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The longer he’s friends with Gansey, the more Adam is convinced that time travel is a reality.
And frankly, at this point it wouldn’t even be particularly shocking. All things considered.
Times like these entirely convince Adam of the theory. He vaguely shakes his head in wonder at the state of Gansey’s bedroom, and genuinely entertains the possibility that Richard Campbell Gansey III was sent to them via time machine from some place very far away and some year very long ago indeed. The other explanation would be that Gansey was simply a hoarder. Research was still pending on that matter.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Gansey says, waving a hand. He looks comical, bundled in his weary pajamas, standing in the middle of the chaos. Adam thinks the thing in his hand might be an actual skull. He wonders where he got it, and promptly decides that he doesn’t want to know.
“You do?” Adam asks, sarcastic. “Because I’m still trying to figure that out myself.”
“You think I’m crazy.”
“Not necessarily. I am also considering the possibility of psychological hoarding. There are programs for that, you know.”
Gansey all but rolls his eyes. Packing the room for even a weekend was a feat, and the prospect of leaving for two entire months this time around was clearly causing Gansey no small amount of stress. Adam’s phone buzzes with Blue laughing at the picture he’d snuck of the room and its frazzled inhabitant.
“I’m just not sure when you would ever need some of this,” says Adam. “I mean, you have to admit that the ratio of historical artifacts to clean clothes in here is a little frightening.”
Gansey shrugs, running a hand through his hair. “Point taken. I believe I am experiencing some sort of separation anxiety.”
“Separation anxiety. For a sword from 1750?”
“Well, this particular sword was really in use closer to the 1730s.”
Adam stares. Gansey groans in as much of a Ganseylike manner as possible.
“I know, I know.” He says. “I just can’t seem to part with any of it.” He throws himself into his desk chair and surveys the mess, looking partly dejected and entirely bewildered.
Adam takes pity.
“Gansey,” he says, feeling his accent pull at the vowels. “It’ll all still be here when you get back. Nobody’s going to break in and steal your swords.”
Adam Parrish was many things, and comforting was not typically one of them. Granted, Gansey wasn’t typically the sort of person to experience separation anxiety, and this combined with the fact that Gansey inspired all sorts of out of character behavior on the best days inspires Adam to put a little more effort forward. Seeing Gansey so at ends with himself pulls at something deep in Adam’s chest, strings nestled within the special chamber reserved for the time-traveled charm of the boy across from him.
“You don’t have to leave them all,” says Adam. He understands the sentiment, although feeling attached to taxidermized animals was slightly out of his realm of comprehension. “Take a few with you, Gansey. That way you’ll have something to remember the rest by while you’re gone. It’ll remind you of home.”
Gansey smiles at the word home, eyes going all fuzzy and soft behind his glasses. Adam watches as he turns the skull in his hands over a few times, considering.
He sighs, then. “You’re right.” The skull is placed neatly into the corner of his suitcase. “Trust Adam Parrish to calm my swivet. The magician.”
Adam laughs, shoving at his shoulder. “Go drool over your swords.”
The unique brand of fondness that Gansey lovingly wheedled out of Adam was a gently cradled thing.
Adam kept it protected from outside influence, washed over with waves of it at odd moments and most often in the very room in which they sat. There were scratched sunglasses thrown across English textbooks thrown over attempts at watercolor paintings. And for that, for how entirely it encompassed everything Gansey was, Adam had always loved Gansey’s bedroom. The overflowing papers, stacks of books akimbo, world maps and the general feeling you got when you found yourself standing in the middle of it all; like you yourself had entered the intravenous system. Like you were the carotid itself. Witness to his deeds and his dreams both, and to the moments where you forgot everything else except that he was a strange young man with strange passions and stranger home décor.
No matter how often Gansey left and returned, it never got easier to see his bedroom without him in it. Adam knew he was being sentimental, and chastised himself for it. He would be back in two months. They all would be.
Because it was a mantra that had become unerringly familiar in the past year, Adam sighs. His phone buzzes again, and Gansey laughs out loud at his own screen.
“Looks like Henry’s got a new friend,” he says. He reaches forward to display his screen, and Adam snorts at the pixelated image of Henry Cheng looking vaguely horrified by the parakeet sitting comfortably upon his shoulder.
Blue’s ill-advised purchase of Tio the parakeet had been one of the most vibrant additions to the summer; Maura had made it abundantly clear that she should have thought it through before planning a months-long sojourn through the American plains. Adam smiles at the photo without meaning to.
Gansey eventually comes to terms with the practicalities of shipping an Early Enlightenment era sword cross-country, and settles for a small model of the Pinta with its accompanying detachable sails. Adam shakes his head, laughing.
“Are you sure you’re a real person?”
“Only marginally.” Gansey stands, cheerfully rolling the wheels of the suitcase against his newly freed floor. “Oh, and before I forget,” he says, reaching into his back pocket, “Blue told me to pass this along.”
In Gansey’s hands, a folded up piece of yellowed paper with blue and green flowers scribbled onto the edges. Adam has no problem imagining Blue rushing to shove it at Gansey before he left the house, impatient and ink smudging in her haste; it’s a funny scene, and Adam nearly laughs out loud.
