The Raven Boys

by Maggie Stiefvater

Page 8

 

  When did this become my life?

  Whelk shrugged. "I don’t remember him skipping. "

  "You have him with Gansey, though, don’t you?" Milo asked. "That explains it. Those two are tight as ticks. "

  It was a strange, old expression, one that Whelk hadn’t heard since his own days at Aglionby, when he, too, had been tight as ticks with his roommate Czerny. He felt a hollowness inside him, like he was hungry, like he should’ve stayed home and drank more to commemorate this miserable day.

  He swam back to the present, looking at the attendance sheet the substitute teacher had left. "Ronan was in class today, but Gansey wasn’t. Not in mine, anyway. "

  "Oh, that’s probably because of that St. Mark’s Day hoopla he was talking about," Milo said.

  This got Whelk’s attention. No one knew that today was St. Mark’s Day. No one celebrated St. Mark’s Day, not even St. Mark’s mother. Only Whelk and Czerny, treasure hunters and troublemakers, cared about its existence.

  Whelk said, "Beg pardon?"

  "I don’t know what all’s going on," Milo replied. One of the other teachers said hi to him on the way out of the staff room, and Milo looked over his shoulder to reply. Whelk imagined grabbing Milo’s arm, forcing his attention back his way. It took all of his effort to wait instead. Turning back around, Milo seemed to sense Whelk’s interest, because he added, "He hasn’t talked to you about it? He wouldn’t shut up about it yesterday. It’s that ley line stuff he’s always on about. "

  Ley line.

  If no one knew about St. Mark’s Day, truly no one knew about ley lines. Certainly no one in Henrietta, Virginia. Certainly not one of Aglionby’s richest pupils. Definitely not in conjunction with St. Mark’s Day. This was Whelk’s quest, Whelk’s treasure, Whelk’s teen years. Why was Richard Gansey III talking about it?

  With the words ley line spoken aloud, a memory was conjured: Whelk in a dense wood, sweat collected on his upper lip. He was seventeen and shivering. Every time his heart beat, red lines streaked in the corners of his vision, the trees darkening with his pulse. It made the leaves seem like they were all moving, though there was no wind. Czerny was on the ground. Not dead, but dying. His legs still pedaled on the uneven surface beside his red car, making drifts of fallen leaves behind him. His face was just … done. In Whelk’s head, unearthly voices hissed and whispered, words blurred and stretched together.

  "Some sort of energy source or something," Milo said.

  Whelk was suddenly afraid that Milo could see the memory on him, could hear the inexplicable voices in his head, incomprehensible but nonetheless present ever since that failed day.

  Whelk schooled his features, though what he was really thinking was: If someone else is looking here, I must have been right. It must be here.

  "What did he say he was doing with the ley line?" he asked with studied calm.

  "I don’t know. Ask him about it. I’m sure he’d love to talk your ear off about it. " Milo looked over his shoulder as the secretary joined them in the hall, her bag on her arm, her jacket in her hand. Her eyeliner was smudged after a long day in the office.

  "We talking about Gansey the third and his New Age obsession?" the secretary asked. She had a pencil stuck in her hair to keep it up and Whelk stared at the stray strands that wound up around the lead. It was clear to him from the way she stood that she secretly found Milo attractive, despite the plaid and the corduroy and the beard. She asked, "Do you know how much Gansey senior is worth? I wonder if he knows what his kid spends all his time on. Man, sometimes these entitled little bastards make me want to slit my wrists. Jonah, are you coming with me for a smoke break or not?"

  "I quit," said Milo. He cast a quick, uneasy glance from the secretary to Whelk, and Whelk knew he was thinking about how much Whelk’s father had been worth, once upon a time, and how little he was worth now, long after the trials had left the front pages of the newspapers. All the junior faculty and the admin staff hated the Aglionby boys, hated them for what they had and what they stood for, and Whelk knew they were all secretly pleased that he had fallen down among their ranks.

  "How about you, Barry?" the secretary asked. Then she answered her own question: "No, you don’t smoke, you’re too pretty for that. Oh well, I’ll go myself. "

  Milo turned to go as well.

  "Feel better," he said kindly, although Whelk had never said he was sick.

  The voices in Whelk’s head were a roar, but for once, his own thoughts had drowned them out.

  "I think I do already," said Whelk.

  It was possible that Czerny’s death wasn’t for nothing after all.

  Chapter 6

  Blue wouldn’t really describe herself as a waitress. After all, she also taught penmanship to third graders, made wreaths for the Society for Ladies of Perpetual Health, walked dogs that belonged to inhabitants of Henrietta’s poshest condo complex, and replaced bedding plants for the elderly ladies of their neighborhood. Really, being a waitress at Nino’s was the least of things she did. But the hours were flexible, it was the most legitimate-looking entry on her already bizarre résumé, and it certainly paid the best.

  There was really only one problem with Nino’s, and it was that for all practical purposes, it belonged to Aglionby. The restaurant was six blocks over from the iron-gated Aglionby campus at the very edge of the historic downtown. It wasn’t the nicest place in Henrietta. There were others with bigger televisions and louder music, but none of them had managed to grip the school’s imagination like Nino’s. Just to know that Nino’s was the place to be was a rite of passage; if you could be seduced by Morton’s Sports Bar on Third, you didn’t deserve to be in the inner circle.

