“By the time we’re married,” Declan said eventually, “I want you to have applied for a different studio in this place because this man’s paintings are very ugly.”
Her pulse gently skipped two beats before continuing on as before. “I don’t have a social security number of my own, Pozzi.”
“I’ll buy you one,” Declan said. “You can wear it in place of a ring.”
The two of them looked at each other past the canvas on her easel.
Finally, he said, voice soft, “I should see the painting now.”
“Are you sure?”
“It’s time, Jordan.”
Putting his jacket to the side, he stood. He waited. He would not come around to look without an invite.
It’s time, Jordan.
Jordan had never been truly honest with anyone who didn’t wear Hennessy’s face. Showing him this painting, this original, felt like being more honest than she had ever been in her life.
She stepped back to give him room.
Declan took it in. His eyes flicked to and from the likeness, from the jacket on Portrait Declan’s leg to the real jacket he’d left behind on the chair. She watched his gaze follow the live edge she had taken such care to paint, that subtle electricity of complementary colors at the edge of his form.
“It’s very good,” Declan muttered. “Jordan, it’s very good.”
“I thought it might be.”
“I don’t know if it’s a sweetmetal. But you’re very good.”
“I thought I might be.”
“The next one will be even better.”
“I think it might be.”
“And in ten years your scandalous masterpiece will get you thrown out of France, too,” he said. “And later you can triumphantly sell it to the Met. Children will have to write papers about you. People like me will tell stories about you to their dates at museums to make them think they’re interesting.”
She kissed him. He kissed her. And this kiss, too, got all wrapped up in the art-making of the portrait sitting on the easel beside them, getting all mixed in with all the other sights and sounds and feelings that had become part of the process.
It was very good.
Once upon a time, back when they lived in the nation’s capital, Hennessy and Jordan had briefly run something called the Game. The Game began at midnight at the River Road exit on I-495. Not once you’d taken the exit. At it. On the interstate, screaming by it. Bit of a fraught proposition with DC traffic. Underestimate the congestion and the would-be player would end up passing River Road minutes after everyone else had left. Overestimate it and the player showed up too early, hoping they didn’t burn too much time looping around for another approach.
Easy? No. But Hennessy had never been interested in easy.
At midnight, ready-or-not-here-I-come, Hennessy howled by the River Road exit in whatever vehicle she’d taken from the McLean mansion or temporarily lifted, pied pipering a restless parade of horsepower to the location of the game. The other girls—June, etc.—would already be in place, two of them bookending start and finish, the rest stationed at exits. The usual tricks in the bag: police band radio, radar detectors, fourteen keen eyes.
Then they raced. Point to points, drags, drifts, two up, four up, whatever burned at Hennessy that night. Sometimes when it was Hennessy, it was actually Jordan. Sometimes it was both.
The stakes of the Game were always high. Sometimes the prize was drugs. Weapons. The loser’s car. A year’s rent in someone’s really posh second home. Goods too hot to sell on the open market. The drivers, the players, the pawns, they were all of a certain type: twenty- and thirtysomething men who only came alive after dark, usually white and swish enough to be able to survive any traffic infraction that might come their way, all of them driving cars designed to do more than get HOV lane violations. They congregated in forums to discuss the Game, to offer up prizes for the next, to talk smack and measure dicks. At first they were all area marks, but eventually people would come from up and down the 95 corridor in hopes of rolling into the Game.
Hennessy and Jordan usually just moderated the race for a cut of the prizes, but when the girls needed cash or were intrigued by one of the offerings, they raced, too. Hennessy was good at it because she had no fear and no inhibitions. Jordan was better at it because she did. Together they were known as the Valkyrie, although a few of the more observant return players called them the Valkyries.
The Game broke a shit ton of rules.
Hennessy loved it. Or at least she loved that she couldn’t think of anything else while she was doing it.
That was as close as she got to happiness. She thought it was probably the best she could hope for.
