The Dream Thieves

She looked at him again. He was handsome and he liked her and if she hadn’t told him the truth, she could have dated him like a normal girl and even kissed him without worrying about killing him.

Blue stood by the front door, her head leaning against the wall.

But she didn’t want that. She wanted something more.

Maybe there is nothing else!

Maybe she’d go for a walk, just her and the pink switchblade. They were a good pair. Both incapable of opening up without cutting someone. She didn’t know where she’d go, though.

She crept up to the reading room, quietly, so that she wouldn’t wake Adam or alert Orla. Picking up the phone, she listened to make sure no one was having a psychic experience on the other end. Dial tone.

She called Gansey.

“Blue?” he said.

Just his voice. Her heart tethered itself. Not completely, but enough to stop quivering so much. She closed her eyes.

“Take me somewhere?”

They took the newly minted Pig, which indeed seemed identical to the last one, down to the odor of gasoline and the coughing start of the engine. The passenger seat was the same busted vinyl bucket it had been before. And the headlights on the road ahead were the same twin beams of weak golden light.

But Gansey was different. Though he wore his usual khakis and stupid Top-Siders, he was wearing a white, collarless T-shirt and his wireframe glasses. This was her favorite Gansey, the scholar-Gansey, not a hint of Aglionby about him. There was something terrible about how this Gansey made her feel at the moment, though.

When she got in, he asked, “What happened, Jane?”

“Adam and I fought,” she said. “I told him. I don’t want to talk about it.”

He put the car in gear. “Do you want to talk at all?”

“Only if it isn’t about him.”

“Do you know where you want to go?”

“Someplace that isn’t here.”

So he drove them out of town and he told her about Ronan and Kavinsky. When he’d done with that, he kept driving into the mountains, onto ever more narrow roads, and he told her about the party and the book club and organic cucumber sandwiches.

The Camaro’s engine growled, echoing up the steep bank beside the road. The headlights only illuminated as far as the next turn. Blue pulled her legs up and wrapped her arms around them. Resting her cheek on her knees, she watched Gansey switch gears and glance in his rearview mirror and then at her.

He told her about the pigeons and he told her about Helen. He told her about everything except for Adam. It was like describing a circle without ever saying the word.

“Okay,” she said finally. “You can talk about him now.”

There was silence in the car — well, less sound. The engine roared and the anemic air-conditioning blew fitful breaths over them both.

“Oh, Jane,” he said suddenly. “If you’d been there when we got the call about him walking on the interstate, you would’ve . . .” He trailed off before she found out what she would’ve done. And then, all of a sudden, he pulled himself together. “Ha! Adam’s communing with trees and Noah keeps reenacting being murdered and Ronan’s wrecking and then making me new cars. What’s new with you? Something terrible I trust?”

“You know me,” Blue said. “Ever sensible.”

“Like myself,” Gansey agreed grandly, and she laughed delightedly. “A creature of simple delights.”

Blue touched the radio knob, but she didn’t turn it. She dropped her fingers. “I feel terrible about what I said to him.”

Gansey guided the Pig up an even more narrow road. It might have been someone’s driveway. It was difficult to tell in these mountains, especially after dark. The insects in the close-pressed trees trilled even louder than the engine.

“Adam has killed himself for Aglionby,” he said suddenly. “And for what? Education?”

No one went to Aglionby for education. “Not just that,” she said. “Prestige? Opportunity?”

“But maybe he never had a chance. Maybe success is in your genes.”

Something more. “This really isn’t a conversation I feel like having right now.”

“What? Oh — that is not what I meant. I mean that I’m rich —”

“Not helping.”

“I’m rich in support. So are you. You grew up loved, didn’t you?”

She didn’t even have to think before she nodded.

“Me too,” Gansey said. “I never doubted it. I never even thought to doubt it. And even Ronan grew up with that, too, back when it mattered, when he was becoming the person he was. The age of reason, or whatever. I wish you could have met him before. But growing up being told you can do anything . . . I used to think, before I met you, that it was about the money. Like, I thought Adam’s family was too poor for love.”

“Oh, but since we’re poor but happy —” started Blue hotly. “The cheerful peasants —”

“Don’t, please, Jane,” he interrupted. “You know what I mean. I’m telling you I was stupid over it. I thought it was about trying so hard to survive that you didn’t have the time to be a good parent. Obviously that’s not it. Because you and I, we’re both . . . wealthy in love.”

“I suppose,” Blue said. “But that’s not going to get me into community college.”

“Community college!” Gansey echoed. His shocked emphasis on community hurt Blue more than she could admit out loud. She sat quietly and miserably in the passenger seat until he glanced over. “Surely you can get scholarships.”

