Of course. Mr. Gray had come looking for a magical parcel, and when he’d failed to deliver it to his employer Colin Greenmantle, Greenmantle had flooded the town with people looking for Mr. Gray. It would be foolish to assume they’d all left.
Gansey preferred to be foolish.
“Unsurprising!” Malory concluded. He clapped a hand on Gansey’s shoulder. “Lucky for both of you that this young man has a better ear than most; he’ll hear that king long before anyone else has thought to even listen. Now, let us flee this coarse place before it rubs off. Here! To Spruce Knob. By way of these other two lumps.”
Out of old habit, Gansey gathered up the transit and GPS and laser rod as Malory climbed into the Suburban to wait. Adam went into the woods a bit farther to pee, an action that always made Gansey wish that he was not too inhibited to do the same.
When he returned, Adam said suddenly, “I’m glad we’re not fighting. It was stupid for it to go on so long.”
“Yes,” Gansey replied, trying not to sound relieved, exhausted, pleased. He was afraid to say too much; he’d destroy this moment, which already felt imaginary.
Adam continued, “That thing with Blue. I should’ve known it would be weird trying to date her once she was one of … you know, with us all. Whatever.”
Gansey thought of his fingers on Blue’s and how foolish such a gesture had been. This equilibrium was so hard-won.
He preferred being foolish, but he couldn’t keep on that way.
Both boys looked out through the bare spot in the trees toward the valley. Thunder rumbled somewhere, though there was not a cloud in the sky. It didn’t feel like it came from the sky, anyway. It felt like it came from below them, down in the ley line.
Adam’s expression was ferocious and pleased; Gansey was at once proud to know him and uncertain he did at all.
“I can’t believe we’re doing this,” Gansey said.
Adam replied, “I can.”
This was not Blue’s real life.
As she leaned against the wall outside the guidance counselor’s office, she wondered when she would start to think of school as an important thing again. After an extraordinary summer full of chasing kings and disappearing mothers, it was hard to really, truly picture herself going to class every day. What would any of this matter in two years? Nobody here would remember her, or vice versa. She would only remember that this was the fall her mother vanished. This was the year of Glendower.
She peered across the linoleum-basted hall to the clock. In an hour she could walk back home to her real life.
You are coming back tomorrow, Blue told herself. And the next day.
But it felt like more of a dream than Cabeswater.
She touched her palm with the fingers of her other hand and thought about that flag Malory had found, painted with three women with red hands and her face. She thought about how the boys were off exploring without her.
She became aware of Noah’s presence. At first she just sort of knew that he was there, and when she considered how it was that she happened to know, she realized she could see him slouching beside her in his rumpled Aglionby uniform.
“Here?” Blue demanded, though really she was pleased. “Here, and not in the raven cave of death?”
Noah shrugged, apologetic and smudgy. His proximity chilled Blue as he pulled energy from her to stay visible. He blinked at two girls who walked by pushing a cart. They didn’t seem to notice him, but it was difficult to tell if it was because he was invisible to them or just because he was Noah.
“I think I miss this part,” he said. “The beginning. This is the beginning, right?”
“First day,” Blue replied.
“Oh, yeah.” Noah leaned back and inhaled. “Oh, wait, no, it’s the other one. I forgot. I actually hate this part.”
Blue did not hate it, because that would require acknowledging that it was really happening.
“What are you doing?” Noah asked.
She handed him a brochure, even though she felt self-conscious sharing it, as if she were giving him a list for Santa Claus. “Talking to the counselor about that.”
Noah read the words as if they were in a foreign language. “Ex-per-ie-ence di-verse fo-rest types in the A-ma-zon. The Sch-ooool for E-col-o-gy fea-tures a stud-y a-broad — oh, you can’t go somewhere.”
She was very aware that he was probably right. “Thanks for the vote of confidence.”
“People are going to see you talking to nobody and think you’re weird.” This amused him.
