“Hur.”
“Matthew.”
“Yah, yah, I’m in my room. SL hates you. It’s like two or sumthin’. Whatdya want?”
Ronan didn’t reply right away. Matthew couldn’t see him, but he was curled on his bed back at Monmouth, forehead resting on his knees, one hand gripping the back of his own skull, phone pressed to his ear. “Just to know you’re all right.”
“ ’m all right.”
“Go to sleep, then.”
“Still sleeping now.”
The brothers hung up.
Outside of Henrietta, nestled on the ley line, something dark watched all of this, everything in the Henrietta night, and said, I’m awake I’m awake I’m awake.
The following morning was over-bright and over-hot.
Gansey and Adam stood by the double doors of the Gladys Francine Mollin Wright Memorial Theater, hands folded neatly. They had pulled usher service — just Adam had, really, but Gansey had volunteered to take Brand’s place as the other usher. Ronan was nowhere in sight. Annoyance simmered inside Gansey.
“Raven Day,” said Headmaster Child, “is more than a day of school pride. Because don’t we have school pride every day?”
He stood on the stage. Everyone was sweating a little, but not him. He was a lean, rugged cowboy in the cattle drive that was life, skin striated like the face of a bleached canyon wall. Gansey had long maintained that Child was wasted here. To put such a survivor into a light-gray suit and tie was to throw away the opportunity of putting him, instead, on the back of a buckskin horse and on the inside of a ten-gallon hat.
Adam shot Gansey a knowing look. He mouthed yee haw. They smirked and had to look away from each other. Gansey’s gaze landed right on Henry Cheng and the Vancouver crowd, all seated together near the back. As if feeling his attention, Henry looked over his shoulder. His eyebrow raced upward. Gansey was uncomfortably reminded of how Henry had seen the Orphan Girl in the back of the SUV. He would, at some point, require an explanation, an evasion, or a lie.
“— for this Raven Day,” Child insisted.
Gansey was ordinarily charmed by Raven Day. It was composed entirely of things that he liked: students assembled smartly in white T-shirts and khaki pants like extras from a WWI documentary; hoisting of flags; teams pitted against one another with plenty of hurrahing; pomp, circumstance, in-jokes; ravens painted upon everything. This crop of juniors had made ravens for the entire student body to stage a mock conflict on the common while the school photographers captured shining faces for another year’s worth of promotional materials.
Now, everything in Gansey sang urgently for him to spend his time seeking. His quest was a wolf, and it starved.
“Today is the tenth anniversary of Raven Day,” Child said. “Ten years ago, the festivities we enjoy today were proposed by a student who had attended Aglionby for years. Sadly, Noah Czerny cannot be here today to celebrate, but before the rest of us do, we are fortunate enough to have one of his younger sisters here to tell us a little more about Noah and the day’s origins.”
Gansey would have thought he had misheard if Adam hadn’t peered at him and mouthed, Noah?
Yes, Noah, because here was one of the Czerny sisters climbing onto the stage. Even if Gansey had not recognized her from the funeral, he would have recognized Noah’s elfin mouth, the tiny eyes with the cheery bags beneath them, the large ears hidden behind fine hair. It was odd to see Noah’s features on a young woman. It was odder to see them on anyone living. She seemed too old to be Noah’s younger sister, but it was only because Gansey had forgotten how Noah existed in suspension. He would have been twenty-four now if he had been saved instead of Gansey.
A freshman said something that Gansey didn’t catch and got himself promptly escorted from the theater for his trouble. Noah’s sister leaned into the microphone and said something also too faint to catch, and then said something else that was eaten by a squeal as the sound manager tried to adjust the volume. Finally, she said, “Hi, I’m Adele Czerny. I don’t really have a long speech. I mean, I sat through these things when I was your age, and they’re boring. I’m just going to say a few things about Noah and Raven Day. Did any of you guys know him?”
In unison, Gansey and Adam started to lift their hands and just as quickly dropped them. Yes, they knew him. No, they had not known him. Noah, alive, had been before their time here. Noah, dead, was a phenomenon, not an acquaintance.
