Kavinsky goes up in flames on the Fourth of July. The cops write it off as an accident, the papers as a too foreseeable tragedy.
Don't play with illegal fireworks, kids, if you don't want to get burned.
Now there's a Mitsubishi Evo gathering dust in Monmouth's lot and there's a hole in Ronan's chest that feels bigger than it was ever meant to be.
And Ronan is changed. People say he changed after his father died and he did but this is something different. This feels less like reclaiming what was lost than coming into his own.
In August, Ronan looks at the Mitsubishi and decides that's it.
He gives the car to Jiang, who wants it in the covetous way of the grief-stricken. There are a hundred of these in an abandoned fairground and Jiang wants this one. Ronan doesn't ask, is simply glad someone's willing to take it.
Ronan picks him up from a mansion on the affluent side of town, the one the locals consider a different world altogether. They don't speak as they drive to Monmouth. Jiang's eyes are sharp and greedy, soaking in everything.
Jiang is stoned. He's got alcohol on his breath, too, and Ronan...can't care. He doesn't have time to solve every fuckup's problems, especially when he can barely solve his own. Not when Noah's decaying and Blue's mother is gone, and Adam's losing more and more of himself every day.
Jiang and Ronan have only ever shared two things in common: a love for fast cars and a disdain for all things Henry Cheng. They aren't friends. They never were. Ronan can't take the time to care about him.
"Did he ever give you anything?" he asks Jiang as they stand in Monmouth's lot. Ronan's secret lies between them. It's a light thing, just another piece of the impossible boy that was Joseph Kavinsky. You run with Kavinsky, you don't care about those sorts of secrets.
Did you know? Ronan is really saying. You had to have known.
"He gave me a million things," Jiang says. They look at the Mitsubishi. Jiang's holding the keys. He doesn't seem keen on driving it. "Nothing as grand as this, though." He gives Ronan a cautious look. "I knew what he could do. We all did. Sometimes it was heaven and sometimes it was hell."
He went out the way he wanted goes unspoken. It might even be true.
Jiang smells like cologne, alcohol, and gasoline. It's an intoxicating, familiar mix.
Jiang's gazing up at one of the second floor windows. Noah's standing there. He gives Jiang an inscrutable look and turns away.
Ronan rubs his wrists, feeling bruises long gone.
He hopes Jiang sets the Mitsubishi on fire, melts it down to the stereo and keeps going until the chassis is nothing more than a twisted hunk of metal. He's not sure he could bear seeing anyone drive it.
He gets the feeling Jiang thinks they're friends. Maybe they could have been once. Real ones, not just passing acquaintances. Ronan could have made that choice, taken Kavinsky's offer. He could still make an effort. He knows what Jiang, Skov, and Swan are going through.
Ronan has no room in his life right now for more friends.
Eventually, Jiang gets in the Mitsubishi and drives off. Eventually, Ronan walks back inside Monmouth Manufacturing and collapses onto his bed.
He doesn't sleep till morning.
"What's going on?" Adam asks.
O'Leary shrugs. "Two of our local delinquents getting in a pissing match."
There's a crowd around two students who are in the midst of an honest-to-God, knockdown, drag-out fight. Adam shouldn't be surprised- he's seen the Lynch brothers go at it a number of times- but it's still somewhat shocking to see two well-bred, rich kids duking it out.
"I've got my money on Skov," Brett Johnson says amiably. "You?"
He's talking about real money, which he knows Adam doesn't have. It's a deliberate dig or maybe it's not. Maybe Johnson thinks Adam is white trash enough to actually place a bet.
Skov's left eyebrow is split and starting to swell. There's blood trailing down the side of his face. Swan has a bruise forming on his jaw. His hands are in up in fists, legs spread in a poor imitation of a boxing stance.
These two aren't surprising, per se. It's the here and now of it.
Once, there was someone to defuse the situation that was Skov and Swan breathing the same air. Now that someone is gone and there's no one eager to take his place.
Maybe that's what they're fighting about. Taking his place.
Swan swings, landing a solid hit to Skov's ribs. Skov wheezes. Swan brings his knee up and slams it into Skov's stomach before he can catch his breath. He locks his hands together and brings them down on the back of Skov's neck, slamming his knee into him again. Skov hits the ground.
Someone whistles in appreciation.
Adam has to admire Swan. He might be taller and broader-shouldered but Skov is heavier, more solid.
