Blue Lily, Lily Blue (4 page)

lue couldn’t sleep that night. She couldn’t stop waiting for the sound of the front door. Some ingrained, foolish part of her couldn’t believe that her mother would not come

home before school began tomorrow. Her mother always had an answer for everything, even if it was wrong, and Blue had taken for granted that she would be unchanging as everything else turned sideways.

Blue missed her.
She went to the hall and listened. Outside, Orla was conducting a midnight chakra clearing with a few ardent clients. Downstairs, Calla angrily watched television alone. On her floor, she heard nothing, nothing — and then a series of short, purposeful sighs from Persephone’s room at the end of the hall.
When she knocked, Persephone said in her tiny voice, “You might as well.”
Inside, the lamplight reached only to a shoddy little desk and the end of Persephone’s high, elderly twin bed. Persephone sat cross-legged in the Victorian desk chair, her enormous nimbus of curly hair lit golden by the single bulb. She worked away at an old sweater.
As Blue climbed onto the worn mattress, several bobbins of thread raced down to nestle against her bare feet. She tugged her oversized shirt down over her knees and watched Persephone for a few minutes. She seemed to be adding length to the sleeves by sewing on mismatching cuffs. Every so often, she sighed as if she were annoyed with herself or the sweater.
“Is that yours?” Blue asked.
“Is what mine?” Persephone followed her eyes to the sweater. “Oh. Oh, no. I mean, it was. Once. But you see I’m changing it.”
“For someone with giant long arms?”
Persephone held out the garment to verify if this was the case. “Yes.”
Blue slowly lined up the thread by color on the bed beside her. “Do you think Mom went looking for Butternut?”
“Your father. Artemus,” Persephone corrected. Or clarified.
Butternut
was not really Blue’s father’s name— it was a pet name Maura had apparently given him in Ye Olde Days. “I think that’s oversimplifying it. But yes, that is one of the reasons why she went.”
“I thought she had the hots for Mr. Gray.”
Persephone considered. “The problem with your mother, Blue, is she likes to touch things. We told her that Artemus was in the past. He made his choices long before you, I said. But no, she had to keep touching it! How can you expect something to heal if you keep
poking
?”
“Sooooo she’s . . . gone . . . to . . . get . . . him?”
“Oh, no!” Persephone said with a little laugh. “I don’t think that would — no. As you said, she has the hots for Mr. Gray. Do young people really say that anymore?”
“I just said it. I’m young.”
“Ish.”
“Are you asking me or not? Either you accept my authority on this point or we move on.”
“We move on. But it is up to her, you know, if she wants to go looking for him. She never gets to be all on her own, and this is her chance to have some time to herself.”
Maura did not strike Blue as a
time to herself
person, but maybe that had been the problem. “So you’re saying we shouldn’t keep looking for her.”
“How should I know?”
“You’re a psychic! You charge people to tell their future! Look into the future!”
Persephone gazed at Blue with her all-black eyes until she felt a little bad about her outburst, and then Persephone added, “Maura went into Cabeswater. That’s not the future. Besides, if she had wanted help, she would have asked. Probably.”
“If I had paid you,” Blue said dangerously, “I would be asking for my money back right now.”
“Fortunate that you didn’t pay me, then. Does this look even to you?” Persephone held up the sweater. The two sleeves were nothing alike.
With a rather blasted
pshaw!
Blue leapt off the bed and stormed out of the room. She heard Persephone call, “Sleep is brain food!” as she headed down the hall.
Blue was not comforted. She did not feel in any way as if she had just had a meaningful exchange with a human.
Instead of going to her bedroom, she crept into the dim Phone/Sewing/Cat Room and sat beside the psychic hotline, folding her bare legs beneath her. The window, ajar, let in the chilly air. The streetlight through the leaves cast familiar, living shadows over the bins of sewing materials. Snatching a pillow from the chair, Blue rested it on top of her goose-bumped legs before picking up the handset. She listened to make sure there was a dial tone and not psychic activity on the other end.
Then she called Gansey.
It rang twice, three times, and then: “Hello?”
He sounded boyish and ordinary. Blue asked, “Did I wake you up?”
She heard Gansey fumble for and scrape up his wireframes.
“No,” he lied, “I was awake.”
“I called you by accident anyway. I meant to call Congress, but your number is one off.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, because yours has 6-6-5 in it.” She paused. “Get it?”
“Oh, you.”
“6-6-5. One number different.
Get it?
”
“Yeah, I got it.” He was quiet for a minute then, though she heard him breathing. “I didn’t know you could call hell, actually.”
“You can call in,” Blue said. “The thing is that you can’t call
out
.”
“I imagine you could send letters, though.”
“Never with enough postage.”
“No, faxes,” Gansey corrected himself. “Pretend I didn’t say letters.
Faxes
is funnier.”
Blue laughed into the pillow. “Okay, that was all.”
“All what?”
“All I had to say.”
“I’ve learned a lot. I’m glad you misdialed.”
“Well. Easy mistake to make,” she said. “Might do it again.”
A very, very long pause. She opened her mouth to fill it, then changed her mind and didn’t. She was shivering again, even though she wasn’t cold with the pillow on her legs.
“Shouldn’t,” Gansey said finally. “But I hope you do.”

