The Dream Thieves (9 page)

Including the collection of Adam’s monthly rent check.

When he saw her, his stomach plummeted. He was filled with the certainty that his last check had bounced. She would tell him there were insufficient funds, and Adam would scramble to push money into the yawning hole of the account, and then he’d have to pay a returned check fee to the bank and another one to Mrs. Ramirez, getting further behind on his next month’s rent, an endless pathetic loop of insufficiency.

Voice thin, he asked, “What can I do for you, ma’am?”

Her expression shifted. She wasn’t sure how to say what needed to be said.

Adam’s fingers tightened on the door frame.

“Oh, sweetie,” she said, “I’m just letting you know about the rent on your little room here.”

I’m so done
, he thought.
No more. Please, I can’t take any more.

“Well, we got a new — tax assessment,” she started. “For this building. And you know how we charge you as a nonprofit. So we … your rent’s going to change. It’s got to stay the same percentage of the, uh, building costs. It’s two hundred dollars less.”

Adam heard
two hundred
and wilted, and then he heard the rest and thought he must have misunderstood. “Less? Each year?”

“Each month.”

Blue looked delighted, but Adam couldn’t quite accept that his rent had just dropped by two thirds. Twenty-four hundred dollars a year, suddenly freed up. His dubious Henrietta accent slid out before he could stop it. “Why did you say it was changing?”

“Tax assessment.” She laughed at his suspicion. “Those taxes don’t normally work out on the happy side, do they!”

She waited for Adam to answer, but he didn’t know what to say. Finally, he managed, “Thank you, ma’am.”

As Blue closed the door, he drifted back to the center of the room. He still couldn’t quite believe it. No,
wouldn’t
believe it
.
It just didn’t track. He retrieved the letter from Aglionby. Sinking onto his flat mattress, he finally opened it.

Its contents were very thin indeed, just a single-spaced letter on Aglionby letterhead. It didn’t take long to convey its message. The following year’s tuition was increasing to cover additional costs, although his scholarship was not. They understood the tuition raise presented a hardship for him, and he was an exceptional student, but they needed to remind him, with as much kindness as possible, that the waiting list for Aglionby was quite long, inhabited by exceptional boys able to pay full tuition. In conclusion, they reminded Mr. Parrish that fifty percent of the next year’s tuition was due by the end of the month in order to hold his place.

The difference in tuition between this year’s and next was twenty-four hundred dollars.

That number again. It couldn’t be a coincidence.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Blue asked, sitting down beside him.

He didn’t want to talk about it.

Gansey had to be behind it. He knew Adam would never accept the money from him, so he’d engineered all of this. Persuaded Mrs. Ramirez to take a check and manufacture a tax assessment to cover his tracks. Gansey must have gotten a matching tuition notice two days ago. The raise wouldn’t have meant anything to him.

For a brief moment, he imagined life as Gansey must live it. The car keys in his pocket. The brand-new shoes on his feet. The careless glance at the monthly bills. They couldn’t hurt Gansey. Nothing could hurt him; people who said money couldn’t buy everything hadn’t seen anyone as rich as the Aglionby boys. They were untouchable, immune to life’s troubles. Only death couldn’t be swiped away by a credit card.

One day
, Adam thought miserably,
one day that will be me.

But this ruse wasn’t right. He would have never asked for Gansey’s help. Adam wasn’t sure how he would have covered the tuition raise, but it was not
this
, not Gansey’s money. He pictured it: a folded-over check, hastily pocketed, gazes not met. Gansey relieved that Adam had finally come to his senses. Adam unable to say thank you.

He became aware that Blue was watching him, her lips pursed, eyebrows tight.

“Don’t look at me like that,” he said.

“Like what? I’m not allowed to be worried about you?”

Heat hissed through his voice. “I don’t want your pity.”

If Gansey wasn’t allowed to pity him, Blue sure as hell wasn’t allowed to. She and Adam were in the same boat, after all. Wasn’t she on her way to work, the same as he’d just come from it?