“Well, you were missing out,” she said. “My mom always said he was a firecracker, which just meant he was always getting speeding tickets and jumping on tables at family reunions and stuff. He always had so many ideas. He was so hyper.”
Adam and Gansey looked at each other. They had always had the sense that the Noah they knew was not the true Noah. It was just disconcerting to hear how much Noahness death had stripped. It was impossible to not wonder what Noah would have done with himself if he had lived.
“Anyway, I’m here because I was actually the first one he told about his idea for Raven Day. He called me one evening, I guess it would’ve been when he was fourteen, and he told me he’d had this dream about ravens fighting and battling. He said they were all different colors and sizes and shapes, and he was inside them, and they were, like, swirling around him.” She motioned around herself in a whirlwind; she had Noah’s hands, Noah’s elbows. “And he told me, ‘I think it would be a cool art project.’ And I told him, ‘I’ll bet if everybody at the school made one, I bet you’d have enough.’ ”
Gansey was aware that his arm hairs were standing up.
“So they’re swooping and careening and there’s nothing but ravens, nothing but dreams all around you,” Adele said, only Gansey wasn’t sure if she had actually said it, or if he’d heard her wrong and he was just half-remembering something she’d already said. “Anyway, I know he’d like what it is like nowadays. So, um, thanks for remembering one of his crazy dreams.”
She was walking off the stage; Adam was covering one of his eyes with a hand; there was the dutiful double clap that Aglionby students were asked to perform in lieu of unruly applause.
“Let’s go, ravens!” Child said.
This was Adam and Gansey’s cue to open the doors. Students poured out. Humidity and light poured in. Headmaster Child joined them in the doorway.
He shook Gansey’s hand, then Adam’s. “Thanks for your service, gentlemen. Mr. Gansey, I didn’t think your mother could put together this fund-raiser and a guest list by this weekend, but we’re pretty much there. She has my vote for running the country.”
He and Gansey exchanged the sort of comradely smile that comes from having signed legal paperwork together. It would have been a fine moment if it had ended there, but Child lingered, making polite chitchat with Gansey and Adam — his best and his brightest, respectively.
For seven excruciating minutes, they mined the weather, Thanksgiving break plans, and shared experiences in Colonial Williamsburg, and then, finally, exhausted, they parted ways as the juniors appeared with their raven warriors.
“Jesus Christ,” Gansey said, panting a bit from the effort.
“I thought he would never leave,” Adam said. He touched the bottom of his left eyelid, squinting it shut, before looking past Gansey. “If — ah. I’ll be right back. I think I have something in my eye.”
He left Gansey; Gansey set himself free on Raven Day. He found himself at the foot of the stairs where students were receiving ravens. The flock was composed of paper and aluminum foil and wood and papier-mâché and brass. Some birds floated with helium balloon bellies. Some glided. Some teetered on multiple supports, with separate rods to control flapping wings.
Noah had done this. Noah had dreamt this.
“I’m flipping you a bird,” said a junior, handing him a dull black raven made of newspaper tacked to a wooden frame.
Gansey stepped off into the crowd. Noah’s crowd. In a better world, Noah would have been giving that tenth-anniversary introduction.
At eye level, the landscape was all sticks and arms and white T-shirts, the mechanics and gears. But if one squinted into the too-bright sky, the sticks and the students vanished and the expanse was filled with ravens. They swooped and attacked, plunged and lifted, flapped and spun.
It was very hot.
Gansey felt time slip. Just a little. It was just that this sight was so oddly like something from his other life, his real life; these birds were cousins to Ronan’s dream things. It seemed unfair that Noah should have died and Gansey had not. Noah had been living when he was murdered. Gansey had been marking time.
“What are the rules of this battle again?” he asked over his shoulder.
“No rules in war except stay alive.”
Gansey turned; wings flapped past his face. He was hemmed in by shoulders and backs. He could not tell who had spoken, or even, now, without a face to look at, if someone had.