Opal (The Raven Cycle #4.5)(3)
“Self-defeating,” Adam had replied.
“Fuck you. Catch-22. That’s what I meant.”
“You dreamt the first Cabeswater without a Cabeswater.”
“I just need it to not suck.”
“I feel like there are more useful parameters. Like the amount of dream charge it could focus for you versus the amount of attention it draws.”
“Good thought, Parrish. We need to dream you a new car, after all.”
Opal, eavesdropping, had not quite followed the gist of the conversation — she was still better in the old dream language that waking Ronan never spoke — but she could tell that Adam liked it when Ronan talked like this. Sometimes they would stop talking and instead begin kissing, and Opal would eavesdrop on this as well. Her capacity for voyeurism was boundless and incorrigible. They were always coming together in surprising moments, going from easygoing to urgent in the space of a few breaths. She watched them kiss messily in the car in the driveway and she watched them tangle around each other in the laundry room and she watched Adam unbuckle Ronan’s belt and slide his hand against skin. With intellectual curiosity, she watched ribs and hips and arms and legs and spines. She had no lust, because Ronan hadn’t dreamt any for her, but she also had no shame, because Ronan hadn’t dreamt any of that for her, either.
The only thing that had ever made her blink away was when Adam had once encountered Ronan in the second-floor hallway. Ronan had been standing outside of his parents’ old room, one hand holding a cassette tape and the other clenched into a fist, and he’d been there for quite a few minutes by the time Adam climbed the stairs. Adam had taken the cassette from Ronan’s hand, working Ronan’s fingers loose and putting his own fingers between them. For a moment Opal, hidden, had thought they were going to kiss. But instead, Ronan pressed his face against Adam’s neck and Adam quietly put his head on top of Ronan’s head and they did not move for a long time. Something about this made Opal burn so furiously that she could not stand to look a second longer. She left them there with a clatter so they would know she had been watching. Then she went out to rummage in the woods.
She had been doing this more and more since she had been taken from dreams. She thought of these roaming days as animal days. Animal days in an animal world. Unlike a dream, the animal world was strict. She liked this. The animal world had narrow rules, and once you learned those rules, it was much less surprising than a dream, which could change itself at any time. In the animal world, people could not suddenly fly. Faces did not move around to the back of skulls without warning. The fields around the Barns never shifted into an unfamiliar prairie or shopping mall before you could get to the driveway. Cars never turned into bicycles. Rainbows never fell out of cereal boxes and lava never poured from water taps. Dead things never became alive. Time marched in a boring and pleasant straight line. These were the rules that kept the animal world small and manageable.
This should have made the animal world more boring, but instead, it made her feel braver inside it. She ranged farther and farther from the farmhouse each week. She did not always go back when the sun went down. Instead she dug herself holes in fields and lay in them or made herself nests of stolen lawn furniture cushions. In this way she continuously expanded her territory without losing her way, sometimes making it to the far edge of the woods where there was a place that smelled like gasoline. She liked this place a lot. She liked to watch what people did when they did not think they were being watched. Sometimes they hit the 93 premium button and watched the 93 premium count numbers on a screen. Sometimes they wiped down their windshields with a scented liquid that she wanted to drink. Sometimes they sat in their cars and cried softly. She liked this best of all, because it was rare, and she found she liked rare things the most.
Sometimes late at night when she risked stealing a drink out of the windshield-washing bins, a person would come to the door of the building and shout “What, what is that?” and she would have to scamper away behind the building, creeping and capering around the trash bins. On nights like these, she ran all the way back to the Barns with her heartbeat cluttered inside her because she was supposed to be secret and she was a little less secret than she’d been just a little while before.
Being spotted in such a way also reminded her that she broke the rules of this animal world. Outside of a dream, there were not girls with furry legs and hooves (although she thought there should have been, since both were very practical in the underbrush). Because of this, she was secret, and would forever have to be secret.
She sulked about this. She tore up a stack of vintage car magazines in the sitting room and sat in the ruins of them and when Ronan came home and demanded what the hell is wrong with you like seriously, she told him that she was bored of being secret.
He said, “Aren’t we all!” Then he made her clean up all the damp, gummed paper, and then he made her wipe down the floor because some of the printing had transferred to the wood because of her spit, and then he made her take out the trash plus the kitchen trash without even letting her dig through it first. When she finally was done and angry instead of bored, he said, “I know you’re bored. When I dream the new Cabeswater, it’s going to be a way bigger and cooler place for you to play in. It’s not going to be like just sticking around here.”
Opal’s heart frogged up her throat and escaped to the hallway. She shook her head and then shook it some more and then, because he didn’t say anything, shook it some more.