Blue Lily, Lily Blue (8 page)

he next day after school, Blue sat at the table with a spoon in one hand and
Lysistrata
, the play she’d chosen to analyze for English, in the other. (
It’s not easy, you

know, for women to get away. One’s busy pottering about her husband; poking the servant awake; putting her child asleep or washing the brat or feeding it.
) Gray drizzle pressed against the windows of the cluttered kitchen.

Blue was not thinking about
Lysistrata
. She was thinking about Gansey and the Gray Man, Maura and the cave of ravens.
Suddenly, a shadow the exact size and shape of her cousin Orla fell across the table.
“I get that Maura is away, but that is no reason to go around being a social tard,” Orla said by way of hello. “Also, when was the last time you ate a food that wasn’t yogurt?”
Sometimes Blue couldn’t take Orla. This was one of those times. She didn’t look up. “Don’t be offensive.”
“Charity told me that T.J. asked you out today and you just stared at him.”
“What?”
“T.J. asked you out. You just stared at him. Ringing bells?” Orla had long since graduated from Mountain View High, but she was still friends or ex-girlfriends with her entire class, and the collective power of all of those younger siblings served to provide Orla with a view, somewhat incomplete, of Blue’s current high school life.
Blue looked up (and up, and up) at her tall cousin. “At lunch, T.J. came over to my table and drew a penis on the unicorn on my binder. Is that the incident Charity is referring to?”
“Don’t Richard Gansey the Third at me,” Orla replied.
“Because if that’s what she meant, then yes, I just stared at him. I didn’t realize it was a conversation because
penis
.”
Orla flared her nostrils magnificently. “Here’s some advice: Sometimes people are just trying to be friendly. You can’t expect everyone to be profound all the time. There’s just chatting.”
“I
chat
,” Blue retorted. The T.J. incident hadn’t offended her, although she’d preferred her unicorn non-gendered. It had just made her feel wearily older than everyone in the school. “Do you mind? I’m trying to get this done before Gansey gets here.” (
O Zeus, what throbbing suffering!
)
“You can be just friends with people, you know,” Orla said. “I think it’s crazy how you’re in love with all those raven boys.”
Orla wasn’t wrong, of course. But what she didn’t realize about Blue and her boys was that they were
all
in love with one another. She was no less obsessed with them than they were with her, or one another, analyzing every conversation and gesture, drawing out every joke into a longer and longer running gag, spending each moment either with one another or thinking about when next they would be with one another. Blue was perfectly aware that it was possible to have a friendship that wasn’t all-encompassing, that wasn’t blinding, deafening, maddening, quickening. It was just that now that she’d had this kind, she didn’t want the other.
Orla snapped her fingers in between Blue and her book. “Blue. This is what I was just talking about.”
Blue folded her finger in the pages to keep her place. “I didn’t ask for any advice.”
“No, but you should,” Orla said. “What do you think’s going to happen in a year? All of your boys are going to go off to fancy schools, and where will you be? Here in Henrietta with the people you didn’t
chat
with.”
Blue opened her mouth and closed it, and Orla’s eyes flashed with victory. She knew she’d dug down to marrow.
Outside, the familiar grumble of an old Camaro sounded, and Blue leapt up. She dumped her spoon in the sink. “My ride’s here.”
“
Temporary
ride.”
Blue exploded, hurling her yogurt container into the recycling bin. “What is it, Orla? Jealousy? Or what? You just don’t want me to like them as well as I do because . . . you’re trying to save me from being hurt? You know what else is temporary?
Life
.”
“Oh, please, don’t you think you’re taking this a bit —”
“So maybe I should have spread my love out through some other mothers, too!” Blue snatched up her jacket and stormed down the hall toward the door. “If I didn’t love
her
as much, then it wouldn’t feel so bad when she was gone! I could have some fallback parents, each containing a
tiny
piece of my affection so that when one goes away, I barely notice! Or maybe I should just not love anyone or anything! That makes it the easiest, really, because then I’ll never get let down! I will build a tower for my heart!”
“Oh, calm your ass down,” Orla said, clomping after Blue in her platform clogs. “That wasn’t what I meant.”
“You know what I think, Orla? I think you’re a big, fat
bully
—” Blue barreled right into Gansey, who had stepped inside the front hall. For a moment she smelled mint, felt the solidness of his chest, and then she wheeled back.
Gansey untangled his watch from Blue’s crochet jacket. “Hi. Oh, Orla.”
“Oh,
Orla
,” echoed Orla, not pleasantly. It was not at him, but he didn’t know that; he flinched.
From upstairs, Calla roared, “SHUT UP!”
“You’ll remember this conversation later and say sorry to me,” Orla told Blue. “You forget who you are.” She whirled with as much grace as she could manage on her long legs and massive shoes.
Gansey was too gracious to inquire after the source of the argument.
“Get me out of here,” Blue said.

