Adam was changing. Ronan couldn’t.
He was moving here, he thought. It would work.
Ronan snarled, “Yeah, he’s always been a regular Florence Nightingale.”
“They say opposites attract,” Eliot said. They took a photo of Ronan’s winning lot and put their head down to text it to someone.
“That’s me,” Ronan said. “He saves people; I take their lunch money.”
Benjy had stopped collecting cards and instead pensively eyed the stack he’d made. In his small voice, he said, “I envy him. I wish I had his family.”
Eliot’s fingers paused in their texting. “Yeah. I wish my dad could meet his dad. I hate my father.”
Record scratch, freeze-frame, stop the press.
“He has such wonderful Southern family stories,” Fletcher said grandly. “He’s like Twain without the racism. His words, the gravy, our ears, the biscuits.”
Once upon a time, Ronan Lynch had punched Adam Parrish’s father in front of the Parrish trailer. Once upon a time, Ronan Lynch had been there when Adam Parrish’s father had beaten the hearing out of his left ear for good. Once upon a time, Ronan Lynch had helped move Adam Parrish’s stuff into a shitty rented room so that he wouldn’t have to live with his parents ever again.
Ronan felt as if he was blinking around in a dream. Everything subtly incorrect.
He was still staring at the Crying Club when Adam reappeared.
“You ready?” Adam asked.
“It was nice to meet you, Ronan Lynch.” Fletcher held his hand out across the table.
Ronan hesitated, still off balance. Then he knocked Fletcher’s hand sideways so he could bump knuckles instead. “Yeah.”
“Don’t be a stranger,” Eliot said.
“Buh-bye,” added Benjy.
“Fuck off,” Gillian said kindly.
As they walked away, Ronan heard Fletcher say, “That man is very fetch.”
They pushed out of the common room; Adam reached between them to take Ronan’s hand. They climbed the stairs; Ronan disentangled their fingers and instead put his arm round Adam so that they climbed hip-to-hip. They stepped into Adam’s room; they made it no farther. In the dark, they tangled in each other for several minutes, and finally broke off when stubble had made lips sore.
“I missed you,” Adam said, voice muffled, face pressed against Ronan’s neck.
For a long moment, Ronan didn’t reply. It was too ideal; he didn’t want to ruin it. The bed was right there; Adam felt warm and familiar; he longed for him even while holding him.
But then he said, “Why did you lie to them?”
It was difficult to ascertain how he knew Adam reacted, since he didn’t reply or move, but Ronan nonetheless felt it.
“The Crying Club,” Ronan added. “Don’t tell me you didn’t.”
Adam stepped away. Even in the dark, Ronan could see that his expression looked more like the Adam that Ronan had known for years. Guarded.
“I didn’t really,” Adam said.
“Like hell you didn’t. They think your father—I don’t even want to fucking call him that—is some kind of saint.”
Adam just held his gaze.
“What are you playing at, Adam?” Ronan asked. “You sitting there at that table with a bunch of rich kids playing a card game where the punch line’s poverty, pretending you left some Brady Bunch bull back home?”
He could remember it like it had happened yesterday. No, like it had happened minutes ago. No, like it was still happening, always happening, kept fresh in a perfect, savage memory: Adam on his hands and knees outside the trailer, swaying, disoriented, broken, the light from the porch cut into fragments by his strange shadow. His father standing over him, trying to convince Adam it was his fault, always his fault. At the time it had only flooded Ronan with boiling, bursting, non-negotiable rage. But now it made him feel sick.
“Is it so bad?” Adam asked. “Is it so bad to start over? Nobody knows me here. I don’t have to be the kid from the trailer park or the kid whose dad beats him. Nobody has to feel sorry for me or judge me. I can just be me.”
“That’s some pretty fucked-up shit.” As Ronan’s eyes got used to the dark, he saw Adam’s profile clearly against the dull blue Cambridge night outside the dorm windows. Furrowed brow, lips tight. Pained. Old Adam. Adam from before graduation, before summer. Perfectly and depressingly recognizable, unlike that elegantly coiffed one on the walkway.
“You wouldn’t get it.”
This was too much; Adam wasn’t allowed ownership of hardship. Ronan growled, “I’m gonna start telling people my parents are still alive. I don’t want everyone to think of me as that orphan from now on.”
“This is what I got. You have your brothers. I’ve got no one, okay?” Adam said. “Leave me alone, because you have no idea.”
His voice hitched on because.
And like that, the fight was over. It had never been a fight between them, anyway. For Adam, it was what it always was: a fight between Adam and himself, between Adam and the world. For Ronan, it was what it always was, too: a fight between truth and compromise, between the black and white he saw and the reality everyone else experienced.
They knotted back together and stood there, eyes closed. Ronan put his lips on Adam’s deaf ear, and he hated Adam’s father, and then he said it out loud: “I’m looking at apartments. Tomorrow.”
For a breath, he was worried Adam no longer wanted a version of Ronan who could come stay with him in Cambridge, but then Adam said, “Don’t just say that. Don’t just throw it out. I can’t …”
“I’m not just saying it. Declan’s here. Matthew. They drove me up. I had to be in the Volvo for, like, eight hours. We have—I’ve got—appointments and shit. Tours. To see them. To pick one. You can come with if you aren’t doing your Harvard parade. It’s all set up.”
Adam pulled away again, but this time his expression was quite different. This was neither old-old Adam nor new-polished Adam. This was the Adam who’d spent the last year at the Barns, a complicated Adam who didn’t try to hide or reconcile all the complex truths inside himself, who just was. “How would that work?”
“I can control it.”
“Can you?”
“I stay at Declan’s all the time.” Ronan didn’t get much sleep there, but the statement was still true.
“And what about your face? The … nightwash. What about that?”
“I’ll go out of town every weekend to dream. I’ll find some-place safe.”
Adam said, “What about …” but he didn’t add anything else. He just frowned more deeply than he had during the entire exchange, his mouth all crumpled with consternation.
“What’s the face for?”
“I want it too much,” Adam said.
That sentence, Ronan thought, was enough to undo all bad feeling he might have had meeting Adam’s Harvard friends, all bad feeling about looking like a loser, all bad feeling about feeling stuck, all bad feeling, ever. Adam Parrish wanted him, and he wanted Adam Parrish.
“It’ll work,” Ronan told him. “It’ll work.”