Opal (The Raven Cycle #4.5)
Maggie Stiefvater
These were the rules. Some visitors could see her, if Ronan said it was all right, and some visitors could not see her, if Ronan told her to make herself scarce, and no visitors were allowed to see her hooves.
She was not to eat anything that was inside the house unless it was given to her, even if it was something that sounded good while she chewed it, like cardboard boxes or plastic serving utensils, and in particular she was not to eat anything of Adam’s or from Aurora’s bedroom and if she did, she would be punished. She was not supposed to call Ronan Kerah because he had a name and she was perfectly capable of forming any word she liked, unlike Chainsaw, who only had a beak. She was allowed to climb on nearly anything except for the cars because hooves were not good for metal and also her hands were always very grubby. She did not have to take a bath or otherwise wash herself unless she wanted to come in the house, and she could not lie about having washed herself if she wanted to be allowed on a couch because God, Opal, your legs smell like wet dog. She was not allowed to steal. Hiding objects from other people counted as stealing, unless the objects were presents, which you hid but then laughed about later. Dead things were not to be eaten on the porch, which was a hard rule, because living things were also not to be eaten on the porch. She was not to run in the road or try to return to the ley line without someone with her, which was a silly rule, because the ley line felt like a dream and under no circumstance would she willingly return to one of those. She was to only tell the truth because Ronan always told the truth, but she felt this was the most unfair rule of all because Ronan could dream himself a new truth if he liked and she had to stick with the one she was currently living. She was to remember that she was a secret.
Mostly it was all right, though, and Opal could do what she wanted around the Barns. Her only recent punishment had been because of the UPS man. She had been allowed to run out to greet him as long as she remembered to pretend that her name was my little cousin from Syracuse and also to never forget to wear the clumsy, tall boots Ronan had made her. The UPS man had very bright teeth and grew hair right on top of his face nearly over his mouth, hair that was longer than the hair on Ronan’s head and nearly as long as the hair on Opal’s legs. She had asked him once how she might get hair like that to grow on her own face and he had said “just keep trying,” which she thought was very kind and encouraging of him. She still liked him a lot, but she was no longer allowed to greet him ever since she had crept into the cab of his truck to take the box of dog biscuits under the passenger seat and the photo of his wife taped up by his gearshift. She’d eaten the first in its entirety and had bitten the eyes out of the second.
“Well, that’s fucked,” Ronan had said, discovering the photograph after the UPS man had gone. “It’s not like we can give it back to him. She’s gone completely feral.”
“She was never tame,” Adam replied. “Only afraid.”
Adam did not live at the Barns, much to Opal’s disappointment. He was always kind to her and sometimes would show her how things worked and also she would have liked to sit in the dark room and watch him sleep.
But instead he came and went according to no schedule that she could discern. When he did sleep at the Barns, it was often during the day, when she felt certain she would be caught spying. She had to content herself with stolen glimpses through cracked doors, slender one-inch views of duvet and sheets piled like thunderheads, Adam and sometimes Ronan pillowed among them.
Since the weather warmed, Adam’s car sat in the driveway. Unlike Ronan’s car, it rested on blocks instead of wheels, and he spent a lot of time underneath it or folded under its hood. Opal came to understand that Adam’s car was supposed to be more like Ronan’s, but there was something wrong with it called shitbox. Ronan kept offering to dream a cure for shitbox, but Adam was intent on fixing it “the right way.” This seemed to be a long process, so Ronan’s car was often missing, as Adam used it in his mysterious comings and goings. Sometimes Ronan left with Adam, and they didn’t tell Opal when they would be back because they didn’t know, they would be back when they were back, they were just going for a drive, don’t touch anything in the long barn and try for God’s sake to not dig any more holes in the front yard.
The long barn was not the longest barn in the secret rolling fields that stretched out around the old farmhouse, but it was the longest in relation to its width. It was surrounded by scrubby grass as coarse as the hair that covered Opal’s legs, and also by cows that were always lying down but never being dead. (Sometimes she climbed on their wide, warm backs and pretended she was riding into battle, but they were about as much fun as the rocks that broke the fields up closer to the woods.) This was where Ronan kept all of his current work — which was what he called sleeping when no one was allowed to be near him. Ronan was always telling Opal not to interfere with the contents of the long barn, but there was no danger of her doing so. She could hear that the long barn was full of dreamstuff, and she was afraid of it.
Dreamstuff always sounded like a dream, which sounded like the ley line, which sounded a little bit like the electrical murmur you would hear under large power lines, which sounded like when you walked into a room and the television had been left on but the sound was turned down. It was also a little like the thrum inside her that she could sort of hear-feel when she was lying quietly in the grass not-sleeping. Dreamstuff could be objects, like those left behind by Ronan’s father in the outbuildings, but it could also be living things, like the deer Ronan had dreamt, or like Opal herself.