It neither amused nor worried Blue. She’d gone through eighteen years as the town psychic’s daughter, and now, in her senior year, she had already held every single possible conversation about that fact. She had been shunned and embraced and bullied and cajoled. She was going to hell, she had the straight line to spiritual nirvana. Her mother was a hack, her mother was a witch. Blue dressed like a hobo, Blue dressed like a fashion mogul. She was untouchably hilarious, she was a friendless bitch. It had faded into monotonous background noise. The disheartening and lonesome upshot was that Blue Sargent was the strangest thing in the halls of Mountain View High School.
Well, with the exception of Noah.
“Do you see other dead people?” Blue asked him.
Meaning: Do you see my mother?
Noah shuddered.
A voice came from the cracked office door. “Blue? Sweetie, you can come in now.”
Noah slid into the office ahead of her. Even though he looked solid and living in the strong sunlight through the office window, the counselor looked right through him. His invisibility seemed downright miraculous as he sat down on the floor in front of the metal desk to pleasantly eavesdrop.
Blue shot him a withering look.
There were two sorts of people: The ones who could see Noah, and the ones who couldn’t. Blue generally only got along with the former.
The counselor — Ms. Shiftlet — was new to the school, but not to Henrietta. Blue recognized her from the post office. She was one of those impeccably dressed older women who liked things done right the first time. She sat perfectly straight in a chair designed for slouching, out of place behind a cheap shared desk cluttered with mismatching personal knickknacks.
Ms. Shiftlet efficiently checked the computer. “I see someone just had a birthday.”
“It was your birthday?” Noah demanded.
Blue struggled to address the counselor instead of Noah. “What — oh — yes.”
It had been two weeks ago. Ordinarily, Maura made sludgy brownies, but she hadn’t been there. Persephone had tried her best to re-create their undercooked glory, but the brownies had accidentally turned out pretty and precise with powdered sugar dusted in lace patterns on top. Calla had seemed worried Blue would be angry, which bemused Blue. Why would Blue be angry at them? It was Maura she wanted to slap. Or hug.
“I can’t believe you didn’t tell us,” muttered Noah. “We could have gone for gelato.”
Noah couldn’t eat, but he liked the gelato parlor in town for reasons that escaped Blue.
Ms. Shiftlet inclined her head to Blue without disrupting her perfect posture. “I see here you talked to Mr. Torres before he left. He has a note here about an incident in —”
“That’s all taken care of and done with,” Blue interrupted, avoiding Noah’s eyes. She slid the brochure across the desk. “Pretend like it never happened. All I’d like to know is if there is any way to get here from what I’m doing now.”
Ms. Shiftlet was visibly eager to get off the topic of anything that could be considered an incident. She consulted the brochure. “Well, this looks like a barrel of monkeys, pun intended! Do you have an interest in wildlife? Let me pull up some information on this school.”
Noah leaned over. “You should see her shoes. Pointy.”
Blue ignored him. “I’d like to do something with river systems, or forest —”
“Oh, this school is very competitive.” Ms. Shiftlet was too efficient to let Blue
finish her sentence. “Here, let me show you the average scores of the students who get accepted.”
“Rude,” Noah commented.
Ms. Shiftlet turned the monitor so that Blue could see a somewhat demoralizing graph. “You see how few students get accepted. That means financial aid would also be very competitive. You’d be applying for aid?”
She said it like a statement instead of a question, but she wasn’t wrong. This was Mountain View High. No one was paying outright for a private school. Most of Blue’s peers considered community college or state schools, if they considered college at all.
“I don’t know if Mr. Torres went over the types of schools you need.” Ms. Shiftlet sounded as if she suspected he hadn’t, and that she judged him for it. “What you need is three different types. Reach schools, match schools, and safety schools. This one is a wonderful example of a reach school. But now it’s time to add some others to your list. Some schools that you can be sure you can get into and afford. That’s just good sense.”
Ms. Shiftlet wrote reach, match, and safety on an index card. Underlining safety, she slid it across the desk. Blue wasn’t sure if she was supposed to keep it.
“Have you filled out your application fee waiver form?”
