Pinter’s voice was a little deeper as he said, "I don’t think you understand why Mr. Lynch’s time at Aglionby is being threatened. He utterly flaunts school regulations and seems to have nothing but contempt for his academics. We have given him leeway considering his extremely difficult personal circumstances, but he seems to forget that attending Aglionby Academy is a privilege, not a chore. His expulsion is meant to be effective Monday."
Gansey leaned forward and rested his head against the steering wheel. Ronan, Ronan, why …
He said, "I know he’s screwing up. I know he should’ve been kicked out a long time ago. Just give me to the end of the school year. I can get him through his finals."
"He hasn’t been to any classes, Mr. Gansey."
"I can get him through his finals."
For a long moment there was silence. Gansey heard a television playing in the background.
Finally, Pinter said, "He has to make Bs in all of his finals. And toe the line until then or he’s out of Aglionby immediately. He doesn’t have any more chances."
Sitting up, Gansey let out his breath. "Thank you, sir."
"Also, don’t forget about your father’s interest in our nautical history section. I’ll be watching for it."
And Ronan thought he had nothing to learn from Pinter. Gansey smiled grimly at the dashboard, though he was as far away from amused as he’d ever been. "The boats have always been a big part of our life. Thanks for picking up the phone after hours."
"Enjoy your weekend, Mr. Gansey," Pinter replied.
Gansey clicked END and tossed the phone onto the dashboard. Closing his eyes, he breathed a swear word. Gansey had dragged Ronan through his midterms. Surely he could do it again. He had to do it again.
The Peugeot rocked as someone got into the passenger seat. For a breathless moment, Gansey thought, Noah?
But then, his father said, "Are you being seduced by this French beauty? This makes your mullet car seem pretty coarse, doesn’t it?"
Gansey opened his eyes. Beside him, his father ran a palm over the dash of the car and then inspected it for dust. He squinted at Gansey as if he could determine the state of his son’s health and mental facilities merely by looking at him.
"It’s nice," Gansey said. "Not really me, though."
"I’m surprised your jalopy got you here," his father said. "Why don’t you take the Suburban back?"
"The Camaro’s okay."
"Smells like gasoline."
Now Gansey could imagine his father pecking around the Camaro where it was parked in front of the garage, his hands behind his back as he sniffed for fluid leakage and observed nicks in the paint.
"It’s fine, Dad. It’s exemplary."
"I doubt that," his father said, but amiably. Richard Gansey II was rarely anything but. A lovely man, your father, people told Gansey. Always smiling. Nothing flaps him. Such a character. This last bit was because he collected strange old things and looked in holes in walls and had a journal of things that had happened on the fourteenth of April every year since history began. "Do you have any idea why your sister purchased that hideous bronze plate for three thousand dollars? Is she angry at your mother? Is she trying to play a practical joke?"
"She thought Mom would like it."
"It’s not glass."
Gansey shrugged. "I tried to warn her."
For a moment they sat there. His father asked, "Do you want to start it up?"
Gansey didn’t care, but he found the key in the ignition and turned it. The engine turned over immediately, springing to obedient life, nothing like the Camaro.
"Bay four, open," his father said, and the garage door in front of them began to power open. When he saw Gansey’s glance, he explained, "I had voice controls installed. The only difficulty is that if you shout very loudly outside, the door closest to you will open. Obviously, that is detrimental to security. I’m working on that. We did have an attempted break-in a few weeks ago. They only made it as far as the front gate. Installed a weight-based system out there."
The garage door opened on the Camaro, parked directly in front of them, blocking their exit. The Pig was low and defiant and rough around the edges in comparison to the demure, self-contained, always smiling Peugeot. Gansey felt a sudden and irrepressible love for his car. Buying it was the best decision of his life.
"I never get used to that thing," Gansey’s father said, eyeing the Pig without malice.
Once, Gansey had overhead his father saying, Why in the world did he even want that car? and his mother replying, Oh, I know why. One day he would find an opportunity to bring up that conversation with her, because he wanted to know why she thought he had bought it. Analyzing what motivated him to put up with the Camaro made Gansey feel unsettled, but he knew it had something to do with how sitting in this perfectly restored Peugeot made him feel. A car was a wrapper for its contents, he thought, and if he looked on the inside like any of the cars in this garage looked on the outside, he couldn’t live with himself. On the outside, he knew he looked a lot like his father. On the inside, he sort of wished he looked more like the Camaro. Which was to say, more like Adam.
His father asked, "How are you doing in school?"
"Great."
"What’s your favorite class?"
"World History."
"Good teacher?"
"Perfectly adequate."
"How’s your scholarship friend doing? Finding the classes harder than public school?"
Gansey turned the driver’s side mirror so that it reflected the ceiling. "Adam’s doing well."
"He must be pretty smart."
