Eve Week #2
Eve tends to think of her life as a story. It’s how she gets things to make sense, it’s how she gets things to hurt less. If she can cast herself as an unlikely hero and see everything she has to endure as struggles appropriate to such a character, it makes it all survivable. This is just one part of the tale, and the next chapter will look very, very different. In the next chapter, she’ll be living far away from Henrietta. She will speak easily without a trace of her old accent. There are so many things that she wants that it’s hard to categorize or prioritize them. An apartment that makes people jealous. A good education. A better job. Enough money that she won’t have to mentally add up the prices of everything she puts in her cart and the grocery store to be sure she has enough with her to cover the total. But when it comes right down to it, what she wants is simple. She wants to get up in the morning and decide what she’s going to do with her day. She wants choices. It’s taken work to establish with Gansey that Eve is not there at her beck and call, that she comes when she wants to and doesn’t otherwise, because Gansey relies on routines. If Eve gets into the habit of coming to Monmouth whenever Gansey wants her there, Gansey will begin to assume that she’ll show up no matter what. Eve doesn’t want that.
Increasingly, she feels that none of her time is her own. If she isn’t at school, she’s at work or with Gansey and Ronan and Leah and Blue. In a way it’s good, because it keeps her out of the house, and she needs to be out of the house. All the same, she could use a little time alone. So she finds herself making time, leaving early and biking to Aglionby a good half hour before school starts, sometimes riding around the town, sometimes sitting quietly on one of the benches in the main courtyard of the school, sometimes finding some new and undiscovered spot to haunt, a gawkish girl without a smile for anyone who might pass by. It means she has less time to sleep, but she finds herself in this one instance unwilling to be pragmatic. This, too, is a sort of need, if not a physical one. A need for solitude and independence, a need to spend some part of the day doing what she wants to do, even if it’s entirely unproductive. Especially if it’s entirely unproductive.
She thinks of Ronan, whose leisure is boundless and therefore pointless. Ronan never really has to be anywhere. She’s supposed to do many things, but she rarely does any of them. She skips school and homework and tennis practice, doesn’t reply to her brother’s phone calls, regularly fails to come along on Glyndower trips because she’s too busy sulking in her room. What she does is always by choice, and for this Eve envies her and her envy is a terrible, uncontrollable creature that often makes her dislike Ronan if she’s not already disliking her for her rudeness and hostility. Choice means nothing to Ronan, because she’s never been without it, and everything to Eve, because she’s never had it.
Aglionby had been a choice, though. A choice she’d had to fight tooth and nail to be allowed to make, but one she had finally secured after working at it furiously for a year, finding time between classes to write the admissions essays, finding extra jobs to scrounge up the application fee, the deposit, the monthly tuition bills. She doesn’t like the fact that in many ways, she’d picked Aglionby out of spite, because she was so sick of seeing everything the raven girls had that she didn’t, sick of the impenetrable wall between herself and them. A wall which hadn’t come crashing down just because she’d gotten in -- one she’d had to keep chipping away at until she met Gansey and everything had changed. When she thinks about it, she considers the day the two of them had become friends as the day she’d actually become a raven girl, and that was long after she’d had her first day at the academy. And to be friends with Ronan was an even stranger thing than to be friends with Gansey, because it was Ronan -- or a girl with a car like Ronan’s -- who had pushed her over the edge and made her decide to apply.
She’d been riding her bike home from work, exhausted, her jeans dirty, miserable as she pedaled through the rain, when a black BMW drove by her, splashing her with water. She’d been completely drenched and pissed off and as she watched the car drive away, she’d seen an Aglionby bumper sticker on the back. That night, she’d decided that she would go to that school, that she would be one of those girls. How she’d ended up friends with a girl who owned a black BMW, she wasn’t entirely sure, though she knew it couldn’t have been Ronan herself, who wasn’t old enough at the time to have a license.
But getting into Aglionby hadn’t been enough. Eve still wants so much. She still wants to be able to drive home in a car and not be restricted to places she can get to on her bike. She still wants to be able to dedicate more time to her school work instead of spending all her energy making enough money to stay in school. She wants, most of all, to be out of Henrietta. Sometimes she thinks about what this will mean for her and her friends. Ronan will never leave this place, and Blue will never be able to stay in one place. It’s difficult to say where Gansey will end up. Somehow, it’s difficult to imagine a future Gansey, one driven by something other than the search for Glyndower. One way or another, it doesn’t seem likely that any of them will be near her, and the idea of a life without them is unspeakably lonely. So when Eve tells herself the story of her life, she doesn’t think about people. She doesn’t think about where any of the others will be. When she finds herself in need of distraction, she thinks of what she wants, not what she’ll lose along the way, and she tries not to let it keep her up at night.