“Four of them. I read online I could get up to four waived?”
This show of efficiency visibly pleased Ms. Shiftlet. “So maybe you already know this is your reach school! Now it’s time to make a sensible backup plan.”
Blue was so tired of compromises. She was tired of sensible.
Noah scratched his fingernails on the desk leg. The sound — which was admittedly uncomfortable — made Ms. Shiftlet frown.
He said, “I’d be way more sunshiney if I was a counselor.”
“If I did get in,” Blue said, “could I get loans and aid to cover it all?”
“Let me get you some paperwork,” Ms. Shiftlet said. “FAFSA will pay for a percentage depending on your need. The amount varies.”
Blue couldn’t expect any help from the lean budget at 300 Fox Way. She thought about the bank account she’d slowly been filling. “How much will be left over? Could you guess?”
Ms. Shiftlet sighed. Guessing clearly fell outside her realm of interests. She flipped the monitor around again to reveal the school’s tuition rate. “If you were staying in the dorm, you’d probably be obligated for ten thousand dollars a year. Your parents could take out a loan, of course. I have paperwork for that, too, if you would like it.”
Blue leaned back as her heart vacated her chest cavity. Of course it was impossible. It had been impossible before she arrived and would continue being impossible forever. It was just that spending time with Gansey and the others had made her think that the impossible might be more possible than she’d thought before.
Maura was always telling her, Look at all the potential you hold inside yourself!
Potential for other people, though. Not for Blue.
It wasn’t worth shedding tears over something she had known for so long. It was just that this, on top of everything else —
She swallowed. I will not cry in front of this woman.
Suddenly, Noah scrambled out from under the desk. He leapt to his feet. There was something wrong about the action, something about it that meant it was too fast or too vertical or too violent for a living boy to perform. And he kept going up, even after he’d already stood. As he stretched to the ceiling, the card that said reach, match, and safety hurtled into the air.
“Oh?” said Ms. Shiftlet. Her voice wasn’t even surprised, yet.
The warmth sucked from Blue’s skin. The water in Ms. Shiftlet’s glass creaked.
The business card holder upended. Cards splayed across the desk. A computer speaker fell onto its face. An array of paper swirled up. Someone’s family photo shot upward.
Blue jumped up. She didn’t have any immediate plan but to stop Noah, but as she flung her hands out, she realized that Noah wasn’t there.
There was just a tossed explosion of tissues and business envelopes and business cards, a frenetic tornado losing propulsion.
The material collapsed back to the desk.
Blue and Ms. Shiftlet stared at each other. The paper rustled as it settled completely. The knocked-over computer speaker buzzed; one of its cables had been knocked ajar.
The temperature was slowly rising in the room again.
“What just happened?” Ms. Shiftlet asked.
Blue’s pulse galloped.
Truthfully, she replied, “I have no idea.”
Blue arrived at Monmouth Manufacturing before anyone else. She knocked to be sure, and then let herself in. Immediately, she was enveloped with the comfortable scent of the room: the faded library-smell of old books, the cool odor of mint, the must-and-rust scent of century-old brick and ancient pipes, the note of funk from the heap of dirty laundry against the wall.
“Noah?” Her voice was small in the huge expanse. She dropped her backpack on the desk chair. “Are you here? It’s okay, I’m not upset. You can use my energy if you need.”
There was no answer. The space was turning gray and blue as one of the strange flash thunderstorms roiled over the mountains, filling the floor-to-ceiling windows of the warehouse with clouds. The sharp afternoon shadows behind the stacks of books mutated and diffused. The room felt heavy, sleepy.
Blue peered into the dark gathering at the far-above peak of the roof. “Noah? I just want to talk about what happened.”
She put her head in the door of Noah’s room. Malory’s things occupied it currently, and it smelled mannish and evergreen. One of his bags was open and Blue could see that it was entirely filled with books. This struck her as impractical and Gansey-like and made her feel a bit more benevolent toward the professor.
Noah was not there.
