eyes. “Erroneous.”

They drop Matthew off. He hugs Gansey again before he goes, a big, warm sunshine of a thing. Matthew is a bear, tallest and thickest. He is so easy to love. He is, indubiously, the strangest of the brothers Lynch.

“Shall we go eat?” Declan suggests without looking up from his phone. He taps out a few more letters in his peculiar thumb-and-forefinger way, then deigns to meet Gansey’s eyes. He looks away briefly, breathes, and looks back. “I presume I am to feed and walk you before you’re returned to your master.”

“What do you recommend?” Gansey says, since ignoring the dig will irk Declan more than any witticism he could return. Though a classic Well, spank my ass and call me Ashley does come to mind.

“What I want,” Declan says, “more than anything in the world, is burrata. A huge, fresh ball of burrata with thick slices of heirloom tomato and chiffonaded basil and some chunky salt over the top.”

Which is to say they go to a trendy, soulless coffee shop where Declan orders cold brew with an extra shot.

They walk with their drinks. Declan holds his between his thumb and forefinger, insistently swirling it between steps. Gansey nurses a pink thing with fair trade coconut flesh and raw sugar sweetener.

Eventually, they find a bench, framed by a willow and a bus stop. Without speaking, they claim it.

There is a park; they watch children chase each other and dogs tug at their leads. The bare trees quiver as Jack Frost touches them just so; with the squirrels and birds tucked away, how they lean into even the wind’s breath.

“So you’re still parenting,” says Gansey.

“So you’re still living,” says Declan.

They turn away from each other.

Gansey fiddles with his straw wrapper. “You still stamp collecting?”

“You still living?”

“You were never such a raging bitch at first.”

“Ha!”

“Quiet, strange, always—” Gansey gestures loosely, “—organizing things, but you are a proper bitch now. You’ve grown great big bitch wings and you soar above the heads of the rest of us, depositing great stinkering bitch shits onto our nicely done hair and nicely shined windshields.”

“Perhaps you bring it out of me.”

“Hm.”

They watch for a while a man playing chess against himself. Too, a child trying to fly a kite. The wind is too great for her; she trips to keep a hold on the string.

“How much did Ronan tell you?” Gansey says.

“Not much,” says Declan. “Never much.”

“Enough?” says Gansey.

“Hardly.” Then, unbothered, “You could have called me.”

“You’re all bluff.”

“Touché. Which is to say: What does that make you?”

“D,” says Gansey, and Declan mouths a curse just a heartbeat before his cold-flushed face turns away—just enough that Gansey, student in the school of men, sees it.

“Hasn’t it been long enough?” Declan says. “Why are we still hurting each other? Don’t you know by now that I love Ronan too?”

“Certainly,” says Gansey. “It’s not about whether you do or don’t. It’s about… history. And what your love drove Ronan to do. Or how it made him feel. Do you understand?”

“No. Yes, but no as in, No, you will not pin that on me.”

“Who else am I to pin it on?”

“Pin it on my father. He is a very convenient hook for all my many grievances.”

“You and I had our own… thing, for lack of a better term.”

“We, ha, we certainly did. I’m not the one who threw it away.”

“I had to choose Ronan. Would you have preferred he hung himself? Or dreamt something to do it for him?”

Declan neatly removes a baggie of ashy antacids from an inside pocket of his long black coat. He removes three using only thumb and forefinger and places them all on his tongue before he chews with distaste, swallows. Chases them with a large sip of cold coffee.

“I do miss you.”

“You are such a liar,” Declan says.

“Need I bother saying touché?”

“Ronan didn’t tell me much, but I don’t rely on Ronan for anything, least of all the truth.”

“Who, then? Henry?” Gansey swears. “Judas himself.”

“You don’t resemble who I miss.”

“Jesus, D.”

“No, really.”

“Declan.”

He says, “Are you going to listen?”

Gansey knows what that means. And to be offered such a gift—he falls quiet at once.

“There was a boy,” says Declan. “He was odd but nonetheless well-loved, like a three-legged beagle. Don’t make that face. I told you he was well-loved. He committed himself to a hunt for magic. It was all a metaphor, but he didn’t realize that quite yet. He was too caught up in the journey. In organizing the pieces he had into a recognizable image. So he drove to purple mountains and scaled them. He walked through rapids, past salmon and seaweed, and loved them. He saw dozens of lands, spoke to hundreds of people, and he was glad. But he had a glaring geis: he would die.

