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The veil between words was thin at special times, at special places. Usually only so thin as to provide a hint of something beyond -- whispers that came from nowhere, bumps in the night, possessions moved to different places in the house.
Sometimes, if you paid the right kind of attention, were the right type of person, and was in the right kind of place, you could find and identify such types of liminal spaces.
Ronan Lynch was the right kind of person.
He laid in his bed awake, under covers, log stiff, feigning sleep as he waited for his family to go to sleep and for the night to grow dark. Not any kind of dark. The darkest kind of dark, when the the little spot of the world he claimed as his own was the furthest away from the sun.
Midnight.
Or, a few minutes of.
When that time came Ronan slipped out of bed and over to his window. He slide it open. All the creaks and groans from it were gone from regular use. He was only two stories up, and right below his window was a little slate of roof that covered a downstairs reading nook. It was easy to drop down to the that, and then from that to the ground.
He had a bag with a flashlight stowed away in the bushes there. With it, he navigated around the cow pasture, past the supply shed, and into the woods just deep enough to find the tiny little stream that weaved through it. At a particular curve in its course Ronan stopped, sat down crossed legged in the dirt, and waited.
Ronan Lynch was thirteen years old and he still believed in miracles.
“Hey,” said a quiet voice, like a hint of the wind.
Ronan turned his head. Adam had appeared seated beside him, just like every midnight Ronan made it here.
Like every appearance, Adam looked like a reflection in glass. To follow that metaphor though, he was just as untouchable as well. They had tried. What Ronan had expected -- that Adam would be intangible as smoke -- wasn’t the case. Instead it was like barrier existed between them, gone as soon as Adam was gone.
“Hey,” Ronan replied back, a little like he had just run here.
Adam sat cross-legged in a reflection of Ronan, but always with his shoulders concaved over.
Ronan fiddled with the end of his loose shoelaces. They had been meeting every night so far this summer. It was an accidental finding that started this. Ronan had “run away” in a half-conceived fit of pique. That afternoon he had a fight with his older brother which was particularly painful because his older brother was like his best friend, and then Mom had taken his brother’s side, and the betrayal had been complete. What the fight had been about was now lost in the disinterested part of Ronan’s memory, because when he had determined himself able to live in the woods here, all plans and negativitives were swept away when he ran across what had looked like a ghost boy sitting by the stream.
“Do you ever think about how this is possible?” Adam asked, right now.
“I’m just coming out into the woods,” Ronan said. “I don’t know how you’re possible.”
“I’m in my bedroom,... but I don’t want to be there. So, I’m here. Halfway.”
“That doesn’t make any damn sense.” This was the summer Ronan had decided to try out swearing. He was enjoying it so far.
Adam shrugged once, wincing, like the shift of his muscles were painful. Ronan wondered if that meant he was hiding a bruise. Sometimes he had bruises in places that couldn’t be hidden. Some nights he didn’t show up at all.
“Do you think…” Adam started, but his words died off.
Ronan Lynch, the middle of three brothers, was used to speaking up, speaking over, speaking louder to be heard amongst the usual rabble of his household. He had learned with Adam that sometimes he had to just shut up and allow space for his words.
“Do you think... if we met in real life... that we’d be friends?”
“We are friends,” Ronan started.
An owl hooed from somewhere vaguely overheard, and then a leaf-heavy branch rustled from its takeoff.
“In real life,” Adam said. “I don’t have friends.” Before Ronan could interject, Adam plowed on. “In real life, I don’t think you’d like me.”
“Bullshit,” Ronan said. “This is real life.”
“This…” Adam said, meaning his state of currently being and however he was managing to be right here in the woods while he wasn’t in the woods. “Is the only interesting thing about me.”
Ronan heartily disagreed. He found many things about Adam interesting and only one of them was the fact that his presence in the woods by the stream at midnight was supernatural. He liked that Adam laughed at the same jokes as him; and even told some too when he was in his better moods. He liked that Adam listened completely to what Ronan said before responding, because being in a big family means he wasn’t always completely heard and also because he find putting a lot of things into words hard and wasn’t worth it unless someone was willing to listen. He liked that Adam was smart. He read a lot of books -- a lot more than Ronan -- and paid attention in whatever school he went to -- also a lot more than Ronan -- so he had a whole storehouse of facts up in his brain to share on lots of different topics. He liked that Adam made them something interesting.
He also found Adam interesting to look at: the color of his eyes, the slope of his nose, the length of his fingers, the wire of his mouth.
But Ronan, who had trouble putting thoughts and emotions into sentences, ran out of time. Adam had begun to fade.
They only ever got a handful of minutes each night. Some lucky nights -- which Ronan speculated had to do with the phase of the moon and/but/also/or the presence of holy days -- their time stretched, sometimes to almost three quarters of an hour. Tonight was not a lucky night, and Ronan didn’t have a chance to tell Adam all the ways he was wrong.
#
“Ronan has an imaginary friend,” Declan chanted, loudly, in the foyer as he stepped inside from the porch, Ronan stomping in red-faced after him. “Ronan has an imaginary friend. Ronan has a --”
“Shut up!” Ronan yelled, louder.
