Call Down the Hawk

Ronan was dreaming of Bryde’s voice, but he was also dreaming of Lindenmere.

Lindenmere, Lindenmere.

It was a name out of a poem that had never existed. It didn’t sound dangerous.

Lindenmere, Lindenmere. It was a forest, or rather, it was a thing that was forest-shaped for now. Ronan had an idea that it had existed somewhere else for a very long time, and only now whispered its way into the world this time in the shape of a forest. It knew him, and he knew it, insofar that they could be known, both of them full of mysteries, even to themselves.

He was in love with it, and it with him.

Do you understand? For you, reality is not an external condition. For you, reality is a decision.

The room was a compelling contemporary painting, a textural experiment of disembodied crab legs, bright liquid guts, and a little bit of Adam’s and Ronan’s blood. It was beginning to stink of exhaust.

Fletcher’s eyes roved over all this. His eyes landed on Ronan’s makeshift lance.

“My flag,” Fletcher said.

Adam shut the door hurriedly behind him.

“The walls,” Fletcher said.

The crab guts were peeling the paint off them and the hoverboard had left several large dents in the plaster.

“The beds,” Fletcher said.

The sheets were torn and ruined.

“The window,” Fletcher said.

One of the panes had somehow gotten broken.

“A motorcycle,” Fletcher said.

“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.

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.

“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.”

“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.

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.

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.

Adam Parrish.

This was how it had begun: Ronan had been in the passenger seat of Richard Campbell Gansey III’s bright orange ’73 Camaro, hanging out the window because walls couldn’t hold him. Little historic Henrietta, Virginia, curled close, trees and streetlights alike leaning in as if to catch the conversation down below. What a pair the two of them were. Gansey, searching desperately for meaning, Ronan, sure that he wouldn’t find any. Voted most and least likely to succeed, respectively, at Aglionby Academy, their shared high school. Those days, Gansey was the hunter and Ronan the hawkish best friend kept hooded and belled to prevent him tearing himself to shreds with his own talons.

This was how it had begun: a student walking his bike up the last hill into town, clearly headed the same place they were. He wore the Aglionby uniform, although as they grew closer Ronan saw it was threadbare in a way school uniforms couldn’t manage in a single year’s use—secondhand. His sleeves were pushed up and his forearms were wiry, the thin muscles picked out in stark relief. Ronan’s attention stuck on his hands. Lovely boyish hands with prominent knuckles, gaunt and long like his unfamiliar face.

“Who’s that?” Gansey had asked, and Ronan hadn’t answered, just kept hanging out the window. As they passed, Adam’s expression was all contradictions: intense and wary, resigned and resilient, defeated and defiant.

Ronan hadn’t known anything about who Adam was then and, if possible, he’d known even less about who he himself was, but as they drove away from the boy with the bicycle, this was how it had begun: Ronan leaning back against his seat and closing his eyes and sending up a simple, inexplicable, desperate prayer to God:

Please.