The fighting seems at odds with Swan's personality. Then again, five seconds with Skov would bring anyone to a breaking point. Even Swan, who is as elegant and refined as an overmedicated trophy wife.
He even looks like one. Swan's the sort of beautiful that makes people look twice and say things like "mixed" and "exotic", and "what are you?". He's not really aloof, just generally pissed off and partway through a water bottle of vodka. He's quiet, with a passion for egging people on. One of those people who just wants to watch the world burn.
Adam should probably find a new phrase to describe the terminally self-destructive.
Skov's upright. Swan drives a knee into his side again. You'd think Skov would try to protect it.
Why are these two even associating anymore? Swan and Skov were always volatile together, their uneasy association barely tempered by whatever substance Kavinsky was peddling that month.
No one can tell what pisses them off more: being together or being apart. Then again, no one really cares. To Aglionby's students and faculty, Kavinsky's dysfunction was amusing. The squabbles of his underlings not so much. Everyone's waiting to see who will implode first. Kavinsky's gone, Prokopenko's in the hospital, who will be next? In this sick game, they're all expendable.
There's a crack as Skov's fist connects with Swan's nose. Blood spurts in a wide arc. Skov staggers back, red on his fist.
Swan brings his fingers to the space above his upper lip. He looks at the blood on his fingers, then at Skov, and grins. His face is suffused with feral joy. No, more than that. Liberation.
"Swan," Adam says, feeling queasy. "That's who's going to win."
He walks away. He won't derive any pleasure from watching these two fight.
A hole has been left in Gansey's Henrietta.
In a span of three years, five people have died strange, mysterious deaths. Niall Lynch, Barrington Whelk, Joseph Kavinsky, Jesse Dittley, and Persephone Poldma. Two others, Noah and Prokopenko, are the dead masquerading as living. Aurora Lynch is a dream brought to life. Matthew, Ronan told him one sleepless night this fall, was the same.
There was also, of course, the nameless hit man. He was not a piece of Henrietta, though, just someone passing through, intent on destroying the Lynch family
Gansey will not publicly mourn him, any more than he mourned Whelk or Kavinsky. Some people were better off gone.
His mother supports the death penalty.
Gansey, generally, does not. It's a waste of taxpayers' dollars for one, all the appeals and assorted death row costs. It also went against his belief that people deserved second chances.
Only, Whelk and the hitman got their second chances. Look what they did with them. It might be time for Gansey to revise his stance.
Gansey sighs and leans back in his chair.
He would have liked Kavinsky to have had a chance to turn his life around. He could have gotten off the drugs, maybe even made a name for himself.
He could have been something.
"Do you really believe that?" Noah asks from his perch on the corner of Gansey's desk. He trails a translucent hand over a Welsh grammar book. "That he could have been something?"
As the days grow longer and Glendower beckons louder, Gansey is becoming more certain of what his favor will be.
"Yes," he says. "He had potential. He only needed to put in the effort."
Noah's fingers skitter over the edge of the desk.
"Are you going to help his friends?" Noah asks.
"Help them with what?"
"Never mind," Noah says quietly and he's fading.
It scares Gansey how little Noah is visible these days. If Blue isn't around, he starts to fade as soon as he appears. He's a proper ghost now.
"Hang in there," he tells Noah. "Soon, you'll be strong again."
He's already gone.
An early snow sends flurries through Henrietta. Ronan is out driving when they first come down, little patches of white against a black night.
The streets are dead. There's only Ronan, the BMW, and the snow.
The light goes from yellow to red. Ronan slows to a stop. He watches the snow fall. He rolls his window down and breathes in the cold air, watches how his breath turns into a white cloud with every exhale.
A car pulls up beside him. Ronan recognizes it. He's raced it too many times not to. Jiang's Supra. Swan is behind the wheel.
From this angle, he almost looks normal. Swan drove through a guardrail a few weeks ago and had to be peeled out of the wreckage of his Golf. Diagnosis: cracked ribs and a half dozen cuts and bruises. For a good while, it looked like someone took a sandblaster to the right side of his face.
Ronan doesn't give a shit. It's just part of the mental tally he keeps of his classmates and their endless misadventures and occasional successes. Aglionby, for all it tries, can't cut out the rottenness at the core of so many of them. Not everyone can be a Gansey or a Henry Cheng.
He expects Swan to goad him into racing, to rev his engine and nose up to the light.
Swan doesn't even look at him. When the light turns green, there's no burst of speed, not even a crude gesture. He makes a left turn.
Jiang's eyes follow the BMW as they disappear into the night.