he following morning, Gansey and Malory went out to investigate the ley line. Adam agreed to join them, which surprised Gansey. It wasn’t that the two of

them had been fighting. It was that they’d been . . .
not
fighting. Not talking. Not anything. Gansey had kept going on the same road he always had, and Adam had taken a fork onto a second road.

But for the moment, at least, they were headed in the same direction. Goal: Find another entrance to the raven cave. Method: Retrace steps from previous ley line searches. Resources: Roger Malory.

It was a good time of year to show off the town. Henrietta and her environs were a paint box of colors. Green hayfields, golden cornfields, yellow sycamores, orange oaks, periwinkle mountains, cerulean cloudless sky. The freshly paved road was black and snaking and inviting. The air was crisp and breathable and insistent on action.

The three of them moved quickly until Malory’s attention was caught and held at their fourth stop of the morning, Massanutten Mountain. It was not the most mystical of locales. Neighborhoods bubbled from its sides and a ski resort crowned it. Gansey found it coarse, tourist and student fodder, but if he’d said it out loud, Adam would’ve torn out his throat in a minute for being elitist.

The three of them stood just off the road, avoiding the stares of slowing drivers. Malory was all turtled over behind his tripod, lecturing either Adam or himself. “The procedure of ley hunting is quite different in the States! In England, a true ley must have at least one aligned element — church, barrow, standing stone — every two miles, or it is considered coincidental. But of course here in the Colonies”— both boys smiled good-naturedly — “everything is much farther apart. Moreover, you never had the Romans to build you things in wonderfully straight lines. Pity. One misses them.”