She checked the bathroom, which was also sort of the laundry room and kitchen. The doors hung open on a small stacked washer-dryer unit; socks draped over the sink’s edge, either drying or flung. A small fridge lurked dangerously close to the toilet. A length of rubber tubing strangled a showerhead above a grimy drain; the shower curtain was strung from the ceiling with fishing line. Blue was disturbed by the number of chip bags that were reachable from the toilet. A dark red tie on the floor pointed a jagged line toward the exit.
Some foreign impulse urged Blue to pick up any of the mess, any single component, to improve upon the disaster.
She did not.
She backed out.
Ronan’s room was forbidden, but she looked inside anyway. His raven’s cage sat with its door ajar, impeccably and incongruously clean. His room was filled not so much with filth, but clutter: shovels and swords leaned in the corners, speakers and printers piled by the wall. And bizarre objects in between: an old suitcase with vines trailing out of it, a potted tree that seemed to be humming to itself, a single cowboy boot in the middle of the floor. A mask hung high on the wall, eyes wide, mouth gaping. It was blackened, as if by fire, and the edges were badly bitten, as if by a saw. Something that looked suspiciously like a tire track ran over one of its eyes. The mask made Blue think of words like survivor and destroyer.
She didn’t like it.
A crash behind Blue made her leap — but it was only the apartment door opening. Guilt had amplified the sound.
Blue darted out of Ronan’s room. Gansey and Malory trailed in slowly, deep in conversation. The Dog sulked behind them, excluded by virtue of not speaking English.
“Of course Iolo Goch would make sense as a companion,” Gansey was saying, sloughing off his jacket. “Him or Gruffudd Llwyd, I suppose. But — no, it’s impossible. He died in Wales.”
“But are we sure?” Malory asked. “Do we know where he was buried? That he was buried?”
“Or if he was just made into nightgowns, you mean?” Gansey caught sight of Blue then, and he rewarded her with his best smile — not his polished one, but the more foolish number that meant he was excited. “Hallo, Jane. Tell me what Iolo Goch
means to you.”
Blue pulled her thoughts from Ronan’s mask and Noah and school. “A chest cold?”
“Glendower’s closest poet,” Gansey corrected. “Also, very funny.”
“Did you find anything?” she asked.
“Absolutely nothing,” he replied, but he sounded cheerful about it.
Malory lowered his mass onto the leather couch. The Dog lay on top of him. It didn’t seem as if it would be very comfortable; the Dog draped over the professor like a slip cloth over a chair. But Malory merely closed his eyes and stroked him in an uncharacteristic show of affection. “Gansey, I perish for a cup of tea. Can such a thing be had in this place? I cannot possibly hope to survive this jet lag without a cup of tea.”
“I got tea just for you,” Gansey said. “I’ll make some.”
“Please not with loo water,” Malory called after him, not opening his eyes. The Dog kept lying on him.
For an overwhelming moment, Blue was afraid she was going to be unable to prevent herself from asking what the Dog was for. Instead, she followed Gansey back to the kitchen-bathroom-laundry.
He rummaged through the cluttered shelves. “We were just talking about the mechanics of bringing Glendower over here. The books say he traveled with mages — are they the ones who put him to sleep? Did he want it? Was he sleeping before he left, or did he fall asleep here?”
It suddenly seemed like a lonesome thing to be buried a sea away from your home, like being shot off into space. “Iolo Goch was one of the mages?”
“No, just a poet. You heard Malory in the car. They were very poetlitical — poet — political.” Gansey laughed at his own stumble. “Poets were political. I know that’s not really a tongue twister. I’ve been listening to Malory all day. P-p-political. Poets. Iolo composed these really flattering poems about Glendower’s past prowess and his house and lands. His family. And such. Oh, what am I even looking for here?”
He paused to locate a tiny microwave. He examined the interior of a mug before filling it. Pulling a mint leaf from his pocket to suck on, he spoke around it as the water heated. “Really, if Glendower were Robin Hood, Iolo Goch would have been … that other guy.”