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"I know a spot," Gansey had said.
He'd said it on Monday, in the back booth at Nino's, after nobody asked. He had said it again on Tuesday. On Wednesday he had drawn Blue aside by the soda machine and told her to keep Friday evening clear, and to wear shoes she could walk in, and that he couldn't possibly say more.
"You can't say more," Blue repeated.
"It would spoil it."
"Is it a cave? I'm not doing another cave. I still have clay in my ears from the last one."
"It's not a cave." He had looked hurt. Then he'd looked pleased with himself again. He never could keep it off his face for long. "It's a spot. I found it months ago. I've been saving it."
"For what?"
"For you, Jane," said Gansey, as though that were obvious. Then he cleared his throat and went back to the table with his ears pink.
So it was Friday. It was seven in the evening in the middle of June, and Blue was in the passenger seat of the Pig with her feet on the dash. They were going somewhere, and she didn't know where.
She had brought her camera. It was a boxy old thirty-five millimeter she had found at the thrift store for four dollars, with a cracked leather case and a strap she'd braided herself. There was one roll of film in it. Twenty-four exposures. Film cost money, and getting it developed cost more, so she was careful. She only took a picture when she was sure.
She had not taken one yet.
"Are you going to tell me now?"
"No."
"We've been driving for forty minutes."
"It's a little farther." Gansey had both hands on the wheel, and his sleeves rolled, and his good watch on. The windows were down. The Camaro was making the noise it always made, a huge orange bellow, like an animal that was thrilled to be out. "You'll see why. It has to be the right time of day. I've worked it out. If we get there at eight-ten, we'll have nineteen minutes."
"Until what?"
"Until it's worth it!"
Blue looked at him.
He'd had a haircut. She could tell. He was wearing the blue shirt, the one she had once said was all right. And there was a basket in the back seat, a real wicker one with a lid and leather straps, like something out of a book about English children. It had a blanket folded on top of it. Blue had been pretending not to see it since Henrietta.
Her stomach did something stupid.
They had been together since the spring. It was still new enough that she wasn't sure of the rules. She didn't know what you were supposed to do with a boy who planned things. Nobody at 300 Fox Way planned anything. Things were foreseen, and that wasn't the same.
"You're very pleased with yourself," she said.
"I am, rather."
"It's a bad look on you."
"I know." He grinned at the road. "Though I can't seem to stop."
The fields went by, gold and long-shadowed. They had left the highway a while ago. This was a county road, narrow and patched, with no line down the middle of it. They hadn't passed another car in ten minutes. Blue put her arm out the window and let the wind push her hand around.
All right, she thought. Fine. This is nice. I'm allowed to think it's nice.
The Pig coughed.
It was a small cough. Gansey's eyes went to the dash.
"That's nothing," he said.
It coughed again. The whole car shuddered. Something under the hood went tunk, twice, and the bellow dropped to a mutter.
"That's nothing either," said Gansey, with less conviction.
"Gansey."
"She does this. She's only clearing her throat."
The engine died.
It went quite suddenly. One second there was the noise, and the next there was only the wind, and the tires on the patched road, and a long, slow, dignified loss of speed. Gansey steered them onto the gravel shoulder with the last of it. The Pig rolled to a stop beside a fence post.
A meadowlark was singing somewhere. It was very loud in the quiet.
Gansey sat with his hands at ten and two.
"Well," he said.
He tried, to be fair to him.
He got out and put the hood up. He stood in front of the engine with his hands on his hips, in his good shirt, and regarded it thoughtfully. He had the look of a man studying a painting in a language he didn't speak.
Blue came around and stood next to him. She knew nothing about cars. But she had grown up in a house where things broke daily, and she had opinions.
"What's that?" she said.
"That's the—it's part of the cooling arrangement, I believe."
"Is it supposed to be doing that?"
"I don't think it's doing anything."
"It's dripping."
"Is it? Oh. So it is." He bent closer. "Adam showed me this once. There's a thing you jiggle."
"Which thing?"
"I'd know it if I saw it."
He jiggled several things. He got back in and turned the key. The Pig made a sound like someone dragging a chair across a floor, and then nothing.
He tried four more times. Blue leaned on the fence and watched the sun.
It was going down. She could see what he'd meant about the time of day. The light had gone thick and gold, the kind that lasts about half an hour in June and makes everything look like it's been dipped in honey. It lay across the hayfield beyond the fence. It was in the tops of the trees. Somewhere out there, eleven miles on or twenty, there was a spot, and the light was landing on that too. Nobody was there to see it.
Gansey got out of the car. He shut the door gently. He came and stood beside her and looked at his watch.
"Eight-oh-four," he said.