“And he did.” Declan leans back into the bench, empty coffee cup dangling Damoclesian from one leather-gloved hand. “It was written, so it happened. What no one accounted for, least of all the boy, was how he would come back. Completely alive, looking precisely the same, to fill the hole he’d left. Everything he knew was in him still, but coated beneath a layer of permafrost. Shag-carpeted with the itching terror of eternity. He was only dead for minutes, mind you.” Declan chances a look at Gansey, sideways and calculating, and what he sees makes him go on. “It was enough.

“So imagine you are him. You are righteous and trustworthy and loyal, and yet you believe nothing your round table tells you of the boy they knew. You’d say something quite bitchy and intellectually superior to anyone who so much as dinged their armor, but here you are: dealing the ultimate disrespect to them, constantly. Insisting you don’t believe them. Insisting their best friend shouldn’t be alive.” The story-telling trance has dissipated around them like dew into afternoon. Declan is, Gansey forgot, oh how Declan is a snake. Oh how he waits to savor the killing bite. “I should be the one saying it, not you. I should be the one weeping to know another dream. So if Ronan can try to forgive himself for being a shitty Catholic and reanimating his best friend, and if I can look at you and see someone that… see that you’re real. If that is where we are, then I cannot comprehend why you cannot meet us there. You, Gansey of wonder. Star of light. You can’t look at yourself and see hope the way you could in Ronan? In Parrish, that badlands of a boy?”

“Well,” Gansey says. He clears his throat. “Fuck, then.”

“Why did you come to see me?” Declan says.

“So wary,” Gansey says. His voice is still shaken. He straightens his scarf to busy his hands. “So ready to be taken advantage of. Maybe I wanted to see you.”

“I hope,” Declan crosses his legs, ankle onto knee, “that I’ve given you what you came looking for.”

“A world of exchanges,” Gansey muses. “Yes, Declan. You’ve always been good at that.”

Declan hums something humored. He taps his middle and pointer fingers repeatedly against his lips.

“You can smoke in front of me,” Gansey says. “I don’t mind.”

Declan’s fingers still against his parted mouth.

“I remember when you used to smell like it,” Gansey says. “You’d come home from your internship and your coat reeked. I thought it was incongruent. You’re so careful, so safe about what you eat. I’ve never seen you eat a chip. Have ice cream. But you smoke cigarettes like a steamship.”

“It’s not about health,” says Declan. “Nothing I do is.”

“Be honest to me,” Gansey begs. “If to no one else, then me.”

“That is a lot to ask.”

“Too much?”

“You?” Declan looks away. “Never.”

“That’s the spirit.”

“Well, then. I suppose it’s about… what I want to be.”

“Good Lord,” says Gansey. “Well, you’ve never been one for happiness.”

“Ronan never knew about it,” Declan says, his lips quirking.

“He only believes what he wants to,” Gansey replies.

With long, neat fingers, Declan slips a carton of American Spirit menthols from his pocket. He sticks one between his teeth, then thumbs one out of its row to offer to Gansey.

“I’ll just share yours,” Gansey says.

So they share it. They’re quiet and they’re neither of them what everyone thinks, least of all themselves, so they roll that truth and fill their lungs with it, then breathe out again.

“It’s something the rest of us can do for him.” There is a measure of disgust in Ronan’s voice as he flicks a rain-slick rose mallow petal onto Fox Way’s matted lawn. “You can do a lot, but you can’t do this.”

“And he loves you,” says Blue.

“Aw, don’t be green about it,” Ronan says. He beheads the bare stalk and tosses it like a frisbee into the grass. “I’d kiss you too, maggot, all you gotta do is ask. I’m not a personal fan of dixie chicks but I’m generous that way.”

She drops her head onto his hooked shoulder. “I don’t mind,” Blue says. She pulls on her joint. Laced with jasmine, today, and occupying her hands, if nothing else. “I wouldn’t have minded even when he was happy and searching and everything was normal. He loves you. Why should I stop him loving you?”

“He loves you, too,” Ronan says.

“Oh, I know,” says Blue. “You don’t need to tell me that. He is the bleedingest hand of cards there ever was, though you,” she butts her chin into his Anorak sleeve, “are a close second. You’re so happy-scared that he needs you. You like being needed. You also have very little practice with it.”