Blue said, “Then don’t be pitiful!”

Anger snarled up in him, instantly owning him. It was a binary emotion in the Parrishes. No such thing as slightly mad. Only nothing, and then this: all-encompassing fury.

“What’s pitiful about me, Blue? Tell me what’s pitiful.” He jumped up. “Is it ’cause I work for everything I get? Is that what makes me pitiful and Gansey not?” He shook the letter. “Is it because I don’t get this
given
to me?”

She didn’t flinch, but something simmered in her eyes. “No.”

His voice was terrible; he heard it.
“I don’t want your damn pity.”

Her face was shocked. “What did you say?”

She was looking at the box that served as his nightstand. Somehow it had moved several feet away from the bed. The side was badly dented, its former contents scattered violently across the floor. Only now did he remember the act of kicking the box, but not the
decision
to kick it.

It hadn’t switched off the anger.

For a long moment, Blue stared at him, and then she stood up.

“You be careful, Adam Parrish. ’Cause one day you might get what you ask for. There might be girls in Henrietta who’ll let you talk to them like that, but I’m not one of them. Now I’m going to go sit on those stairs out there until my shift. If you can be — be
human
before then, come get me. If not, I’ll see you later.”

She ducked a little to keep from smashing her head, and then she shut the door behind her. It would have been easier if she’d yelled or cried. Instead his words just kept hitting flint inside his thoughts, again and again, another spark, and another. She was just as bad as Gansey.
Where does she get off?
When he graduated and flew from this place, and she was still trapped here, she’d feel stupid about all this.

He wanted to open the door and shout this fact at her.

He made himself stay where he was.

After a moment, he calmed enough to see how his anger was a separate thing inside him, a dingy, surprise gift from his father. He calmed enough to remember that if he waited long enough, carefully analyzing how it felt, the emotion would lose its inertia. It was the same as physical pain. The more he tried to mentally decide what made pain hurt, the less his brain seemed able to remember the pain at all.

So he took apart the anger inside him.

Is this what he felt like
, he wondered,
when he grabbed my sleeve as I was going out the door? Is this what made him shove my face into the fridge? Did he feel this when he passed by my bedroom door? Was this what he fought every time he remembered I existed?

He calmed enough to realize it wasn’t even Blue he had been angry at. She’d just been unlucky enough to be standing in the blast zone when he went off.

He’d never escape, not really. Too much monster blood in him. He’d left the den, but his breeding betrayed him. And he knew why he was pitiful. It wasn’t because he had to pay for his school or because he had to work for a living. It was because he was trying to be something he could never be. The sham was pitiful. He didn’t need to graduate. He needed Glendower.

Some nights he lured himself to sleep by imagining how he would word the favor for Glendower. He needed to get the words exactly right. Now he rolled phrases around his mouth, desperately reaching for one that would comfort him. Ordinarily, words would tumble and lull through his mind, but this time, all he could think was
Fix me
.

Suddenly, he caught another image.

Right after he did, he thought,
What does that mean?
One couldn’t
catch
an image. And he certainly hadn’t done it more than once. But the sensation lingered, an idea that he had glimpsed, or felt, or remembered some movement at the corner of his eye. A snapshot captured just behind his eyes.

He had a strange, disconcerting feeling that he couldn’t trust his senses. Like he was tasting an image or smelling a feeling or touching a sound. It was the same as just a few minutes before, the idea that he’d glimpsed a slightly wrong reflection of himself.

Adam’s previous worries vanished, replaced with a more immediate concern for this ragged body he was carting around in. He’d been hit so many times. He’d already lost his hearing in his left ear. Maybe something else had been destroyed on one of those tense, wretched nights.

Then he caught another image.

He turned.

