The Raven Boys (13 page)

It was possible, Blue thought after a long moment, that Maura meant Blue’s father. None of the awkward conversations Blue had attempted with her mother had ever gotten her any information about him, just nonsensical humorous replies (
He is Santa Claus. He was a bank robber. He’s currently in orbit.
) that changed every time she asked. In Blue’s head, he was a dashing heroic figure who’d had to vanish because of a tragic past. Possibly to a witness protection program. She liked to imagine him stealing a glimpse of her over the backyard fence, proudly watching his strange daughter daydream under the beech tree.

Blue was awfully fond of her father, considering she’d never met him.

Somewhere in the depths of the house, a door closed, and then there was once more the sort of night-silence that is hard to disturb. After a long moment, Blue reached over to the plastic bin that served as her nightstand and retrieved the journal. She rested a hand on the cool leather cover. The surface of it felt like the cool, smooth bark of the beech tree behind the house. As when she touched the beech tree, she felt at once comforted and anxious: reassured and driven to action.

Henrietta is quite a place
, Neeve had said. The journal seemed to agree. A place for what, she wasn’t sure.

Blue didn’t mean to fall asleep, but she did, for another hour and twelve minutes. It wasn’t her alarm that woke her this time, either. It was a single thought shouted in her brain:

Today is the day Gansey comes for his reading.

Embroiled in the daily routine of getting ready for school, the conversation between Maura and Neeve seemed more commonplace than it had before. But the journal was still as magical. Sitting on the edge of her bed, Blue touched one of the quotes.

The king sleeps still, under a mountain, and around him is assembled his warriors and his herds and his riches. By his right hand is his cup, filled with possibility. On his breast nestles his sword, waiting, too, to wake. Fortunate is the soul who finds the king and is brave enough to call him to wakefulness, for the king will grant him a favor, as wondrous as can be imagined by a mortal man.

She closed the pages. It felt as if there were a larger, terribly curious Blue inside her that was about to bust out of the smaller, more sensible Blue that held her. For a long moment she let the journal rest on her legs, the cover cool against her palms.

A favor.

If she had a favor, what would she ask? To not have to worry about money? To know who her father had been? To travel the world? To see what her mother saw?

The thought rang through her brain again:

Today is the day Gansey comes for his reading.

What will he be like?

Maybe, if she was standing before that sleeping king, she’d ask the king to save Gansey’s life.

“Blue, I hope you’re awake!” Orla screamed from downstairs. Blue needed to leave soon if she was to make the bike trip to school on time. In a few weeks, it would be an uncomfortably hot ride.

Possibly, she would ask a sleeping king for a car.

I wish I could just cut class today.

It wasn’t that Blue dreaded high school; it just felt like … a holding pattern. And it wasn’t as if she was bullied; it hadn’t taken her very long to discover that the weirder she looked on the outside — the more she let other kids realize that she wasn’t like them, from the very beginning — the less likely she was to be picked on or ignored. The fact was, by the time she got to high school, being weird and proud of it was an asset. Suddenly cool, Blue could’ve happily had any number of friends. And she
had
tried. But the problem with being weird was that everyone else was
normal
.

So her family remained her closest friends, school remained a chore, and Blue remained secretly hopeful that, somewhere out there in the world, there were other odd people like her. Even if they didn’t seem to be in Henrietta.

It was possible, she thought, that Adam was also odd.

“BLUE!”
Orla bellowed again.
“SCHOOL.”

With the journal held fast to her chest, Blue headed toward the red-painted door at the end of the hall. On her way, she had to pass the frenzy of activity in the Phone/Sewing/Cat Room and the furious battle for the bathroom. The room behind the red door belonged to Persephone, one of Maura’s two best friends. The door was ajar, but still, Blue knocked softly. Persephone was a poor but energetic sleeper; her midnight shouting and nocturnal leg paddling ensured that she never had to share a room. It also meant that she grabbed sleep when she could; Blue didn’t want to wake her.

Persephone’s tiny, breathy voice said, “It’s available. I mean, open.”

Pushing open the door, Blue found Persephone sitting at the card table beside the window. When pressed, people often remembered Persephone’s hair: a long, wavy white-blond mane that fell to the back of her thighs. If they got past her hair, they sometimes recalled her dresses — elaborate, frothy creations or quizzical smocks. And if they made it past that, they were unsettled by her eyes, true mirror black, the pupils hidden in the darkness.

Currently, Persephone held a pencil with a strangely childlike grip. When she saw Blue, she frowned in a pointy sort of way.

“Good morning,” Blue said.

“Good morning,” Persephone echoed. “It’s too early. My words aren’t working, so I’ll just use as many of the ones that work for you as possible.”

She twirled a hand around in a vague sort of way. Blue took this as a sign to find a place to sit. Most of the bed was covered by strange, embroidered leggings and plaid tights running in place, but she found a place to lean her butt on the edge. The whole room smelled familiar, like oranges, or baby powder, or maybe like a new textbook.

“Sleep badly?” Blue asked.

“Badly,” Persephone echoed again. Then, “Oh, well, that’s not quite true. I’ll have to use my own words after all.”

“What are you working on?”

Often, Persephone was working on her eternal PhD thesis, but because it was a process that seemed to require vexed music and frequent snacks, she rarely did it during the morning rush.

“Just a little something,” Persephone said sadly. Or perhaps thoughtfully. It was hard to tell the difference, and Blue didn’t like to ask. Persephone had a lover or a husband who was dead or overseas — it was always difficult to know details when it came to Persephone — and she seemed to miss him, or at least to notice that he was gone, which was notable for Persephone. Again, Blue didn’t like to ask. From Maura, Blue had inherited a dislike of watching people cry, so she never liked to steer the conversation in a way that might result in tears.

