Helen did not need to be anything. She didn’t have careers, she had hobbies that involved other people’s lives.
"I do remember," he said tensely. "It’s May tenth." A lab mix tied in front of the first house bayed dolorously as he passed. The other dog continued to worry at his tires, a snarl ascending with the engine note. Three kids in sleeveless shirts stood in one of the yards shooting milk jugs with BB guns; they shouted Hey, Hollywood! and affably aimed guns at the Pig’s tires. They pretended to hold phones by their ears. Gansey felt a peculiar stab at the three of them, their camaraderie, their belonging, products of their surroundings. He wasn’t sure if it was pity or envy. Everywhere was dust.
Helen asked, "Where are you? You sound like you’re on the set of a Guy Ritchie movie."
"I’m going to see a friend."
"The mean one, or the white trash one?"
"Helen."
She replied, "Sorry. I meant Captain Frigid or Trailer-Park Boy."
"Helen."
Adam didn’t live in a trailer park, technically, since every house was a double-wide. Adam had told him that the last of the single-wide trailers had been taken out a few years ago, but he had said it ironically, like even he knew that doubling the size of the trailers didn’t change much.
"Dad calls them worse things," Helen said. "Mom said one of your weird New Age books was delivered to the house yesterday. Are you coming home anytime soon?"
"Maybe," Gansey said. Somehow seeing his parents always reminded him of how little he’d accomplished, how similar he and Helen were, how many red ties he owned, how he was slowly growing up to be everything Ronan was afraid of becoming. He pulled in front of the light blue double-wide where the Parrishes lived. "Maybe for Mom’s birthday. I have to go. Things might get ugly."
The cell phone speaker made Helen’s laugh a hissing, pitchless thing. "Listen to you, sounding all badass. I bet you’re just listening to a CD called ‘The Sounds of Crime’ while you cruise for chicks outside the Old Navy in your Camaro."
"Bye, Helen," said Gansey. He clicked END and climbed out.
Fat, shiny carpenter bees swooped at his head, distracted from their work of destroying the stairs. After he knocked, he looked out across the flat, ugly field of dead grass. The idea that you had to pay for the beauty in Henrietta should have occurred to him before then, but it hadn’t. No matter how many times Adam told him he was foolish about money, he couldn’t seem to get any wiser about it.
There is no spring here, Gansey realized, and the thought was unexpectedly grim.
Adam’s mother answered his knock. She was a shadow of Adam — the same elongated features, the same wide-set eyes. In comparison to Gansey’s mother, she seemed old and hard-edged.
"Adam’s out back," she said, before he could ask her anything. She glanced to him and away, not holding his gaze. Gansey never failed to be amazed at how Adam’s parents reacted to the Aglionby sweater. They knew everything they needed to about him before he even opened his mouth.
"Thanks," Gansey said, but the word felt like sawdust in his mouth, and in any case, she was already closing the door.
Under the old carport behind the house, he found Adam lying beneath an old Bonneville pulled up onto ramps, initially invisible in the cool blue shadows. An empty oil pan protruded from under the car. There was no sound coming from beneath the car, and Gansey suspected that Adam wasn’t working so much as avoiding being in the house.
"Hey, tiger," Gansey said.
Adam’s knees bent as if he were going to scoot himself out from under the car, but then he didn’t.
"What’s up?" he said flatly.
Gansey knew what this meant, this failure to immediately come out from beneath the car, and anger and guilt drew his chest tight. The most frustrating thing about the Adam situation was that Gansey couldn’t control it. Not a single piece of it. He dropped a notebook on the worktable. "Those are notes from today. I couldn’t tell them you were sick. You missed too much last month."
Adam’s voice was even. "What did you tell them, then?"
One of the tools under the car made a halfhearted scraping sound.
"Come on, Parrish. Come out," Gansey said. "Get it over with."
Gansey jumped as a cold dog nose shoved into his dangling palm — the mutt that had so savagely attacked his tires earlier. He reluctantly fondled one of her stumpy ears and then jerked his hand back as she leapt at the car, barking at Adam’s feet when they started to move. The ripped knees of Adam’s camo cargo pants appeared first, then his faded Coca-Cola T-shirt, then, finally, his face.
A bruise spread over his cheekbone, red and swelling as a galaxy. A darker one snaked over the bridge of his nose.
Gansey said immediately, "You’re leaving with me."
"It will only make it worse when I come back," Adam told him.
"I mean for good. Move into Monmouth. Enough’s enough."
Adam stood up. The dog pranced delightedly around his feet as if he’d been gone to another planet instead of merely underneath a car. Wearily, he asked, "And what about when Glendower takes you away from Henrietta?"
Gansey couldn’t say it wouldn’t happen. "You come with."
"I come with? Tell me how that would work. I lose all the work I put in at Aglionby. I have to play the game again at another school."
Adam had once told Gansey, Rags to riches isn’t a story anyone wants to hear until after it’s done. But it was a story that was hard to finish when Adam had missed school yet again. There was no happy ending without passing grades.
Gansey said, "You wouldn’t have to go to a school like Aglionby. It doesn’t have to be an Ivy League. There are different ways to be successful."
At once, Adam said, "I don’t judge you for what you do, Gansey."
And this was an uneasy place to be, because Gansey knew it took a lot for Adam to accept his reasons for chasing Glendower. Adam had plenty of reasons to be indifferent about Gansey’s nebulous anxiety, his questioning of why the universe had chosen him to be born to affluent parents, wondering if there was some greater purpose that he was alive. Gansey knew he had to make a difference, had to make a bigger mark on the world because of the head start he’d been given, or he was the worst sort of person out there.
The poor are sad they’re poor, Adam had once mused, and turns out the rich are sad they’re rich.