“Well,” says Ronan, “you hate being useless. Which you are right now. And you hate me for having all the gold at the right time and the prize of our dreams to spend it on.”

“You are an unbelievable prick,” says Blue.

“Hey, you started it,” says Ronan.

She studies the toes of her galoshes beside the mud-caked soles of Ronan’s work boots. A neighbor has their fireplace running; her hair will smell of burnt wood when she returns inside. Somewhere, a crow cries. She smokes, and reflects on eighteen years of pragmatism.

Ronan drops his cheek on her head, curses, presses one of her bobby pins down, and returns his cheek to her crown with renewed vigor. When his arm comes around her, first stiff and then hearty, she feels enveloped. He is warm. He is good.

“You’re such a schmuck,” says Blue.

A huff of laughter, humorless. “Yeah, Bluecifer. You too.”

“Do something good to me,” Adam says, the door slamming shut behind him as a gust rips it from his hand.

“You look cold,” says Gansey. “Are you?” As he settles in for the evening, Adam pulls the Holden hat off his head and throws it into the downtown region of the little Henrietta. “Now you just look silly,” says Gansey.

“Bite me,” says Adam, attempting to scrape his overgrown waves into place. “Christ, my hands are cold. Where’s the space heater? I need to sit on it. Or swallow it whole.”

He goes to the floor directly in front of it instead. Gansey joins him, pulled to admire Adam’s boyish hands and the shape of his muscles through his layered shirts and sweatshirts, or maybe his near-invisible eyelashes. Gansey has wished for a long time Adam would allow him to buy a warmer coat for him: Adam’s is wearing thin, the stuffing poking out of a deep scuff over one elbow.

Gansey tries to warm Adam’s hands first with his own, then with his breath, but Adam curses and throws him off, claiming his touch is colder than death.

“Can I cut your hair?” Gansey says. “That can be something good for you.”

Adam says, “What are you, new?”

“I’m serious.”

“I cut my own hair, Gansey.”

“Yes, I can tell. We can all tell.”

“Why can’t you learn to leave well enough alone?”

“Why would I, when I have so little ability to change great things and so much ability to participate wholeheartedly in the mundane?”

Adam looks sideways at Gansey. “You are like a caricature of a person. And yet you are very real.” He takes Gansey’s head between his hands and kisses Gansey’s brow. While Gansey blinks owlishly up at him, he smiles, a slow and luxurious cat-stretch, smug with its own surety. “Fine. Cut my hair. Take scissors to my neck, Gansey, while I can’t see you, and change everything about how I look—how I’m seen. You do that.”

“Okay,” says Gansey.

He goes and gets the scissors.

“You’re really riding this train,” Adam says when Gansey returns. He is chewing on a pear which drips juice all down his chin, up his arm and under his pushed-up sleeve. There is music playing now: an old Nick Drake cassette of Gansey’s, a murmur behind the eyes, like wheels grinding gravel and the groan-and-stretch of roots growing down. Only there if you listen close.

“You told me I could. Now you’re taking it back?” Gansey says, and Adam stares. He shakes his head, and shakes it. Gansey says, “You look like a briard. Or Hulk Hogan.”

“Well, I’m never going in public again.” Adam tosses his pear core into the garbage and dries his hands on his work cargos. “Alright, then. When push comes to cut, I know there’s no use telling you no.”

Gansey maneuvers Adam into a chair at the dining table. Gansey boosts himself onto the tabletop so he can reach Adam’s head properly.

He works in silence, weeding through Adam’s soft, straw-colored waves methodically. It is hard to follow the pattern of what has already been done, the cuts are so erratic and uneven.

“How was the garage?” Gansey asks.

“Cold,” says Adam. “Long. Could barely feel my hands enough to get anything done.”

“Will tomorrow be the factory?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s good. It’ll give your cracked skin a break.”

“Back onto my sore knees, though.”

“Is it so predictable?” Gansey says. “Your life, I mean.”

“Everything is… yeah, I guess. Scheduled.”

“Is that… good?” Gansey asks.

Adam tilts his head; Gansey mouths a curse, almost slicing a wave at the wick, and straightens him back out. “Yes,” Adam decides. “I need to know what’s coming. I need to know I’ve planned for every possibility.”

“That doesn’t sound much like a life. It sounds like—I dunno, a series of shifts.”

“That is my life, Gansey.”

“Not all of it.”