Outside, it was a miserable day, soggy and cool, late fall come too early. Malory was already installed in the Pig’s front seat; Blue was at once regretful and glad that he was along. He would keep her from doing something stupid.

Now she sat beside the Dog, looking out the backseat window as they passed Mole Hill on the way to Coopers Mountain, feeling her bad mood leach into the gray. This was a very different part of the world than Henrietta. Rural, but less wild. More cows, fewer woods. And very poor. The houses that lined the highway were smaller than single-wide trailers.

“I’m not hopeful about this,” Gansey was saying to Malory. He plucked at his left shoulder; rain was coming in through his window, though it was rolled up. Water also dripped onto the dash beneath the rearview mirror. Malory shook water off the map in his hands. “I crawled all over this mountain a year ago and saw no cave. If there is one, it’s someone else’s secret.”

Blue leaned forward; so did the Dog. She said, “There’s this super clever way that folks in the country find out someone else’s secrets. We
ask
them.”

Gansey met her eyes, and then the Dog’s, in the rearview mirror. “Adam keeps his secrets pretty close.”
“Oh, not
Adam’s
sort of country people.”
Blue had discovered that there were two distinct stereotypes for the rural population of her part of Virginia: the neighbors who loaned one another cups of sugar and knew everything about everyone, and the rednecks who stood on their porches with shotguns and shouted racist things when they got drunk. Because she grew up so thoroughly entrenched in the first group, she hadn’t believed in the second group until well into her teens. School had taught her that the two kinds were almost never born into the same litter.
“Look,” she said, “When we get there, I’ll show you the houses to stop at.”
Coopers Mountain turned out to be more of a mountainette than a proper mountain, impressive mostly because of its sudden appearance in the middle of sparsely populated fields. A small neighborhood lay on one side. Widely flung farmhouses dotted the rest of the surrounding area. Blue directed Gansey past the former and toward the latter.
“People in neighborhoods only know about people in neighborhoods,” she said. “No caves in neighborhoods. Here, here, this one’s good! You better wait in the car with your fancy face.”
Gansey was too aware of his face’s fanciness to protest. He minced the Camaro down a long gravel drive that ended at a white farmhouse. A shaggy dog of no breed or all breeds burst out to bark at her as she climbed out into the rain.
“Hey, you,” Blue greeted it, and the dog retreated immediately under the porch. At the door, an older woman holding a magazine answered her knock. She looked friendly. In Blue’s experience, everyone who lived in remote tired farmhouses generally looked friendly, until they didn’t.
“What can I do for you?”
Blue slathered on her accent as slow and local as possible. “I’m not selling anything, I promise. My name’s Blue Sargent and I live in Henrietta and I’m doing a geology project. I heard there was a cave ’round here. Could you possibly point me in the right way?”
Then she smiled as if the woman
had
already helped her. If there was one thing Blue had learned while being a waitress and dog walker and Maura Sargent’s daughter, it was that people generally became the kind of person you expected them to be.
The woman considered. “Well, that does sound familiar, but I don’t reckon I. . . Have you asked Wayne? Bauer? He’s good with this area.”
“Which one’s he, now?”
The woman pointed kitty-corner across the highway.
Blue gave her a thumbs-up. The woman wished her luck.
It turned out Wayne Bauer wasn’t home, but his wife was, and she didn’t know anything about a cave, but had they asked Jimmy down the road, because he was always digging ditches and you knew you found all kinds of things in ditches. And Jimmy didn’t know, but he thought Gloria Mitchell had said something about it last year. They discovered that Gloria wasn’t home, but her elderly sister was, and she asked, “What, you mean Jesse Dittley’s cave?”
“You don’t have to look so smug,” Gansey said to Blue as she buckled her seat belt.
“Sure I do,” Blue replied.
The Dittley farm was directly at the base of Coopers Mountain. The swaybacked wood-frame house was surrounded by partial cars and entire sofas, all overgrown. The abandoned tires and broken window air conditioners inspired the same feeling in Blue as the cluttered kitchen-bathroom-laundry in Monmouth had: the urge to tidy and impart order.
