Adam Parrish sat, covered in oil and grease from work, next to Ronan Lynch in the dreamt BMW. The night was young, and Gansey was out of town, meaning that Ronan and Adam could get into as much trouble as they wanted without disappointing their friend. Adam, though, was still an anchor to sensibility that kept Ronan from doing anything too extreme. They were going to "break some shit" Ronan had told Adam. In the back of Ronan's car rested hundreds of glass grasshoppers in boxes.
Ronan had been having dreams about glass grasshoppers ever since Adam had given him one for his birthday, along with a T-shirt that had the name of Ronan's favorite band brandished across the front in large blue letters. His gifted grasshopper sat safely in his room in a box so that Chainsaw couldn't knock it off a shelf and break it. Noah thought they were going to be breaking the grasshoppers, so he tagged along in the back seat beside the tower of boxes. Noah was wrong.
Noah usually knew what people were thinking or feeling, but Ronan was unpredictable, mostly because he had dreamt himself a ring to protect his mind from psychic invasion, because of Calla, but the ring deflected ghosts as well as psychics.
With the stars as their only witnesses, Ronan, Adam, and Noah carried five boxes of glass grasshoppers to the middle of an empty field.
"Now we wait," Ronan instructs. Noah wondered why Chainsaw had been left behind and what these boxes of grasshoppers meant for him. Adam wondered what Ronan was thinking. Ronan wondered what Adam was thinking.
"Ronan?" Adam whispered as the boxes of grasshoppers began to rattle, the silvery tinkling of glass mounting into a roar. The grasshoppers erupted from the boxes. Ronan scooped one into his hand, its glass limbs were animated, and from within each of the now sentient grasshoppers, a brilliant light beat like a heart inside it.
"Woah." Adam grins.
"Now watch this," Ronan says, tossing the grasshopper. Adam thought it would fall to the ground and shatter, Noah secretly hoped they were finally getting to the "breaking shit" part of the adventure. He was wrong again.
The tiny glass grasshopper continues to go up, and up. The others, which had been erratically hopping about, saw their drifting brother and followed suit. At first, it looked like fireflies, the kind that all three of the boys had grown up catching and putting in mason jars. The type that Ronan dreamt of on good nights. Then as the grasshoppers drifted higher, they became small dots of light, like stars, spreading across the night sky.
Ronan and Adam had been holding hands up until now, and as the last of the glass grasshoppers blew away on the wind, they looked at one another in the darkness. Noah didn't have to read Ronan's mind to know what was coming next. As Adam and Ronan leaned into one another, Noah brought himself uncomfortably close to the couple.
"Can we go break something now?" He begged. He had already watched them make out five times that day, as well as cuddle on the couch for an hour before Adam had to go to work. And them when Ronan picked Adam up from work the made out again.
Noah was happy for them, of course, but a dead boy can only handle so much.
"Buzz off, shithead!" Ronan laughs. Noah decides he'll wait in the car. He waited for a very long time.