“Get in, hurry up, time is a waterfall, and the moment we’re trying to catch is rapidly swimming toward the edge,” Hennessy said.
“Hennessy?” Jordan asked, shocked.
Jordan Hennessy stood on the dark sidewalk near Fenway Studios, her bag slung over her shoulder, looking sleek and urbane with her natural hair pulled back into a high ponytail, slim-shouldered leather jacket, orange crop top, sharp black leggings, subtle chevron-patterned flats.
Jordan Hennessy also sat behind the wheel of a thrumming Toyota Supra on the curb, looking camera-ready with huge hair, deep purple lips, a man’s bomber jacket, a deep purple corset, and heels that seemed difficult to operate a clutch with.
These two Jordan Hennessys shared identical septum rings, identical floral tattoos across their hands. Nearly identical floral tattoos around their throats.
But no one would mistake them for the same person.
“You didn’t call, bruv,” Jordan said.
“In.”
Jordan got in.
She had changed a little since Hennessy had seen her, but not so much that Hennessy couldn’t read her expression. It was a nuanced thing, this expression. Shock was the primary flavor. Then there was a note of relief. And then, just on the back of the tongue, wariness.
All of this was expected. What Hennessy hadn’t expected to see was joy. It had radiated from Jordan before she’d seen Hennessy. She’d been walking the sidewalk in the damned middle of the night with a grin on her face, a grin she kept trying to put away but kept escaping. Somehow Jordan had been living here in Boston away from Hennessy and she had not only been okay, but she’d been so okay that happiness was bursting out of her and she couldn’t stop anyone from being able to see it. Hennessy had been pulling out the Lace and Jordan had been happy.
Hennessy didn’t know what to do with this, so she started to prattle. She prattled as she sent the Supra down the street and Jordan put her bag on the floor by her feet like she always did. She prattled as she sent the Supra onto the highway and Jordan rolled up the window so that the increasing wind would stop beating her hair around. She prattled as they were joined by several other heavily muscled cars in the tunnels under Boston Harbor. She prattled as Jordan eyed the other cars and then put her seat belt on.
“How much notice did you give them?” Jordan asked. She wasn’t stupid. She recognized the Game when she saw it.
“Five hours,” Hennessy said. “On that mad nootropics investment banker Slack—do you remember that one? That means there is a very good chance statistically that one of these drivers is currently totally mashed on some completely unregulated South American plant by-product.”
They burst west out of Boston at a speed several ticks above proper. They had acquired quite a contingent of impressive cars. Flat cars, wide cars, flanking, waiting. The Game was getting ready to whisk Hennessy’s feelings away. It hadn’t yet. But it was going to.
It had to.
She didn’t know what she had wanted out of seeing Jordan again, but not this. Some part of her had always known that if she called, Jordan would be doing okay without her. Knew that if she showed up, Jordan would be doing okay without her. Knew that if there was a way for their lives to be separated, Jordan would be doing okay without her. Knew that it was Hennes
sy who couldn’t live without Jordan.
She supposed she had hoped she was wrong.
As the cars gathered and revved, Jordan asked, “How can we run a Game? There’s no one to guard the exits. They’re all dead.”
“It ruins the fun when you say that, so I’m going to pretend you didn’t,” Hennessy said. “Also, I’ve already thought about that and, as they say, planned accordingly. It’s a straight shot. Starts with a triple flash of the lights and then it’s on for exactly seven miles. No exits in between. If we’re clear when it starts, we should be still by the end. No surprises for us. We’ll have a grand ol’ time.”
“ ‘We.’ Are we racing?”
“Yes.”
“Hennessy,” Jordan said, “there’s a GTR right there. A new nine-one-one behind it. I can’t see that thing two cars back because it’s too damn flat, but my pheromones suggest it’s a McLaren. Are you just planning on watching taillights?”