As she climbed out, she turned the name
Jesse Dittley
over and over in her mind. Something about it poked the back of her mind, but she couldn’t think what. Old family friend? Sex offender from a newspaper story? Character from a picture book?
Just in case he was the middle one, she made certain that she had her pink switchblade knife in her pocket. She didn’t really think she would have to stab anyone, but she liked being prepared.
She stood on the slanted porch with fourteen empty milk jugs and ten cats and knocked. It took a long time for the door to open, and when it did, a puff of cigarette smoke came out with it.
“WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU?”
She peered up at the man. He peered down at her. He must have been close to seven feet tall and was wearing the largest white wife-beater that she’d ever seen (and she’d seen a lot). His face was mild, if surprised; the booming, Blue decided, was from chest capacity and not from malice. He stared at her shirt, which she had made from ribbons and soda can tabs, and then at her face.
“Excited to meet you, is what I am.” She peered past him into the house. She saw more recliners than she’d ever seen in her life (and she’d seen a lot). Nothing hinted where she might have heard his name before. “Are you Jesse Dittley?”
“I AM JESSE DITTLEY. DID YOU NEVER EAT YOUR GREENS?”
It was true that Blue was just shy of five feet and it was also true that she hadn’t eaten her greens, but she’d done the research and she didn’t think the two were related. She said, “I lost the genetic roll of the dice.”
“DAMN STRAIGHT.”
“I’m here because folks are saying you have a cave.”
He considered this. He scratched his chest. Finally, he looked to where the Camaro sat sodden in the pitted driveway. “WHO’S THAT?”
“My friends,” Blue replied, “who are also interested in the cave. If it exists.”
“OH, IT EXISTS.” He let out a hurricane-sized sigh. “MIGHT AS WELL TELL THEM TO COME IN OUT OF THE RAIN.”
The Camaro
was
theoretically already out of the rain — well, perhaps not Gansey’s left shoulder — but Blue didn’t argue the point. She gestured for the others to join her.
Inside the farmhouse was much like the outside. Machines half-dissected, dead plants in dry pots, dusty bedspreads balled in corners, cats peering from inside sinks. It was gray and colorless and dark in the rain. There was something sort of
sideways
about it, like the hallways were a little too narrow, or a little slanted, or just slightly wrong in some way.
Jesse Dittley. The familiarity of it was driving her crazy.
In the living room, Malory sat on a brown recliner without blinking an eye. Gansey remained standing. He looked a bit faint.
Blue sat on an ottoman without a chair. Jesse Dittley stood next to a card table covered with empty glasses. He didn’t offer them a drink.
“WHAT DO YOU WANT TO KNOW ABOUT THE CAVE?” Before they could answer, he added gloomily, “IT’S CURSED.”
“My,” said Malory.
“I don’t so much mind about curses,” Gansey said, his oldmoney Virginia accent sounding elegant and affected beside Jesse’s. “Is it near here?”
“RIGHT OVER THERE,” Jesse reported.
“Oh! Do you know how long it is?” Gansey asked, at the same time that Blue asked, in a friendly way, “What sort of curse?”
“MY DADDY DIED IN IT. AND MY DADDY’S DADDY. AND MY DADDY’S DADDY’S DADDY.” Jesse concluded, possibly erroneously, “IT PROBABLY HAS NO END. YOU ONE OF THEM AGLIONBY BOYS, THEN?”
“Yes,” Gansey replied precisely.
“DOES THAT DOG WANT WATER?”
They all looked at the Dog. The Dog looked a bit faint.
“Oh, if it’s not too much trouble,” Malory said.
Jesse went to get water. Gansey exchanged a look with Blue. “This has turned unexpectedly ominous.”
“Do you think there’s a curse?” she asked.
“Of course there is,” Malory replied. “It is on a ley line. Apparitions and lightning storms, black beasts and time slipping.”
“To us, just the ley line. To everyone else, a curse,” Gansey finished wonderingly. “Of course.”
Jesse returned with a chipped glass mixing bowl full of water. The Dog drank ravenously. The Camaro had an exhaust leak, which had a dehydrating effect upon its occupants.
“WHAT IS IT YOU WANT WITH THE CAVE? I RECKON THERE ARE PLENTY OF CAVES WITHOUT CURSES HERE.”
Gansey replied, “We’re exploring another cave system and we’ve reached a section that’s blocked. We’re trying to find another way into it, and we think your cave might do it.”
How neatly the truth worked.
Jesse took them out the back door, through another screen porch, and into the mist.