  So the Aglionby boys at Nino’s were not just Aglionby students, but they were the most Aglionby that the school had to offer. Loud, pushy, entitled.

  Blue had seen enough of the raven boys to last a lifetime.

  Tonight, the music was already loud enough to paralyze the finer parts of her personality. She tied on her apron, tuned out the Beastie Boys as best she could, and put her tip-earning smile on.

  Close to the beginning of her shift, four boys came through the front door, letting a cold hiss of fresh air into the room that smelled of oregano and beer. In the window beside the boys, a neon light that said Since 1976 lit their faces a Limesicle green. The boy in front was talking on his cell phone even as he showed Cialina four fingers to indicate party size. Raven boys were good at multitasking, so long as all tasks were exclusively to benefit themselves.

  As Cialina hurried by, her apron pocket stuffed with tickets to deliver, Blue handed her four greasy menus. Cialina’s hair floated above her head with static electricity and abject stress.

  Blue asked, very unwilling, "Do you want me to take that table?"

  "Are you kidding?" Cialina replied, eyeing the four boys. Having finally ended his call, the first one slid into one of the orange vinyl booths. The tallest of them knocked his head on the green cut-glass light hanging over the table; the others laughed generously at him. He said, Bitch. A tattoo snaked out above his collar as he swiveled to sit down. There was something hungry about all of the boys.

  Blue didn’t want them anyway.

  What she wanted was a job that wouldn’t suck all the thoughts out of her head and replace them with the leering call of a synthesizer. Sometimes, Blue would creep outside for an infinitesimal break, and as she lay her head back against the brick wall of the alley behind the restaurant, she’d dream idly about careers studying tree rings. Swimming with manta rays. Scouring Costa Rica to find out more about the scale-crested pygmy tyrant.

  Really, she didn’t know if she’d truly like to find out more about the pygmy tyrant. She just liked the name, because, for a five-foot-tall girl, pygmy tyrant sounded like a career.

  All of those imagined lives seemed pretty far away from Nino’s.

  Just a few minutes after Blue’s shift began, the manager signale
d to Blue from the kitchen. Tonight it was Donny. Nino’s had about fifteen managers, all of them related to the owner and none of them high-school graduates.

  Donny managed to both lounge and offer the phone at once. "Your parent. Uh, mother. "

  But there was no need to clarify, because Blue didn’t really know who her other parent was. Actually, she’d tried to pester Maura about her father before, but her mother had neatly slithered out of that line of questioning.

  Plucking the phone from Donny’s hand, Blue tucked herself back into the corner of the kitchen, next to a terminally greasy fridge and a large-basined sink. Despite her care, she still got jostled every few moments.

  "Mom, I’m working. "

  "Don’t panic. Are you sitting? You probably don’t need to sit. Well, possibly. At least lean on something. He called. To schedule a reading. "

  "Who, Mom? Speak louder. It’s loud here. "

  "Gansey. "

  For a moment, Blue didn’t understand. Then realization tumbled down, weighting her feet. Her voice was a bit faint. "When … did you schedule it for?"

  "Tomorrow afternoon. It was the fastest I could get him in. I tried to get him in sooner, but he said he had school. Do you have a shift tomorrow?"

  "I’m changing it," Blue replied immediately. It was someone else saying the words, though. The real Blue was back in the churchyard, hearing his voice say Gansey.

  "Yes, you are. Go work. "

  As she hung up, she could feel her pulse fluttering. It was real. He was real.

  It was all true and terribly, terribly specific.

  It seemed foolish to be here, now, busing tables and filling drinks and smiling at strangers. She wanted to be home, leaning back against the cool bark of the spreading beech tree behind the house, trying to decide what this changed about her life. Neeve had said this was the year she’d fall in love. Maura had said that she’d kill her true love if she kissed him. Gansey was supposed to die this year. What were the odds? Gansey had to be her true love. He had to be. Because there was no way she was going to kill someone.

  Is this the way life is supposed to be? Maybe it would be better not to know.

  Something touched her shoulder.

  Touching was strictly against Blue’s policy. No one was to touch her person while she was at Nino’s, and especially no one was to touch her now, when she was having a crisis. She whirled.

  "Can. I. Help. You?"

  Before her stood the multitasking cell phone Aglionby boy, looking tidy and presidential. His watch looked as if it cost more than her mother’s car, and every area of exposed skin was a flattering shade of tan. Blue had never figured out how Aglionby boys managed to tan earlier than locals. It probably had something to do with things like spring break and places like Costa Rica and the Spanish coast. President Cell Phone had probably been closer to a pygmy tyrant than she would ever be.

  "I certainly hope so," he said, in a way that indicated less hope and more certainty. He had to speak loudly to be heard, and he had to incline his head to meet her eyes. There was something annoyingly impressive about him, an impression that he was very tall, although he was no taller than most boys. "My socially inhibited friend Adam thinks you’re cute, but he’s unwilling to make a move. Over there. Not the smudgy one. Not the sulky one. "