"How far is it?"
"Sixteen miles."
"Ah."
"…Yes."
He didn't say anything else. He took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. When he put them back on, his face had gone smooth and pleasant and polite. Blue knew that face. He used it on headmasters, and on his mother's friends. It was what he put on when something had gone wrong and he had decided nobody was going to be troubled by it.
She hated that face. She hated that he was using it on her.
"I'm so sorry, Jane," he said, lightly. "This isn't at all what I'd—I'll ring Adam. He'll know what it is. We'll have you home in an hour. I do apologize. I ought to have brought the other car."
"What other car?"
"The Suburban."
"You were going to take me on a date in the Suburban?"
"No. That's rather the point. I didn't." He got his phone out and held it up. He turned in a circle. He held it higher. "There's no signal. Of course there isn't."
"There was a gas station," Blue said. "About a mile back. I saw the sign."
"I'll walk it. You stay with the car."
"I'm not staying with the car, it's a car, nobody's going to steal it, it doesn't go." She pushed off the fence. She went to the back seat and hauled the basket out by its leather straps. It was heavy. "And I'm bringing this."
"Jane, you don't have to—"
"You packed it. I want to know what's in it. Carry the blanket."
He looked at her.
Then he took the blanket.
The gas station was called Pruitt's. It had two pumps and a sign for live bait. Inside there was one aisle, a cooler, and a boy of about fifteen behind the counter reading a comic book. A pay phone hung on the wall by the door, under a calendar from a feed company.
Gansey fed it quarters. Blue went to look at the cooler.
"Adam!" she heard him say. He sounded brighter at once. "Thank God. Listen, I'm afraid the Pig's given out. We're on County Road 614, about a mile past a place called—what? I can't hear you. What's that noise?"
Blue turned around.
Gansey was holding the receiver a little away from his ear. Even from the cooler she could hear it. There was a sort of shrieking, high and thin. Under that there was crashing, and somebody shouting.
"Is that Ronan?" said Gansey. "Is he all right? What do you mean, 'mostly'?"
Blue came over. He tipped the phone so that she could listen.
"—fine," Adam's voice was saying. He was out of breath, but perfectly calm. It was the voice of a boy holding a door shut with his shoulder. "It's fine, it's under control. Ronan fell asleep on the couch. Something came back with him. It's small."
There was a tremendous bang.+
"It's in the fucking WALL!" Ronan roared, some distance off.
"It's in the wall," Adam relayed. "That's all right. That's better than the kitchen. Gansey, I can come, but it'll be a while. I can't leave him with it. It's got a lot of legs."
"How many legs?"
"I haven't been able to get a count. It keeps—Ronan, don't use the shovel, you'll go through the plaster—"
. "I've GOT it! I've—no. No, that's a different one There's two."
"There's two," said Adam. He sighed. "Give me an hour and a half. Maybe two. What's it doing, the car?"
Gansey described the dripping. He described the chair noise.
"Water pump, most likely," Adam said. "Or a hose. I'll bring both. Stay with her, don't try and start her again, you'll only flood it. Are y'all safe where you are? Have you got water?"
"We've got a picnic."
There was a pause. Behind it, something shattered.
"You've got a picnic," Adam said.
"Yes."
"Well, that's nice. Have a good time. I've got to go, it's got his boot."
The line went dead.
Gansey hung up slowly. He and Blue looked at each other.
"They're having a very different evening," he said.
"They always are,"
"It's remarkable, when you think about it. One calls with a spot of car trouble, and there they are, at war with the unknown." He shook his head. "I do sometimes feel we're not pulling our weight."
Blue started to laugh. She couldn't help it. It was the way he'd said it, so seriously, in his good shirt, under the bait sign.
"An hour and a half," she said.
"Or two."
"Then we'd better get supplies."
She went back to the cooler. Her mother had raised her to find the best thing in any bad situation, and she found it on the second shelf, between the bologna and the worms.
"Oh," said Blue. "Yes."
It was yogurt. It was the good kind, with the fruit on the bottom, in the little waxed cups. They had peach. They had peach, in a bait shop, on County Road 614.
She took four.
"Jane," said Gansey, coming up behind her. "I did pack a dinner. There's a quiche."
"Did you pack yogurt?"
"...No."
"Then you didn't pack a dinner. You packed a first course." She put the cups on the counter. The boy with the comic book rang them up without looking. "Spoons?"
He pushed a box of plastic ones across.
Gansey paid. He tried to pay with a fifty, and the boy looked at it as if it were a foreign coin. Blue found two dollars and a quarter in her skirt pocket.
They walked back along the shoulder in the last of the light, with the basket between them, each holding a strap.