“She would’ve delivered it herself, but you know.”
Adam does know. Class started too soon in Cambridge to organize the send-offs they’d wanted. It was a sharp pang of sadness that faded its way into well-worn acceptance, and Adam reminds himself to focus on the beautiful blue of the flower petals rather than the fact that they would be all he’d have of Blue until Christmas.
“Thanks. No love letter from you? What, am I not pretty enough for you anymore?”
Gansey laughs an ugly, loud guffaw as he shuffles plane tickets to fit properly in his brimming wallet. “You are neatly and entirely out of my league, Adam Parrish.”
“So is Blue.”
“That she is, young fellow.” Gansey smiles at Adam, hands on his hips. He sighs out while looking him up and down in the way Adam imagines a proud father would his son jetting off to his first day of Kindergarten. “No letter I could write would sum up quite how much I’ll miss you, I’m afraid. Come on,” he says, waving Adam along as he strolls out of the lamp-warm space of his bedroom, “We’d better get going.”
x
“For the love of God, Parrish.”
“I thought you weren’t supposed to take the Lord’s name in vain.”
“I thought we’d been over this a million times already.”
“I thought you said you were good at this.”
Ronan scoffs, and the sound is muffled by the metal held between his teeth.
“Yeah, well,” he manages. “Times have changed. Apparently.”
The chest of drawers, in Ronan’s defense, is more complicated than Adam had anticipated. The funny thing about instructions was that, to be useful, they had to be in the language of the builder. For all his merits, Ronan Lynch did not speak Swedish.
“Just let me try it. The instructions are useless, Ronan.” Adam says, thumping his heel repeatedly against the drywall. It was impressively hollow. Ronan grunts, head stuffed underneath a shelf.
“No,” he says, stubbornly, and Adam rolls his eyes.
“See you in an hour, then.” He mutters, strolling back out into the hallway where the swathes of families moving in their fresh-faced students flitter like an anthill. There’s the sound of jingling keys, of hammers and drills attempting to meld ingredients into a cohesive, edible loaf, and the slightly acidic scent of fresh paint. Adam inhales. He holds it in his lungs like smoke.
Putting off the inevitable, of course, is a talent that not even the most successful of shirkers can ever master. This is because inevitability is just that. Inevitable. Certain to happen, unavoidable; at least, according to the Oxford Dictionary. And yet.
Harvard is everything that Adam had known it would be. The students he comes across are polite, unique, altogether not entirely different from every other teenager he’s ever met. The dorms look exactly as they had on the website, the financial aid office just as shinily clinical, and the dining hall as exciting to Ronan as Adam had counted on. It is everything he has ever worked towards. It is heart-constricting.
He's staring idly at the geometry of the hall carpet when a curiously multicolored vinyl sleeve drops on the ground in front of him. A neatly circular disc slides out, rolling tumbleweed out and down a few feet.
“Sorry,” says a higher voice, and Adam leans to hand the sleeve back to its owner, looking up as he does. “Jesus, why is it always The Beach Boys that rolls away? Trying to catch a wave, I guess.”
Adam laughs against his will and shrugs. “One too many bad puns.” He hopes it doesn’t come across as overly sarcastic. Did girls who went to Harvard like sarcasm? Was it a bygone of a ruder subgroup of academies? Perhaps only Princeton students fall back on witty remarks, he considers, suddenly over conscious. Luckily, the girl just laughs, shaking Adam’s hand once she’s situated The Beach Boys: 50 Big Ones back in the crook of her arm.
“Laila,” she introduces, her handshake firm and calloused on the palms. “1606.”
“1604,” Adam says. “Guess that makes us neighbors.”
She grins, and in a sharklike, tributary way, it sort of reminds Adam of Ronan.
Laila is tall compared to most girls Adam knows, certainly taller than Blue by about a mile, with layer-chopped, bleached blond hair and dip-dyed purple ends against fair skin. She’s got two piercings through the end of her eyebrow and hooped around the contour of her lip, and her shirt reads something indiscernible accompanied by the inexplicable print of a rabbit.
“She lives down the hall,” Adam relays to Ronan, back in his room where the chest of drawers has miraculously come to fruition. Adam has a sneaking suspicion that a number of the required nuts and bolts have been discarded somewhere adjacent to Ronan’s pocket, which may or may not result in the structure crumbling to the ground at any given moment in the future. Most times, Adam admires Ronan’s guile as something sewn into the bones of him, but in this case he wishes he’d been gifted just slightly more forethought.
“Sounds like a real hoot,” Ronan replies. He tosses one of Adam’s books from a box onto his unmade bed and takes his time before reaching in for the next.
“Sort of reminded me of you.”
Ronan raises an eyebrow. “Think I should pierce my tongue?”
“Only if you’re planning on bleaching your head.”
Ronan shrugs. “Bribe me, and I’ll think about it.”
Adam rolls his eyes, smiling. He crosses the few feet between them to crowd Ronan against the lofted bed and stand between his legs. The funny thing about Ronan being here was that he both fit in entirely, and yet not at all. Paradoxically, impossibly. He was nearly too-tall in the space, although the ceiling was a good amount of feet above his head, and the black of his shirt cut harshly against the eggshell of the walls. He hated school. He did not typically care for people who enjoyed it. With a few exceptions, naturally.
