The Dream Thieves

It wasn’t enough. He ached inside. But there was a line he wasn’t allowed to cross, and he was never sure where it started. Surely this was close to it. He felt dangerous and kinetic.

Then her fingers cautiously pressed into his back, feeling his spine. He hadn’t gone too far, then.

He leaned in to kiss her.

Blue tore herself from his arms. She actually tripped in her haste to get away. Her head knocked against the slanted ceiling.

“I said no,” she gasped, hand clapped on the back of her skull.

Something stung in him. “Like six weeks ago.”

“It’s still no!”

They stared at each other, both hurt.

“Just,” she said, “. . . just, not kissing.”

He still ached. His skin was a constellation of nerve endings. “I don’t understand.”

Blue touched her lips as if they had been kissed. “I told you.”

He just wanted an answer. He wanted to know if it was him, or if it was her. He didn’t know how to ask it, but he did anyway. “Did something . . . happen to you?”

Her face was blank for a moment. “What? Oh. No. Does there have to be a reason? The answer’s just no! Isn’t that good enough?”

The correct answer was yes. He knew it. But the real answer was that he wanted to know if he had bad breath or if she was only doing this with him because he was the first one to ask her or if there was some other obstruction that he wasn’t considering.

“I’m going to take a shower,” he said. He tried not to let it sound like he was still hurt, but he was, and it did. “You gonna be here when I get back out? When’s your shift start?”

“I’ll wait.” She tried not to let it sound like she was hurt, but she was, and it did.

While Blue paged through a few maps he had on his plastic bed stand, Adam stood in a cold shower until his heart stopped steaming. What do you want, Adam? He didn’t even know. From inside the sloped old shower, he caught a half-image of himself in the mirror and startled. For a moment something about his own reflection had seemed wrong. His wide eyes and gaunt face peered back at him, troubled but not unusual.

And just like that, he was thinking of Cabeswater again. Some days he felt he didn’t think of anything else. He hadn’t owned many things in his life, properly owned them, him and no one else, but now he did: this bargain. It had been a little over a month since he’d offered his sacrifice to Cabeswater in order to wake Gansey’s ley line. The entire ritual felt swimmy and surreal in his mind, like he’d been watching himself perform it on a television screen. Adam had gone fully prepared to make a sacrifice. But he wasn’t quite sure how the specific one he’d eventually made had come to him: I will be your hands. I will be your eyes.

So far, nothing had happened, not really. Which was almost worse. He was a patient with a diagnosis that he couldn’t understand.

In the shower, Adam scratched a thumbnail across his summer-brown skin. The line of his nail went from white to angry red in a moment, and as he studied it, it struck him that there was something odd about the flow of the water across his skin. As if it was in slow-motion. He followed the stream of water up to the showerhead and spent a full minute watching it sputter from the metal. His thoughts were a confusion of translucent drops clinging to metal and rain trembling off green leaves.

He blinked.

There was nothing odd about the water. There were no leaves. He needed to get some sleep before he did something stupid on the job.

Climbing out of the shower, his spine aching, shoulders aching, soul aching, Adam dried and dressed slowly. He feared — hoped? —that Blue might have left after all, but when he opened the bathroom door, scrubbing his hair dry, he discovered that she stood at the door, talking cheerfully to someone.

The visitor turned out to be St. Agnes’s office lady, her black hair curled in the humidity. She probably had an official title that Ronan knew, sub-nun, or something, but Adam only knew her as Mrs. Ramirez. She seemed to do everything a church required to keep it running, short of saying Mass.

Including the collection of Adam’s monthly rent check.

When he saw her, his stomach plummeted. He was filled with the certainty that his last check had bounced. She would tell him there were insufficient funds, and Adam would scramble to push money into the yawning hole of the account, and then he’d have to pay a returned check fee to the bank and another one to Mrs. Ramirez, getting further behind on his next month’s rent, an endless pathetic loop of insufficiency.

Voice thin, he asked, “What can I do for you, ma’am?”

Her expression shifted. She wasn’t sure how to say what needed to be said.

Adam’s fingers tightened on the door frame.

“Oh, sweetie,” she said, “I’m just letting you know about the rent on your little room here.”

I’m so done, he thought. No more. Please, I can’t take any more.

“Well, we got a new— tax assessment,” she started. “For this building. And you know how we charge you as a nonprofit. So we . . . your rent’s going to change. It’s got to stay the same percentage of the, uh, building costs. It’s two hundred dollars less.”

Adam heard two hundred and wilted, and then he heard the rest and thought he must have misunderstood. “Less? Each year?”

“Each month.”

Blue looked delighted, but Adam couldn’t quite accept that his rent had just dropped by two thirds. Twenty-four hundred dollars a year, suddenly freed up. His dubious Henrietta accent slid out before he could stop it. “Why did you say it was changing?”