But she didn’t sound angry; she never sounded angry. She was always up for whatever madness Hennessy was into. Wasn’t this better? Hennessy thought. Wasn’t this how it should have been? Her and Jordan, Hennessy setting that timer on her phone, staying awake for as long as possible, never seeing the Lace.
“We should do this again,” Hennessy said.
“We are doing it again.”
“I mean you-and-me, I mean Jordan Hennessy. You should come with us or I should come light up Boston, except seriously can we do New York instead, because this place is like a hot girl’s elbow pit. It’s fine but there’s not a lot to do.”
“You been sleeping, Heloise?” Jordan asked.
The question was absolutely intolerable. All of it. The content, the timing, the nickname.
“You been painting?” Hennessy countered. “I can’t help but notice some paint on your neck there. Looks like Tyrian purple.” It did not. It looked like ordinary white paint, but Tyrian purple was a better reference to Declan Lynch.
Jordan should have been irritated by Hennessy’s misdirect, but instead her mouth whispered that smile again, the one Hennessy had seen on the sidewalk. She touched her fingers to her neck, feeling the paint, and the sweetness of the touch drove home the meaning of the smile.
She liked that asshole. That boring-ass drone of a prick—she liked him. Hennessy had begged Bryde and Ronan to stop for the Supra, knowing how much Jordan loved it, and here the two of them were on this midnight highway, the Valkyries, surrounded by several million dollars of several thousands of horsepower, and Jordan was smiling over that dough-faced DC pig.
Some part of Hennessy was always looking at that old door without a handle, a keyhole with no key in it.
“Ready-set-go,” Hennessy said.
She flashed her lights. One. Two. Three.
The cars bolted.
As Jordan had predicted, the Supra was nowhere near as fast as the speediest of the contenders. The tight pack swiftly loosened as the fit got fitter and the slow stayed slow.
Jordan petted the dash of the Supra as if to make the car feel better about not leading the pack, and then, in a different sort of voice, she asked, “Did you dream me without memories of Jay?”
The thing about the ley line getting stronger was that Hennessy felt she could see the Lace even with her eyes open sometimes.
“There’s a neat trick we’re going to do up here,” Hennessy said.
Lacy shapes thrown by aftermarket headlights.
“Hennessy.” Jordan drew her back. “Did you?”
Lacy threads of pine needles caught under the Supra’s wiper.
Hennessy went on. “It’s a fancy thing I nicked off Bryde. Fancy little shit. It’s got some fun side effects.”
Lacy shadows crisscrossing behind the streetlights racing by.
“Hennessy—”
Lacy eyelashes blink-blink-blinking. It looked like the patterns her mother’s lamps had thrown across her studio wall.
Rolling the window down, Hennessy scooped the little stolen silver orb out of the door pocket. She rolled it in her palm the way she’d seen Bryde do when he wanted the orb to fly faster than it was being thrown, and then she hurled it into the dark.
For a moment there was no result. Just taillights of cars all about to claim faster times than the Supra.
The little orb zipped ahead of them. It unfolded. The cloud burst free.
And then there was chaos.
The cars spun. One here, one there. They smashed into each other. They nosed into the ditch. A Subaru flipped right over in the air. A Corvette spun and then slid backward nearly as fast as the Supra was going forward. It went for yards and yards. There was a high-pitched noise happening during all of this that keened and keened and keened, and Hennessy could not decide if it was her or Jordan or tires screaming.
There were supercars everywhere, dazzled across the highway. Some nosed into others, the headlights pointed every which way.
“We win,” Hennessy said. She eased the Supra to a stop and pulled up the parking brake.
Jordan was out of the car immediately, hands linked round the back of her neck, surveying the damage. Hennessy could tell she was horrified, and for some reason, this was great, this was perfect, this was just what Hennessy wanted. This felt much better than Jordan’s vague smile, her wild joy.
Hennessy gestured grandly. “The prize is whichever we want. Which one do you fancy?”
Jordan turned to her. “This isn’t a dream!”
“I know,” Hennessy said, “because I could control everything here.”