He didn’t know how Declan had found out, or what exactly he had seen, or heard, but when he had asked Ronan just moments ago who he was meeting in the woods every night, Ronan had given the most incriminating answer, a stuttering, “What? I don’t know.”
They always found some way to rib at each other. Brothers that close in age always would, but Declan had discovered a spot more sensitive than he knew, because Adam was a secret, Adam was real, and Adam was Ronan’s.
“What’s all this about?” Dad stepped out from the kitchen into the hall. Both of the brothers had been so caught up in their squabble on their pursuit inside that neither had noted Dad’s car in the driveway. Their fight was momentarily paused as they ran to him, excited to see him after an especially long business trip. Niall Lynch ruffled Ronan’s particular mop of curls.
“Now what’s all this yelling?”
Declan was interrogated first, which was good because it revealed how little was actually in his hand of knowledge. He knew Ronan was sneaking out, but he didn’t know what he had been sneaking out for. ‘Who’ had been a proding guess and Ronan had reacted, giving him an answer.
When Niall turned his gaze on Ronan, indicating it was his time to spill, Ronan decided not to make the same mistake twice. He kept his mouth shut.
Niall sighed. It wasn’t a loud, or noticeable, or exaggerated sigh. Just a long, drawn breath. He hooked his hand around Ronan’s upper arm and lead him to the privacy of the his den. No one was allowed in there without permission.
He sat Ronan down in the big, impossibly comfortable armchair in there. Which made Ronan equally comfortable and guilty for lying by omission.
“Now,” Niall said, pulling up the ottoman as a little stool and sitting himself down across from Ronan, perfectly at his eye level. “Tell me what’s going on.”
Ronan, who didn’t lie, spilled all.
Niall listened, quiet, and nodded, a little wrinkle of his thought on his brow. Once Ronan finished, he remained quiet for a little longer.
Then, sitting up a little straighter in a way that made him a little taller, he said, “Ronan -- It’s time we had an important conversation.”
And like a father would usually give his son on the curve of adolescents, Niall told Ronan the truth of their shared existence. That they were dreamers. No, not anyone else in the family. Just them. It sounded very much to Niall’s own ear that this phantom-vision friend Ronan had found was likely a concoction of his own dreams.
“You mean he isn’t real?”
“Oh on,” Niall said. “For you and me a dream we bring with us can be very real.”
But Ronan felt betrayed. Adam had been his friend. Being one of three brothers, he was used to sharing everything. Adam had been his alone. Adam had liked him not because he had to, but because he just did. But if Adam was just a figment of his dreams, that wasn’t true anymore. Adam was indeed an imaginary friend.
Deep lava descended into his gut.
A week and a half later, Niall made a declarative announcement that the time for the boys’ homeschooling was over and that they’d start attending real school at the start of September.
Ronan didn’t return to the stream again.
#
And so life passed, and tragedy struck the heart of the Lynch family. And so Ronan grew older, and angrier, and sadder. And so he went to school even though he hated it. Hated have a rigid schedule, to sit still and at attention, to not learn about the animals on the farm, or way things grew. And so one person who had been a best friend was now the big enemy. And so he wasn’t the same.
He was sixteen years old, and he believed in God and he knew that he could bring things out of his dreams although they weren’t all good things. Miracles, though, he had a hard time in believing.
#
Ronan Lynch slinked into his Latin class twenty-three minutes late on his second day of sophomore year, banging the door shut behind him as an accent to his entry.
“Ronan Lynch,” drawled that shiftface, Mr. Whelk, from the front of the classroom. “Thank you for finally gracing us with your presence.”
Ronan scowled, fiercely, but a pleading look from Gansey from the center column of desks made Ronan suppress any of his verbal feelings on the matter. It wouldn’t do well to earn a suspension the first week of the school year by calling the shitfaceiest teacher in the school a shitface to his face.
Beelining with destined determination, he plopped down in the empty desk seat directly behind Gansey. Even though he had not been present when class started, the study body had been smart enough to leave his usual seat empty.
The boy sitting in front of Gansey turned around -- just enough -- in his seat to spy at Ronan over his shoulder. Ronan’s scowl grew more vicious. Like he knew what was good for him, the boy turned back around front. For the rest fo the period, he sat, head bowed as he focused on scribbling down notes. First hint of the bell, Ronan was out of his seat and moving, ahead of all others of his classmates, into the hall.
#
Ronan stormed through the halls, in the opposite direction of his locker, Gansey’s, and the classroom he was supposed to get to next. The beginning of the school year was particularly restrictive -- these halls, this tie, all the modulated schedule -- after the freedom of summer. He couldn’t stand anyone right now, even his best friend.
The bell rang warning for the next class; the halls began thinning of people. Everyone in the student population of Aglionby knew he was too dangerous to bother.
Except for the one very unwise kid who had just came behind him and said his name, all inquisitive.
“Ronan?”