“Is this my bribe?” Ronan asks, voice lower for the narrow space between them. Adam slides a hand around to cup the back of his neck and folds the tip of his right ear forward so that it touches the outline of his jaw. He hums, gaze caught on the pull of Ronan’s mouth.
“I don’t know if I like blonds,” he says, pretending to be thoughtful. “Could always do a trial run.”
“What, you want me to find a wig?”
Adam laughs at the prospect. “Imagine that,” he says, bristling a hand over the fresh buzz there, “Miss Piggy.”
Ronan tugs Adam’s hand away and brings it up to rest on his shoulder, where he’s overwarmed through the dark fabric. “Oh, yeah, talk dirty to me.”
“Hey, nothing is sexier than The Muppets.” Adam runs a thumb against the grain of Ronan’s eyebrow, idly picturing a piercing through it where the hair now sticks opposite. He smooths it back.
Ronan snorts. “I could think of a few things.”
“For example,” says Adam, using Ronan to vault himself up onto the mattress. “A dorm room.”
“Oo, la la,” Ronan deadpans. He rests his head on his arms, which are folded on the bed against Adam’s pillow from home. They look at each other like that, for a while, the in-between sort of comfortable silence born of countless minutes doing this very thing. Ronan likes to look, observatory with too-sharp light eyes, and Adam has found, preposterously, that there are very few things that Adam will deny him.
Adam breathes out. There’s only so much that a chest of drawers and eccentric neighbor can distract a teenage boy from, and the inevitable is not one of them. The ticking of the watch on Adam’s wrist is inaudible, and yet he feels every strike of the second like a physical blow.
“Stop it,” says Ronan, shoving at the line between Adam’s eyebrows with a thumb. Adam protests, pushing his hand away before thinking better of it and trapping it against his chest.
“I’m not doing anything.”
“And I’m Mona fucking Lisa.” Ronan leans his head in closer. “Listen, Parrish.” His voice is specifically convicted, the tone he uses when he is about to say something that will probably piss Adam off, if only because it is something that he needs to hear and does not particularly want to. “Everything is gonna be fine and fucking dandy.”
When Adam is silent, Ronan kisses his temple and noses behind his ear until he opens his eyes again. “I’m serious. You’re smart as shit. Not even your weird plants will scare them off, once they meet you.”
Adam considers this. “They’ve actually got to meet me first, Ronan.”
“Damn straight. You already met the freaky neighbor. Check that off the list.” He makes an exaggerated show of drawing a giant checkmark in the empty space above Adam’s thighs. Adam digs a light nail into Ronan’s fourth knuckle in response. It wasn’t like Adam hadn’t worked his way meticulously through each worry and anxiety before they’d come to Massachusetts; the summer had been an amalgamation of intentionally ignoring what was coming and facing it head-on with a spiked baseball bat. Feeling like one was the star of a thriller movie was an intriguing way to go through life, and yet Adam had grown more or less re-accustomed to it by now. It helped that Ronan owned a spiked baseball bat in real life, if only because owning it pissed Declan off.
“I just-” Adam huffs, turning the same issues over in his head like a washboard. The fresh cotton of the slippery thoughts that honed in on the pit in his stomach; not that he would fail his classes, but that he’d pass them all and not have a single meaningful thing to show for it. He didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life. Or, worse, he did, and he was leaving them all miles away to pursue something he deeply feared that he may have outgrown. “It’s going to be hard.”
And, bless him, Ronan merely shrugged. His silence was chosen delicately. He’d heard Adam work aloud through each in and out of the process from the day he’d gotten his application to go through to a four hour phone call with Helen Gansey regarding his FAFSA application.
“I know that I have to do it. I’m going to do it.” Adam tugs at the longest part of Ronan’s leather bracelet, wrapping it around his middle finger. “I’ll do it, and I’ll do it well.”
“But,” whispers Ronan, staring at the joinder of their hands. Adam smiles, wryly.
“Yeah. But. I’ll miss the rest of it.”
Becoming used to sharing yourself with another person was something that Adam thought should be more advertised, out in the world. To transition from hiding the smallest contrivances of worry and shame and anger to placing them onto the back of a leather-clad Atlas was enough to give you whiplash. Like beating against your shoulders with solid oak drumsticks, or laying yourself down in the road while the circus troupe stampeded past.
Like actively watching a tree shed its feathers, Ronan rolls his shoulders and stands straight. “You’re starting to sound like Gansey.”
Adam smiles, though it feels a little sad. He can’t exactly help it. Not with Ronan standing in this new place looking as Ronan as ever. “The horror. Did I start waxing poetic about ancient kings again?”
Ronan grins, selachian, and smashes a kiss to the back of Adam’s hand, right against the darkest freckle. “If you ever start, I’ll bleach my head.”
x
Laila turns out to be, above all else, unpredictable.
