The Dream Thieves (37 page)

Gansey’s mind was on overload. He could feel his synapses murdering one another.

“One wonders about those trucking jobs that are lost, though,” said the woman on the right. “Pass the sugar, would you?”

Say hi to your mom?

“I sort of feel the local infrastructure needed to process and sell the produce will end up with a null sum job loss,” Gansey said. “The biggest challenge will be adjusting people’s expectations to the seasonality of produce they’ve come to expect year-round.”

Wrecked.

“You’re probably right,” said the woman on his left. “Though I do love having peaches in winter. I’ll take the sugar, too, if you would?”

He passed a bowl of lumpy brown sugar cubes from the woman on his right to the woman on his left. Across the table, Helen was animatedly gesturing to a creamer shaped like a genie’s lamp. She looked fresh as a newscaster.

Glancing up, she caught Gansey’s eye, and then she tapped the corners of her mouth with her napkin, said something to her conversation partner, and stood up. She pointed at Gansey and gestured toward the door to the kitchen.

Gansey excused himself and joined her in the kitchen. It was the only part of the house that hadn’t been renovated in the last two decades, and it was always dark and vaguely scented by onions. Gansey stopped by the espresso machine. He had an immediate, distant memory of his glamorous mother placing a frothing pitcher’s thermometer under his tongue to check for fever. Time felt irrelevant.

The door swung shut behind Helen.

“What?” he asked in a low voice.

“You looked like you spent your last joy bill.”

He hissed, “What does that even mean?”

“I don’t know. I was just trying it out.”

“Well, it doesn’t work. It doesn’t make sense. And anyway, I’ve got plenty of joy bills. Loads.”

Helen said, “What’s happening there on your phone?”

“A very small joy debit.”

His older sister’s smile shone brightly. “You see, it does work. Now, did you or did you not need to get out of that room?”

Gansey inclined his head in slight acknowledgment. Gansey siblings knew each other well.

“You’re so welcome,” Helen said. “Let me know if you need me to write a joy check.”

“I really don’t think it works.”

“Oh, I think it has promise,” she replied. “Now, if you excuse me, I must get back to Ms. Capelli. We’re talking about space adaptation syndrome and the Coriolis effect. I just wanted you to know what you’re missing.”

“
Missing
is a strong term.”

“Yes. Yes, it is.”

She pushed through the swinging door. Gansey stood in the dim, root-vegetable-scented kitchen until the door had stopped. Then he called Ronan’s number.

“Dick,” Kavinsky said. “Gansey.”

Pulling the phone back from his head, Gansey confirmed he had actually dialed the correct number. The screen read
RONAN LYNCH
. He couldn’t quite understand how Ronan’s phone had ended up in Kavinsky’s hands, but stranger things had happened. At least now the text messages made sense.

“Dick-Three,” Kavinsky said. “You there?”

“Joseph,” Gansey said pleasantly.

“Funny I should hear from you. Saw your car running around last night. It’s got half a face now. Poor bastard.”

Gansey closed his eyes and let out a whisper of a sigh.

“Sorry, I didn’t hear you,” Kavinsky said. “Come again? I know, I know — that’s what Lynch says.”

Gansey set his teeth in a very straight line. Gansey’s father, Richard Campbell Gansey II, had also gone to a boarding school, the now defunct Rochester Hall. His father, collector of things, collector of words, collector of money, offered tantalizing stories. In them, Gansey caught glimpses of a utopian community of peers intent on learning, keen with the pursuit of wisdom. This was a school that didn’t just teach history — no, it wore the past like a comfortable jacket, beloved for all of its frayed ends. Gansey II described students — comrades, really — forming bonds of brotherhood that would last for the rest of their lives. It was C. S. Lewis and the Inklings, Yeats and the Abbey Theatre, Tolkien and his Kolbítar, Glendower and his poet Iolo Goch, Arthur and his knights. It was a community of scholars just outside of adolescence, a sort of Marvel comic where every hero represented a different arm of the humanities.

It was not toilet-papered trees and whispered bribes, front-lawn hacky sack and faculty affairs, gifted vodka and stolen cars.

It was not Aglionby Academy.

Sometimes, the difference between that utopia and reality exhausted Gansey.

“All right, now,” Gansey said. “This was great. You giving this phone back to Ronan at any point?”

There was silence. It was a
slick
sort of silence, the sort that would make bystanders turn their heads to note it, same as a loud laugh.

Gansey didn’t quite care for it.

“He’s going to have to try harder,” Kavinsky said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“That’s what Lynch says, too.”

Gansey could hear the crooked smile in Kavinsky’s voice. He asked, “Do you ever think your humor veers too much on the side of prurient?”

“Man, don’t SAT at me. Here’s what’s up. The Ronan you know is no more. He’s having a coming-of-age moment. A — a — bildungsroman. Goddamn me! SAT
that
, Dick-dick-dick.”

“Kavinsky,” Gansey said evenly. “Where’s Ronan?”

“Right here.
WAKE UP, FUCKWEASEL, IT’S YOUR GIRLFRIEND!
” Kavinsky said. “Sorry. He’s totally pissed. Can I take a message?”

Gansey had to take a very long minute to compose himself. He discovered, on the other side of the minute, that he was still too angry to speak.

“Dickie. You still there?”

“I’m here. What do you want?”

Kavinsky said, “Same thing I always want. To be entertained.”

The phone went dead.

As Gansey stood there, he suddenly recalled a story about Glendower, one that had always bothered him. Glendower was a legend in most ways. He’d risen in rebellion against the English when every other medieval man his age was giving old age and death the stink eye. He’d united the people, defeated impossible odds, and ridden across Wales on rumors of his magical powers. A lawyer, a soldier, a father. A mystical giant who’d left a permanent footprint.