“I
do
miss the Romans,” Gansey said, just to see Adam smirk, which he did.
Malory sighted his transit through a gap in the trees, toward the gaping valley down below. “And although your line is now awake and profound — positively
profound —
with energy, the secondary line we’re looking for today is n— curses!” He had tripped over the Dog.
The Dog looked at Malory. His expression said,
Curses!
“Hand me that pencil.” Malory took the pencil from Adam and marked something on the map. “Go sit in the car!”
“Excuse me?” Adam asked, polite and shocked.
“Not you! The Dog!”
The Dog sulkily retreated. Another car slowed down to stare. Malory muttered to himself. Adam absently tapped a finger against his own wrist; a gesture somehow disconcerting and otherworldy. Insects buzzed around them; wings brushed Gansey’s cheek.
A bee, maybe; I could be dead in a minute here, maybe, by the side of this road, before Malory can get his cell phone out of the car, before Adam realizes what’s going on.
He didn’t swat the insect. It buzzed away, but his heart still beat fast.
“Talk me through what you’re doing,” Gansey said. Then he corrected: “
Us
. Talk us.”
Malory adopted his professor voice. “Your cave is tied to the ley line, and it has no fixed location. Therefore, if we’re looking for a cave to join up with it, there’s no sense searching for ordinary cave entrances. Only an entrance on a ley will do. And as your cave mapping suggests that you were traveling perpendicular to the ley instead of along it, I believe the cave network in its entirety exists on multiple lines. So we seek a crossroads! Tell me, what is this?”
He indicated something on one of the maps that a younger Gansey had heavily notated. Older Gansey lifted Malory’s finger to look beneath it. “Spruce Knob. Highest peak in West Virginia. Forty-five hundred feet or something like that?”
“Highest peak in Virginia?” echoed Malory.
“West,” said Gansey and Adam at the same time.
“
West
Virginia,” Gansey repeated, studiously avoiding eye contact with another slowing driver. “Sixty miles west of here. Seventy, perhaps?”
Malory dragged his square fingertip a few inches along one of the many short highlighter paths. “And what’s this?”
“Coopers Mountain.”
Malory tapped it. “What’s this note? Giant’s Grave?”
“It’s another name for the mountain.”
The professor raised his hairy eyebrows. “Interesting name for the new world.”
Gansey recalled how excited he had been to learn Coopers Mountain’s old name. It had felt like a stunning bit of detective work to stumble across it in an old court document, and then it had been even more thrilling to discover that the mountain was appropriately odd: situated all by itself in the middle of sloping fields, two miles away from the main ridge.
“Why is it interesting?” Adam asked.
Gansey explained, “Kings were often giants in British mythology. A lot of British locations associated with kings have the word
giant
in them, or are giant
sized.
There’s a mountain in Wales, what is it . . . Idris? Dr. Malory, help me.”
Malory smacked his lips. “Cadair Idris.”
“Right. It translates to
the chair of Idris
, who was a king, and a giant, and so the chair in the mountain is giant-sized, too. I got permission to hike on Giant’s Grave — there was some rumor of Native American graves on there, but I couldn’t find them. No cave, either.”
Malory continued tracing the highlighter line. “And this?”
“Mole Hill. Used to be a volcano. It’s out in the middle of a flat field. No cave there, either, but lots of geology students.”
Malory tapped on the last location on the line. “And this is us, yes? Mass-a-nut-ten. My, this line of yours. I’ve waited a lifetime to see something like it. Remarkable! Tell me, there must be others prowling around poking at it as well?”
“Yes,” Adam replied immediately.
Gansey looked at him. The
yes
had left no place for doubt; a
yes
not of paranoia, but observation.
In a lower voice, for Gansey, not Malory, Adam said, “Because of Mr. Gray.”
Of course. Mr. Gray had come looking for a magical parcel, and when he’d failed to deliver it to his employer Colin Greenmantle, Greenmantle had flooded the town with people looking for Mr. Gray. It would be foolish to assume they’d all left.
Gansey preferred to be foolish.
“Unsurprising!” Malory concluded. He clapped a hand on Gansey’s shoulder. “Lucky for both of you that this young man has a better ear than most; he’ll hear that king long before anyone else has thought to even listen. Now, let us flee this coarse place before it rubs off. Here! To Spruce Knob. By way of these other two lumps.”
Out of old habit, Gansey gathered up the transit and GPS and laser rod as Malory climbed into the Suburban to wait. Adam went into the woods a bit farther to pee, an action that always made Gansey wish that he was not too inhibited to do the same.
When he returned, Adam said suddenly, “I’m glad we’re not fighting. It was stupid for it to go on so long.”
“Yes,” Gansey replied, trying not to sound relieved, exhausted, pleased. He was afraid to say too much; he’d destroy this moment, which already felt imaginary.
Adam continued, “That thing with Blue. I should’ve known it would be weird trying to date her once she was one of . . . you know, with us all. Whatever.”
Gansey thought of his fingers on Blue’s and how foolish such a gesture had been. This equilibrium was so hard-won. He preferred being foolish, but he couldn’t keep on that way.
Both boys looked out through the bare spot in the trees toward the valley. Thunder rumbled somewhere, though there was not a cloud in the sky. It didn’t feel like it came from the sky, anyway. It felt like it came from below them, down in the ley line.
Adam’s expression was ferocious and pleased; Gansey was at once proud to know him and uncertain he did at all.
“I can’t believe we’re doing this,” Gansey said.
Adam replied, “I can.”

As she leaned against the wall outside the guidance counselor’s office, she wondered when she would start to think of school as an important thing again. After an extraordinary summer full of chasing kings and disappearing mothers, it was hard to really, truly picture herself going to class every day. What would any of this matter in two years? Nobody here would remember her, or vice versa. She would only remember that this was the fall her mother vanished. This was the year of Glendower. She peered across the linoleum-basted hall to the clock. In an hour she could walk back home to her real life.