Her roommate is a bubbly sorority girl with deep brown braids named Gianna, who advertises campus-wide functions with a passed around microphone on the green most days of the week. She waves when she sees Adam, friendlier than a dog let loose in the park. Laila’s dorm room sort of resembles what Adam assumes a heavy metal concert would entail; dark, jagged band posters and a mess of taped-on ticket stubs and obscure celebrity tabloids to mirror Gianna’s neatly lavender butterfly quilt. Unexpectedly, Gianna and Laila get along to an almost concerning degree, which makes nights in Laila’s dorm even odder.
They cling to each other as first friends do.
They stumble their way through first week festivities, until the days turn into weeks and Adam finds himself enthralled in a haphazard group friends collected by he and Laila and even Gianna in turns, until the carpet of his dorm room is dotted with not-so-strangers more nights than not.
They are wonderful, and Adam enjoys his days. He is learning. He is moving forward. Harvard is everything he had hoped it would be, the people just as fascinating, the professors just as stimulating. Adam is happy, and each and every time he hangs up the phone with Ronan, with Gansey or Blue or Henry or even Maura, he feels his heart curl into the recovery position and brace for the pain that courses through it.
Although Adam is happy, it takes something more for him to feel whole.
He doesn’t even realize that there are parts of Adam Parrish, full picture, that remain far away from the unique terrarium thermosphere of Harvard until a uniquely warm Thursday halfway through October.
“I’m driving up to meet Sam this weekend,” Kat says, grinning where she lies on her back in the middle of Adam’s floor. His roommate, ever reclusive, is probably somewhere making out with the consistently revolving door of girls that he likes to bring back to the dorm some nights. Adam can’t really be bothered to care.
“Scandalous,” says Laila. Her computer screen glows at her, computer science homework nonsensically staring back from where she’s been actively ignoring it for hours. “Before marriage?”
“Not for long, let’s hope.”
“Please,” laughs Laila, “when you can afford the extra ranch for your McChicken, we can talk about affording a ring.”
Kat sighs dramatically. “A girl can dream. You can be the flower girl, since you’ll probably never get a wedding of your own. Spinster. Speaking of which,” she says, shooting up and catching Adam’s eye, “Mr. Spinster. Wanna go out Friday?”
Adam’s halfway through Thomas Babington MacCauley’s speech on Indian and British empire education, and his eyes are beginning to feel like dried out sponges. He shrugs. “In Cambridge? Where? An Irish pub?”
Laila laughs, and Kat whacks her on the leg with a rolled-up short poster from her mathematical thinking presentation. “Slainte. No,” she amends, moving to sit at Adam’s desk chair, “A club. We’ve got to find you a lady before Halloween. You need a couple’s costume.”
Adam pauses. He glances up from his computer screen, wondering if Kat had misspoken.
He looks at her for a moment, a little like she’s got a third head, before the rational part of him kicks in and recalls that there was a decently probable chance that they simply had never heard Adam mention anything about not being single. He blinks, surprised.
The prospect was uneasy. He mentioned Ronan daily, this he knew; but, he thought now, it was always just. Ronan. Never my boyfriend Ronan, stories about Opal leaving unintentional room for the assumption that she was some neighborhood kid instead of his sort of adopted, semi-goat stepchild. He feels oddly like he’s let them down, in this.
“Adam Parrish, a couple’s costume? When pigs fly.” Laila shakes her head, gesturing at the blue hydrangeas in the too-small vase on Adam’s desk. “Besides, obviously somebody likes him enough to get him flowers. A club girl wishes.”
The hydrangeas had been Ronan’s; dreamt, undying, but otherwise fathomably normal.
It was such a small part of him, of them, that Adam hadn’t considered the idea that they might not know. They knew of Ronan. They knew of Blue, of Gansey, of Henry and Opal and that he was from a small town called Henrietta, that he had once known a funny boy named Noah who had always had an affinity for snow globes. But Adam had not stopped to consider that he had not been painting himself, that he had not been depicting his friends, Ronan, home, as they were. Harvard was shiny, new, exciting, and his friends here were trustworthy and secure, and yet Adam had failed to communicate the most important connections of his lifetime, all for the assumption that they would have been able to smell on him what they couldn’t possibly know unless he spelled it out for them. It was hard, when you were used to the friends he knew from home, to portray yourself instead of trusting others to understand without words.
“Uh,” he starts, unsure how to continue. The hydrangeas hold their breath.
“Secret admirer,” says Kat. “Anywho. We’ll find you someone nice. Loves to read. Listens to yacht rock, something very Adam.”
Laila shakes her head, rolling her eyes. “Stop trying to pawn him off. We don’t have enough to pay his dowry.”
“He would be pretty expensive,” Kat agrees.
“He wouldn’t take a dowry,” Adam says, finally, blowing out a breath as he shakes his head in disbelief. “You’d probably have to pay him in blood feud favors, or something.”
They stare at him for a moment, Kat readjusting her glasses like she’s seeing him clearly for the first time. “He?” she says, eventually, incredulous. Kat mourned daily, humorously, the fact of her friends’ straightness. Adam had never corrected her. He supposes, in hindsight, that part of this was because he had wanted to keep Ronan to himself, hadn’t wanted to give away so much of himself before he knew the layers of the new crown molding of his life.
Adam shrugs, holding his hands out. “I thought it was obvious.”