Turning, Ronan started to say, “The fu--” but then --
It was Adam. Older. Taller. Like he had been stretched upward on the Y axis exclusively. He had always been on the thinner side, but with no millimeter of baby fat left on him or his face, he looked sharper. In contrast. Of course that was helped along by the fact he was tangible and real, standing in the halls of Aglionby Academy right in front of Ronan’s face.
“Do you want to go somewhere to talk?” he said.
Ronan stared for a little while longer, then nodded once -- a jut of the chin.
Ronan lead Adam to a perpetually empty classroom he knew about because sometimes when he wanted to get away from the student population, or the teachers, or just a particular class but wasn’t ready to commit to the leaving campus for the day type of hooky, he planted himself in here. It was set up like a typical classroom with lined up desk, and the windows were big enough and let in enough sun to not require turning on the lights. No lights equalled people were less likely to look for you there.
“You look a lot different,” Adam said, the first to speak, sitting on one of the desktops.
“I am different,” Ronan replied. Ronan paced the front of the room, back and forth, like a shark -- unable to stop moving.
The hair shaved, the tattoo edging up over the collar of his uniform shirt, the attitude. At thirteen he had still been the part of a loving family. At thirteen he hadn’t found his father’s murdered body outside his home on the worst morning of his life.
Adam said, “You stopped coming.”
“I didn’t think you were real,” Ronan replied.
“I’m real.” Adam knocked his knuckles on the desktop, as if to prove his tangibility. “If you didn’t think I was real, what did you think I was?”
Ronan paused for a step. “A dream.”
Except that logic didn’t hold up anymore. It didn’t hold up even before Adam had decided to show up in the flesh today. He knew more about how he brought things out of his dreams now than he had as a child, and how Adam had appeared as an apparition in the forest didn’t fit. For so long now, though, he had leaned on that explanation, and because he hadn’t known any other way for impossible things to happen.
“Sometimes I thought you were just something I made up in my head too,” Adam said. His eyes were following Ronan back and forth across the floor. His shoulders were hunched, just as Ronan remembered them.
He also remembered one of the last conversations they had, on one of the last nights they meet up. Adam confiding in him, saying that outside of Ronan’s companionship he was friendless, that he didn’t even think Ronan would want to be his friend really. And then Ronan had stopped showing up.
He knew what it was like when the things you loved betrayed you. Ronan hadn’t ever thought he’d be the one doing the betraying.
Ronan didn’t know how to put words to an apology, or words to any of the things he hadn’t gotten to say that night all those years ago, and couldn’t even more say now. Now, with age and perspective, he knew what he hadn’t then. That some of what pulled him so eagerly toward Adam every night -- and made the betrayal of his supposed imaginariness so sharp -- was that Ronan had harbored a crush on him.
The silence was getting awkward.
“How did you do it?” Ronan forced out. He was curious, but he mostly picked this question because it was the farthest from his heart.
“This is going to sound weird,” Adam said.
“I can deal with weird.”
“I’m psychic.”
Ronan’s brow furrowed. “My knee jerk reaction is to say bullshit.”
Adam ducked his head in a nod as if to say, ‘That’s fair.’
“But…” He had seen Adam there every night for weeks. And Ronan had admit he was a weird, bullshit thing himself. “Keep talking. Explain more.”
So Adam did explain, about sitting in the darkness of his bed at night, wanting to be anywhere else but where he was. The first time had been an accident. He had a glass of water and he had just been staring so intently, lost so much in thought, and so he had gone unbidden. The nights after, he did it on purpose, and then he met Ronan.
“It was a form a scrying. Astral projection. I didn’t know what that was yet. What I was yet.”
“I don’t fucking know what that is,” Ronan said.
Adam looked like he was contemplating explaining and then didn’t, just shrugging a single shoulder instead.
“Do you believe me?” Adam asked, and for all his effort at an even tone, Ronan heard the uncertainty. Because Ronan knew Adam. Because for a few minutes a night, for a stretch of the summer, they had been close friends.
“I guess I kinda have to,” Ronan said, and then because that wasn’t exactly accurate, and he didn’t lie, he amended, “I believe you.”
Adam nodded once, but he was avoiding Ronan’s eye. Avoiding in expertly looking in his direction, but just a little off to the side, over and past Ronan’s shoulder.
“What now?” Adam said. “I mean, turns out we’re both real. And we’re both here.”
Here, in the same place. The same town. The same school. The same room.
Ronan hadn’t let himself hope. For a dreamer, he didn’t let himself hope for much. Reality was cruel, but it was also the confines that had to be lived in.
Maybe he didn’t hope, but he could believe.
“I remember you said that you didn’t think we’d be friends in real life.”
Adam’s fingers twitched. He kept his voice at his careful level: “Yeah.”
The school bell rang, echoing in the empty box of a classroom. Ronan pointed upward. “That’s lunch.” He took a step toward the door. “You coming?”
Adam was frozen on the desk, then he nodded and slide off.
He was solid and real, walking by his side to lunch and whatever would happen after that and after that and after that.
Ronan’s life was still his life, with all its scars and bruises, but for right now he felt a little lighter.
He elbowed Adam. “You’ll probably regret it at some point, but too bad, loser. You’re stuck with me.”