You are coming back tomorrow
, Blue told herself.
And the next day.
But it felt like more of a dream than Cabeswater. She touched her palm with the fingers of her other hand and

thought about that flag Malory had found, painted with three women with red hands and her face. She thought about how the boys were off exploring without her.

She became aware of Noah’s presence. At first she just sort of knew that he was there, and when she considered how it was that she happened to know, she realized she could see him slouching beside her in his rumpled Aglionby uniform.

Noah shrugged, apologetic and smudgy. His proximity chilled Blue as he pulled energy from her to stay visible. He blinked at two girls who walked by pushing a cart. They didn’t seem to notice him, but it was difficult to tell if it was because he was invisible to them or just because he was Noah.

“I think I miss this part,” he said. “The beginning. This
is
the beginning, right?”
“First day,” Blue replied.
“Oh,
yeah
.” Noah leaned back and inhaled. “Oh, wait, no, it’s the other one. I forgot. I actually hate this part.”
Blue did not hate it, because that would require acknowledging that it was really happening.
“What are you doing?” Noah asked.
She handed him a brochure, even though she felt selfconscious sharing it, as if she were giving him a list for Santa Claus. “Talking to the counselor about that.”
Noah read the words as if they were in a foreign language. “Ex-per-ie-ence di-verse fo-rest types in the A-ma-zon. The Schooool for E-col-o-gy fea-tures a stud-y a-broad — oh, you can’t
go somewhere
.”
She was very aware that he was probably right. “Thanks for the vote of confidence.”
“People are going to see you talking to nobody and think you’re weird.” This amused him.
It neither amused nor worried Blue. She’d gone through eighteen years as the town psychic’s daughter, and now, in her senior year, she had already held every single possible conversation about that fact. She had been shunned and embraced and bullied and cajoled. She was going to hell, she had the straight-line to spiritual nirvana. Her mother was a hack, her mother was a witch. Blue dressed like a hobo, Blue dressed like a fashion mogul. She was untouchably hilarious, she was a friendless bitch. It had faded into monotonous background noise. The disheartening and lonesome upshot was that Blue Sargent was the strangest thing in the halls of Mountain View High School.
Well, with the exception of Noah.
“Do you see other dead people?” Blue asked him.
Meaning:
Do you see my mother?
Noah shuddered.
A voice came from the cracked office door. “Blue? Sweetie, you can come in now.”
Noah slid into the office ahead of her. Even though he looked solid and living in the strong sunlight through the office window, the counselor looked right through him. His invisibility seemed downright miraculous as he sat down on the floor in front of the metal desk to pleasantly eavesdrop.
Blue shot him a withering look.
There were two sorts of people: The ones who could see Noah, and the ones who couldn’t. Blue generally only got along with the former.
The counselor— Ms. Shiftlet — was new to the school, but not to Henrietta. Blue recognized her from the post office. She was one of those impeccably dressed older women who liked things done right the first time. She sat perfectly straight in a chair designed for slouching, out of place behind a cheap shared desk cluttered with mismatching personal knickknacks.
Ms. Shiftlet efficiently checked the computer. “I see someone just had a birthday.”
“It was your
birthday
?” Noah demanded.
Blue struggled to address the counselor instead of Noah. “What — oh — yes.”
It had been two weeks ago. Ordinarily, Maura made sludgy brownies, but she hadn’t been there. Persephone had tried her best to re-create their undercooked glory, but the brownies had accidentally turned out pretty and precise with powdered sugar dusted in lace patterns on top. Calla had seemed worried Blue would be angry, which bemused Blue. Why would Blue be angry at
them
? It was Maura she wanted to slap. Or hug.
“I can’t believe you didn’t tell us,” muttered Noah. “We could have gone for gelato.”
Noah couldn’t eat, but he liked the gelato parlor in town for reasons that escaped Blue.
Ms. Shiftlet inclined her head to Blue without disrupting her perfect posture. “I see here you talked to Mr. Torres before he left. He has a note here about an incident in —”
“That’s all taken care of and done with,” Blue interrupted, avoiding Noah’s eyes. She slid the brochure across the desk. “Pretend like it never happened. All I’d like to know is if there is any way to get here from what I’m doing now.”
Ms. Shiftlet was visibly eager to get off the topic of anything that could be considered an
incident
. She consulted the brochure. “Well, this looks like a barrel of monkeys, pun intended! Do you have an interest in wildlife? Let me pull up some information on this school.”
Noah leaned over. “You should see her shoes. Pointy.”
Blue ignored him. “I’d
like
to do something with river systems, or forest —”
“Oh, this school is
very
competitive.” Ms. Shiftlet was too efficient to let Blue finish her sentence. “Here, let me show you the average scores of the students who get accepted.”
“Rude,” Noah commented.
Ms. Shiftlet turned the monitor so that Blue could see a somewhat demoralizing graph. “You see how few students get accepted. That means financial aid would also be very competitive. You’d be applying for aid?”
She said it like a statement instead of a question, but she wasn’t wrong. This was Mountain View High. No one was paying outright for a private school. Most of Blue’s peers considered community college or state schools, if they considered college at all.
“I don’t know if Mr. Torres went over the types of schools you need.” Ms. Shiftlet sounded as if she suspected he hadn’t, and that she judged him for it. “What you need is three different types.
Reach
schools,
match
schools, and
safety
schools. This one is a wonderful example of a reach school. But now it’s time to add some others to your list. Some schools that you can be sure you can get into and afford. That’s just good sense.”
Ms. Shiftlet wrote
reach
,
match
, and
safety
on an index card. Underlining
safety
, she slid it across the desk. Blue wasn’t sure if she was supposed to keep it.
“Have you filled out your application fee waiver form?”
“Four of them. I read online I could get up to four waived?”
This show of efficiency visibly pleased Ms. Shiftlet. “So maybe you already know this is your
reach
school! Now it’s time to make a sensible backup plan.”
Blue was so tired of compromises. She was tired of
sensible
.
Noah scratched his fingernails on the desk leg. The sound — which was admittedly uncomfortable— made Ms. Shiftlet frown.
He said, “I’d be way more sunshiney if I was a counselor.”
“If I
did
get in,” Blue said, “could I get loans and aid to cover it all?”
“Let me get you some paperwork,” Ms. Shiftlet said. “FAFSA will pay for a
percentage
depending on your
need
. The amount varies.”
Blue couldn’t expect any help from the lean budget at 300 Fox Way. She thought about the bank account she’d slowly been filling. “How much will be left over? Could you guess?”
Ms. Shiftlet sighed.
Guessing
clearly fell outside her realm of interests. She flipped the monitor around again to reveal the school’s tuition rate. “If you were staying in the dorm, you’d probably be obligated for ten thousand dollars a year. Your parents could take out a loan, of course. I have paperwork for that, too, if you would like it.”
Blue leaned back as her heart vacated her chest cavity. Of course it was impossible. It had been impossible before she arrived and would continue being impossible forever. It was just that spending time with Gansey and the others had made her think that the impossible might be more possible than she’d thought before.
Maura was always telling her,
Look at all the potential you hold inside yourself!
Potential for other people, though. Not for Blue.
It wasn’t worth shedding tears over something she had known for so long. It was just that
this
, on top of everything
else
—