“They don’t cover books.”

“That’s only a few hundred dollars a semester. Right?”

“Just how much do you think I make at a shift at Nino’s, Gansey?”

“Don’t they make grants to cover that?”

Frustration welled in her. Everything that had happened that day felt ready to explode out of her. “Either I’m an idiot or I’m not, Gansey — make up your mind! Either I’m clever enough to have researched this myself and be eligible for a scholarship, or I am too stupid to have considered the options and I can’t get a scholarship anyway!”

“Please don’t be angry.”

She rested her head on the door. “Sorry.”

“Jesus,” Gansey said. “I wish this week was over.”

For a few minutes, they drove in silence: up, up, up.

Blue asked, “Did you ever meet his parents?”

In a low, unfamiliar voice, he said, “I hate them.” And a little bit later, “The bruises he’d come to school with. Who has he ever had to love him? Ever?”

In her mind, Adam pressed that fist against her bedroom wall. So gently. Though every muscle was knotted, wanting to destroy it.

She said, “Look there.”

Gansey followed her gaze. The trees on one side of the road had fallen away, and suddenly they could see that the little gravel track they were on clung to the very side of the mountain, winding up like tinsel. All of the valley suddenly spread out below. Though hundreds of stars were already visible, the sky was still a deep blue, a whimsical touch from an idealistic painter. The mountains on the other side of the valley, however, were night black, everything the sky was not. Dark and cool and silent. And between them, at the mountains’ feet, was Henrietta itself, studded with yellow and white lights.

Gansey let the Pig slide to a stop. He stepped on the parking brake. They both gazed out the driver’s side window.

It was a sort of ferocious, quiet beauty, the sort that wouldn’t let you admire it. The sort of beauty that just always hurt.

Gansey sighed, small and quiet and ragged, like he hadn’t meant to let it escape. She shifted her gaze from the window to the side of his head, watching him watch instead. He pressed his thumb against his lower lip — this was Gansey, that gesture — and then he swallowed. It was, she thought, just as she felt when she looked at the stars, when she walked in Cabeswater.

“What are you thinking?” Blue asked.

He didn’t answer right away. Then, when he did, he kept his eyes trained on the view. “I’ve been all over the world. More than one country for every year that I’m alive. Europe and South America and — the highest mountains and the widest rivers and the prettiest villages. I’m not saying that to show off. I’m just saying it because I’m trying to understand how I could have been so many places and yet this is the only place that feels like home. This is the only place I belong. And because I’m trying to understand how, if I belong here, it . . .”

“— hurts so much,” Blue finished.

Gansey turned to her, his eyes bright. He just nodded.

Why, she thought, agonized, couldn’t it have been Adam?

She said, “If you find out, will you tell me?”

He’s going to die, Blue, don’t —

“I don’t know if we’re meant to find out,” he said.

“Oh, we’re finding out,” Blue said with extra ferocity, trying to tamp down the feeling rising in her. “If you’re not going to, I’ll do it myself.”

He said, “If you find out first, will you tell me?”

“Sure thing.”

“Jane, in this light,” he started, “you . . . Jesus. Jesus. I’ve got to get my head straight.”

He suddenly threw open the door and got out, seizing the roof to pull himself out faster. He slammed the door and then walked around the back of the car; one hand scrubbed through his hair.

The car was utterly quiet. She heard the buzzing of night insects and singing of frogs and slow chirps of birds who should have known better. Every so often, the cooling engine let out a little sigh like a breath. Gansey didn’t return.

Fumbling in the dark, she pushed open her door. She found him leaning against the back of the car, arms crossed over his chest.

“I’m sorry,” Gansey said, not looking at her as she leaned on the car beside him. “That was very rude.”

Blue thought of a few things to reply, but couldn’t say any of them out loud. She felt like one of the night birds had gotten inside her. It tumbled and fumbled every time she breathed.

He’s going to die, this is going to hurt —

But she touched his neck, right where his hair was cut evenly above the collar of his shirt. He was very still. His skin was hot, and she could very, very faintly feel his pulse beneath her thumb. It wasn’t like when she was with Adam. She didn’t have to guess what to do with her hands. They knew. This was what it should have felt like with Adam. Less like playacting and more like a foregone conclusion.

He closed his eyes and leaned, just a little, so that her palm was flat on his neck, fingers sprawled from his ear to his shoulder.

Everything in Blue was charged. Say something. Say something.

Gansey lifted her hand gently from his skin, holding it as formally as a dance. He put it against his mouth.

Blue froze. Absolutely still. Her heart didn’t beat. She didn’t blink. She couldn’t say don’t kiss me. She couldn’t even form don’t.