The Raven Boys (23 page)

“Well,” he said, “I think you’ll find I do pretty much everything quiet. If you can be all right with that, I guess we’ll be fine.”

It turned out that she had walked or biked past Gansey’s apartment every single day of the year, on the way to school and to Nino’s. As they walked toward the massive warehouse, she spotted the fiendishly orange glint of the Camaro in the overgrown parking lot and, only a hundred yards away, a glistening navy blue helicopter.

She hadn’t really believed the part about the helicopter. Not in a way that prepared her for seeing an actual, life-sized helicopter, sitting there in the lot, looking normal, like someone would park an SUV.

Blue stopped in her tracks and breathed, “Whew.”

“I know,” Adam said.

And here, again, was Gansey, and again Blue had a strange shock of reconciling the image of him as a spirit and the reality of him beside a helicopter.

“Finally!”
he shouted, jogging out toward them. He was still wearing those idiotic Top-Siders she’d noticed at the reading, this time paired with cargo shorts and a yellow polo shirt that made it look as if he were prepared for any sort of emergency, so long as the emergency involved him falling onto a yacht. In his hand he held a container of organic apple juice.

He pointed his no-pesticides juice at Blue. “Are you coming with?”

Just as at the reading, Blue felt cheap and small and stupid just by being in his presence. Clipping her Henrietta vowels as best as she could, she answered, “Coming along in the helicopter you just happen to have at your beck and call, you mean?”

Gansey slung a burnished leather backpack over his burnished cotton shoulders. His smile was gracious and inclusive, as if her mother hadn’t recently refused to assist him in any way, as if she hadn’t just been borderline rude. “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

Behind him, the helicopter began to roar to life. Adam stretched out the journal to Gansey, who looked startled. Just a tiny bit of his composure slid, enough for Blue to see once more that it was part of his President Cell Phone mask.

“Where was it?” yelled Gansey.

And he had to yell. Now that it was running, the blades of the helicopter didn’t so much roar as scream. Air beat against Blue’s ears, more feeling than sound.

Adam pointed at Blue.

“Thanks,” Gansey shouted back. It was a default answer, she saw; he fell back onto his powerful politeness when he was taken by surprise. Also, he was still watching Adam, taking his cues from him as to how he should react to her. Adam nodded, once, briefly, and the mask slipped just a little more. Blue wondered if the President Cell Phone demeanor ever vanished completely when he was around his friends. Maybe the Gansey she’d seen in the churchyard was what lay beneath.

That was a sobering thought.

The air rumbled around them. Blue felt like her dress would fly away. She asked, “Is this thing safe?”

“Safe as life,” Gansey replied. “Adam, we’re behind schedule! Blue, if you’re coming, tighten your liberty bodice and come on.” As he ducked to approach the helicopter, his shirt, too, flapped against his back.

Blue was suddenly a little nervous. It wasn’t that she was scared, exactly. It was just that she hadn’t psychologically prepared herself for leaving the ground with a bunch of raven boys when she’d woken up this morning. The helicopter, for all its size and noise, seemed like a pretty insubstantial thing to trust her life to, and the boys felt like strangers. Now, it felt like she was truly disobeying Maura.

“I’ve never flown,” she confessed to Adam, a shout to be heard over the whine of the helicopter.

“Ever?” Adam shouted back.

She shook her head. He put his mouth right against her ear so that she could hear him. He smelled like summer and cheap shampoo. She felt a tickle go all the way from her belly button to her feet.

“I’ve flown once,” he replied. His breath was hot on her skin. Blue was paralyzed; all she could think was
This is how close a kiss is.
It felt every bit as dangerous as she’d imagined. He added, “I hated it.”

A moment passed, both of them motionless. She needed to tell him that he couldn’t kiss her — just in case he was her true love — but how could she? How could she tell a boy that before she even knew if he wanted to kiss her at all?

She felt him take her hand. His palm was sweaty. He really did hate flying.

At the door to the helicopter, Gansey looked back over his shoulder at them, his smile complicated when he saw them holding hands.

“I hate this,” Adam shouted at Gansey. His cheeks were red.

“I know,” Gansey yelled back.

Inside the helicopter, there was room for three passengers on a bench seat in the back, and one in a utilitarian seat beside the pilot. The interior would have resembled the backseat of a really big car if the seat belts hadn’t had five-point fasteners that looked like they belonged in an X-wing fighter. Blue didn’t like to think why passengers had to be strapped down so securely; possibly they were expecting people to be bounced against the walls.

Ronan, the raven boy who was more raven boy than the others, was already installed in a window seat. He didn’t smile when he looked up. Adam, punching Ronan’s arm, took the middle seat, while Blue took the remaining window seat. As she toyed with the seat belt straps, Gansey leaned into the cabin to knock knuckles with Adam.

A few minutes later, when Gansey climbed into the front seat beside the pilot, she saw that he was grinning, effusive and earnest, incredibly excited to be going wherever they were going. It was nothing like his previous, polished demeanor. It was some private joy that she managed to be in on by virtue of being in the helicopter and, just like that, Blue was excited, too.

Adam leaned toward her as if he was about to say something, but ultimately, he just shook his head, smiling, like Gansey was a joke that was too complicated to explain.

In front, Gansey turned to the pilot, who surprised Blue a little — a young woman with an impressively straight nose, her brown hair swept into a beautiful knot, headphones clamping down any loose strands. She seemed to find Blue and Adam’s proximity far more interesting than Gansey had.

The pilot shouted at Gansey, “Aren’t you going to introduce us, Dick?”

Gansey made a face.

“Blue,” he said, “I’d like you to meet my sister, Helen.”

