There was no easy way to establish that Henry was not her boyfriend, and moreover, it seemed somewhat pointless in light of the fact that her secret boyfriend was only slightly less overwhelmingly Aglionby than the specimen currently in front of her.

Blue was filled with the uncomfortable certainty that she probably needed to label the stack BLUE SARGENT IS A HYPOCRITE in her own handwriting.

She stomped over to the passenger window.

“Don’t blow him here, Sargent!” someone shouted. “Make him get you steak first!”

Henry smiled sunnily. “Ho! The natives are restless. Hello, my people! Don’t worry, I’ll establish a higher minimum wage for you all!” Looking back at Blue, or at least turning his sunglasses towards her, he said, “Hi, hi, Sargent.”

“What are you doing here!” Blue demanded. She was feeling – she wasn’t sure. She was feeling a lot.

“I’m here to talk about the men in your life. To talk about the men in my life. I like the dress, by the way. Very boho chic or whatever. I was on my way home, and I wanted to find out if you had a good time at the toga party and also make sure that our plans for Zimbabwe were still on. I see you tried to claw your own eye out; it’s edgy.”

“I thought … I guess … it was Venezuela.”

“Oh, right, we’ll do that on the way.”

“God,” she said.

Henry inclined his head in humble acknowledgement.

“Graduation breathes on us, redneck lady,” he said. “Now is the time to make sure we have the strings to all the balloons we want to keep before they all float away.”

Blue looked at him cannily. It would have been easy to reply that she was not floating anywhere, that this balloon was going to slowly lose its helium and sink to the floor in the same place it had been born, but she thought of her mother’s predictions for her and didn’t. Instead she thought of how she wanted to travel to Venezuela and so did Henry Cheng, and that meant something in this minute, even if it didn’t mean something next week.

A thought occurred to her. “I don’t have to remind you I’m with Gansey, right?”

“Naturally not. I’m Henrysexual, anyway. Can I take you home?”

Stay away from Aglionby boys, because they are bastards.

Blue said, “I can’t get in this car. Do you see what’s happening behind me? I don’t even want to look.”

Henry said, “How about you give me the finger and shout at me now and withdraw with your principles?” He smiled winningly and held up three fingers. He counted to two with devil horns.

“This is incredibly unnecessary,” Blue told him, but she could feel herself smiling.

“Life’s a show,” he replied. He counted one with his middle finger, and then his face melted into exaggerated shock.

Blue shouted, “Drop dead, you bastard!”

“FINE!” Henry screamed back, with slightly more hysteria than the role required. He attempted to squeal out of the lot, stopped to take off the parking brake, and then limped out more sedately.

She had not even had time to turn to see the results of their play in three parts before she heard a very familiar rumble. Oh no –

But sure enough, before she could live down her last visitor, a bright orange Camaro pulled up to the kerb in front of her. The engine was bucking a little bit; it was not quite as happy to be alive as the vehicle that had previously occupied the fire lane, but it was doing its best. It was also just as obviously an Aglionby car holding an Aglionby boy as the one that had just left.

Before, Blue had had half of the bus line’s attention. Now she had all of it.

Gansey leaned across the passenger seat. Unlike Henry, he at least had the good grace to acknowledge the school’s attention with a grimace. “Jane, I’m sorry this couldn’t wait. But Ronan just called me.”

“He called you?”

“Yes. He wants us. Can you come?”

The letters BLUE SARGENT IS A HYPOCRITE were most certainly scrawled in her own handwriting. She felt she had some self-examination to do later.

There was relative silence.

The self-examination was happening now.

“Stupid raven boys,” she said, and got in the car.

No one could quite believe that Ronan had used his phone.

Ronan Lynch had many habits that irritated his friends and loved ones – swearing, drinking, street-racing – but the one that maddened his acquaintances the most was his inability to answer phone calls or send texts. When Adam had first met Ronan, he had found Ronan’s aversion to the fancy phone so complete that he assumed there must have been a story behind it. Some reason why, even in the press of an emergency, Ronan’s first response was to hand his phone to someone else. Now that Adam knew him better, he realized it had more to do with a phone not allowing for any posturing. Ninety per cent of how Ronan conveyed his feelings was through his body language, and a phone simply didn’t care.

And yet he’d used it. While waiting for Declan to be done with Ronan, Adam had gone to Boyd’s to get a few oil changes out of the way. He’d been there a few hours when Ronan had called. Then Ronan had texted Gansey and called Fox Way. He said the same thing to each of them: Come to the Barns, he’d said. We need to talk.

And because Ronan had never really asked them to do anything by phone, they all dropped everything to go.

By the time Adam got to the Barns, the others had already arrived – or at least the Camaro was there, and Adam assumed Gansey would have brought Blue, especially now that their secret was out. Ronan’s BMW was parked sideways with the wheels jacked in a way that suggested it had slid into its current position. And to Adam’s astonishment, Declan’s Volvo was also parked there, backed into a spot, already ready to leave.

Adam got out.

The Barns had a strange effect on Adam. He had not known how to diagnose this feeling the first few times he had visited, because he had not truly believed in the two things that the Barns was made of: magic and love. Now that he had at least a passing acquaintance with both of those things, it affected him in a different way. He used to wonder what he would have looked like if he had grown up in a place like this. Now he thought about how, if he wanted it, he could one day live in a place like this. He did not quite understand what had changed.

Inside, he found the others in various states of celebration. It took Adam a moment to realize that this was Ronan’s birthday: The grill smoked out back and there were store-bought cupcakes on the kitchen table and a few inflated balloons rolling around the corners of the room. Blue was sitting on the tiles tying strings on to balloons, her bad eye squinted shut, while Gansey and Declan stood by the counter, heads lowered, talking in low, serious voices that made them seem older than they were. Ronan and Matthew jostled into the kitchen from the backyard. They were noisy and brotherly, horsing around, impossibly physical. Was this what it was to have brothers?