What he wanted was to know what he wanted.
It was a hateful memory, the sort of memory he would sometimes skirt the edges of by accident as he was falling asleep, his thoughts rolling close to it and then recoiling, burned.
It was a community of scholars just outside of adolescence, a sort of Marvel comic where every hero represented a different arm of the humanities.
I sat there silently, hiding behind my book, knowing that she needed words from me – words I wasn’t willing to give. I wasn’t sure which of us was being more selfish – her, for wanting something that no one could promise, or me, for not promising her something that was too painfully impossible to want.
Gansey appeared in the doorway. He was speaking to a teacher in the hall, thumb poised on his lower lip, eyebrows furrowed handsomely, uniform worn with confident ease. He stepped into the classroom, shoulders square, and for just a second, it was like he was a stranger again – once more that lofty, unknowable Virginia princeling.
Adam had always thought that was what he wanted – for Gansey to know. But now he wasn’t sure. Gainsay wasn’t like anyone else, and suddenly Adam wasn’t sure that he really wanted him to be.
Because Niall Lynch was the biggest liar of them all, and he’d stuffed all of that into his eldest son. There was not much difference between a lie and a secret.
Somehow, objectively troubling truths about their parents had been unable to mar Ronan’s feelings for them. Declan envied him. His love and his grief both.
I don’t like grocery shopping. It’s the same thing over and over every week. I’d like to make enough money, one day, that someone else would do it for me. Do you have to be rich for that?
He always said Ronan differently from other words. As if he had meant to say another word entirely – something like knife or poison or revenge – and then swapped it out for Ronan’s name at the last moment.
Nothing comes from nothing. But something makes something.
When the girl asked Gansey, he just gazed at her for a minute too long, not realizing he was being rude until too late. This was so far from Richard Gansey’s scene that he had no words at all.
You will be one of those gods without magic powers. What are they called? “I don’t think there is a word.” King. Probably. I.
She looked friendly. In Blue’s experience, everyone who lived in remote tired farmhouses generally looked friendly, until they didn’t.
With force, Gansey kicked off his shoes. One flew over his miniature Henrietta and the other made it all the way to the side of his desk. It slammed off the old wood and slid to the ground. Under his breath, Gansey said, “Yee haw.
Soon college would be out, I would join the ranks of the martriculated, and the real world would steal me away for one of their own.
A small percentage of medieval bodies were buried such; historians thought they were the graves of suicides or witches, though really, historians were such Guesser McGuessers, him the biggest of them all.
Adam was very good at watching without being watched. Only Gansey ever seemed to catch him at it.
Tony himself was handsome as a cigarette.
Adam hadn’t let himself dwell on that possibility. Every time his thoughts came close to touching on the near miss, it opened up something dark and sharp edged inside him. It was hard to remember what life at Aglionby had been like before Gansey. The distant memories seemed difficult, lonely, more populated with late nights where Adam sat on the steps of the double-wide, blinking tears out of his eyes and wondering why he bothered.