W
hen Adam called, Ronan, Noah, and Gansey were at the Dollar City in Henrietta, loitering. Theoretically, they were there for batteries. Practically, they were there because both Blue and Adam had work, Ronan’s shapeless anger always got worse at night, and Dollar City was one of the few stores in Henrietta that allowed pets.

Gansey answered his phone as Ronan examined a package of erasers shaped like alligators. The Day-Glo animals wore an assortment of six aghast expressions. Noah tried to skew his mouth to match as Chainsaw, buried in the crook of Ronan’s arm, eyed them suspiciously. At the end of the aisle, the clerk viewed Chainsaw with equal distrust. When Dollar City had said
Pets Welcome
, Dollar City wasn’t certain they’d meant carrion birds.

Ronan was very much enjoying the clerk’s petulant gaze.

“Hello? Oh, hey,” Gansey said to the phone, touching a notebook with a handgun printed on the cover. The
oh, hey
was accompanied by a definite change in the timbre of his voice. That meant it was Adam, and that somehow stoked Ronan’s anger. Everything was worse at night. “I thought you were still at work. What? Oh, we’re at the Bourgeoisie Playground.”

Ronan showed Gansey a plastic wall clock cleverly molded in the shape of a turkey. The wattle, hanging below the clock face, ticked off the seconds.

“Mon dieu!”
Gansey said. To the phone, he said, “If you’re not sure, it probably wasn’t. A woman is hard to mistake for anything else.”

Ronan wasn’t exactly sure why he was angry. Although Gansey had done nothing to invoke his ire, he was definitely part of the problem. Currently, he propped his cell between ear and shoulder as he eyed a pair of plastic plates printed with smiling tomatoes. His unbuttoned collar revealed a good bit of his collarbone. No one could deny that Gansey was a glorious portrait of youth, the well-tended product of a fortunate and moneyed pairing. Ordinarily, he was so polished that it was bearable, though, because he was clearly not the same species as Ronan’s rough-and-ready family. But tonight, under the fluorescent lights of Dollar City, Gansey’s hair was scuffed and his cargo shorts were a greasy ruin from mucking over the Pig. He was bare-legged and sockless in his Top-Siders and very clearly a real human, an attainable human, and this, somehow, made Ronan want to smash his fist through a wall.

Holding the phone away from his mouth, Gansey told them, “Adam thinks he saw an apparition at his place.”

Ronan eyed Noah. “I’m seeing an apparition right now.”

Noah made a rude gesture, a hilariously unthreatening act coming from him, like a growl from a kitten. The clerk clucked audibly.

Chainsaw took the clucking as a personal affront. She plucked irritably at the leather bands on Ronan’s wrist, reminding him of Kavinsky’s strange gift earlier. It was not an entirely comfortable feeling to think of the other boy studying him that closely. Kavinsky had gotten the five bands precisely right, down to the tone of the leather. Ronan wondered what he was hoping to achieve.

“For how long?” Gansey asked the phone.

Ronan rested his forehead on the topmost shelf. The metal edge snarled against his skull, but he didn’t move. At night, the longing for home was ceaseless and omniscient, an airborne contaminant. He saw it in Dollar City’s cheap oven mitts — that was his mother at dinnertime. He heard it in the slam of the cash register drawer — that was his father coming home at midnight. He smelled it in the sudden whiff of air freshener — that was the family trips to New York.

Home was so close at night. He could be there in twenty minutes. He wanted to smash everything off these shelves.

Noah had wandered down the aisle, but now he gleefully returned with a snow globe. He stood behind Ronan until he pushed off the shelf to admire the atrocity. A seasonally decorated palm tree and two faceless sunbathers were trapped inside, along with a painted, erroneous statement:
IT’S ALWAYS CHRISTMAS SOMEWHERE.

“Glitter,”
whispered Noah reverentially, giving it a shake. Sure enough, it was not fake snow but glitter that precipitated on the eternal holiday sands. Both Ronan and Chainsaw watched, transfixed, as the colorful bits caught in the palm tree.