She swallowed.
I will not cry in front of this woman.
Suddenly, Noah scrambled out from under the desk. He leapt to his feet. There was something wrong about the action, something about it that meant it was too fast or too vertical or too violent for a living boy to perform. And he kept going up, even after he’d already stood. As he stretched to the ceiling, the card that said
reach
,
match
, and
safety
hurtled into the air.
“Oh?” said Ms. Shiftlet. Her voice wasn’t even surprised, yet.
The warmth sucked from Blue’s skin. The water in Ms. Shiftlet’s glass creaked.
The business card holder upended. Cards splayed across the desk. A computer speaker fell onto its face. An array of paper swirled up. Someone’s family photo shot upward.
Blue jumped up. She didn’t have any immediate plan but to stop Noah, but as she flung her hands out, she realized that Noah wasn’t there.
There was just a tossed explosion of tissues and business envelopes and business cards, a frenetic tornado losing propulsion.
The material collapsed back to the desk.
Blue and Ms. Shiftlet stared at each other. The paper rustled as it settled completely. The knocked-over computer speaker buzzed; one of its cables had been knocked ajar.
The temperature was slowly rising in the room again.
“What just happened?” Ms. Shiftlet asked.
Blue’s pulse galloped.
Truthfully, she replied, “I have no idea.”