One of Ronan’s eyebrows was raised, sharp as a razor.
Gansey strapped his journal closed. "That doesn’t work on me. She had nothing to do with you and Declan." He said you and Declan like it was a physical object, something you could pick up and look underneath. "You treated her badly. You made the rest of us look bad."
Ronan looked chastened, but Adam knew better. Ronan wasn’t sorry for his behavior; he was only sorry that Gansey had been there to see him. What lived between the Lynch brothers was dark enough to hide anyone else’s feelings.
But surely Gansey knew that as well as Adam. He ran his thumb back and forth across his bottom lip, a habit he never seemed to notice and Adam never bothered to point out. Catching Adam’s gaze, he said, "Christ, now I feel dirty. Come on. Let’s go to Nino’s. We’ll get pizza and I’ll call that psychic and the whole goddamn world will sort itself out."
This was why Adam could forgive that shallow, glossy version of Gansey he’d first met. Because of his money and his good family name, because of his handsome smile and his easy laugh, because he liked people and (despite his fears to the contrary) they liked him back, Gansey could’ve had any and all of the friends that he wanted. Instead he had chosen the three of them, three guys who should’ve, for three different reasons, been friendless.
"I’m not coming," Noah said.
"Need some more alone time?" Ronan asked.
"Ronan," Gansey interjected. "Set your weapons to stun, will you? Noah, we won’t make you eat. Adam?"
Adam glanced up, distracted. His mind had wandered from Ronan’s bad behavior to Ashley’s interest in the journal, and he was wondering if it was more than the ordinary curiosity people possessed when faced with Gansey and his obsessive accessories. He knew Gansey would find him overly suspicious, unnecessarily propiertary of a search Gansey was more than willing to share with most people.
But Gansey and Adam sought Glendower for different reasons. Gansey longed for him like Arthur longed for the grail, drawn by a desperate but nebulous need to be useful to the world, to make sure his life meant something beyond champagne parties and white collars, by some complicated longing to settle an argument that waged deep inside himself.
Adam, on the other hand, needed that royal favor.
And that meant they needed to be the ones to wake Glendower. They needed to be the ones to find him first.
"Parrish," Gansey repeated. "Come on."
Adam made a face. He felt it would take more than pizza to improve Ronan’s character.
But Gansey was already grabbing the car keys to the Pig and stepping around his miniature Henrietta. Even though Ronan was snarling and Noah was sighing and Adam was hesitating, he didn’t turn to verify that they were coming. He knew they were. In three different ways, he’d earned them all days or weeks or months before, and when it came to it, they’d all follow him anywhere.
"Excelsior," said Gansey, and shut the door behind them.
Chapter 5
Barrington Whelk was feeling less than sprightly as he slouched down the hall of Whitman House, the Aglionby admin building. It was five P.M., the school day well over, and he’d only left his town house in order to pick up homework that had to be graded before the next day. Afternoon light spilled in the tall, many-paned windows to his left; on the right was a hum of voices from the staff offices. These old buildings looked like museums at this time of day.
"Barrington, I thought you were out today. You look terrible. You sick?"
Whelk didn’t immediately formulate an answer. For all intents and purposes, he was still out. The question asker was Jonah Milo, the well-scrubbed eleventh- and twelfth-grade English teacher. Despite an affinity for plaid and thin-legged corduroy pants, Milo wasn’t unbearable, but Whelk didn’t care to discuss his absence from class this morning with him. St. Mark’s Eve was beginning to have a sheen of tradition for him, one that involved spending most of the night getting smashed before falling asleep on his kitchenette floor just before dawn. This year he’d had the forethought to request St. Mark’s Day off. Teaching Latin to Aglionby boys was punishment enough. Teaching it with a hangover was excruciating.
Finally, Whelk merely held up the grubby stack of handwritten homework assignments as answer. Milo’s widened his eyes at the sight of the name written on the topmost paper.
"Ronan Lynch! Is that his homework?"
Flipping the stack around to read the name on the front, Whelk agreed that it was. As he did, a few boys on their way to crew team practice crashed past, pushing him into Milo. The students probably didn’t even realize they were being disrespectful; Whelk was barely older than they were, and his dramatically large features made him look younger. It was still easy to mistake him for one of the students.
Milo disentangled himself from Whelk. "How do you get him to come to class?"
The mere mention of Ronan Lynch’s name had scraped something raw inside Whelk. Because it was never Ronan by himself, it was Ronan as part of the inseparable threesome: Ronan Lynch, Richard Gansey, and Adam Parrish. All of the boys in his class were affluent, confident, arrogant, but the three of them, more than anyone else, reminded him of what he’d lost.
Whelk struggled to remember if Ronan had ever missed a class with him. The days of the school year blurred together, one long and unending day that began with Whelk parking his crappy car next to the beautiful Aglionby cars, shouldering his way past laughing, thoughtless boys, standing in front of a room of students who were glassy-eyed at best and derisive at worst. And at the end of the day Whelk, alone and haunted, never, ever able to forget that he was once one of them.
When did this become my life?
Whelk shrugged. "I don’t remember him skipping."
"You have him with Gansey, though, don’t you?" Milo asked. "That explains it. Those two are tight as ticks."
It was a strange, old expression, one that Whelk hadn’t heard since his own days at Aglionby, when he, too, had been tight as ticks with his roommate Czerny. He felt a hollowness inside him, like he was hungry, like he should’ve stayed home and drank more to commemorate this miserable day.
He swam back to the present, looking at the attendance sheet the substitute teacher had left. "Ronan was in class today, but Gansey wasn’t. Not in mine, anyway."
"Oh, that’s probably because of that St. Mark’s Day hoopla he was talking about," Milo said.