188
" Back in Henrietta, night proceeded.
Richard Gansey was failing to sleep. When he closed his eyes: Blue’s hands, his voice, black bleeding from a tree. It was starting, starting. No. It was ending. He was ending. This was the landscape of his personal apocalypse. What was excitement when he was wakeful melted into dread when he was tired.
He opened his eyes.
He opened Ronan’s door just enough to confirm that Ronan was inside, sleeping with his mouth ajar, headphones blaring, Chainsaw a motionless lump in her cage. Then, leaving him, Gansey drove to the school.
He used his old key code to get into Aglionby’s indoor athletic complex, and then he stripped and swam in the dark pool in the darker room, all sounds strange and hollow at night. He did endless laps as he used to do when he had first come to the school, back when he had been on the rowing team, back when he had sometimes come earlier than even rowing practice to swim. He had nearly forgotten what it felt like to be in the water: It was as if his body didn’t exist; he was just a borderless mind. He pushed himself off a barely visible wall and headed towards the even less visible opposite one, no longer quite able to hold on to his concrete concerns. School, Headmaster Child, even Glendower. He was only this current minute. Why had he given this up? He couldn’t remember even that.
In the dark water he was only Gansey, now. He’d never died, he wasn’t going to die again. He was only Gansey, now, now, only now.
He could not see him, but Noah stood on the edge of the pool and watched. He had been a swimmer himself, once. "
― Maggie Stiefvater , The Raven King (The Raven Cycle, #4)
191
" At school, they were driven, quiet, invisible, model students, Aglionby Academy’s 11-percent-of-our-student-body-is-diverse-click-the-link-to-find-out-more-about-our-overseas-exchange-programs. Here, they slouched. They would not slouch at school. Here, they were angry. They could not afford to be angry at school. Here, they were loud. They did not trust themselves to be loud at school. "
― Maggie Stiefvater , The Raven King (The Raven Cycle, #4)
193
" Cabeswater gently prodded Adam’s thoughts, calling up a dozen happy memories in the space of the previous year – well, they would have had to be from just the past year, because even Cabeswater would have had a hard time stirring up glad memories in the time before Gansey and Ronan. When Adam still resisted, images of himself flickered through his mind: himself as seen by the others. His private smile, his surprised laugh, his fingers stretched towards the sun. Cabeswater didn’t quite understand humans, but it learned. Happiness, it insisted. Happiness. "
― Maggie Stiefvater , The Raven King (The Raven Cycle, #4)
