Leah Week #2
This is what Leah remembers about being 16 and alive.
She knows, in some part of her mind, that Whelk isn’t really a good friend. But she knows it in the way that a person can know that their dog isn’t very well behaved or that their mother is a gossip; that is, she knew it with love and even found herself a little endeared by it. One of her sisters will ask why her friend never writes or calls during the vacations, and Leah will laugh a little and will say oh, you know, that’s just Barra. It’s one of her better qualities, she thinks – the ease with which she forgives the faults of those she loves, and she does her best not to think about that fact that at least some part of it is cowardice, an unwillingness to face the fear that if she doesn’t accept what little love is given to her for free, she’ll never have any at all.
Her grades are mediocre, but she doesn’t care. It’s good enough for her lenient parents, will be good enough, she thinks, for the second-tier colleges she wants to go to. She’ll graduate from Aglionby and she doesn’t really need credentials other than that. It’s not like she’s ever had big dreams. All she really wants is a job that doesn’t make her miserable and gets her enough money for groceries and rent. There is in her no longing for prestige or magic, she isn’t like Whelk. But like so many without ambition, she is magnetically attracted to those with an excess of it, as though they might balance each other out. It doesn’t really work like that.
She remembers feelings like warmth, a full stomach, waking up after a good night’s sleep, trivial things that she misses to the point of tears. She finds ways of mimicking them: pressing close to Ronan or Blue, lying all night in her bed with her eyes closed, zoning in and out, but the memory remains too sharp for these to be entirely satisfying.
The only things worse that what she remembers are the things she’s forgotten.
She can’t remember the sound of her mother’s voice or why she’d bought that red Mustang or exactly who she was when she wasn’t dead. While she remembers that she used to get butterflies in her stomach when Whelk touched her, she can’t remember what the actual sensation was like. She thinks Ronan must love Gansey the way she’d loved Whelk, so she tried asking her once but Ronan had just gotten pissed and walked away. She can’t remember not being scared.
It’s been seven years, and the more time goes by, the more she holds onto things that haven’t changed. It’s why she likes to lie on the roof of Monmouth at night and look at the stars, their places according to the seasons as familiar as they always have been. She meets Gansey up there one night. Gansey had apparently been expecting to be alone, because when she sees Leah she almost turns and goes back inside, but when she realizes that Leah has already noticed her, she stays and comes to lie next to her without saying a word. After a while Leah says, “You don’t come up here often, huh?”
Gansey shakes her head, then clears her throat before speaking. “Usually when I can’t sleep I stay downstairs and work on my model Henrietta. Being outside at night makes me feel –” She stops, clears her throat again. “Ronan’s damn bird is making a truly unholy racket down there, I couldn’t stand the noise of it. I was actually sleeping before it started up.”
Leah cringes. “I can’t wait until it’s old enough to be a little quieter.”
“Yeah,” Gansey says, and they lapse into silence a while longer. Then Gansey says, “I think it’s good for Ronan, though. Having something to look after.”
“You’d know all about that,” Leah says, and out of her peripheral vision she sees Gansey turn sharply to look at her, but she keeps her eyes fixed on the sky, and doesn’t elaborate. Gansey doesn’t ask what she means by it. Leah thinks that maybe nighttime Gansey is wiser than the daytime version of herself.
“I like looking at the stars,” Gansey says. “I should do it more often. I like looking at things that will always be there.”
“I like looking at things that have always been there,” Leah says, and Gansey laughs a little, sadly, and they both know why though they don’t say it.
“It’s not true though,” Gansey says. “They’re not permanent, any more than we are. But their lifespans seem to us so vast that we call them eternal.”
“The others,” Leah says. “They don’t like it when you talk like that.”
Gansey laughs again, a hollow sound. “I don’t think they like it when I talk at all.”
“I like it,” Leah says, and she glances at Gansey to see her lips quirk a little. In the silence that follows, Leah knows without hearing or seeing that Gansey is crying. There’s a miserable tug at her gut and she thinks how funny they are, two dead girls stargazing on a pretty spring night. Two dead girls, for all intents and purposes. She wonders if she should feel bitter about Glyndower’s bargain, the trade of her life for Gansey’s. Maybe she should, but she doesn’t and can’t. All she feels is sorry that Gansey will be gone too, and soon. She doesn’t want Gansey to have to feel the way she feels. Reaching out, she takes Gansey’s hand, and she lies. “Hey,” she says. “It’s gonna be okay. You’re gonna be okay.”
She can’t bring herself to contradict Gansey’s hushed, “No, I won’t.” Instead, she just squeezes Gansey’s warm hand and hopes that it’s enough and knows that it isn’t. She was wrong, she thinks, when she’d thought that Gansey was like Whelk. They should have been the same, but they aren’t, and she loves Gansey for that fiercely.
After a while she says, “Maybe not, but you’re gonna be okay tonight.” Gansey doesn’t reply, but Leah decides that she believes it enough for both of them.