Persephone tilted her paper up so Blue could see it. She’d just written the word
three
three times, in three different handwritings, and a few inches beneath it, she’d copied a recipe for banana cream pie.

“Important things come in threes?” Blue suggested. It was one of Maura’s favorite sayings.

Persephone underlined
tablespoon
next to the word
vanilla
in the recipe. Her voice was faraway and vague. “Or sevens. That is a lot of vanilla. One wonders if that is a typo.”

“One wonders,” repeated Blue.

“Blue!”
Maura shouted up. “Are you gone yet?”

Blue didn’t reply, because Persephone disliked high-pitched sounds and shouting back seemed to qualify as one. Instead, she said, “I found something. If I show it to you, will you not tell anybody else about it?”

But this was a silly question. Persephone barely told anybody anything even when it wasn’t a secret.

When Blue handed over the journal, Persephone asked, “Should I open it?”

Blue flapped a hand.
Yes, and quickly.
She fidgeted back and forth on the bed while Persephone paged through, her face betraying nothing.

Finally, Blue asked, “Well?”

“It’s very nice,” Persephone said politely.

“It’s not mine.”

“Well, I can see
that
.”

“It was left behind at Ni — wait, why do you say that?”

Persephone paged back and forth. Her dainty, child’s voice was soft enough that Blue had to hold her breath to hear it. “This is clearly a boy’s journal. Also, it’s taking him forever to find this thing. You’d have already found it.”

“BLUE!”
roared Maura.
“I’M NOT SHOUTING AGAIN!”

“What do you think I should do about it?” Blue asked.

As Blue had, Persephone ran her fingers over the varying grains of the papers. She realized Persephone was right; if the journal had been hers, she would’ve just copied down the information she needed, rather than all this cutting and pasting. The fragments were intriguing but unnecessary; whoever put that journal together must love the hunt itself, the process of research. The aesthetic properties of the journal couldn’t be accidental; it was an academic piece of art.

“Well,” Persephone said. “First, you might find out whose journal it is.”

Blue’s shoulders sagged. It was a relentlessly proper answer, and one that she might have expected from Maura or Calla. Of course she knew she had to return it to its rightful owner. But then where would the fun of it go?

Persephone added, “Then I think you’d better find out if it’s true, don’t you?”

A
dam wasn’t waiting by the bank of mailboxes in the morning.

The first time that Gansey had come to pick up Adam, he’d driven past the entrance to Adam’s neighborhood. Actually, more properly, he’d used it as a place to turn around and head back the way he’d come. The road was two ruts through a field — even
driveway
was too lofty a word for it — and it was impossible to believe, at first look, that it led to a single house, much less a collection of them. Once Gansey had found the house, things had gone even more poorly. At the sight of Gansey’s Aglionby sweater, Adam’s father had charged out, firing on all cylinders. For weeks after that, Ronan had called Gansey “the S.R.F.,” where the
S
stood for
Soft
, the
R
stood for
Rich
, and the
F
for something else.

Now Adam just met Gansey where the asphalt ended.

But there was no one waiting by the clustered herd of mailboxes now. It was just empty space, and a lot of it. This part of the valley was endlessly flat in comparison to the other side of Henrietta, and somehow this field was always several degrees drier and more colorless than the rest of the valley, like both the major roads and the rain avoided it. Even at eight in the morning, there were no shadows anywhere in the world.

Peering down the desiccated drive, Gansey tried the house phone, but it merely rang. His watch said he had eighteen minutes to make the fifteen-minute drive to school.

He waited. The engine threw the car to and fro as the Pig idled. He watched the gearshift knob rattle. His feet were roasting from proximity to the V-8. The entire cabin was beginning to stink of gasoline.

He called Monmouth Manufacturing. Noah answered, sounding like he’d been woken.

“Noah,” Gansey said loudly, to be heard over the engine. Noah had let him leave his journal behind at Nino’s after all, and its absence was surprisingly unsettling. “Do you remember Adam saying he had work after school today?”

On the days that Adam had work, he often rode his bike in so that he’d have it to get to places later.

Noah grunted to the negative.

Sixteen minutes until class.

“Call me if he calls,” Gansey said.

“I won’t be here,” Noah replied. “I’m almost gone anyway.”

Gansey hung up and unsuccessfully tried the house again. Adam’s mother might be there but not answering, but he didn’t really have time to go back into the neighborhood and investigate.

He could cut class.

Gansey tossed the phone onto the passenger seat. “Come on, Adam.”

Of all of the places Gansey had attended boarding school — and he’d attended many in his four years of underage wandering — Aglionby Academy was his father’s favorite, which meant it was the most likely to land its student body in the Ivy League. Or the Senate. It also meant, however, that it was the most difficult school Gansey had ever been to. Before Henrietta, he’d made his search for Glendower his primary activity, and school had been a distant second. Gansey was clever enough and he was good at studying if nothing else, so it hadn’t been a problem to skip classes or push homework to the bottom of the list. But at Aglionby, there were no failing grades. If you dropped below a B average, you were out on your ass. And Dick Gansey II had let his son know that if he couldn’t hack it in a private school, Gansey was cut out of the will.

He’d said it nicely, though, over a plate of fettuccine.

Gansey couldn’t cut class. Not after missing school the day before. That was what it came down to. Fourteen minutes to make a fifteen-minute drive to school, and Adam not waiting.