The Dream Thieves (The Raven Cycle, #2)(20)

“Hello? Oh, hey,” Gansey said to the phone, touching a notebook with a handgun printed on the cover. The oh, hey was accompanied by a definite change in the timbre of his voice. That meant it was Adam, and that somehow stoked Ronan’s anger. Everything was worse at night. “I thought you were still at work. What? Oh, we’re at the Bourgeoisie Playground.”

Ronan showed Gansey a plastic wall clock cleverly molded in the shape of a turkey. The wattle, hanging below the clock face, ticked off the seconds.

“Mon dieu!” Gansey said. To the phone, he said, “If you’re not sure, it probably wasn’t. A woman is hard to mistake for anything else.”

Ronan wasn’t exactly sure why he was angry. Although Gansey had done nothing to invoke his ire, he was definitely part of the problem. Currently, he propped his cell between ear and shoulder as he eyed a pair of plastic plates printed with smiling tomatoes. His unbuttoned collar revealed a good bit of his collarbone. No one could deny that Gansey was a glorious portrait of youth, the well-tended product of a fortunate and moneyed pairing. Ordinarily, he was so polished that it was bearable, though, because he was clearly not the same species as Ronan’s rough-and-ready family. But tonight, under the fluorescent lights of Dollar City, Gansey’s hair was scuffed and his cargo shorts were a greasy ruin from mucking over the Pig. He was bare-legged and sockless in his Top-Siders and very clearly a real human, an attainable human, and this, somehow, made Ronan want to smash his fist through a wall.

Holding the phone away from his mouth, Gansey told them, “Adam thinks he saw an apparition at his place.”

Ronan eyed Noah. “I’m seeing an apparition right now.”

Noah made a rude gesture, a hilariously unthreatening act coming from him, like a growl from a kitten. The clerk clucked audibly.

Chainsaw took the clucking as a personal affront. She plucked irritably at the leather bands on Ronan’s wrist, reminding him of Kavinsky’s strange gift earlier. It was not an entirely comfortable feeling to think of the other boy studying him that closely. Kavinsky had gotten the five bands precisely right, down to the tone of the leather. Ronan wondered what he was hoping to achieve.

“For how long?” Gansey asked the phone.

Ronan rested his forehead on the topmost shelf. The metal edge snarled against his skull, but he didn’t move. At night, the longing for home was ceaseless and omniscient, an airborne contaminant. He saw it in Dollar City’s cheap oven mitts — that was his mother at dinnertime. He heard it in the slam of the cash register drawer — that was his father coming home at midnight. He smelled it in the sudden whiff of air freshener — that was the family trips to New York.

Home was so close at night. He could be there in twenty minutes. He wanted to smash everything off these shelves.

Noah had wandered down the aisle, but now he gleefully returned with a snow globe. He stood behind Ronan until he pushed off the shelf to admire the atrocity. A seasonally decorated palm tree and two faceless sunbathers were trapped inside, along with a painted, erroneous statement: IT’S ALWAYS CHRISTMAS SOMEWHERE.

“Glitter,” whispered Noah reverentially, giving it a shake. Sure enough, it was not fake snow but glitter that precipitated on the eternal holiday sands. Both Ronan and Chainsaw watched, transfixed, as the colorful bits caught in the palm tree.

Farther down the aisle, Gansey suggested to the phone, “You could come stay at Monmouth. For the night.”

Ronan laughed sharply, loud enough for Gansey to hear. Adam was militant about staying at his place, even though it was horrible. Even if the room had been a five-star accommodation, it would have been hateful. Because it wasn’t the bruised home Adam desperately and shamefully missed, nor was it Monmouth Manufacturing, the new home Adam’s pride wouldn’t allow. Sometimes Ronan thought Adam was so used to the right way being painful that he doubted any path that didn’t come with agony.

Gansey’s back was turned to them. “Look, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Ramirez? I didn’t talk to anyone at the church. Yes, twenty-four hundred dollars. I know that part. I —”

This meant they were talking about the Aglionby letter; both Ronan and Gansey had gotten matching ones.

Now Gansey’s voice was low and furious. “At some point it’s not cheati — no, you’re right. You’re right, I absolutely don’t understand. I don’t know and I won’t ever.”

Probably, Adam had made the connection between his rent change and the tuition raise. It wasn’t a complicated assumption, and he was clever. It was easy, too, to hang it on Gansey. If Adam had been thinking straight, though, he would’ve considered how it was Ronan who had infinite connections to St. Agnes. And how whoever was behind the rent change would have had to enter a church office with both a wad of cash and a burning intention to persuade a church lady to lie about a fake tax assessment. Taken apart that way, it seemed to have Ronan written all over it. But one of the marvelous things about being Ronan Lynch was that no one ever expected him to do anything nice for anyone.

“It wasn’t me,” Gansey said, “but I’m glad it happened that way. Fine. Take from that what you will.”

The thing was, Ronan knew what a face looked like, just before it was about to break. He’d seen it in the mirror often enough. Adam had fracture lines all over him.

Next to Ronan, Noah said, “Oh!” in a very surprised way.