Now it seemed simple.
Pill. Beer. Dream.
A Camaro sat among the trees of the dream forest: no more difficult to imagine than any of the other dream objects Ronan had pursued. Just larger.
In Out Silently, he put his hand on the door handle. The leaves of the trees shivered above; a bird sobbed distantly.
Orphan Girl watched from the other side of the car. She shook her head. He put his finger to his lips.
Awake.
He opened his eyes on the morning sky, and there it was. A glory-red Camaro. Not perfect, but perfectly imperfect, smudged and scuffed as the Pig. Down to the scratch on the door where Gansey had backed it into an azalea bush.
The first sensation wasn’t joy but relief. He had not ruined things — he had the Pig back, he could return to Monmouth without begging. And then the joy hit. It was worse than Kavinsky’s green pills. He was hurled into the emotion. It pummeled and thrilled him. He’d been so proud of the puzzle box, of the sunglasses, the keys. How stupid he’d been then, like a kid in love with his crayon drawings.
This was a car. An entire car. It hadn’t been there, and now it was.
An entire world.
Now it would be all right. Everything would be all right.
From the front of the car, Kavinsky sounded unimpressed. He’d lifted the hood. “I thought you said you fucking knew this car, man.”
After Ronan’s limbs had feeling in them again, he joined Kavinsky by the open hood. The defect was immediately apparent. There was no engine. Ronan could see all the way to the stubbled grass. It would probably run, of course. If it worked in the dream, it worked in real life. But that was no comfort.
“I didn’t think of it,” he said. “The engine.”
The joy was fading as quickly as it had appeared. How could Ronan hope to hold all of the Pig’s foibles in his head? Gansey wouldn’t want a perfect Pig, a Pig that ran sans engine. He would want his Pig. He loved the Camaro because it broke down, not despite it. Despair rang in Ronan’s thoughts. It was too complicated.
Kavinsky abruptly punched the side of Ronan’s head. “Think? There’s no thinking, fool! We’re not professors. Kill your brain.” He surveyed the empty engine compartment again. “I guess Dick can use this as a planter. Put his petunias and shit in here.”
Irritated, Ronan slammed the hood shut. He climbed onto it — no point to sparing the paint from scratches — and flicked his fingers against his knee while he tried to get his mind back together. No thinking. Ronan didn’t know a better way to get the car from his dreams. He didn’t understand how to hold the concept inside him as he was thrust into sleep. He was weary of his dreams. They felt as tattered as the night horror’s wings.
“Hey, man, I’m sure he’ll like this one,” Kavinsky said. “And if he doesn’t, fuck him.”
Ronan merely leveled his heaviest gaze. Kavinsky was not Gansey, so maybe he didn’t understand its meaning. There would be no fucking of Gansey. Ronan hadn’t intended to wreck the Camaro when he’d first taken it, but he had. He wasn’t going to add insult to injury by bringing back this impostor. This car was not a truth. This car was a very pretty lie.
“This,” Ronan said, pressing his hands flat against the warm metal of the car, “is a very shitty goldfish.”
“Whose fault is that?”
“Yours.”
Kavinsky had said he’d teach him. He was not taught.
“Yours. I practiced, man!” Kavinsky gestured broadly to the field of Mitsubishis. “You see all these losers? It took me months to get it right. Look at that bitch!”
He pointed to one with a single axle, right in the middle. The car rested sleepily on its front bumper. “I get it wrong, try it again, wait for my dream place to get its juice back, do it again, get it wrong, do it again.”
Ronan repeated, “What do you mean, get your juice back?”
“The dream place runs out,” Kavinsky said. “Walmart can’t keep making TVs all night long! It’s getting low now. Can’t you feel it?”
Was that what he felt? The fraying around the edges? Right now, he could only feel anxiety, dulled to stupidity by beer.
“I don’t have time to practice. I need it now or I can’t go back.”
Kavinsky said, “You don’t have to go back.”
This was the most nonsensical thing he’d said since this entire experience had begun. Ronan didn’t even acknowledge it. He said, “I’m doing it again. I’m doing it right this time.”
“Hell yeah, you are.” Kavinsky retrieved yet more alcohol — maybe he’d been dreaming that, too — and joined Ronan on the hood of the faulty Camaro. They drank in silence for several minutes. Kavinsky poured a handful of green pills into Ronan’s palm; Ronan pocketed them. He wished passionately for something besides Twizzlers. He was wasted on dreams.
If Gansey saw him now … the thought twisted and blackened in him, curled like burned paper.
“Bonus round,” Kavinsky said. Then: “Open.”
He put an impossibly red pill on Ronan’s tongue. Ronan tasted just an instant of sweat and rubber and gasoline on his fingertips. Then the pill hit his stomach.
“What’s this one do?” Ronan asked.
Kavinsky said, “Dying’s a boring side effect.”
It took only a moment.
Ronan thought, Wait, I changed my mind.
But there wasn’t any going back.
Ronan was a stranger in his own body. The sunset cut into his gaze, slantwise and insistent. As his muscles twitched, he lowered himself onto his chest and then rested his cheek against the hood, the heat of the metal not quite painful enough to be unbearable. He closed his eyes. This wasn’t the hurtling-to-sleep pill of before. This was a liquid fatality. He could feel his brain shutting down.
After a moment, he heard the hood groan as Kavinsky leaned over him. Then he felt the ridged callus of a finger drag slowly over the skin on his back. A slow arc between his shoulder blades, drawing the pattern of his tattoo. Then sliding down his spine, tensing every muscle it moved over.
The fuse inside him was burning to nothing, nothing at all.
Ronan didn’t move. If he moved, the touch on his spine would stab him — a wound like this pill. No coming back.
But when his eyes slitted, battling sleep, Kavinsky was just doing another line of coke off the roof, body stretched over the windshield.
He might have imagined it. What was real?
Again the Camaro was parked in the dreaming trees. Again Orphan Girl crouched on the other side of it, eyes sad. The leaves quivered and faded.
He felt this place’s power dissipating.
He crept toward the car.
In Out “Ronan,” whispered Orphan Girl. “Quid furantur a nos?”
(Why do you steal from us?)
She was faded as Noah, smudgy as the dead.
Ronan whispered, “Just one more. Please.” She stared at him. “Unum. Amabo te. It’s not for me.”
In Out But he didn’t hide this time. He wasn’t a thief. Instead, he stood, rising from his hiding place. The dream, suddenly aware, shuddered around him. Flickered. The trees leaned away.
He hadn’t stolen Chainsaw, the truest thing he’d ever taken from a dream.
He wasn’t going to steal the car. Not this time.
“Please,” Ronan said again. “Let me take it.”
He ran his hand across the elegant line of the roof. When he lifted his palm, it was dusted green. His heart thudded as he rubbed pollen-covered fingertips against one another. The air was suddenly hot, sweat sticky in the crease of his elbows, gasoline pricking his nostrils. This was a memory, not a dream.
He pulled open the door. When he got in, the seat burned his bare skin. He was aware of everything around him, down to the scuffed vinyl beneath the improperly restored window cranks.