“Well,” Laila says, glancing around Adam’s side of the room, “I guess it sort of is. Not exactly that it wasn’t a girl, but that there’s someone.”
Adam toys with the idea that his friends had been plotting to set him up with a girl from some club in the middle of Cambridge, some pre-law generational star of the family. It’s almost laughable. And then, he realizes, it makes sense that they would; Adam Parrish of Harvard, he realizes, has become skewed from Adam Parrish, life sized.
Adam Parrish of Harvard takes care to elongate the syllables of his accent so as to neatly step over the dust of a trailer park. The printed-out pictures of his friends invite no conversation, as he realizes they are ‘home friends’, and that this Adam does not exude home. He tries his best to exude Harvard. Somewhere along the way, who he is has become lost in translation.
“It’s him, isn’t it?” Laila asks, smiling. She taps on a tiny print of Ronan leaning against Blue, grinning. Adam had stuck it to his desk, layered with Blue’s still unopened letter and within reach from his bed. “Your famous Ronan.”
Kat gasps, hand to chest. “And you never told us!”
Adam shrugs. “Sorry,” he says, aiming for baiting, “it’s fun seeing you agonize over our unbearable straightness.”
Kat points at him, eyes narrowed. “You, Adam Parrish, are a crook.”
Adam laughs. Strangely, he doesn’t feel any different from telling them. It sort of just makes the ever-present ache in his chest burn a bit more insistently. Ronan had come up two weeks ago, freshly out of a fight with Declan over something comparatively trivial, and they’d spent the weekend more or less holed up in Adam’s room touching and talking and ignoring the world at large. Days with Ronan sometimes ended up like that. He commanded too much of Adam’s attention just in being himself, just in breathing. Harvard was of no interest to him when Ronan visited. He’d left the hydrangeas when he’d gone.
“So, he’s better than a club girl, then?” asks Laila, teasing. She’s ribbing him, but there’s a softness around her blue eyes that Adam appreciates. Laila had a way of cutting to the heart of things; Kat skirted with laughter and soft-fall dramatics, Sofia and Josh filled in the white spaces with color, Gianna the shine to cover it, and Laila was the bold outline that you couldn’t erase even when you tried. Adam guesses he’s the page. The corner that rips when you attempt to tear it out.
“Mm.”
Of course, he is.
Ronan Lynch is many things.
He is reliable. He is stubborn, although less so than Adam, and he is at times misunderstood. He struggles to communicate his emotions, and yet is emotionally wiser than most people older than 80. Ronan is jagged edges, is soft feathers, is a teenage boy who has endured and emerged stronger for it. Ronan is also annoying, likes to push buttons, likes to throw himself into dangerous things that make him feel alive, dreams beautiful and terrible things, things that hold and hurt himself more than anyone. He snuffles like a puppy in his sleep. Adam misses him with a ferocity that bruises.
Kat leaves, eventually, begging off for homework, and Laila and Adam lie on the floor, staring up at the popcorn ceiling.
“I had a boyfriend once,” she says, at one point. Her voice carries fuzzily over the Little River Band vinyl she’s got circling Adam’s roommates’ record player, and Adam has to turn his head to hear her properly in his good ear.
“He was nice. It didn’t work out,” she says, smiling at Adam a little wistfully. “I don’t think he understood me all that much. I didn’t really try to understand him, either.”
Adam thinks of the hydrangeas in the vase, light blue with green sprouting out from the middle of their petals.
“I’m sorry about that,” he says. It feels like the right thing to say.
“Oh, well. I don’t think I’m cut out for that sort of thing. It takes a lot to understand another person like that.”
Adam looks over at her, at where the purple ends of her hair brush against the carpet. She is from somewhere in Pennsylvania, although she has never mentioned precisely where, and Adam feels somewhere deep inside of him that they have introduced themselves anew, here.
“Do you understand me?” he asks, and he is thinking of black leather bracelets and blue flowers blooming.
Laila hums. “I try to.”
“Do I understand you?”
Again, she shrugs. “You try to. That’s about all we can do.”
Adam guesses that’s true. He has been at Harvard, his life’s goal, his years of sweat at a culmination, for a month. Ronan has visited him twice, Gansey calls nightly, and they and Blue and Henry live momentarily in the pictures neatly pinned to his borrowed wall. Opal’s teeth marks in the band of his watch. The hydrangea and its hue.
“Tell me about them,” Laila says, shifting over so she’s really, fully looking down at him. Her eyes are bright. “Help me understand you.”
x
From then on, Adam colors himself in.
He’s still studious, still visits the library deep into nighttime hours and keeps his books neatly stacked by his bedside, still polite and altogether unassuming as much as he can be.
But, he lets parts of himself that he’s grown accustomed to only showing with those who know him seep outwards to the new connections he’s however hesitantly formed, here.
One of them is, of course, more enticing to said connections than others.
“Does that mean I’m going to die young?” Sofia wonders, twirling a tight curl in her fingers. Adam rolls his eyes.
“It’s more like new beginnings. Metamorphosis.”
Kat laughs from her spot on the floor. “Be grateful. I got the clown.”