T
here wasn’t much Gansey didn’t like about flying. He liked airports, with their masses of people all
doing
things, and he liked planes, with their thick-paned windows and fold-out trays. The way that a jet charged down a runway reminded him of how the Camaro pressed him back in the driver’s seat when he hit the gas. The whine of a helicopter sounded like productivity. He liked the little knobs and toggles and gauges of cockpits, and he liked the technological backwardness of the simple clasp seat belts. Gansey derived a large part of his pleasure from meeting goals, and a large part of that large part was pleased by meeting goals efficiently. There was nothing more efficient than aiming for your destination as the crow flew.

And of course, from one thousand feet, Henrietta took Gansey’s breath away.

Below them, the surface of the world was deeply green, and cutting through the green was a narrow, shining river, a mirror to the sky. He could follow it with his eyes all the way to the mountains.

Now that they were in the air, Gansey was feeling a little anxious. With Blue here, he was beginning to feel as if possibly he’d overdone it with the helicopter. He wondered if it would make Blue feel better or worse to know that it was Helen’s helicopter, that he hadn’t paid anything today for the use of it. Probably worse. Remembering his vow to at least do no harm with his words, he kept his mouth shut.

“There she is,” Helen’s voice reported directly into Gansey’s ears; in the helicopter, they all wore headsets to allow them to converse through the ceaseless noise of the blades and the engine. “Gansey’s girlfriend.”

Ronan’s snort barely made it through his headset, but Gansey had heard it often enough to know it was there.

Blue said, “She must be pretty big to see her from up here.”

“Henrietta,” Helen replied. She peered to the left of the helo as she banked. “They’re getting married. They haven’t set a date yet.”

“If you’re going to embarrass me, I’ll throw you out and fly myself,” Gansey said from the seat beside her. This was not a true threat. Not only would he not push Helen out at this altitude, he wasn’t legal to fly without her. Also, truth be told, he wasn’t very good at flying a helicopter, despite several lessons. He seemed to lack the important ability to orient himself vertically as well as horizontally, which led to disagreements involving trees. He comforted himself with the knowledge that, at least, he could parallel park very well.

“Did you get Mom a birthday present?” Helen asked.

“Yes,” Gansey replied. “Myself.”

Helen said, “The gift that keeps on giving.”

He said, “I don’t think that minor children are required to get gifts for their parents. I’m a dependent. That’s the definition of dependent, is it not?”

“You, a dependent!” his sister said, and laughed. Helen had a laugh like a cartoon character:
Ha ha ha ha!
It was an intimidating laugh that tended to make men suspect that they were possibly the brunt of it. “You haven’t been a dependent since you were four. You went straight from kindergarten to old man with a studio apartment.”

Gansey made a dismissive hand gesture. His sister was known for hyperbole. “What did
you
get her?”

“It’s a surprise,” Helen replied loftily, tapping some sort of toggle switch with a pink-nailed finger. The pink was the only fanciful thing about her. Helen was beautiful in the way a supercomputer was beautiful: sleek with elegant but utilitarian styling, full of top-notch technological know-how, far too expensive for most people to possess.

“That means it’s glassware.”

Gansey’s mother collected rare painted plates with the same obsessive fervor that Gansey collected facts about Glendower. He had a hard time seeing the allure of a plate robbed of its original purpose, but his mother’s collection had been featured in magazines and was insured for more than his father, so clearly she was not alone in her passion.

Helen was stony. “I don’t want to hear it. You didn’t get her anything.”

“I didn’t say anything about it!”

“You called it glassware.”

He asked, “What should I have said?”

“They’re not all glass. This one I’ve found her is not glass.”

“Then she won’t like it.”

Helen’s face shifted from stony to very stony. She glowered at her GPS. Gansey didn’t like to think of how much time she’d invested in her non-glass plate. He didn’t like to see either of the women in his family disappointed; it ruined perfectly good meals.

Helen was still silent, so Gansey began to think about Blue. Something about her was discomfiting him, though he couldn’t put his finger on it. Taking a mint leaf from his pocket, Gansey put it into his mouth and watched the familiar Henrietta roads snake below them. From the air, the curves looked less perilous than they felt in the Camaro. What
was
it about Blue? Adam was not suspicious of her, and he was suspicious of everyone. But then again, he was clearly infatuated. That, too, was unfamiliar ground for Gansey.

“Adam,” he said. There was no answer, and Gansey looked over his shoulder. Adam’s headphones were looped around his neck, and he was leaned over beside Blue, pointing something out on the ground below. As she’d shifted, Blue’s dress had gotten hitched up and Gansey could see a long, slender triangle of her thigh. Adam’s hand was braced a few inches away on the seat, knuckles pale with his hatred of flying. There was nothing particularly intimate about the way they sat, but something about the scene made Gansey feel strange, like he’d heard an unpleasant statement and later forgotten everything about the words but the way they had made him feel.

“Adam!” Gansey shouted.

His friend’s head jerked up, face startled. He hurried to pull his headset back on. His voice came through the headphones. “Are you done talking about your mom’s plates?”

“Very. Where should we go this time? I was thinking maybe back to the church where I recorded the voice.”

Adam handed Gansey a wrinkled piece of paper.

Gansey flattened the paper and found a crude map. “What’s this?”

“Blue.”

Gansey looked at her intently, trying to decide if she had anything to gain by misdirecting them. She didn’t flinch from his gaze. Turning back around, he spread the paper flat on the controls in front of him. “Make that happen, Helen.”

Helen banked to follow the new direction. The church Blue directed them toward was probably forty minutes’ drive from Henrietta, but as the bird flew, it was only fifteen. Without a quiet noise from Blue, Gansey would’ve missed it. It was a ruin, hollowed and overgrown. A narrow line of an old, old stone wall was visible around it, as well as an impression on the ground where an additional wall must have originally been. “That’s it?”