“We always need young blood!” boomed the man. Adam was sweating, flipping between the memory of biting stars overhead, the fact of this present-day assault. Gansey took the man’s hand from Adam’s neck and shook it instead. Adam knew he was being rescued, but the room was too loud and too close for gratitude.
Gansey said, “We’re young as they come.”
“You’re pretty damn young,” the man said.
“This is Adam Parrish,” Gansey said. “Shake his hand. He’s more clever than I am. One day we’ll be throwing one of these shindigs for him.”
Somehow Adam had a business card pressed into his hand; someone else gave him more ginger ale. No, this one was actually champagne. Adam did not drink alcohol. Gansey smoothly took the champagne flute from him and placed it on an antique desk with ivory inlay. With a finger he slicked off a single drop of red wine that stained the surface. Voices wrestled with one another; the deepest voice won. Eight months ago we were in the same place as this on that campaign, a man with an enormous tie pin said to a man with an enormously shiny forehead. Sometimes you just throw funds at it and hope it sticks. Gansey shook hands and clasped shoulders. He talked women into confessing their names and then made them believe that he’d known them all along. He always called Adam Adam Parrish. Everyone always called him Dick. Adam gathered a bouquet of business cards. His hip smashed into a piece of lionpawed furniture; Irish crystal jingled from the lamp sitting on it. A spirit touched his elbow. Not here, not now.
“Having fun?” Gansey asked. It did not sound as if he was, but his smile was bulletproof. His eyes roved the room as he knocked back his ginger ale or his champagne. He accepted another flute from a faceless serving tray.
They moved to the next person, and the next. Ten, fifteen, twenty people in and Gansey was an embroidered tapestry of a young man, the hoped-for youth of America, the educated princeling son of Mrs. Richard Gansey II. The room adored him.
Adam wondered if there was a true smile among this herd of wealthy animals.
“Dick, finally, do you have the keys to the Fiat?” Helen came close to them, eye to eye with Gansey in a pair of black pumps that were sensible on every other woman in the room and unreasonably sexy on her. She was, Adam thought, the sort of woman Declan was always trying to obtain, not realizing that Helen was not the obtainable sort. You could love the sleek, efficient beauty of a brand-new bullet train, but only a fool could imagine it would love you back.
“Why would I?” Gansey asked.
“Oh, I don’t know. Every car is parked in except that one. Those idiot valets.” She tipped her head back and looked at the tree-painted ceiling; to Adam, the intricate branches seemed to be moving. “Mom wants me to do a booze run. If you come with, I can use the HOV lanes and not spend the rest of my life getting wine.” She noticed Adam. “Oh, Parrish. You clean up well.”
She meant nothing by it, nothing at all, but Adam felt an ice chip pierce his heart.
“Helen,” Gansey said, “Shut up.”
“It’s a compliment,” Helen said. A server replaced their empty drinks with full ones.
Remember why you’re here. Get in, get what you need, get out. You’re not one of them.
Adam said evenly, flattening his accent, “It’s all right.”
“I meant that you two were always in your school uniforms,” Helen said. “Not, like —”
“Shut up, Helen,” Gansey said.
“Don’t PMS on me,” Helen replied, “just because you wish you were with your beloved Henrietta.”
A fleeting expression passed across Gansey’s face then; she’d guessed right. It was killing him to be here.
“Why is it, again, you didn’t bring the other one?” Helen asked. But before Gansey could reply, someone else caught her eye and she allowed herself to be swept away as swiftly as she’d appeared.
“What a dreadful thought,” Gansey observed suddenly. “Ronan amongst this crowd.”
For a fleeting moment, Adam could imagine it: the brocade curtains in decaying flames, the decorated consorts screaming from beneath the harpsichord, Ronan standing among it all saying f**k Washington.
Gansey said, “Ready for the next round?”
The evening would never end.
But Adam kept watching.
He swallowed his ginger ale. He wasn’t sure it hadn’t actually been champagne, now, all along. The party had become a devil’s feast: will-o’-the-wisps caught in brass hunting lamps, impossibly bright meats presented on ivy-filagreed platters, men in black, women jeweled in green and red. The painted trees of the ceiling bent low overhead. Adam was wired and exhausted, here and somewhere else. Nothing was real but him and Gansey.
Before them was a woman who had just spoken with Gansey’s mother. Everyone who caught Gansey had either just conversed with his mother or just shook her hand or just glimpsed her moving between the dark-clad partygoers. It was an elaborate political play where his mother played a beloved but rare wraith; although everyone recalled seeing her, no one could actually locate her at the moment of recollection.
“You have,” the woman said to Gansey, “grown so much since the last time I’ve seen you. You must be nearly . . .” and at that, at the moment of guessing Gansey’s age, she hesitated. Adam knew that she had sensed that otherness to his friend: that sense that Gansey was both young and old, that he’d only just arrived, or he’d always been.
She was saved by a glance at Adam. Quickly assessing his age, she finished, “Seventeen? Eighteen?”
“Seventeen, ma’am,” Gansey said warmly. And he was, as soon as he’d said it. Of course he was seventeen, and nothing else. Something like relief passed over the woman’s face.
Adam felt the press of the candied tree branches overhead; to his right, he caught a half-image of himself in a gold-framed mirror and startled. For a moment, his reflection had seemed wrong.
It was happening. No, no, it’s not happening. Not here, not now.
A second glance revealed a clearer image. Nothing strange. Yet.
“Did I read in the paper that you’re still looking for those crown jewels?” the woman asked Gansey.
“Oh, I’m looking for an actual king,” Gansey said, speaking loudly to be heard over the violin (there were three of them, actually; the last man had informed him that they were students from Peabody). The strings wavered as if the sound came from underwater. “A Welsh king from the fifteenth century.”