Ronan merely leveled his heaviest gaze. Kavinsky was not Gansey, so maybe he didn’t understand its meaning. There would be no f**king of Gansey. Ronan hadn’t intended to wreck the Camaro when he’d first taken it, but he had. He wasn’t going to add insult to injury by bringing back this impostor. This car was not a truth. This car was a very pretty lie.
“This,” Ronan said, pressing his hands flat against the warm metal of the car, “is a very shitty goldfish.”
“Whose fault is that?”
“Yours.”
Kavinsky had said he’d teach him. He was not taught.
“Yours. I practiced, man!” Kavinsky gestured broadly to the field of Mitsubishis. “You see all these losers? It took me months to get it right. Look at that bitch!”
He pointed to one with a single axle, right in the middle. The car rested sleepily on its front bumper. “I get it wrong, try it again, wait for my dream place to get its juice back, do it again, get it wrong, do it again.”
Ronan repeated, “What do you mean, get your juice back?”
“The dream place runs out,” Kavinsky said. “Walmart can’t keep making TVs all night long! It’s getting low now. Can’t you feel it?”
Was that what he felt? The fraying around the edges? Right now, he could only feel anxiety, dulled to stupidity by beer.
“I don’t have time to practice. I need it now or I can’t go back.”
Kavinsky said, “You don’t have to go back.”
This was the most nonsensical thing he’d said since this entire experience had begun. Ronan didn’t even acknowledge it. He said, “I’m doing it again. I’m doing it right this time.”
“Hell yeah, you are.” Kavinsky retrieved yet more alcohol — maybe he’d been dreaming that, too — and joined Ronan on the hood of the faulty Camaro. They drank in silence for several minutes. Kavinsky poured a handful of green pills into Ronan’s palm; Ronan pocketed them. He wished passionately for something besides Twizzlers. He was wasted on dreams.
If Gansey saw him now . . . the thought twisted and blackened in him, curled like burned paper.
“Bonus round,” Kavinsky said. Then: “Open.”
He put an impossibly red pill on Ronan’s tongue. Ronan tasted just an instant of sweat and rubber and gasoline on his fingertips. Then the pill hit his stomach.
“What’s this one do?” Ronan asked.
Kavinsky said, “Dying’s a boring side effect.”
It took only a moment.
Ronan thought, Wait, I changed my mind.
But there wasn’t any going back.
Ronan was a stranger in his own body. The sunset cut into his gaze, slantwise and insistent. As his muscles twitched, he lowered himself onto his chest and then rested his cheek against the hood, the heat of the metal not quite painful enough to be unbearable. He closed his eyes. This wasn’t the hurtling-to-sleep pill of before. This was a liquid fatality. He could feel his brain shutting down.
After a moment, he heard the hood groan as Kavinsky leaned over him. Then he felt the ridged callus of a finger drag slowly over the skin on his back. A slow arc between his shoulder blades, drawing the pattern of his tattoo. Then sliding down his spine, tensing every muscle it moved over.
The fuse inside him was burning to nothing, nothing at all.
Ronan didn’t move. If he moved, the touch on his spine would stab him — a wound like this pill. No coming back.
But when his eyes slitted, battling sleep, Kavinsky was just doing another line of coke off the roof, body stretched over the windshield.
He might have imagined it. What was real?
Again the Camaro was parked in the dreaming trees. Again Orphan Girl crouched on the other side of it, eyes sad. The leaves quivered and faded.
He felt this place’s power dissipating.
He crept toward the car.
In
Out
“Ronan,” whispered Orphan Girl. “Quid furantur a nos?”
(Why do you steal from us?)
She was faded as Noah, smudgy as the dead.
Ronan whispered, “Just one more. Please.” She stared at him. “Unum. Amabo te. It’s not for me.”
In
Out
But he didn’t hide this time. He wasn’t a thief. Instead, he stood, rising from his hiding place. The dream, suddenly aware, shuddered around him. Flickered. The trees leaned away.
He hadn’t stolen Chainsaw, the truest thing he’d ever taken from a dream.
He wasn’t going to steal the car. Not this time.
“Please,” Ronan said again. “Let me take it.”
He ran his hand across the elegant line of the roof. When he lifted his palm, it was dusted green. His heart thudded as he rubbed pollen-covered fingertips against each other. The air was suddenly hot, sweat sticky in the crease of his elbows, gasoline pricking his nostrils. This was a memory, not a dream.
He pulled open the door. When he got in, the seat burned his bare skin. He was aware of everything around him, down to the scuffed vinyl beneath the improperly restored window cranks.
He was lost in time. Was he sleeping?
“Call it by name,” said Orphan Girl.
“Camaro,” Ronan said. “Pig. Gansey’s. Cabeswater, please.”
He turned the key. The engine turned, turned, turned, finicky as it had always been. It was as real as anything had ever been.
When it caught, he woke up.
Kavinsky grinned in the windshield at him. Ronan sat in the driver’s seat of the Pig.
Air sputtered in the air-conditioning vents, scented with gasoline and exhaust. Ronan didn’t have to look under the hood to know that the thundering he felt in his feet came from a proper engine.
Yes-yes-yes.
Also, he thought he knew why Cabeswater had disappeared. Which meant he might know how to get it back. Which meant he might get his mother back. Which meant he might make Matthew smile for a little while longer. Which meant he had something besides a restored car to bring back to Gansey.
He rolled down the window. “I’m going.”
For a moment, Kavinsky’s face was perfectly blank, and then Kavinsky flickered back onto it. He said, “You’re shitting me.”
“I’ll send flowers.” Ronan revved the engine. Exhaust and dust swirled in a wild torment behind the Camaro. It coughed at twenty-eight-hundred rpm. Just like the Pig. Everything was back the way it was.
“Running back to your master?”
“This was fun,” Ronan said. “Time for big boy games now, though.”
“You’re a player in his life, Lynch.”