The Raven King
Page 64

But he was still in trouble. Not with his parents. They were delighted to see him – How tan you are, Dick – and they were, as predicted, even more delighted to see Henry and Blue. Henry immediately passed some sort of friend-peer test that Adam and Ronan had always seemed to struggle with, and Blue was – well, whatever it was about Blue’s sharply curious expression that had attracted the youngest Gansey in the first place clearly also caught the older Ganseys. They immediately began to question Blue about her family’s profession as they diced eggplant.
Blue described an average day at 300 Fox Way with rather less wonder and bewilderment than she’d just used in the car to tell Gansey about the unaverage experience of her father disappearing into a tree. She listed the psychic hotline, the cleansing of houses, the meditation circles, and the laying out of cards. Her perfunctory method of describing it only charmed Gansey’s parents more; if she had tried to sell it to them, it would have never worked. But she was just telling them how it was and not asking a thing from them and they loved it.
With Blue there, Gansey was excruciatingly aware of how they all must look through her eyes – the old Mercedes in the drive, the hemmed trousers, even skin, straight teeth, Burberry sunglasses, Hermes scarves. He could even see the schoolhouse through her lens now. In the past, he wouldn’t have thought that it looked particularly moneyed – it was sparsely decorated, and he would’ve assumed that came off as austere. But now that he had spent time with Blue, he could see that the sparseness was exactly what made it look rich. The Ganseys did not need to have a lot of things in the house because every object they did have was exactly the right thing for its purpose. There was not a cheap bookshelf also pressed into service as a repository for extra dishes. There was not a desk that had to carry paperwork as well as sewing materials as well as toys. There were not pots and pans piled on cabinets or toilet plungers sitting in cheap plastic buckets. Instead, even in this crumbling schoolhouse, everything was aesthetic. That was what money did. It put plungers in copper pots, and extra dishes behind glass doors, and toys into carved hope chests, and hung skillets from iron pot racks.
He felt quite squirmy about it.
Gansey kept trying to catch Blue’s and Henry’s gazes to see if they were all right, but the trick with trying to be subtle in a room full of Ganseys was that subtlety was a language they all spoke. There was no discreetly asking if rescue was needed; all messages would be intercepted. And so light conversation proceeded until lunch could be removed to the porch out back. Henry and Blue were seated in chairs too far away for him to air-drop aid to them.
Helen made a point to sit next to him. He was tasting vanilla by the bucket load.
“Headmaster Child said you were a bit late with your college applications,” Mr Gansey said as he leaned forward to spoon quinoa on to plates.
Gansey busied himself getting a gnat from his iced tea.
Mrs Gansey waved her hand at an invisible gnat out of solidarity. “It seems like it should be too cold for insects. There must be standing water around here.”
Gansey carefully wiped the dead insect on the edge of the table.
“I’m still in touch with Dromand these days,” Mr Gansey said. “He’s still got his fingers stuck in all the pies in the Harvard history department, if that’s what you’re still thinking about.”
“Jesus, no,” Mrs Gansey said. “Yale, surely.”
“What, like Ehrlich?” Mr Gansey laughed gently at some private joke. “Let this be a lesson to us all.”
“Ehrlich’s an outlier,” Mrs Gansey replied. They clinked their glasses together in a mysterious toast.
“What have you put in already?” Helen asked. There was danger in her voice. Unidentifiable to non-Ganseys, but enough that their father frowned at her.
Gansey blinked up. “None, yet.”
“I can’t remember the timing for these things,” Mrs Gansey said. “Soon, though, right?”
“Time got away from me.” It was the simplest possible version of theoretically I am to die before it matters so I used my evenings for other things.
“I’ve read a study on gap years,” Henry said. He smiled at his plate as Mrs Gansey placed it before him, and in that smile was an understanding that he was fluent in this language of subtlety. “It is supposed to be good for people like us.”
“What are people like us?” Gansey’s mother asked, in a way that suggested she enjoyed the idea of commonality between them.
“Oh, you know, overeducated young people who drive themselves to nervous breakdowns in the worthy pursuit of excellence,” Henry said. Gansey’s parents laughed. Blue picked at her napkin. Gansey had been rescued; Blue had been stranded.
Mr Gansey saw it, though, and he caught the ball before it even hit the ground. “I would love to read something from you, Blue, on growing up in a house of psychics. You could go academic or you could go memoir, and either way, it would just be fascinating. You have such a distinct voice, even when speaking.”
“Oh yes, I noticed that, too, the Henrietta cadence,” Mrs Gansey said warmly; they were excellent team players. Good save, point to the Ganseys, win for Team Good Feeling.
Helen said, “I nearly forgot about the bruschetta; it’s going to burn. Dick, would you help me carry it in?”
Team Good Feeling was abruptly disbanded. Gansey was about to find out why he was in trouble.
“Right, sure,” he said. “Can I get anyone anything while I’m inside?”
“Actually, if you’d bring back my schedule by the Ellie-furniture, that would be great, thanks,” his mother said. “I need to call Martina to make sure she’s going to be there in enough time.”
The Gansey siblings headed inside, where Helen first removed the toast from the oven and then turned to him. She demanded, “Do you remember when I said, ‘tell me what kind of dirt I will find on your brodude friends so that I can spin it before Mom gets out here’?”
“I trust that’s a rhetorical question,” Gansey said. He garnished bruschetta.
Helen said, “You did not get back to me with any information on that front.”
“I sent you clippings of the Turk Week pranks.”
“And yet you failed to mention that you had bribed the headmaster.”
Gansey stopped garnishing bruschetta.