"Declan," Gansey said, voice full of warning, "if you come back over here, I swear …"
With a jerk of his chin, Declan spit blood at the pavement. His lip was bleeding, but his teeth were still good. "Fine. He’s your dog, Gansey. You leash him. Keep him from getting kicked out of Aglionby. I wash my hands of him."
"I wish," snarled Ronan. His entire body was rigid underneath Gansey’s hand. He wore his hatred like a cruel second skin.
Declan said, "You’re such a piece of shit, Ronan. If Dad saw —" and this made Ronan burst forward again. Gansey clamped arms around Ronan’s chest and dragged him back.
"Why are you even here?" Gansey asked Declan.
"Ashley had to use the bathroom," Declan replied crisply. "I should be able to stop where I like, don’t you think?"
The last time Gansey had been in the Nino’s co-ed bathroom, it had smelled like vomit and beer. On one of the walls, a red Sharpie had scrawled the word BEEZLEBUB and Ronan’s number below. It was hard to imagine Declan choosing to inflict Nino’s facilities on his girlfriend. Gansey’s voice was short. "I think you should just go. This isn’t getting solved tonight."
Declan laughed, just once. A big, careless laugh, full of round vowels. He clearly found nothing about Ronan funny.
"Ask him if he’s going to get by with a B this year," he told Gansey. "Do you ever go to class, Ronan?"
Behind Declan, Ashley peered out of the driver’s side window. She’d rolled down the window to listen; she didn’t look nearly as much like an idiot when she thought no one was paying any attention to her. It seemed like justice that perhaps this time, Declan was the one getting played.
"I’m not saying you’re wrong, Declan," Gansey said. His ear throbbed where it had been boxed. He could feel Ronan’s pulse crashing in his arm where he restrained him. His vow to consider his words more carefully came back to him, and so he framed the rest of the statement in his head before saying it out loud. "But you are not Niall Lynch, and you won’t ever be. And you’d get ahead a lot faster if you stopped trying."
Gansey released Ronan.
Ronan didn’t move, though, and neither did Declan, as if by saying their father’s name, Gansey had cast a spell. They wore matching raw expressions. Different wounds inflicted by the same weapon.
"I’m only trying to help," Declan said finally, but he sounded defeated. There was a time, a few months ago, when Gansey would’ve believed him.
Next to Gansey, Ronan’s hands hung open at his sides. Sometimes, after Adam had been hit, there was something remote and absent in his eyes, like his body belonged to someone else. When Ronan was hit, it was the opposite; he became so urgently present that it was as if he’d been sleeping before.
Ronan told his brother, "I’ll never forgive you."
The Volvo’s window hissed closed, as if Ashley had just realized that this had become a conversation she wasn’t meant to hear.
Sucking on his bloody lip, Declan looked at the ground for a bare moment. Then he straightened and adjusted his tie.
"Wouldn’t mean much from you anymore," he said, and tugged open the Volvo’s door.
As he slid into the driver’s seat, Declan said, "I don’t want to talk about it" to Ashley and slammed the door shut. The Volvo’s tires squealed as they bit into the pavement, and then Gansey and Ronan were left standing next to each other in the strange dim light of the parking lot. A block away, a dog barked balefully, three times. Ronan touched his pinkie finger to his eyebrow to check for blood, but there was none, just a raised, angry bump.
"Fix it," Gansey said. He wasn’t entirely sure that whatever Ronan had done, or failed to do, was easily corrected, but he was sure that it must be corrected. The only reason Ronan was allowed to stay at Monmouth Manufacturing was because his grades were acceptable. "Whatever it is. Don’t let him be right."
Ronan said, low, just for Gansey, "I want to quit."
"One more year."
"I don’t want to do this for another year." He kicked a piece of gravel under the Camaro. Now his voice did rise, but only in ferocity, not in volume. "Another year, and then I get strangled with a necktie like Declan? I’m not a damn politician, Gansey. I’m not a banker."
Gansey wasn’t, either, but it didn’t mean he wanted to leave school. The pain in Ronan’s voice meant he couldn’t have any in his when he said, "Just graduate, and do whatever you want."
The trust funds from their fathers had ensured that neither of them had to work for a living, ever, if they didn’t choose to. They were extraneous parts in the machine that was society, a fact that sat differently on Ronan’s shoulders than Gansey’s.
Ronan looked angry, but he was in the mood where he was going to look angry no matter what. "I don’t know what I want. I don’t know what the hell I am."
He got into the Camaro.
"You promised me," Gansey said through the open car door.
Ronan didn’t look up. "I know what I did, Gansey."
"Don’t forget."
When Ronan slammed the door, it echoed across the parking lot in the too-loud way of sounds after dark. Gansey joined Adam at his safely distant vantage point. In comparison to Ronan, Adam looked clean, self-contained, utterly in control. From somewhere, he had gotten a rubber ball printed with a SpongeBob logo, and he bounced it with a pensive expression.
"I convinced them not to call the cops," Adam said. He was good at making things quiet.
Gansey let out his breath. Tonight, he didn’t have it in him to talk to the police on Ronan’s behalf.
Tell me I’m doing the right thing with Ronan. Tell me this is how to find the old Ronan. Tell me I’m not ruining him by keeping him away from Declan.
But Adam had already told Gansey he thought Ronan needed to learn to clean up his own messes. It was only Gansey who seemed afraid that Ronan would learn to live in the dirt.
So he merely asked, "Where’s Noah?"
"He’s coming. I think he was leaving a tip." Adam dropped the ball and caught it again. He had an almost mechanical way of snapping his fingers around the ball as it bounced back toward him; one moment his hand was open and empty, and the next, tight shut around it.
Bounce. Snap.
Gansey said, "So, Ashley."
"Yes," Adam replied, as if he’d been waiting for him to bring her up.