Twenty-five minutes away, Gansey was wide awake, and he was in trouble.
He didn’t know yet what he was in trouble for, and knowing the Gansey family, he might never know. He could feel it, though, sure as he could feel the net of the Glendower story lowering over him. Annoyance in the Gansey household was like a fine vanilla extract. It was used sparingly, rarely on its own, and was generally only identifiable in retrospect. With practice, one could learn to identify the taste of it, but to what end? There’s some anger in this scone, don’t you think? Oh, yes, I think a little —
Helen was pissed at Gansey. That was the upshot.
The Gansey family had convened at the schoolhouse, one of the Gansey investment properties. It was a comfortably shabby old stone schoolhouse located in the verdant and remote hills between Washington, D.C., and Henrietta, where it earned its keep as a short-term rental. The rest of the family had stayed the night there – they’d tried to convince Gansey to come spend the night with them, a request he might have fulfilled if not for Ronan, if not for Henry. Maybe that was why Helen was annoyed with him.
In any case, surely he had made up for it by bringing interesting friends for them to play with. The Ganseys loved to delight other people. Guests meant more people to display elaborate cooking skills for.
But he was still in trouble. Not with his parents. They were delighted to see him – How tan you are, Dick – and they were, as predicted, even more delighted to see Henry and Blue. Henry immediately passed some sort of friend-peer test that Adam and Ronan had always seemed to struggle with, and Blue was – well, whatever it was about Blue’s sharply curious expression that had attracted the youngest Gansey in the first place clearly also caught the older Ganseys. They immediately began to question Blue about her family’s profession as they diced eggplant.
Blue described an average day at 300 Fox Way with rather less wonder and bewilderment than she’d just used in the car to tell Gansey about the unaverage experience of her father disappearing into a tree. She listed the psychic hotline, the cleansing of houses, the meditation circles, and the laying out of cards. Her perfunctory method of describing it only charmed Gansey’s parents more; if she had tried to sell it to them, it would have never worked. But she was just telling them how it was and not asking a thing from them and they loved it.
With Blue there, Gansey was excruciatingly aware of how they all must look through her eyes – the old Mercedes in the drive, the hemmed trousers, even skin, straight teeth, Burberry sunglasses, Hermes scarves. He could even see the schoolhouse through her lens now. In the past, he wouldn’t have thought that it looked particularly moneyed – it was sparsely decorated, and he would’ve assumed that came off as austere. But now that he had spent time with Blue, he could see that the sparseness was exactly what made it look rich. The Ganseys did not need to have a lot of things in the house because every object they did have was exactly the right thing for its purpose. There was not a cheap bookshelf also pressed into service as a repository for extra dishes. There was not a desk that had to carry paperwork as well as sewing materials as well as toys. There were not pots and pans piled on cabinets or toilet plungers sitting in cheap plastic buckets. Instead, even in this crumbling schoolhouse, everything was aesthetic. That was what money did. It put plungers in copper pots, and extra dishes behind glass doors, and toys into carved hope chests, and hung skillets from iron pot racks.
He felt quite squirmy about it.
Gansey kept trying to catch Blue’s and Henry’s gazes to see if they were all right, but the trick with trying to be subtle in a room full of Ganseys was that subtlety was a language they all spoke. There was no discreetly asking if rescue was needed; all messages would be intercepted. And so light conversation proceeded until lunch could be removed to the porch out back. Henry and Blue were seated in chairs too far away for him to air-drop aid to them.
Helen made a point to sit next to him. He was tasting vanilla by the bucket load.
“Headmaster Child said you were a bit late with your college applications,” Mr Gansey said as he leaned forward to spoon quinoa on to plates.
Gansey busied himself getting a gnat from his iced tea.
Mrs Gansey waved her hand at an invisible gnat out of solidarity. “It seems like it should be too cold for insects. There must be standing water around here.”
Gansey carefully wiped the dead insect on the edge of the table.
“I’m still in touch with Dromand these days,” Mr Gansey said. “He’s still got his fingers stuck in all the pies in the Harvard history department, if that’s what you’re still thinking about.”
“Jesus, no,” Mrs Gansey said. “Yale, surely.”