“The fool,” Adam corrects, reshuffling the deck of tarot cards gifted to him by Persephone. It’s tethered to her somewhere beyond tangibility and closer to the soft echo of Cabeswater in his deaf ear, and Adam feels a unique peace when his fingers brush her cards. “It’s not a bad card. There are no bad cards.”
“Tell that to the grim reaper. Yikes.” Sofia flips the card back over, pensive. “Adam,” she says, “how did you learn to do all this? You don’t really seem like the type. No offense.”
Adam smiles to himself, thinking of the mess of Cabeswater and Persephone and Blue’s tree-relatives and the uncanny ability of his boyfriend to yank things directly from his imaginings, and settles on a shrug.
“None taken. One of my friends taught me. It’s not that difficult, if you know what to look for.”
Sofia considers this. Adam likes her; Josh tends to be insensitive in ways he doesn’t quite realize, unforgivably rich in the way that Gansey had sometimes come across, although with none of his charm or apologetic genuineness to erase the sting. Sofia seems to notice this, and makes up for it by being unerringly pleasant.
“Draw some for yourself,” she proposes. “I want to know what the ether thinks of you.”
“The ether?” Kat says, incredulous.
Laila adds, “Probably that he spends too much time studying. The ether probably agrees that he should come out to coffee with us every once in a while.”
“My cards don’t really change, nowadays,” Adam says. “It won’t be exciting.”
They look at him as though he’s escaped the asylum. “Well,” Laila insists, scooting over to sit on her knees next to Adam, “I want to know what the ether has to say. Hurry up.”
“What if the ether is boring?” Kat considers.
“It is,” Adam assures, shuffling, waiting for the tug he’s grown used to. He knows what he’ll find. In some ways, the cards really never change. It’s gotten to the point where no matter what he pulls, the messages circulate the same themes like sharks cornering prey. It goes like this, unerringly, Adam Parrish abridged:
- Without fail, The Magician. Upright. The deepest meaning of himself. Adam Parrish, laid bare.
- The Chariot. Adam Parrish, on fire.
- Knight of Cups. This, kept close to his chest. Adam Parrish, in love.
He doesn’t explain what they mean, laughs as his friends clamber over only marginally accurate Google descriptions and explanations, and lays back in the space he’s carved out for himself in the red clay carpet.
He recalls last night, where he had worked through a three-hour FaceTime with Ronan, mostly trying not to react too ridiculously to Ronan’s project of building Opal special ladders so that she could see above the haybales and not hurt the cloves of her hooves on the metal. He wanted to do something insane, like perhaps declare pages long admiration for Ronan’s thoughtfulness, or blush red enough to burn to the touch, or drive all the way home with no regard of his classes.
He runs a thumb over the Knight of Cups, thinks dreamer, fondly, and shuffles it back into the deck.
X
And yet, sometimes, he doubts.
Adam expected it. He’s prepared for every scenario. He has money saved from Boyd’s, from his penny-pinching habits, has everything planned scrupulously to avoid the inevitability of blaring lights outlining the fact that he does not belong at a place like this. He will belong. He wills it so.
Classes aren’t necessarily difficult; not for someone like him, who has spent years perfecting the balance between sleeplessness and efficiency, who has weeded out procrastination and misunderstanding like a gardener picking through a spring harvest. He is the almanac and the picker.
He is prepared for the doubt. He is prepared to struggle. He is not quite prepared for the intricacies of the feeling.
“Adam,” says his European History professor, and Adam whips his head around. There is no one left in the classroom. He hadn’t slept much the night before. His head aches from trying to hear the professor speak from the only open seat at the back of the room, his good ear facing the wall.
“Your essay on appeasement was very well-done,” the old man says, smiling. Adam attempts to return it, and feels the tightness of it where it pulls at his cheeks. “You’re very gifted.”
“Thank you, sir,” Adam says, trying to sound like he believes a word of what he says. It’s been a long day, and his friends are out of town on conventions and home visits and sick days.
“You don’t sound particularly convinced.” The old man says so with a wry smile; he’s teasing. Mostly.
Adam shakes his head, apologetic. “I’m sorry, sir. I couldn’t quite find the words in that essay. It was…” Adam, shrugs. “Lackluster.”
“You must have very high standards.”
Adam nods. “I could have done better.” It’s likely not a good idea to admit to your professor your shortcomings, doesn’t do to contradict him. He probably sounds crude. Unfit.
“Well. I think you have serious ability here. Have you considered English, for your major?”
Adam thinks about it. He hadn’t really. He’d considered history, for a potential law school path, business, for practicality, communications, which Ronan had blinked at (honestly, Parrish, you’d pay to learn how to speak? You do that fine already), and had even briefly considered pre-med until he’d remembered the financial and personal obligations of medical school and thrown that idea out the nearest window.
“No, sir. I don’t know what I would do with it.”
“You could do plenty. There’s an internship program, next summer, for a journalism position. Editing, interviews, that sort of thing. I’ll send you the details for it. I think you could go very far with it, indeed.”
Professor Jackson was kind, was practical, and the sort of man Adam had imagined would major in English. He wasn’t sure where he fit in with that. If he did, at all.
