Opal (The Raven Cycle #4.5)(6)
Ronan ducked his head under the table and caught her eye. “For God’s sake. Get a jar and go outside and catch twenty fireflies. Don’t come back in until you’ve caught twenty fireflies.”
She went outside. There were a lot of fireflies in the waning light, but she was not good at keeping them in the jar while catching new ones, so it took her quite awhile. She did not go back inside when she was done, because by this time Adam and Ronan had come outside — Adam first, head down, walking fast, hands stuffed in pockets, feet still bare, not looking back, and then Ronan, pausing to jerk on his jacket before following Adam. Ronan called Adam’s name twice, but Adam didn’t turn or respond, even when Ronan caught up to him.
The two of them walked in silence up the dirt road to one of the barns in the upper fields, barely visible against the dark. The trees that surrounded the valley were already blacker than black.
“I might not get into any of them,” Adam said. “It might have been for nothing.”
“Whatever. Then you make a new list.”
“You don’t understand. I’d miss a semester unless I went for rolling admissions and that completely screws up the financial aid. Look, I don’t expect you to care about this.” Right after saying this, Adam said, in a different voice, “I’m being a shithead.”
“You are. And a shitfoot. Where are your shoes?”
“Still under the table.”
“Opal, could you get them for him?”
Opal could not, because it was too boring to go back to the house when they were out here being exciting in the dark. What she could get them was that jar of twenty fireflies, which she released in Adam’s face as she scampered by him. He reared back while Ronan enjoyed the scenery.
“She’s so useful,” Adam said. Opal preened.
“I know. Hold up.” Ronan paused to kick off his own shoes and stuff his socks in them. Leaving them by the side of the track, he continued alongside Adam with matching bare feet. All of his dream creatures were slowly starting to assemble in the fields, more sound than sight in the darkness. Opal increasingly thought these animals were stupid. They were simple creatures, not as excellent as her. But Ronan seemed to like them anyway. Opal was a little worried that they would tell Ronan about the lady they had chased but then she remembered that things didn’t work that way in the animal world. In any case, when the creatures saw that Ronan didn’t have any buckets in hand and that Opal was close, they remained at a distance, cropping the grass or rooting in the dirt.
Adam and Ronan only stopped walking when they got to the rearmost field. Adam was never there when Ronan went out to drive his car in circles there and he seemed surprised to see what Ronan had done to the landscape. He stared at the flattened grass and muddy tire tracks for a good long time without saying anything. Possibly he was feeling excluded. Opal had ridden with Ronan once when he drove in the field, not because she wanted to ride in the car, but because she didn’t like being left out. The experience had been jostling and loud. The car complained the entire time, and the stereo sang along with electronic chirrups. Ronan had told her she was not allowed to ride with him anymore after she had been sick behind the passenger seat, but she found she didn’t mind. She would rather be excluded.
“You’ll get into one of the others,” Ronan told Adam eventually. “You’re not going to have to make another list. It won’t be what you imagined, but it’ll be just as good.”
“Remind me of that later.”
“Count on it.”
Adam looked a little less crumpled. He prodded a clod of mud with one of his bare toes. “Is the new Cabeswater going to have a place to do this?”
Adam wasn’t looking at Ronan and so he did not see the complicated expression that flitted across Ronan’s face, but Opal did.
“It’s going to be a one-stop shopping experience,” Ronan said. “I’m living the dream.”
This made Adam laugh, and then he let out a deep breath. He appeared a lot less crumpled now. They held hands and it all became less exciting. Opal waited to see if there would be any more raised voices or discussion of her usefulness, but they remained quiet until they turned back around to return to the farmhouse. Then the only thing they talked about was how their feet were sore and dirty, which wouldn’t have been a problem if they had been made with hooves.
Summer arrived. Summer made things hot, and both Adam and Ronan smelled more in the summer, though they didn’t seem to notice or care. Ronan accidentally started a fire in one of the smaller outbuildings, and although this started out shouty it ended up wild and joyful, with both Adam and Ronan hurling things into it while music galloped in the background. Adam’s car got off the blocks and almost immediately returned to them. There were a lot of mice, which Opal enjoyed catching and occasionally eating. The cloud lady continued bringing books and foods to the bench by the creek and also began to bring a suitcase with tubes that went in her nose, which was interesting and made Opal stick things up her nose for a few days after she first saw it. Adam got one of the Lynch family’s old backhoes running again and dug a strategically placed hole out in one of the fields. A natural spring slowly began to fill it and an unnatural hosepipe finished the job; the boys stripped and leapt into the resulting body of water on the hottest of days. Opal did not want to swim but Adam taught her until she was fearless, and then Ronan threw buoyant objects for her to fetch until he got tired of being on the shore. He had dreamt himself a pair of tattered black wings that did not quite hold him and he used them now like a temporary diving board, letting them lift him half a dozen feet over the water before dropping him with a muddy splash. Opal floated on her back and kicked her legs like Adam had shown her to do while the boys clung to each other in the water and then separated. The heat in the air made everything smell and look more like itself. Everything was very good.