Outside, he was even bigger than Blue had thought he was. Or possibly, now it was easier to compare his size with the house and find the house wanting. As he led them across a vast cow pasture, he didn’t duck his head against the rain. This lack of concern struck Blue as noble, though she couldn’t quite convince her own head to follow his lead as rain dripped off her earlobes.
“This weather reminds me of this dreadful climb I went on with this fellow Pelham,” Malory muttered, producing an umbrella from his person and sharing it with Blue. “Fourteen kilometers each way, and all for a standing stone that looked like a dog in certain lights. The man went on and on about football and his girlfriend — a terrible time was had by all.”
With great, sloped strides, Jesse led them to a barbed-wire fence. On the other side, a ruined stone structure of indeterminate age grew out of the rocky hillside. It was roofless and about twenty feet square. Although it was only a single crumbled story, something about it gave the impression of height, as if it had once been taller. Blue struggled to imagine what its original purpose might have been. Something about the tiny aspect of the windows seemed wrong for a residence. If it had not been Virginia, if it had been someplace
older
, she would have thought it looked like the ruin of a stone tower.
“THIS IS IT.”
Blue and Gansey exchanged a look. Gansey’s look said,
We did tell him “cave,” right?
Blue’s said,
We definitely did.
Jesse used a stick to push down the top string of the barbed wire so they could step over — all except the Dog, who remained pissily behind. Then, feet slipping on damp leaves, they climbed up the hill. On the backside of the building, a considerably newer door had been set into the old door frame. A padlock held it closed. Jesse produced a key, which he handed to Blue. “Me?” she asked.
“I’M NOT GOING INSIDE.”
“Gallant,” Blue observed. She wasn’t exactly nervous; it was just that she hadn’t set out that morning with the intention of broaching a curse.
“ONLY KILLS DITTLEYS,” Jesse reassured her. “UNLESS YOU HAVE DITTLEY BLOOD IN YOU?”
Blue said, “I don’t reckon so.”
She fit the key into the lock and let the door fall open.
Inside were saplings, crumbled stones, and then, amidst the debris, a hole. It was nothing like the inviting cavern opening Cabeswater had provided for them. It was smaller, blacker, more uneven, steeper from the outset. It looked like a place for secrets.
“Look at that cave, Gansey,” Malory said, “I wonder who said there was a cave here.”
“Leave the smugness to Jane,” Gansey told him.
“Don’t come in here,” Blue warned him, picking her way through the rubble. “In case there are nests or something.”
“IT LOOKS BAD WHEN YOU LOOK IN,” Jesse said as she peered in the hole. It was utter black inside, blacker because there was no sun. “BUT IT’S NOT STEEP. JUST CURSED.”
“How do you know it’s not steep?” she asked.
“BEEN IN IT BEFORE FOR MY DADDY’S BONES. CURSE DOESN’T TAKE YOU UNTIL IT’S READY.”
It was difficult to argue with this brand of logic.
“Do you think we could go in?” Gansey asked. “Not now, but coming back with proper equipment?”
Jesse peered at him and then at Malory and finally at Blue. “I LIKE THE LOOKS OF YOU, SO —”
He shook his head.
“NO.”
“Beg your pardon, did you say no?” Gansey asked.
“COULDN’T IN ALL GOOD CONSCIENCE. GO ON NOW, COME OUT OF THERE. LET’S LOCK IT BACK UP.”
He accepted the key from Blue’s shocked fingers.
“Oh, but we’d be very careful,” she told him.
Jesse locked the door again as if she hadn’t spoken.
“We could pay for your expenses?” Gansey suggested carefully, and Blue kicked his leg hard enough to leave a muddy scuff on his pants. “Jesus, Jane!”
“DON’T TAKE THE LORD’S NAME IN VAIN,” Jesse said. “YOU KIDS HAVE A GOOD TIME EXPLORING SOMEWHERE ELSE NOW.”
“Oh, but —”
“SHORT WAY IS ACROSS THE FIELD. HAVE A GOOD ONE.”
They had been dismissed. Impossibly, they’d been dismissed.
“Just as well,” Malory said as they headed back across the damp field, shoulders hunched miserably. “Caves are terrible places to die.”
“What now?” Blue asked.
“We’re supposed to hurry, apparently. Hurry, hurry,” Gansey said. “So we find a way to persuade him, I guess. Or we trespass.”
After he got into the car, she realized he was wearing his Aglionby uniform, shoulders spattered with rain, just as his spirit had been when she saw it on the ley line. He could have died in that field and she would have been warned. But she hadn’t even thought about it until afterward.
It was so impossible to live life backward.