They ate on the hood of the car.
It was Blue's idea. The metal was still warm from the engine. It sloped just enough to lean back on, with your feet on the bumper and the windshield behind you. She spread the blanket on it. She opened the basket.
He had brought a quiche. He had brought strawberries in a glass dish with a lid, and a wedge of cheese in wax paper, and a little loaf of bread, and a bottle of something sparkling that turned out to be cider. There were cloth napkins. There were two real forks.
At the bottom was a jar with holes punched in the lid.
"What's this for?"
"Ah," said Gansey. "That was for the spot."
He had gone quiet again. He was sitting with his knees up and a strawberry in his hand that he wasn't eating. The polite face was back.
Blue put the jar down.
"Tell me about it," she said.
"It hardly matters now."
"Gansey. Tell me about the stupid spot."
He turned the strawberry over.
"It's a field," he said. "That's all it is. I found it in March, when I was walking the line out toward the county border. It's on a hill. There's an old chimney standing in the middle of it, where a house burned down a hundred years ago. And a stand of trees at the bottom, along a creek." He was looking at the hayfield across the road, not at her. "I went back in May, in the evening. I don't know why. And there were fireflies. I've never seen so many. Thousands. They come up out of the grass by the creek, all at once, just as the sun goes. For about twenty minutes the whole hillside is—it's like standing inside the sky."
He stopped.
"I stood there," he said, "and all I could think was that you ought to be seeing it. I thought that for the whole twenty minutes. I couldn't properly look at it. So I thought, well. I'll bring her."
Blue didn't say anything.
"I wanted to give you one evening that went right," Gansey said. His voice was very even. "That's all. Everything we do is caves and rain and things with teeth. You're always cold and I'm always wrong about the weather. I wanted to plan one thing, for you, and have it work. One ordinary, lovely thing. Like other people have." He laughed, a little. It wasn't a happy one. "And I couldn't even get you there. I've got you a gas station."
He looked down at his own car.
"I should've known better than to trust her. Everyone tells me. Adam's told me a hundred times. It's only that I do love her. I thought, just this once, she'd—"
"Stop," said Blue.+
He stopped.
She was angry. It took her a second to work out who at. It wasn't him. It was whoever had taught him to take that tone about himself, light and reasonable, as though his own disappointment were bad manners.
"Look at me," she said.
He did.
"Do you know what I thought," said Blue, "when the engine quit?"
"That I was an idiot, I expect."
"I thought, oh, good."
Gansey blinked.
"I did. I was so relieved. Because you had a basket. You had a haircut. You had a schedule, you had it down to the minute, for the gods sake! And I was sitting there the whole way thinking, what am I supposed to do with this? What if I'm not impressed enough? What if I get there and I say the wrong thing, or I'm in a bad mood, or there's a bug in my hair, and I ruin it?" She pulled her knees up. "I don't know how to be on a perfect date. I've never been on one. Nobody in my family has. We'd break it."
"Jane—"
"And then your stupid car died. And I knew what to do." She waved at the hood, and the blanket, and the four yogurts. "I'm really good at this. I'm good at when it goes wrong. I've got two dollars and a mile to walk and a bait shop, and I can make a whole night out of that. It's the only kind I know how to have."
She picked up one of the peach cups and peeled the lid back. She stuck a spoon in it. She held it out to him.
"This is the best yogurt there is," Blue said. "I haven't had it since I was twelve. They quit selling it in Henrietta. If your car hadn't died, I wouldn't have found it. So shut up about your spot."
He took the cup.
He looked at it. He looked at her. The polite face had come off. What was under it was younger, and not smooth at all. He looked like he'd been braced for something for an hour and it hadn't come.
"You have to stir it," she said. "The fruit's on the bottom."
Gansey stirred it. He ate a spoonful.
"Good Lord," he said.
"Right?"
"That's extraordinary. Why is that so good? It was next to the worms!"
"That's why."
He laughed. It was a real one. It came all the way up, and his shoulders came down with it. He ate the whole cup. He ate half of the next one. Then they ate the quiche with their fingers, since the forks seemed too formal by then, and drank the cider out of the bottle, passing it back and forth.
The sun went. The sky turned green at the edge, and then a deep soft gblue. The road was empty in both directions.
Blue got her camera out of its case.
She looked at him through it. He was leaning back on the windshield with his sleeves rolled and his hair gone flat on one side. He had cider on his chin and a yogurt spoon in his mouth. Behind him was the long orange hood of the car he loved, and a fence, and the first star.
She was sure.
The shutter clicked. Twenty-three.
"I wasn't ready," said Gansey.
"I know. That's why it'll be good."
"I had a spoon."