“Someone could be dead here.” Jordan paced and then jogged across the asphalt, ducking her head to look in at this driver and that. They all gazed at her and past her, expressions swimming.
Hennessy droned, “Asshole dies in a street race, news at eleven.”
“This isn’t a dream!”
“How about the Lambo?” Hennessy asked. “I feel like the Lambo would be the most fun.”
Jordan threw open the door of a sweet little busted-up Porsche as bright as Ronan’s sky blade. The driver was slumped over the wheel, which had crumpled in enough to press him back into his seat. His eyes looked at nothing, but it was hard to say if that was because of Bryde’s dreamt orb or because he was injured.
“I don’t want to steal cars and fuck shit up, Hennessy!” Jordan snapped, rummaging until she found the seat controls. She worked to get the seat back enough to tug the man free. Hennessy didn’t move a muscle as Jordan threw all of her weight to pull him out. “I’ve got a life here. I want to live my life. My real life. Art and growing up and not this.”
“Nice for you,” Hennessy said.
“Why the hell are you being this way?” Jordan demanded. “This is what you came all this way for? The Game?”
Hennessy looked at her as she propped the driver up against the wheel of his car and went to look at the next one. “I wish you were dead.”
This spun Jordan neat as a top. “What did you say?”
“I wish you’d died with the others,” Hennessy said. It was awful, it was terrible, her mouth wouldn’t stop saying it, her expression wouldn’t stop being scathing. “I wish you were all dead so it would just be me and I could do what I wanted. I can feel you dragging me down every second of every day. I’m so fucking tired of you.”
Jordan’s arms hung by her sides. She didn’t look mad or hurt, she just stared, standing there in the middle of all the cars pointed helter skelter.
“You came here to tell me that?”
Hennessy didn’t know what she’d come here to do, but she’d done this now. She understood that she wanted Jordan to hate her. She didn’t know why that would be better than anything else, but she knew with certainty in this moment, that was the goal.
“I wanted to see your face to make sure it was true,” Hennessy said.
She shrugged.
She could feel her shoulders shrugging even though she hadn’t thought about it.
It was like she had manifested somethin
g from a dream and was paralyzed, watching herself from above. The thing she had manifested was this awful Hennessy trying her best to make Jordan break and scream for her to leave.
“This is what you came from,” Hennessy said, gesturing to herself, “and you’re using it to become a craft painter and make babies with that white bro? Guess I should’ve given my mother’s memories some credit. They were a safeguard against suburbia.”
Quietly, Jordan asked, “Why do you always do this?”
Because Hennessy always dreamt of the Lace, that was why, because it was always the same dream, always the same.
“Enjoy your nightmare,” she said.
Declan remembered the worst dream he’d ever had.
It was his last year at Aglionby. He was passing his classes. He had dragged Ronan through his classes with the help of Ronan’s friend Gansey. He had bought Christmas gifts for Matthew. He had his internships lined up and the move planned to the town house his dead father had left him. He had done the math on the money left in the will and had worked out how much he needed to make and how much he was allowed to spend each year in order to continue to live in the way he thought would be all right to live. He was dating a girl named Ashleigh, after breaking up with a girl named Ashley. Ashleigh was thinking of going to school in DC to be closer to him. Declan was eyeing a less attentive Ashlee to replace her. He was doing his best to keep the noose of malevolent business associates his father had made for them from tightening before he graduated.
That was not the worst dream. That was the waking world.
The worst dream was this: It was nearly Christmas. There was frost on the colorless grass around the farmhouse at the Barns. Niall had just come back from a December business trip and now he was presenting gifts to his sons, just as he did in real life.
He gave Matthew a puppy that was only alive when Matthew was holding it (“I’m never gonna put it down,” declared dream Matthew).
He gave Ronan a textbook with no words in it (“My favorite kind,” Ronan had said).
He gave Declan a box … and in the box was the ability to dream things into life.
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