Call Down the Hawk (Dreamer, #1)(9)

This was how it had begun: a student walking his bike up the last hill into town, clearly headed the same place they were. He wore the Aglionby uniform, although as they grew closer Ronan saw it was threadbare in a way school uniforms couldn’t manage in a single year’s use—secondhand. His sleeves were pushed up and his forearms were wiry, the thin muscles picked out in stark relief. Ronan’s attention stuck on his hands. Lovely boyish hands with prominent knuckles, gaunt and long like his unfamiliar face.

“Who’s that?” Gansey had asked, and Ronan hadn’t answered, just kept hanging out the window. As they passed, Adam’s expression was all contradictions: intense and wary, resigned and resilient, defeated and defiant.

Ronan hadn’t known anything about who Adam was then and, if possible, he’d known even less about who he himself was, but as they drove away from the boy with the bicycle, this was how it had begun: Ronan leaning back against his seat and closing his eyes and sending up a simple, inexplicable, desperate prayer to God:

Please.

And now Ronan had followed Adam to Harvard. After Declan dropped him off at the gate (“Don’t do anything stupid. Text me in the morning.”), he just stood inside the Yard’s iron perimeter, regarding the fine, handsome buildings and the fine, handsome trees. Everything was russet: brick dorms and brick paths, November leaves and November grass, autumnal scarves round students’ throats as they idled past. The campus felt unfamiliar, transformed by the seasons. Funny how quickly a handful of weeks could render something unrecognizable.

Six thousand seven hundred undergraduate students. Legacy students: twenty-nine percent. Receiving financial aid: sixty percent. Average financial award: forty thousand. Yearly tuition: sixty-seven thousand dollars. Median annual salary of Harvard grad after ten years: seventy thousand. Acceptance rate: four-point-seven percent.

Ronan knew all the Harvard statistics. After Adam had been accepted, he’d spent evening after evening at the Barns pulling apart every detail and fact he could find about the school. Ronan had spent weeks with two Adams: one certain he had earned his place at an Ivy and one certain the school would soon discover how worthless he truly was. Ronan endured it with as much grace as he could manage. Who else did Adam have to crow to, after all? His mother was a disconnected wraith and if his father had gotten his way, Adam might have been dead before he’d graduated high school. So Ronan absorbed the data and the anxiety and the anticipation and tried not to think about how he and Adam were stepping onto differing paths. He tried not to think about all the shining, educated, straightforward faces in the brochures that Adam Parrish might fall in love with instead of him. Sometimes Ronan thought about what might have happened if he’d finished high school and gone off to college this fall, too. But that was as impossible as imagining an Adam who had dropped out of high school and stayed in Henrietta. They knew who they were. Adam, a scholar. Ronan, a dreamer.

Is there any version of you that could come with me to Cambridge?

Maybe. Maybe.

It took Ronan several moments of digging through his phone to find the name of Adam’s dorm—Thayer—and then several more to find a campus map. He could have texted Adam to tell him he was there, but he liked the idea of the soft surprise of it, of Adam knowing he was coming today but not knowing when. Ronan was well versed in comings and goings, in the tidal rhythm of a lover washing out to sea and returning under favorable winds. This was his father, after all, leaving the Barns with a trunk full of dreams and returning some months later with a trunk full of money and gifts. This was his mother, after all, sending him off and then welcoming him home. Ronan remembered the reunions well. The way Aurora’s smile got unwrapped along with the rest of the parcels in Niall’s trunk, the way Niall’s was dusted off from a high shelf where Aurora kept it.

Over the past few days, Ronan had played his reunion with Adam over in his head many times, trying to imagine what shape it would take. Stunned quiet before an embrace on the stairs outside Adam’s dorm? Slowly growing grins before a kiss in a hallway? Ronan, said this imaginary Adam as his dorm room door fell open.

But it wasn’t any of those.

It was Ronan finally figuring out how to point himself toward Thayer, Ronan stalking through the students and tourists, Ronan hearing, surprised, “Ronan?”

It was him, turning, and realizing they’d passed each other on the walkway.

He’d walked right by Adam.

Even looking at him now, properly, the two of them an arm’s length away as others were forced to make a berth around them, he realized why he had. Adam looked like himself but also not. His gaunt face had not changed in the weeks since Ronan had last seen him—he was still that boy with the bicycle. His dusty hair was still as Ronan recalled, charmingly and unevenly cropped short as if by self-piloted scissors in a bathroom mirror.

All the car grease and sweat and grit Ronan remembered was gone, though.

Adam was impeccably dressed: collared shirt, sleeves rolled just so, vintage tweed vest, perfect brown slacks cuffed above stylish shoes. He held himself in that precise, reticent way he always had, but it looked even more remote and proper now. He looked as if he belonged here in Cambridge.

“I didn’t recognize you,” they both said at the same time.

Ronan thought this was a ridiculous sentiment. He was unchanged. Completely unchanged. He couldn’t change if he wanted to.

“I walked right by you,” Adam said, with wonder.