"I know." She put the camera in her lap. She was smiling so hard it hurt. "That's the one I'm keeping. That's what you look like."
He took the spoon out. He looked at her for a long moment, in the dusk.
"Blue," he said. He only used it when he meant it.
"What?"
"Turn around."
She turned.
The hayfield across the road was full of lights.
They were coming up out of the grass. First there were a dozen, low down, by the ditch. Then a hundred. Then more than she could count. They rose slowly, blinking, gold-green, and drifted up over the field as far as she could see. There was no chimney, and no creek. It was only some farmer's hay, beside a county road, a mile from a bait shop.
It looked like standing inside the sky.
"Oh," Blue said.
"They're here too," said Gansey. He sounded dazed. "I didn't know. I thought it was only the one place. I thought I'd found the one place."
"It's a field, you dork. They're fields. They've all got them."
"I never looked."
"You were busy finding the perfect one."
"Yes," he said. "I do that, don't I."
She leaned back against the windshield, next to him. Their shoulders touched. After a moment he put his arm around her, carefully, as if she might object. She didn't object. She put her head down on his collarbone, where the blue shirt was open at the neck. He smelled like mint and motor oil and peach.
They watched for a long time.
"I'd still like to take you," he said, into her hair. "To the other one. Sometime."
"Okay."
"In the Suburban."
"No. In this. And we'll bring Adam, and a water pump."
"That's not very romantic."
"It's extremely romantic. That's how you get a girl there." She tipped her face up. "You can catch me one, though. You brought the jar."
He caught her one. It took him six tries. He went over the fence and chased them through the hay with the jar held out in front of him. She laughed so hard that she nearly fell off the car. She got a picture of that, too. Twenty-two.
He came back with a single firefly, and grass stains to the knee, and such a look of triumph that she had to kiss him.
It was a good one. He set the jar down on the hood first, so as to have both hands. The cider bottle rolled off the bumper. Neither of them went after it.
The headlights came over the hill at a quarter to eleven.
They were low and wide and going much too fast. The BMW pulled in behind the Pig in a spray of gravel. Both doors opened.
"Gross," said Ronan.
Blue took her hand out of Gansey's hair. She didn't hurry.
Ronan was standing in the beams with his arms folded. He looked like he'd been through a hedge. There was plaster dust all over his head and shoulders, and a long scratch down one cheek. He was wearing one boot. On the other foot was a sock, and the sock had been chewed.
"You're on the hood," he said. "With a picnic. There's a blanket. Is that a firefly? I'm going to be sick. I spent three hours getting bit by a thing with nine knees, and you two are out here doing this."
"Did you get them both?" Gansey asked, with real interest.
"There were four."
"Four!"
"Parrish got the last one in a stockpot. It's in the trunk. Don't open the trunk."
Adam came around the front of the BMW with a toolbox in one hand and a flashlight in the other. He was dusty too. His sleeve was torn off at the elbow. He looked over the scene on the hood, the basket and the yogurt cups and the two of them, flushed and rumpled, and the jar blinking gently between them.
His tired face went soft.
"Looks like it went all right," he said.
"It broke down sixteen miles short," said Blue.
"That's about right for her." He patted the Camaro's fender on his way by, the way you would a horse. He put his head under the hood and shone the light around. He was in there about ten seconds. "Yeah. It's a hose. Clamp's rusted through. Gansey, you jiggled something, didn't you?"
"Several things."
"I can tell. Give me fifteen minutes."
"Adam," said Gansey, with feeling, "you are a prince among men."
Ronan scowled.
Adam deadpanned. "I know it. Hold the light."
Gansey slid off the hood to hold the light. Ronan came and leaned on the fender where he'd been. He looked into the basket. He found the last peach yogurt, peeled it, and drank it straight from the cup like a shot.
"That's good," he said, surprised.
"You have to stir it."
"I don't have to do shit." He wiped his mouth. He looked sideways at Blue, at her hair coming down and the grass on her skirt. Then he looked at Adam bent under the hood, humming, with a firefly on his shoulder that he hadn't noticed.
"He was gonna take you to the chimney field," Ronan said, low. "He's been on about it since March. He made me go look at it. He wanted to know if I thought you'd like it."
"What did you tell him?"
"I said you'd like it better if something went wrong." He shrugged. "Was I right?"
Blue thought about it.
"Shut up," she said.
Ronan grinned, all teeth. He stole a strawberry.
She picked up her camera. She had twenty-two exposures left. She'd been saving them, the way she saved everything.
She took one of the two boys under the hood, heads together, in the flashlight. She took one of Ronan with one boot on and his mouth full, giving her the finger. She took one of the jar.
She'd find the money to develop them.