A summer internship would mean connections, professional development, a career… a summer internship would mean a summer away from The Barns, hours spent in a suit rather than with the fresh breeze scent of clothes drying on the line and visits to Fox Way for home cooked meals, hours missing out on the limited time he would have of getting to see, to touch, to feel-
Adam breathes.
Adam thanks him. He walks back to his dorm. He keeps his head down, all the way until he swings the heavy door shut and breathes relief at the empty room. His heart is beating unreasonably quickly, and he leans his forehead against the cool wood to assuage it.
He likes to write. He loves it, even. He doesn’t know enough about it. He is clueless. He wants to go home. He wants Ronan, and he fears the two are inextricably synonymous.
“Jesus, Adam,” he admonishes himself, thumping his forehead against the door. He knows, logically, that there is no reason to be so incredibly… unmoored. He is a freshman in college. At Harvard. Nobody knows what they are doing. It feels like he is the only one; it feels like he is alone in a cracking fishbowl, and the kraken is squeezing its tentacles around the glass, crushing it to pressurized pieces, and the rescue ships cannot reach him, don’t even know where he is in the great, sprawling ocean, their compasses spinning out. “Calm down,” he orders himself, and knows as he says it that it won’t work.
He wants Ronan.
What he gets is himself, alone, hours away, surrounded by measly two-dimensional representations of what makes him feel okay.
He slips down to sit on the floor and feels for his phone. He is tired of straining to hear in the dining hall, tired of covering the lines of his accent, and he is tired of admitting to himself that he is tired; this is what he has worked for, and he dares to complain. Adam Parrish, failing nobody more than himself.
He isn’t entirely sure what he is doing until it’s done, until the phone is ringing against his good ear and he’s finally exhaling when Ronan’s familiar rasping ‘Parrish’ is answering. Adam doesn’t respond. He breathes in the silence. Breathes out.
“Adam?” Ronan says, and Adam can hear the crunch of likely boots on gravel. He’s probably working The Barns. Opal’s somewhere playing with Chainsaw or getting into trouble or sleeping charmingly on the arm of the couch. “Adam.”
Adam nods, although he knows that Ronan can’t see him. He glances over at the hydrangeas and brings a hand up to his forehead.
“Remember how we said it would be hard?” he asks, trying for wry and ending up somewhere between afraid and defeated.
Ronan is quiet for a moment, and Adam pictures the way he must be standing. Wide shoulders, tall against the doorway that he’d built with his own two hands. Tugging on his bracelets. Something of his tattoo poking out the back of his shirt.
“Adam,” he says again.
“Ronan,” Adam whispers back, feeling each letter wrap around his lips.
“Come home this weekend.”
Adam wants it so badly that he almost cries. “I can’t,” he says, instead, wishing that he could throw away the part of him that is incessantly responsible, that holds him inescapably accountable. “I can’t.”
“Where’s that punk? Laila? Are you alone?”
Adam huffs. “Out of town. I’m not an invalid.”
Instead of getting angry, snapping back, like he might’ve when they were new and misunderstood the twists of their words where they intertwined, Ronan breathes what Adam knows is his smoker’s breath. In, out.
“I’m sorry,” says Adam, the fight going out of him as quick as it came. “Ronan, I don’t know if I want it anymore.”
“You what?”
Adam buries his face against his knees and closes his eyes against the denim. How deranged did he have to be, how much had Cabeswater burrowed and switched around his insides, that he should even consider tossing out this forever dream and scratch away the formations of Adam Parrish, all for the weight of his vulnerable yearning. His childlike, unreasonable yearning, the tide that he cannot stop, the pain that doesn’t go away no matter how many friends he makes or classes he takes or goals he crests.
“I want to come home.”
Ronan sighs on the other line. “Adam,” he says, and this time he says it like someone else might say sweetheart.
“I know. I’m being stupid. I have to finish. I have to, you know that, don’t you? I want to come home, but I can’t.”
“Fuck,” says Ronan.
“Eloquent,” Adam jokes, falling flat.
“Damnit, Parrish. Fuck. I-” Ronan pauses, and Adam hears the palpable frustration coming through. “I want to help. I don’t know how.”
It hurts to hear; Ronan’s compassion, his desire to fix, it all makes Adam even more impossibly fond, and this fondness reminds him of the other facets of home, the other empty spaces that college invites. He has never been so social in his life. He has never been so lonely. Missing a childhood dog for the simple way his paws would scrabble against the wood floor. Little aches, considerable misgivings.
“This helps. You help. I feel ridiculous. There’s nothing to be this freaked out over,” Adam says, pulling at his hair, “I know that. My professor thinks I’m some sort of great poet,”
“Well, aren’t you?”
“No. I don’t know. That’s the problem. I’m not much of anything. Certainly not anything great. All that’s in me is whatever’s left from motor oil and trailer park and then the rest is just. You. I don’t want to fill it with anything else.”
Ronan takes this in as Adam picks at his shoelaces. Adam tries to remember the calming force of Cabeswater, and comes up with the phantom feeling of Ronan’s warm hands against his back.
“Then don’t.”
“Hm?”
“Don’t. If you don’t want to change, you don’t have to. Shit, I’m the exact same. You’re not some failure just because you don’t want to become someone new.”