"He’s a genius," Gansey said, with certainty.
"And the Irish one?"
Gansey couldn’t bring himself to make up a convincing lie for Ronan, not so soon after the call with Pinter. Just then, it felt very weighty to be Gansey the younger. He replied, "Ronan is Ronan. It’s hard for him without his father."
Gansey, Sr., didn’t ask about Noah, and Gansey realized he couldn’t remember him ever doing so. In fact, he couldn’t remember ever mentioning Noah to his family at all. He wondered if the police would call his parents about him finding the body. If they hadn’t already, it seemed unlikely that they would. They’d given Gansey and Blue cards with the number of a counselor on it, but Gansey thought they both probably needed help of a different variety.
"How’s the ley-line hunt going?"
Gansey considered how much to say. "I’ve actually made some breakthroughs that I hadn’t expected. Henrietta is looking promising."
"So things aren’t going badly? Your sister said you seemed a little melancholy."
"Melancholy? Helen’s an idiot."
His father clucked his tongue. "Dick, you don’t mean that. Word choice?"
Gansey turned off the engine and exchanged a look with his father. "She bought Mom a bronze plate for her birthday."
Gansey, Sr., made a little hm noise, which meant that Gansey, Jr., had a point.
"Just so long as you’re happy, and keeping busy," his father said.
"Oh," Gansey said, retrieving his phone from the dash. Already his mind was churning over how to crunch three months of study into Ronan’s brain, how to return Noah to his former self, how to convince Adam to leave his parents’ house even though Henrietta no longer seemed like such a dead end, what cunning thing he could say to Blue when he saw her next. "I’m keeping busy."
Chapter 32
When Blue knocked on the door of Monmouth Manufacturing after school, Ronan answered the door.
"You guys weren’t waiting outside," Blue said, feeling a little self-conscious. After all this time, she’d never been inside, and she felt a little like a trespasser merely by standing in the decrepit stairwell. "I thought maybe you weren’t here."
"Gansey’s partying with his mother," Ronan said. He smelled like beer. "And Noah’s fucking dead. But Parrish is here."
"Ronan, let her in," Adam said. He appeared at Ronan’s shoulder. "Hey, Blue. You’ve never been up before, have you?"
"Yeah. Should I not —"
"No, come —"
There was a bit of a fumble and then Blue was inside and the door was shut behind her and both of the boys were watching her reaction carefully.
Blue gazed around the second floor. It looked like the home of a mad inventor or an obsessed scholar or a very messy explorer; after meeting Gansey, she was beginning to suspect that he was all of these things. She said, "What’s the downstairs look like?"
"Dust," Adam replied. He used his foot to discreetly move a pair of dirty jeans, boxers still tucked inside them, out of Blue’s direct line of sight. "And concrete. And more dust. And dirt."
"Also," said Ronan, moving off toward a pair of doors at the other end of the floor, "dust."
For a moment, Ronan and Adam craned their necks, looking around the spread-out space as if they, too, were seeing it for the first time. The vast room, painted red with afternoon sun through the dozens of windowpanes, was beautiful and cluttered. It reminded Blue of the feeling she had when she had first seen Gansey’s journal.
For the first time in days, she thought about the vision of his fingers resting on her face.
Blue, kiss me.
For one half of a breath, Blue closed her eyes to reset her thoughts.
"I have to feed Chainsaw," Ronan said, a sentence that made absolutely no sense to Blue. He disappeared into the tiny office and shut the door behind himself. An inhuman squawking noise emitted from within, which Adam didn’t comment on.
"We’re not doing anything today, obviously," Adam said. "Do you want to hang out?"
Blue looked around for a couch. It would be easier to hang out with a couch. There was an unmade bed in the middle of the room, a very expensive-looking leather armchair (the sort with glossy brass bolts holding the leather in place) situated in front of one of the floor-to-ceiling windows, and a desk chair with papers scattered across it. No couch.
"Has Noah —?"
Adam shook his head.
Blue sighed. Maybe, she thought, Adam was right about Noah’s body. Maybe moving it off the ley line had stolen his energy.
"Is he here?" she asked.
"It feels like it. I don’t know."
To the empty air, she said, "You can use my energy, Noah. If that’s what you need."
Adam’s expression was enigmatic. "That’s brave of you."
She didn’t think so; if it was something that she needed to be brave about, she was certain her mother wouldn’t have her along to the church watch. "I like to be useful. So, do you live here, too?"
Adam shook his head, his eyes on the spread of Henrietta outside the windows. "Gansey would like me to. He likes all of his things in one place." His voice was a little bitter, and after a pause, he added, "I shouldn’t say things like that. He doesn’t mean it badly. And we’re — it’s just, this place is Gansey’s. Everything in it is Gansey’s. I need to be an equal, and I can’t be, living here."