“You don’t need to sugarcoat it. I have a shift at the factory. A shift at Aglionby. A shift at the nursery. A shift searching for Glendower. A shift with Maura and Calla. A shift at the Barns. A shift at the garage. A shift playing Smash with you and Ronan.”

“Are you so joyless?”

“For now,” says Adam. “But eventually I’ll earn more freedom.”

“I’m not sure I’m so disciplined,” says Gansey, but what he means is, I’m not sure I could live that life.

“It’s hard work, Gansey. Growing up. Changing. Learning how to be your own person. Deciding what is worth enduring.” This, of course, touches Gansey somewhere. “But you have to suck it up. Figure out what you want to do with your life and plan the steps to do it.”

And there it is. “I don’t know the first thing about how. I wouldn’t know who to ask.”

“Yourself.”

“He’s no help.”

“How about,” says Adam, cruelly now, “you call from the heights of your gilded tower. Hello, down there! Who can I pay great amounts of money to plan my third life for me, since I’m too busy self-flagellating and staring out rainy windows?”

Gansey goes cold. “I don’t make it the business of others to clean up my messes, Adam.”

“Fine, then,” Adam says, but it’s still tight.

Gansey’s hands fall still in Adam’s hair. “Why do you stay if you’ve never liked me?”

Adam is silent.

“I’m not saying you don’t care for me in your way,” says Gansey, “but you have never liked me. If you were to describe me to someone, you’d probably say Boy, the kid’s a looker, but you’ll have to forgive the personality.”

“Do you really think that’s true?” says Adam. His voice is tenuous. “You must think the worst of me. Worse than anyone.”

“That’s patently inaccurate.”

“You think I don’t like you?”

“I know you care about me,” Gansey says again. “Maybe you’re misunderstanding. I’m not saying you don’t have—affection for me.”

“Affection, Gansey?” Adam says coarsely. It’s a furious, frightening thing. “Now you need me to swear my love for you right out in the open, huh?”

“Who else is here to hear the great Adam Parrish bow his hangdog head to his master? What about it chafes you so? Not even I am allowed to know how you feel about me. Right?”

“Especially not you. You always find a way to use what I love against me.”

“You only seem to love the leftovers of what I’ve loved first.”

“Jesus, Gansey.”

“That one slipped out. I didn’t mean it.”

“You did.”

“My social cues are scrambled six ways to Sunday, Adam.”

“You don’t need social cues to know not to say shit like that.” Adam turns around on the chair, crossing his arms over its back. “Gansey, no one makes me furious like you do. No one in the world. And—God.” Gansey is bending his ear out of the way so he can trim his sideburns; Adam leans into the touch with a weak laugh, anger melting out of him as his shoulders sag. “You will never get it if I don’t say it. And I can never say it because it’ll make my heart stop with how stupid I am. I know I think about things wrong sometimes, but I can’t help it. I love you like I’m mad at you.”

“You love me?” says Gansey.

Adam rolls his eyes, but does not tease him. He just places a careful palm on Gansey’s waist. “How does the ‘do look? Like I shop at Brooks Brothers?”

“Oh, no,” says Gansey, “I haven't a clue how to cut hair. I just needed to have my hands on you. And—yes. No, I will stop myself there. I believe… as usual, yes, I’ve said enough. More than. Punch me in the mouth already, have mercy. Turn me off.”

So Adam pries the scissors from Gansey’s hands, gently. He walks himself to the kitchen and sits on the toilet lid where he can see most of his head, at a strange quarter-angle, in the mirrored front of the medicine cabinet. He yanks chunks of wavy hair this way and that, trimming with deft, confident cuts. It is a very metaphorical moment, Gansey notes; the only way it could be more overt is if each bunch of hair grew into its own Parrish and ran far from the first, appearance melting into something stranger with every step.

Gansey says, “You are to me what Wonder Bread is to you.”

Adam says, “Soft and white?”

“A comfort.” Gansey kneels before Adam’s porcelain throne, between Adam’s splayed knees, and holds Adam’s chin between forefinger and thumb. Through his lashes, Adam’s gaze is fond. “A staple. A beautiful memory. Delicious when slathered with peanut butter and jelly.”

Adam smiles. It is a careless, jovial thing with his bunched-together front teeth on proud display. Gansey is stunned by what endurances would be worthwhile on its behalf. “Shucks. You old sap.”