Adam squeezes his eyes against the dark. “Isn’t that the point of this? Of me coming up here? I wanted to prove that I could be someone new.”
“Maybe when you were fifteen,” grunts Ronan. “You changed before you ever got into Harvard. There’s no need to have some identity crisis just because you’re in Cambridge instead of Henrietta.”
“Cambridge is a lot bigger than Henrietta,” Adam mutters.
“Yeah, well, you’re too good for the both of them. I don’t get your obsession with school, you know I can’t fucking stand it, but I know… I know that-”
Ronan pauses, and comes back with the brick heaviness of conviction in his voice. “You’re always going to have somewhere to come back to. I don’t care if you become some great American poet or solve world hunger or, I don’t know, invent a new version of the fucking lightbulb, I-”
“Fuck, Adam,” he says, exhaling all at once. “You can always come home. You won’t. But you can.”
Adam imagines the thickness of Ronan’s shoulder, how it feels under his hand. “Adam Harvard Parrish,” he whispers.
Ronan laughs, though it sounds a little strained.
“Adam Henrietta Parish,” says Adam, amending.
Ronan hums. Silence on the line for another second or two, and Adam can hear the drone of the ceiling vents if he concentrates hard enough, if he ignores the ache in his head from the burn of that very concentration, before Ronan speaks again, voice familiar.
“Just Adam. Adam Parrish.”
The knock comes deep in the night, and it jars Adam so badly that he nearly falls out of bed. He’s in a too-large sports t-shirt and boxer shorts, and he’s sure his cheeks are ruddy with the warmth of his blankets. He expects to see Nico, the ever-intoxicated roommate with a girl attached to his arm or a handle of Tito’s hanging off his wrist, pulls open the door exhausted and ready to roll his eyes at the fatigue of it all.
But it is not Nico. And there are no girls, and there is no handle, and it doesn’t matter what he’s wearing or how tired he is or how mussed from sleep his hair might be.
It is not Nico, because it is Ronan, and Adam barely has a moment for it to register before he is throwing himself into his chest and locking his arms around him so tightly he thinks he might’ve cracked a rib. Luckily, Ronan is tough. Ronan is tough, Ronan is here, Ronan is Ronan, and Adam thinks that he has never felt so relieved in his entire life.
“You dick,” he exhales, cracking, inhaling Ronan’s cologne and the line-drying freshness of home.
“Nah, Gansey’s somewhere in Arizona,” Ronan says against his hair, and Adam makes a sound that would be embarrassing if it were in front of anyone else.
He buries his face into Ronan’s shoulder and revels in the knowledge that he knows exactly where the tail end of his tattoo snakes around to become visible against his collarbone.
“Sounded like you could use some help,” Ronan mutters.
Months ago, this would have bristled Adam. He would have balked at the suggestion. Now, he hears the soft edge of Ronan’s concern and simply treasures that this sweet, thoughtful dream creature only ever wants to do anything and everything in his power to make Adam feel better.
He has been tripping and tugging his way into being in love with this boy for a long while, and the proof of it is in the fact that he would drive hours through the night to offer the feeling of skin against skin. Adam is overcome. It had been something hard for him to come to terms with, at first, growing up the way he did; to not grow tired of another person, and more terrifyingly, to accept that another person (a beautiful, intricate, watercolored person) would not grow tired of you.
“Guess so,” he admits, quietly.
They stand like that for several moments past what is probably acceptable. According to Adam’s watch, it is 4:02 in the morning. Ronan is warm, and has not removed his arm from where it secures Adam against him.
“Stay,” he all but commands, speaking into Ronan’s neck. Ronan exhales, warm. He says nothing, only walks Adam backwards with palms against his back until he wrestles him up into bed and piles the comforter atop him. He flops down with his head against Adam’s stomach, and Adam smiles at the way his too-long legs dangle off the edge. Scratching Ronan’s neck with blunt nails, Adam marvels at the things that stay the same.
“Was planning on it.” He pushes up into Adam’s hand like a cat begging for pets, and Adam laughs like he isn’t falling all over himself to keep himself together, even as his organs shift to accommodate the weight of change, even as his brain strains to reorder what can remain, and what should be done away with. Ronan, at least, is an obvious.
Blue’s letter, flowers doodled on edges, is at long last read by an impatient Ronan aloud as Adam’s cheek is dug into by the pointiness of his knee. It goes as follows:
When you ask yourself why, whenever big bad Harvard gets to be too much, remember that you, Adam Parrish, are a badass.
We love you more than you can possibly convince yourself of, and we are cheering for you until you decide to turn that shitbox of a car around and come back to us.
When you walk across the stage in four years, you can throw this away.
But not before then!
Love, Blue.
“She’s got some wisdom in that tiny body after all,” Ronan grunts.
“More than you’ve got in all six feet of you.”
“See if I ever get anything down from the top shelf for you again, Parrish.”
Adam snorts, shoving at Ronan’s shoulder until he can climb over his lap and hold his face between two hands.
“Everything is fine and fucking dandy,” he says, repeating Ronan’s profanity back to him. “I am Adam Parrish, and I can come home.”