But this story … some of the Welsh weren’t convinced that throwing sticks at their English neighbors would improve Wales’s dire straits. In particular, one of Glendower’s cousins, a man named Hywel, thought Glendower was out of his lawyerly mind. In the way of most families, he expressed his difference of opinion by raising a small army. This might have put off most princes, but not Glendower. He was a lawyer and — like Gansey — a believer in the power of words. He arranged to meet Hywel alone in a deer park to talk it all over.

Gansey was untroubled with the story up to this point. This was the Glendower he’d follow anywhere.

Then, the two men spotted a deer. Hywel lifted his bow. But instead of shooting the animal, he let the arrow fly at Glendower … who had cleverly worn chain mail beneath his tunic.

Gansey would’ve preferred the story to end here.

But it didn’t. Instead, unharmed by the arrow and enraged by the betrayal, Glendower pursued Hywel, stabbed him, and finally stuffed Hywel’s body inside an oak tree.

All the stabbing and stuffing and utter loss of temper seemed rather ignoble. Gansey wished he hadn’t ever found the story. There was no unreading it. But now, after hearing Kavinsky’s slow laugh on the other end of the line, imagining Ronan drunk in his absence from Henrietta, picturing the Camaro in any state other than how he’d left it, Gansey thought he finally glimpsed understanding.

He was at once closer and farther from Glendower than he’d been before.

R
onan woke up in a movie theater seat.

Of course, it wasn’t really a movie theater; it was just a basement home theater in a big, flimsy suburban mansion. In the light of day, he could see that it was done up with the works. Real movie seats, popcorn machine, ceiling projector, shelf full of action flicks and porn with uninventive titles. He vaguely recalled, with less acuity than a dream, watching an endless video of Saudi Arabian street racing on the big pull-down screen last night. What was he doing? He had no idea what he was doing. He couldn’t focus on anything except one hundred white Mitsubishis in a field.

“You didn’t throw up,” Kavinsky noted, from his perch two seats away. He held Ronan’s phone. “Most people throw up after drinking that much.”

Ronan didn’t say the truth, which was that he was not a stranger to drinking himself senseless. He didn’t say anything at all. He just stared at Kavinsky, doing the math:
One hundred white Mitsubishis. Two dozen fake IDs. Five leather bracelets. Two of us.

“Say something, Rain Man,” said Kavinsky.

“Are there others?”

Kavinsky shrugged. “Hell if I know.”

“Is your father one?”

“Is
your
father one?”

Ronan got up. Kavinsky watched him try all three of the insubstantial white doors until he found the bathroom. He shut the door behind himself and peed and splashed water on his face and stared at himself.

One hundred white Mitsubishis.

On the other side of the door, Kavinsky said, “I’m getting bored, man. You want a line?”

Ronan didn’t answer. He dried his trembling hands, got himself together, and stepped out. He sat against the wall and watched Kavinsky do a line off the top of the popcorn machine. Shook his head when Kavinsky raised an eyebrow, an offering.

“You always this talkative after you drink?” Kavinsky asked.

“What were you doing with my phone?”

“Calling your mother.”

“Say something else about my mother,” Ronan said easily, “and I’ll smash your face in. How do you do it?”

He expected Kavinsky to crack another lewd joke about his mom, but instead, he just fixed a gaze on Ronan, his pupils cocaine-huge.

“So violent. Such a PTSD poster boy. You know how to do it,” Kavinsky said. “I saw you do it.”

Ronan’s heart twitched convulsively. It couldn’t seem to get used to this secret being the opposite of one. “What are you talking about?”

Kavinsky leapt to his feet. “Your ‘suicide attempt,’ man. I saw it happen. The gate’s right by Proko’s window. I saw you wake up and the blood appear. I knew what you were.”

That had been months and months and months ago. Before the street racing had even begun. All this time. Kavinsky had known all this time.

“You don’t know a damn thing about me,” Ronan said.

Kavinsky jumped to stand on one of the theater seats. As the furniture rocked beneath him, it sang a little — just a little scrap of a pop song that had been overplayed two years before — and Ronan realized it must be a dream thing, too. “Come on, man.”

“Tell me how you do it,” Ronan said. “I don’t mean just the dreaming. The cars. The IDs. The —” He lifted his wrist to indicate the bracelets. The list could’ve gone on and on. The fireworks. The drugs.

“You have to go after what you want,” Kavinsky said. “You have to know what you want.”

Ronan said nothing. Under those parameters, it would be impossible for him. What he wanted was to know what he wanted.

Kavinsky’s smile was wide. “I’ll teach you.”

A
dam was gone.

At two p.m., Gansey thought he’d waited long enough for Adam. Bracing himself, he knocked on the bedroom door. Then he pushed it open and found the room empty and sterile. Afternoon sun washed over the unfinished silhouettes of old models. He leaned toward the bathroom and called Adam’s name, but it was clear there was no one in either room.

Gansey’s first thought was only mild irritation; he didn’t blame Adam for avoiding everything having to do with the tea party, nor was he surprised he was lying low after last night’s argument. But now he
needed
him. If he didn’t tell someone about Ronan breaking parts off the car, he was going to self-immolate.

But Adam wasn’t there. It turned out that Adam wasn’t anywhere.

He was not in the onion-scented kitchen or the brick-floored library or the small, moldy mudroom. Not stretched on the stiff sofas in the formal living room, nor the voluminous corner couches in the casual family room. He was not holed up in the basement bar nor wandering in the humid garden outside.