Gillian, who wore a tie knotted with more certainty and polish than Ronan ever had, shook her cards at him. “You say ‘Repo’ unto them so they can assess the suit and color of your lot and form a strategy to hopefully stop you from repo’ing the last card you need to win.”
Ronan looked at the cards he’d already laid out on the table. “I only need one more?”
“He’s a savant,” said Fletcher, whose great, round expanse was held in by a snazzy sweater vest. He seemed as if he ought to be smoking a cigar or backing slowly into the black-and-white photo he had emerged from. “He’s a savant and he doesn’t know it. The beautiful girl who doesn’t know her beauty. The brute who doesn’t know his strength. Twenty’s what you need. Twenty in your lot, and you’re the boss, game over. And you, my friend, have nineteen.”
“H-E-double boomerang,” said Benjy softly, with feeling. He had only two cards in his lot.
“But you could be put off,” Gillian explained. “Adam, for instance, could pay his bill with his spades. He could put them all in the bank, and then you wouldn’t be able to complete the spades in your lot with his cards.”
Beneath the table, Adam pressed the rest of his leg up against Ronan’s, his expression unchanging as he did.
This card game, Ronan thought, was going on forever.
“But if Adam pays spades, then he wouldn’t be able to complete his own lot with spades,” Fletcher interjected in his plummy voice. “Technically, yes, but not practically. Paying spades would be on his record for ten more turns, so he couldn’t play spades until after that. At this stage in the game, someone else will have won before he frees up spades for himself again.”
“That’s heavy,” Ronan said.
“Poverty sucks,” Fletcher mused, smoothing his sweater.
“Anecdotally,” Gillian said wryly.
Ronan shot a glance at Adam. Adam, who’d grown up in a trailer; Adam, who even now wore that secondhand tweed vest Gansey’s father had given him years ago; Adam, who had never spared words about the entitled students at the private school he’d worked three jobs to attend.
But Adam just tilted his cards toward his chest so the others couldn’t see his hand anymore.
“Well, fucking Repo, then,” Ronan said.
Gillian played a joker next to Ronan’s lot. “I’m parking you in.”
“Noble,” whispered Benjy.
“Write it on my grave,” she said.
As the others took another round of turns, skipping both Ronan and Gillian because of her sacrificial move, Ronan stared around the common room and tried to imagine spending time here regularly. He hadn’t told Adam about the appointments yet. It wasn’t a conversation he wanted to have in front of everyone here; they wouldn’t understand why it was even a decision. To the outside eye, there was no reason why Ronan shouldn’t move: his parents were dead, he had no job, he wasn’t going to college, and the Barns could run wild and unattended until he returned to visit his brothers for holidays.
To the outside eye, Ronan Lynch was a loser.
“Hey, Scary,” said Eliot. “Scary Spice.”
“Lynch, it’s your turn,” added Adam.
Ronan cast an appraising look over the table. Picking up Gillian’s joker, he added the four other jokers he’d collected over the course of the game, and put the five matching cards down in the center of the table.
“This is how this works, right?” he asked as he plucked a king of hearts out of Fletcher’s lot to add to his own lot of nineteen cards he’d assembled in front of him, making it an even twenty.
“God, it is, God, I hate you,” Fletcher moaned operatically.
“Who are you to come to our lands and take our women,” murmured Gillian.
“We don’t like your boyfriend, Adam,” Benjy said.
Adam just smiled a private smile as he deftly swept his cards into a stack. “I’m taking the winner away, you guys.”
“Wait,” Gillian said. “You and I should talk to Yanbin before you go.”
“Just a second,” Adam told Ronan. Leaning in close, he added, “Don’t kill anyone.” The words were only an excuse to breathe in Ronan’s ear; it made a marvel of his nerve endings.
Ronan was left facing Adam’s remaining friends. He didn’t know how good of friends they were. Not good enough to come up in phone conversations more than Gansey and Blue, but good enough that they could claim a game of Repo before Ronan got Adam to himself. They weren’t what he expected. Aglionby had been a private boarding school, and he’d expected Harvard kids to be some unpleasant variation of the Aglionbros. But Adam’s friends were not remotely the same species. They were not even the same species as each other; they were peculiar, distinct individuals. They were also more openly and gleefully queer than any Aglionby student Ronan had ever met. Ronan, who’d spent most of his high school years assuming other people were rich assholes and being the only gay person he knew, found these developments somewhat unsettling.
It was not that he thought Adam would replace him. It was just that now he saw precisely what Adam could replace him with.
“So where’d he find you crying?” Benjy murmured.
Ronan thought he’d misheard him. “What?”
Eliot said, “When you met. Where were you crying?”
Their words clarified nothing. Ronan couldn’t imagine why they would have thought him a crier, period. The last time Ronan had cried had been over the memory of his dreamed mother, who had been eviscerated while a magical forest he adored was similarly dismantled around her. It seemed unlikely Adam would have told strangers any part of that, but the idea of it nonetheless sent an unpleasant warmth through his chest. Maybe Adam had told an untrue story of how they’d met. Also unpleasant to consider.
Fletcher seemed to read Ronan’s face, because he patted his ample tummy fondly before rumbling, “So he didn’t always collect criers, then. You’re pre-crying.”
“Maybe he doesn’t date criers,” Eliot pointed out.
“You’re going to have to back this truck up,” Ronan said.
“We’re the Crying Club,” Benjy explained. “We were all criers.”
“Adam Parrish and the Crying Club, like a band,” Fletcher said. “He has a nose for us. Like a superhero. Somewhere on the Harvard campus someone is hidden in a stairwell crying right now, and Adam is on his way to find them and comfort them and give them someone to play cards with on a Friday night.”
Ronan spent a fraught few seconds trying to reconcile the standoffish Adam he knew with this description. The Adam he knew was a silent observer. A cataloguer of the human experience. A look don’t touch. The idea of him being something else, something Ronan didn’t know, felt as unsettling as realizing that Adam’s new friends weren’t awful. He and Adam had been making the same memories for so long that he’d forgotten that it didn’t always have to be like that. Adam was here having a new life, becoming a new person, growing from something beaten down into whoever he was meant to be. And Ronan was … Ronan. Still hidden away in the foothills of Virginia. Dropped out of school. Living in the place he’d been born. Keeping his head down so he could stay alive. Making the same memories he’d been making for months.