Page 5 (2/2)
You incredible creature!
Creature was a good word for hiht What the hell am I?
Maybe Gansey ake
Ronan and Gansey both suffered froh they had very different solutions for it When Ronan couldn’t -- or wouldn’t -- sleep, he listened tofor vehicular trouble Or all three When Gansey couldn’t sleep, he studied the bristling journal he’d cos Glendower or, when he was too tired to read, used a cereal box and a bin of paints to add another building to the waist-high model of Henrietta he’d constructed Neither could really help the other find sleep But sometimes it was better just to know you weren’t the only one awake
Ronan padded out of his rooh, Gansey sat cross-legged on Main Street, sloaving a newly painted piece of cardboard in the direction of the singleair conditioner At night, he looked particularly se Lit only by the small lamp he’d set on the floor beside his journal, the room yawned above, a wizard’s cave full of books and ht was flat black against the hundreds ofpanes,them just another wall
Ronan placed the wooden box he’d just dreamt next to Gansey and then retreated to the other end of the tiny street
Gansey was quaint and scholarly with his night-time wireframes slid down his nose He looked fro But he did take one of his earbuds out as he continued running a line of glue along aa bone in his neck, Ronan let Chainsan to entertain herself She proceeded to turn over the wastebasket and go through the contents It was a noisy process, rustling like a secretary at work
The scenario felt faether at Mon as Gansey had been in Henrietta -- al hadn’t looked like this in the beginning It had been just one of the many abandoned factories and warehouses in the Valley They never got torn down They just got forgotten Mon was no different
But then Gansey had come to toith his crazy drea for cash No else had noticed it, even though they drove by every day It was on its knees in the rye grass and the creeper, and he saved it
The fall after Ronan and Gansey had become friends, the su for Glendower and the other half hauling junk out of the second floor The floor was furred with flaked curls of paint Wires trailed frole vines Chipped plywood e The boys burned crap in the overgrown lot until the cops asked them to stop, and then Gansey had explained his situation and the cops had gotten out of their cars to help finish the job Back then, it had surprised Ronan; he hadn’t realized yet that Gansey could persuade even the sun to pause and give him the ti for months The first week of June, Gansey found a headless statue of a bird with king carved on its belly in Welsh The second week, they wired a refrigerator in the upstairs bathrooht next to the toilet The third week, someone killed Niall Lynch The fourth week, Ronana cereal-box front porch into place, Gansey asked, "What was the first thing you took out? Did you always know?"
Ronan found himself pleased to be quizzed "No It was a bunch of flowers The first time"
He remembered that drea in the dapples He’d walked through the whispering trees with an often-present dreah the canopy, sudden as a storm cloud Ronan, bereft with terror and the certainty that this alien force wanted hi ripped aloft
When he’d woken, he’d clutched a pulpy handful of blue flowers of a sort no one had seen before Ronan tried, now, to explain theness of the stamen, the furriness of the petals The impossibility of them
Even to Gansey, he couldn’t adht: I’m just like my father
As Ronan spoke, Gansey’s eyes were half-closed, turned toward the night His thoughtless expression was one of wonder or of pain; with Gansey, they were so often the sa
"That was an accident," Gansey reasoned He capped the glue "Now you can do it on purpose?"
Ronan couldn’t decide if he should exaggerate his prowess or emphasize the difficulty of the task "I can so, but I can’t choose what I dreaet a ue and spoke around it "Walk h it What happens?"
Fro tearing sound as a sthwise
"First," Ronan replied, "I get a beer"
Gansey shot hi look
The truth was that Ronan didn’t understand the process very well hi to do with how he fell asleep The dreams were more pliable when he drank Less like taut anxiety and more like taffy, susceptible to careful manipulation until, all at once, they broke
He was about to say this, but instead, what ca pardon?"
"They always have been I just didn’t knoas Latin until I got older"
"Ronan, there’s no reason for that," Gansey said sternly, as if Ronan had hurled a toy on the floor
"No shit, Sherlock But there it is"
"Is it your -- your thoughts that are in Latin? Or the dialogue? Do other people speak Latin in them? Like, am I in your dreams?"
"Oh, yes, baby" It ah that Chainsaw abandoned her paper shredding to verify that he wasn’t dying Ronan soant and fluently disdainful of dream-Ronan’s clumsy attempts to communicate