Gansey shrugs. He said what he meant to. He sits down, crossing his legs. Then he drops his chin on Adam’s knee. Adam continues to cut his hair and Gansey watches the strands fall to the tiled floor like snow.

“I’ve been thinking,” Blue says, and Gansey says, “Stop jostling your hand, I’m getting red everywhere.”

“I’ve been thinking,” Blue says again, kicking him in the knee, which really just makes him paint polish down to her second knuckle, “about this whole new life thing. And about moving on. And everything you are haunted by.”

“Oh?” says Gansey. If Blue didn’t know him so well, she’d think he wasn’t paying attention to her.

“Yes,” says Blue, “and I am especially thinking of something Adam said to me.”

“Adam is always saying something to someone.”

“He taught me more Latin, actually.”

“Did he, now.”

“I think it’s how he flirts.”

“He is a strange bird.”

“Vincit qui se vincit,” she says. “He conquers who conquers himself.”

“He should try that one on Ronan next. It’ll be a hit. More specifically, a punch in the nuts.”

She laughs, head falling back to the ceiling.

“You know,” Gansey says, carefully applying a second coat to her last nail, and she interrupts, “No, I don’t.”

“You are incorrigible,” he says, but there is a smile in his eyes. It makes her want to flower and fruit. “You know,” he says again, he is a trusting fool, she tackles him flat to the bed before he can speak. “Wah!”

“WAH!” she imitates, laughing harder. “Wah, he says. Gansey, Gansey.” She smothers him with kisses through her hand and he grins a perfect, toothy grin, sadder than it used to be, older and worn, but all the more beautiful with every day—it is a smile he had to learn. To win. And there is nothing forced about it. “Gansey.”

“Jane,” he says with quiet veneration, looking up at her left eye, her right one. Back and forth. With one finger, he traces that scar cutting through her brow and down onto her cheek. “I love you such a lot.”

“That makes me happy,” she says. “It makes me glad to be alive. I’m lucky to be so loved. And you are, too.”

“I am quite loved, it turns out,” Gansey says softly. His focus upon her cheek is singular. “It changes things. Most things. Everything.”

“Do you love you?” she says.

“I will,” he says. “I can’t help loving what you love. And anyway, there’s something to be said for old, beaten things.”

“You are so strange,” she says. She palms his loose curls off his forehead. “You are such a thing. Will you say what you were trying to say before I KO’d you?”

“Will you listen?”

“Will I ever.”

“I never thought,” says Gansey, “that I am what's after death, too.” His mouth quirks like he’s remembering something; Blue brushes a finger against the shape of his lips, prods the depth of his funny dimple. “I’ve been chewing on that for a few weeks now. How I spent all this time searching for what happens, sticking my hands into its gnarly rib cage so to say, yet I completely overlooked myself as an example.”

“You’ve always been the sleeping king,” she says gently, tucking a curl behind his ear.

“And I’ve thought about how I believe all this is wrong. And I still do. But that doesn’t make it untrue. I can’t will myself gone, not even to rebalance nature. I sort of have to live with it.”

“You do,” she says. “You do have to live. You might as well try liking it instead of treating it like torment.”

“I’ve also been thinking about how I have hurt you all.”

“You being hurt is the worst pain for us, Gansey.”

“Because you love me,” he says.

“We all do.”

“Well,” says Gansey. “Well.”

He is so flustered. It is such a thing.

And there is this feeling, humming at her. A certainty. A comfort. With her above and him below, so and so…

“What comes after death, Gansey?” she asks him.

“This,” he replies.

And so she kisses him.

His lips are a memory. Chapped and full, minty with chapstick. This time—well, they are still this time, too. So she pulls back.

Gansey is speechless, eyes enormous.

His chest rises and falls with frantic breath. Beneath her hand, his heart flies.

Blue smiles.

“I have to stay alive, don’t I,” says Gansey.

“Yes, dear,” she says.

“Oh, Jane,” he sighs. He touches his mouth with his thumb, then hers. “You have a singular ability to shake my footing the moment I’ve found it.”

It’s a clumsy thing, most definitely.

Gansey wakes, still, with nightmares. With his hand closed around his throat. Some days he cannot rise. Some days he drives into the forest or the purple mountains or the sideways slopes of valley and sits in the snow, under rain, face turned into the wind, one with it all. He stares fearfully at the world, himself, and all things easy.