“Tax assessment.” She laughed at his suspicion. “Those taxes don’t normally work out on the happy side, do they!”

She waited for Adam to answer, but he didn’t know what to say. Finally, he managed, “Thank you, ma’am.”

As Blue closed the door, he drifted back to the center of the room. He still couldn’t quite believe it. No, wouldn’t believe it. It just didn’t track. He retrieved the letter from Aglionby. Sinking onto his flat mattress, he finally opened it.

Its contents were very thin indeed, just a single-spaced letter on Aglionby letterhead. It didn’t take long to convey its message. The following year’s tuition was increasing to cover additional costs, although his scholarship was not. They understood the tuition raise presented a hardship for him, and he was an exceptional student, but they needed to remind him, with as much kindness as possible, that the waiting list for Aglionby was quite long, inhabited by exceptional boys able to pay full tuition. In conclusion, they reminded Mr. Parrish that fifty percent of the next year’s tuition was due by the end of the month in order to hold his place.

The difference in tuition between this year’s and next was twenty-four hundred dollars.

That number again. It couldn’t be a coincidence.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Blue asked, sitting down beside him.

He didn’t want to talk about it.

Gansey had to be behind it. He knew Adam would never accept the money from him, so he’d engineered all of this. Persuaded Mrs. Ramirez to take a check and manufacture a tax assessment to cover his tracks. Gansey must have gotten a matching tuition notice two days ago. The raise wouldn’t have meant anything to him.

For a brief moment, he imagined life as Gansey must live it. The car keys in his pocket. The brand-new shoes on his feet. The careless glance at the monthly bills. They couldn’t hurt Gansey. Nothing could hurt him; people who said money couldn’t buy everything hadn’t seen anyone as rich as the Aglionby boys. They were untouchable, immune to life’s troubles. Only death couldn’t be swiped away by a credit card.

One day, Adam thought miserably, one day that will be me.

But this ruse wasn’t right. He would have never asked for Gansey’s help. Adam wasn’t sure how he would have covered the tuition raise, but it was not this, not Gansey’s money. He pictured it: a folded over check, hastily pocketed, gazes not met. Gansey relieved that Adam had finally come to his senses. Adam unable to say thank you.

He became aware that Blue was watching him, her lips pursed, eyebrows tight.

“Don’t look at me like that,” he said.

“Like what? I’m not allowed to be worried about you?”

Heat hissed through his voice. “I don’t want your pity.”

If Gansey wasn’t allowed to pity him, Blue sure as hell wasn’t allowed to. She and Adam were in the same boat, after all. Wasn’t she on her way to work, the same as he’d just come from it?

Blue said, “Then don’t be pitiful!”

Anger snarled up in him, instantly owning him. It was a binary emotion in the Parrishes. No such thing as slightly mad. Only nothing, and then this: all-encompassing fury.

“What’s pitiful about me, Blue? Tell me what’s pitiful.” He jumped up. “Is it ’cause I work for everything I get? Is that what makes me pitiful and Gansey not?” He shook the letter. “Is it because I don’t get this given to me?”

She didn’t flinch, but something simmered in her eyes. “No.”

His voice was terrible; he heard it. “I don’t want your damn pity.” Her face was shocked. “What did you say?”

She was looking at the box that served as his nightstand. Somehow it had moved several feet away from the bed. The side was badly dented, its former contents scattered violently across the floor. Only now did he remember the act of kicking the box, but not the decision to kick it.

It hadn’t switched off the anger.

For a long moment, Blue stared at him, and then she stood up.

“You be careful, Adam Parrish. ’Cause one day you might get what you ask for. There might be girls in Henrietta who’ll let you talk to them like that, but I’m not one of them. Now I’m going to go sit on those stairs out there until my shift. If you can be — be human before then, come get me. If not, I’ll see you later.”

She ducked a little to keep from smashing her head, and then she shut the door behind herself. It would have been easier if she’d yelled or cried. Instead his words just kept hitting flint inside his thoughts, again and again, another spark, and another. She was just as bad as Gansey. Where does she get off? When he graduated and flew from this place, and she was still trapped here, she’d feel stupid about all this.

He wanted to open the door and shout this fact at her.

He made himself stay where he was.

After a moment, he calmed enough to see how his anger was a separate thing inside him, a dingy, surprise gift from his father. He calmed enough to remember that if he waited long enough, carefully analyzing how it felt, the emotion would lose its inertia. It was the same as physical pain. The more he tried to mentally decide what made pain hurt, the less his brain seemed able to remember the pain at all.

So he took apart the anger inside him.

Is this what he felt like, he wondered, when he grabbed my sleeve as I was going out the door? Is this what made him shove my face into the fridge? Did he feel this when he passed by my bedroom door? Was this what he fought every time he remembered I existed?