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.
He even sounded different. There was no trace at all of his subtle Virginia accent. He’d endlessly practiced erasing it in high school but never pulled it off. Now it was completely hidden. A stranger’s voice.
Ronan felt a little unsteady. There had been no room for this experience in his daydreams.
Adam glanced at his watch, and Ronan saw then that it was his watch, the elegant timepiece Ronan had dreamt him for Christmas, the watch that told the correct time for wherever Ronan was in the world. The ground steadied a little beneath him.
Adam said, “I thought you wouldn’t be here for hours. I thought you—I should’ve known how you drive. I thought …”
He was staring at Ronan in an unfamiliar way, and after a moment, Ronan realized that Adam was staring at him in exactly the same way Ronan was staring at Adam.
“This is fucking weird,” Ronan said, and Adam laughed in a haggard, relieved way. They hugged, hard.
This was as Ronan remembered it. Adam’s ribs fit against his ribs just as they had before. His arms wrapped around Adam’s narrow frame the same way they had before. His hand still pressed against the back of Ronan’s skull the way it always did when they hugged. His voice was missing his accent, but now it sounded properly like him as he murmured into Ronan’s skin: “You smell like home.”
Home.
Ronan felt even steadier. It was going to be all right. He was with Adam, and Adam still loved him, and this was going to work.
They stepped back from each other. Adam said, “Do you want to meet my friends?”
Friends were serious business for Ronan Lynch. He was slow to acquire them, slower to lose them. The list was small, both because secrets made relationships complicated and because friends, for Ronan, were time-consuming. They got all of him. You could not, Ronan thought, give all of yourself away to many people, or there would be nothing left. So there was burnished Gansey, who might not have saved Ronan’s life in high school, but at the very least kept it mostly out of Ronan’s reach so that he could not take it down and break it. There was pocket-sized Blue Sargent, the psychic’s daughter, with her ferocious sense of right and wrong; they’d learned each other so slowly, peeling back layers and only truly figuring each other out just in time for high school to end. There was Adam, and there were Ronan’s brothers. That was it. Ronan could have had more casual friends, but he didn’t see the point.
“Repo! You’re supposed to say Repo.”
“What?” Ronan was playing a card game. It was a confusing card game, with a lot of rules, an elaborate setup, and an unclear time frame for completing gameplay. He was fairly certain it had been developed by students at Harvard. He was fairly certain, in fact, that it had been developed by the students at Harvard he currently sat with: Fletcher, Eliot, Gillian, and Benjy. Adam sat beside him, hearing ear closest (he was deaf in one).
Beneath the table, Adam’s shoe was pressed hard up against Ronan’s.
Eliot explained, “To notify the other players.”
“Of what?”
Eliot flinched at his tone, although Ronan hadn’t thought he’d been any more terse than usual. Possibly his usual was enough. The first thing breezy Eliot had said when they met Ronan was “Oh, you’re scarier than I expected!”
Fucking nice to meet you, too, Ronan had thought.
The game unrolled at a table in the basement common room of Thayer. Other students played pool, gathered around TVs and laptops, and listened to music. It smelled like garlic and take-out food. The brick arches holding up the ceiling gave the entire space the vibe of either a wine cellar or catacombs. It all felt like a secret club.