But he has always been predisposed to find magic. This time: a time-bleached desire to keep on trying.

Because the most important thing?

Gansey wakes.

“Adam has a sore knee,” Gansey tattles before Blue has crossed the threshold. “Hi,” he adds when she presses her cheek to his in greeting.

“Adam has a heating pad,” Blue says. She made it herself, crooked hand-stitches and a brief but potent phase of determination to do something girly in the way Orla is girly, in the way magazines are girly, in the way of pink underwear and ruffled socks. Jasmine rice filling, so it smells nice when he microwaves it. “Hi.”

“Adam is ovulating,” says Adam from where he is draped pathetically over the couch, rice sack on his abdomen, “so Adam is prioritizing.”

“Adam feels his egg drop,” says Ronan with suspect in the set of his brows. “Adam is a freak of nature.”

“Adam is God’s perfect man,” Adam replies, “so chew on that.”

When Ronan attempts to reply, Adam rolls over, smushing his hearing ear into the cushions.

“We ready?” asks Blue, bouncing on her toes. “Where’s—?”

Henry struts out of the kitchen-bathroom, stroking his sideburns down, cocking his hips. “What does a guy have to do to get an entrance track around here.”

“Today is not about you,” says Blue, twirling the keys to the Pig around her forefinger. She, like Adam, like Ronan, like Gansey, like Henry, is dressed head to toe in black. “Now, if we could all please proceed per the plan.”

“I don’t get why you get to drive,” Ronan grumbles. He prods Adam up and off the couch. “You can’t even see over the steering wheel.”

“I have a pillow to boost myself,” she replies primly. “Chop chop. Processions don’t wait for stragglers.”

The Pig is running in Monmouth’s parking lot. They thunder down the stairs to meet her. It is a cold, bright day; Henrietta is ice-glossed and poses pretty beneath a clear sky. They pack into the seats, hanging onto safety belts and headrests. As they jerk into motion, the coffin rattles in the trunk, heaving against the bungee cords they used to try and tie the door closed.

Blue drives fast, windows down. She likes the growl of the engine through her seat (until it sputters geriatrically) and the biting wind (until her bangs tangle in her lashes and she can’t see). She especially likes her sneaked glances as Gansey with his eyes shut and his face tilted into the window, his arm stuck clean out against the stream, fingers spread like a bad swimmer.

Blue pulls with a squeal into the lot where she once parked with Neeve. They jump out, heave the box out of the trunk, and lay it on the grass beside the outer plots, in a nice spot with afternoon light. Ronan kicks the unlatched lid open with one untied boot; Gansey climbs clumsily inside.

He lays, shivers, then shifts, crossing his arms over his chest and shutting his eyes.

They all look down at him for a moment, quiet.

Henry wraps an arm around Blue, and his scratchy wool coat itches her cheek. Adam’s littlest finger loops around Ronan’s.

“Here lies,” says Blue. The whole place is uncanny. It writhes with magic. “Ah, fuck.”

“Don’t throw dirt on me,” Gansey says, knuckling his slipping glasses higher.

“Be dead better,” Ronan says.

“One might expect a modicum of respect at their own funeral, but you are reliably a class act,” says Gansey. And then it is quiet.

Blue can’t think of a way to continue. From a joke to something grave in no time flat. A cock cries; Blue closes her eyes and wonders about confession. How it feels to sit behind that little screen and bare souls.

“Gansey was not about exchanges,” Blue says. “He was about giving. And altruism. At least when you think about his M.O. in the traditional sense. Gansey didn’t want our money. He didn’t want to be matched tit for tat. He just wanted… permission, I guess. To be himself around us. Or something. Henry?”

“This is where we give you permission, Gansey-Man,” Henry says. In his neat, modern suit and clean, white-laced sneakers, he cuts an alien figure. “And this is where we ask for one last thing. The last string to tie up this… epic journey you’ve taken us on.”

“Anything,” Gansey says. His eyes blink open; Blue feels a chill up her spine. He lives. He’s still living. “Of course, anything.”

“Let us love you anyway,” says Henry.

A slow smile, from one corner of his mouth to the other. He pushes up on his elbows so he can look at them all around him, old and new and borrowed and Blue, last of all, feels every minute writhing bit of every molecule in her body open its mouth and sing sing sing.

“I can do that,” says Gansey. “I think—yes. Well. There is all the time in the world for that.”