Adam sat awkwardly on the edge of Blue’s bed. It felt strange to have so easily gained access to a girl’s bed-room. If you knew Blue at all, the room was unsurprising — canvas silhouettes of trees stuck to the walls, leaves hanging in chains from the ceiling fan, a bird with a talk bubble reading WORMS FOR ALL painted above a shelf cluttered with buttons and about nine different pairs of scissors. Against the wall, Blue self-consciously taped up the drooping branch on one of the trees.
No time, no time.
He squeezed his eyes shut for just a second. He waited for her to stop messing over the trees so they could talk. She kept fiddling. He felt his pulse simmering inside him.
He stood up. He couldn’t sit any longer.
Blue stopped abruptly. She leaned on her hands against the wall, expression watchful.
Adam had intended to begin the conversation with a persuasive statement on why Gansey’s conservative approach to the quest was wrong, but that wasn’t what he said. Instead, he said, “I want to know why you won’t kiss me, and I don’t want a lie this time.”
There was silence. A rotating fan in the corner moved over both of them. The tips of the branches fluttered. The leaves spiraled.
Blue demanded, “That’s what you came here for?”
She was mad. Adam was glad of it. It was worse to be the only person angry.
When he didn’t answer, she kept going, voice ever angrier, “That’s the first conversation you want to have after coming back from D.C.?”
“What does it matter where I came from?”
“Because if I was Ronan or Noah, we’d be talking about — about how the party went. We’d be talking about where you disappeared to and what you wanted to do about that and I don’t know, real things. Not whether or not you got to kiss me!”
Adam thought it was the most irrelevant response ever, and she still hadn’t answered his question. “Ronan and Noah aren’t my girlfriend.”
“Girlfriend!” Blue repeated, and he felt a disconnected thrill to hear her say the word. “How about friend-friend?”
“I thought we were friend-friends.”
“Are we? Friends talk. You go walking to the Pentagon and I find out from Gansey! Your dad’s a jerk and I find out from Gansey! Noah knows everything. Ronan knows everything.”
“They don’t know everything. They know what they were there for. Gansey knows because he was there.”
“Yeah, and why wasn’t I?”
“Why would you be?”
“Because you’d invited me,” Blue said.
The world tilted. He blinked; it straightened. “But there wasn’t any reason for you to be there.”
“Right, sure. Because there’s no girls in politics! I have no interest. Voting? What? I forgot my apron. I think I ought to be in the kitchen right now, actually. My rolling pin —”
“I didn’t know that you —”
“That’s my point! Did it even occur to you?”
It had not.
“You wouldn’t have gone someplace without Gansey, though,” Blue snapped. “You two make a grand couple! Kiss him!”
Adam cocked his head witheringly.
“Well, I don’t want to be just someone to kiss. I want to be a real friend, too. Not just someone who’s fun to have around because — because I have breasts!”
She didn’t generally swear, but breasts felt as close to swearing as Adam could imagine at that moment. The combination of breasts and the morphing of the conversation annoyed him. “Nice, Blue. Gansey was right. You really can be a raging feminist.”
Blue sealed her mouth. Her shoulders trembled slightly: not like fear, but like the tremors before an earthquake.
He shot out, “You still didn’t answer my question. Nothing of what you just said actually has any bearing on us.”
Her lips made a sour shape. “You want the truth?”
“It’s what I wanted at the beginning of all this,” Adam said, even though he didn’t actually know what he wanted from her anymore. He wanted this fight to be done. He wished he hadn’t come. He wished he’d asked her about Glendower instead. He wished he’d thought to ask her to the party. How could he have? His head was too full, too empty, too askew. He’d walked too far out, right past solid ground, but he couldn’t seem to turn around.
“Right. The truth.” She balled her fists and crossed her arms. “Here it is. I’ve been told by psychics my whole life that if I kiss my true love, I’ll kill him. There it is. Are you happy? I didn’t tell you right away because I didn’t want to say true love and scare you off.”
The trees wobbled behind her. Another vision was trying to manifest. He tried to untangle himself from it to sift his memories, trying to coordinate their near-kisses with her confession of this deadly prophecy. It didn’t feel real, but nothing did.
“And now?”
“I don’t know you, Adam.”
That’s not your fault, whispered the air. You are unknowable.
“And now?”
“Now? Now —” Finally, Blue’s voice shook a little. “I didn’t tell you until just now because I realized it didn’t matter. Because it’s not gonna be you.”
He felt it like one of his father’s punches. A moment of deadness and then blood rushing to the point of contact. And then it wasn’t sadness, but the now-familiar heat. It tore through him like an explosion, busting windows and devouring everything in an instantaneous blast.
In slow motion he could imagine the swing of his hand.
No.
No, he’d done this before with her, and he wasn’t doing it again.
He spun away, one fist on his forehead. With the other, he struck the wall, but not hard. Just like he was grounding himself, discharging. He tore apart the anger, limb from limb. Focused on the burning, terrible fire in his chest until it went out.
It’s not gonna be you.
And at the end, all that was left was this: I want to leave.
There had to be some other place he hadn’t been yet, some soil where this emotion wouldn’t thrive.