“You’re going to collapse the toilet,” Blue said, but she let Jimi fold her arms around her and pull her into her ample bosom. She sighed shakily as Jimi rubbed her back and clucked to herself. Blue could not understand how this childish comfort was at once soothing and suffocating. She was both glad for it and wishing that she could be someplace with fewer threads tying her to every challenge or sadness in her life.
“Blue, you know it’s not a bad thing that you want to leave Henrietta, right?” her mother asked from the tub. This was so precisely what Blue had been thinking about that she couldn’t tell if her mother had brought it up because her mother was a good psychic or merely because she knew her well.
Blue shrugged against Jimi. “Pshaw.”
“It’s not always running away,” Jimi said, her voice deep and rumbling through her chest to Blue’s ear. “To leave.”
Calla added, “We’re not going to think you hate Fox Way.”
“I don’t hate Fox Way at all.”
Maura swatted Orla’s hand away; Orla was trying to braid Maura’s damp hair. “I know. Because we’re great. But the difference between a nice house and a nice prison is really small. We chose Fox Way. We made it, Calla and Persephone and I. But it’s only your origin story, not your final destination.”
This wisdom of Maura’s made Blue quite cross for some reason.
“Say something,” Orla said.
Blue didn’t quite know how to say it; she didn’t know quite what it was. “It … just feels like such a waste. Falling in love with all of them.” All of them really meant all of them: 300 Fox Way, the boys, Jesse Dittley. For a sensible person, Blue thought that maybe she had a problem with love. In a dangerous voice, she added, “Don’t say ‘it’s good life experience.’ Do not.”
“I’ve loved a lot of people,” Orla said. “I would say it’s good life experience. Anyway, I told you ages ago those guys were going to leave you behind.”
“Orla,” snapped Calla, as Blue’s next breath was a little uneven. “It confounds me, sometimes, to imagine what you must tell your poor clients on the phone.”
“Whatever,” said Orla.
Maura shot Orla a dark look over her shoulder, and then said, “I wasn’t going to say good life experience. I was going to say that leaving helps, sometimes. And it’s not always a for ever goodbye. There’s leaving and coming back.”
Jimi rocked Blue. The toilet lid creaked.
“I don’t think I can go to any of the colleges I want,” Blue said. “The counsellor doesn’t think so.”
“What do you want?” Maura asked. “Not out of college. Out of life.”
Blue swallowed the truth once, because she was ready to move from crisis and crying to solutions and stability. Then she said the truth slowly and carefully, so that it would be manageable. “What I always wanted. To see the world. To make it better.”
Maura also seemed to be choosing her words carefully. “And are you sure that college is the only way to do that?”
This was the sort of impossible answer Blue’s guidance counsellor would give her after looking at her financial and academic situation. Yes, she was sure. How else could she change the world for the better, without finding out first how to do it? How could she get a job that would pay her to be in Haiti or India or Slovakia if she didn’t go to college?
Then she remembered that it was not her guidance counsellor asking; it was her psychic mother.
“What do I do?” Blue asked cannily. “What have you guys seen me doing?”
“Travelling,” Maura replied. “Changing the world.”
“Trees in your eyes,” Calla added, more gently than usual. “Stars in your heart.”
“How?” Blue asked.
Maura sighed. “Gansey’s offered to help you, hasn’t he?”
It was a guess that didn’t require psychic ability, only a minimal grasp of Gansey’s personality. Blue angrily tried to get up; Jimi wouldn’t let her. “I’m not going to ride the Gansey charity train.”
“Don’t be like that,” Calla said.
“Like what?”
“Bitter.” Maura considered, and then added, “I just want you to look at your future as a world where anything is possible.”
Blue shot back, “Like Gansey not dying before April? Like me not killing my true love with a kiss? Any of those possibilities?”
Her mother was quiet for a long minute, during which Blue realized that she was longing naively for her mother to tell her that both of those predictions could be wrong and that Gansey would be all right. But finally, her mother simply replied, “There’s going to be life after he dies. You have to think about what you’re going to do after.”
Blue had been thinking about what she was going to do after, which was why she’d had a crisis in the first place. “I’m not going to kiss him, anyway, so that can’t be how he goes.”
“I don’t believe in the concept of true love,” Orla said. “It’s a construct of a monogamous society. We’re animals. We make love in the bushes.”
“Thanks for your contribution,” Calla said. “Let’s give Blue’s prediction a call and let it know.”
“Do you love him?” Maura asked curiously.
“I’d rather not,” Blue replied.