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“Hey Adam,” said Ronan. “Do you know what vore is?”
“No? What the fuck is that?”
“I don’t know if I want to know,” said Ronan, his face washed out and highlighted by the screen of his phone.
In this part of Cabeswater, Ronan had assured him, time didn’t pass as it did outside, probably. Above them, the milky way stretched out across the sky like a pleased cat, vibrant, alive and near, in the sky. It was so dark that Adam could hear bats chittering and diving, but could only track their movement when they crossed before the stars, blocking them out, indistinct. It was always night here, and always summer. The trees didn’t know much about the care and keeping of their magician, but this they had, and he could use. They couldn’t light a fire here, but it was too warm to need one, anyway. Adam hadn’t admitted yet that he hadn’t been camping before.
“You’re the one with the smartphone, you look it up.”
Ronan’s phone was something dreamed that gave the inevitable impression of having been designed in a sci-fi novel from at least thirty years ago. Adam’s phone, equally dreamed, was a (nearly) picture perfect pink Motorola Razr that never needed charging, and didn’t have a data plan. It was always in a service area. Adam would never have accepted it, if it wasn’t so horrible, but the first time he’d pulled it out to check the time at Fox Way, Orla had begun crowing, and ran upstairs to shove her grimy, decade old copy of the same phone in his face. The color was a little off, and the Motorola logo was too big, but it worked, and it was funny enough Adam had kept it. He called it the Piglet, mostly to piss off Gansey.
“The joke is,” Noah had paused, giggling so hard he could barely breathe let alone speak, “the joke is,” he’d squeaked and Adam had bitten his lip to keep from smiling, “the joke is that it’s also ugly and old fashioned, but unlike the Pig, it actually works .” Gansey had been making the kind of face that made you wish JK Rowling had written him as a villain because only someone who’d thought up Lucius Malfoy could possible describe the exact purse of his not in front of my Ralph Lauren chinos expression. Adam let himself grin now, in the dark, remembering.
“Parrish you wouldn’t know what to do with a smartphone if someone threw it at your face,” said Ronan with all the smugness of someone who was now slightly less incapable of googling something on their phone than Maura, which is to say, with all the hubris of the truly stupid.
“Really? Well if past experience serves as any guide, going ‘ow, what the fuck Ronan?” seems like it should work.”
Ronan snickered into his hand, and reached across the self-conscious backpack cordon between their sleeping bags, waggling his phone at Adam. “C’mon Parrish, you know you want to.”
Adam folded his arms behind his head and focused on trying to track the bats in the sky. “When has that ever worked?”
Ronan snorted. “Literally all the time. Remember that time we sledded off the roof of the pool shed at school and I broke my tailbone?”
“Yeah, you complained about it for two months.”
“Haha, yeah. It still hurts, like, pretty often.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah, I literally just told you that.”
“Then I don’t understand why this is an advertisement of you getting me to do things.”
“Parrish I figure if you were willing to do something that dumb on school grounds when we barely knew each other, you’d google something for me now.”
Adam looked over again. Ronan was invisible now that his phone screen had gone dark, but he imagined sensing Ronan’s hand hovering over him in the blackness, feeling the heat against his face.
“So this thing I’m googling is like some two girls one cup shit, like it’s jumping off a roof while sitting into a pile of ice level stupid.”
“No,” lied Ronan, and Adam could hear his grin.
“Coward.”
“Nnnnnnnnnnggggggg,” said Ronan and Adam could feel his waving the phone again, air brushing against his face. Now that his eyes had adjusted fully, the stars clustered so thickly in the sky that Adam could see Ronan’s hand, black. He grabbed and caught Ronan’s warm, bony wrist in his hand, hair prickling against the pads of his fingers. Ronan dropped the phone on his face.
“Fuck!”
Ronan sniggered, and so Adam had to climb over their backpacks to beat him with a pillow. “The point of this stupid experiment was for you to try to convince me to get some actual fucking sleep,” he couldn’t see anything, but Ronan kept grabbing his face as though that would stop him, when really it just improved his aim. Ronan’s thumb slipped into his mouth; his pointer finger got stuck up Adam’s nose. Adam spit out the finger. “Throwing phones at me to try to get me to google some perverted shit for you because you’re too cowardly to work your own phone is completely opposite the point.” Panting, stuck in his sleeping bag, leaning across the backpacks with his hand braced on Ronan’s chest while he giggled, Adam shoved the pillow into Ronan’s face. “Anyway, I’ve lost your phone and it’s far too dark to find it now.” Ronan’s t-shirt was very thin--some overpriced bullshit--and Adam could feel his heart beating very fast through his ribs.
Ronan coughed and Adam gave him a nipple twister with his other hand, as Ronan’s laughter became forced.
Adam flinched away as if burned, and flopped on his back on the grass. There was something hard under his shoulder blade; he picked up the phone and threw it back at Ronan. “Here’s your dumb phone, asshole.”
“Hey,” said Ronan, pushing the backpacks and pillow aside so he could make eye contact with Adam. His face shone, a pale oval, faintly, in the moonlight. “Please?”
Adam sighed, not bothering to hide it. He didn’t actually care about googling some shit: he’d been scarred by goatse, it’s not like anything could top that at this point. He didn’t know why Ronan was so resistant--to use his phone att all, but this also--but if Ronan had convinced the trees to make a little space outside time for him to use to sleep, he could look at some fucking...whatever for Ronan.
“Fine!” he said. “Whatever, just give me your phone.”
Ronan actually handed the phone over this time, groping in the air for Adam’s hand. When he touched it, the screen lit dully, not hurting his eyes. Sometimes the dream phones had their uses. He found the web search app, labeled “GNS” for “google ‘n’ shit” as Ronan had explained, and checked that safe search was on before he typed “vore” and hit enter.
The phone lit up, immediately, flashing yellow and red as it vibrated wildly in his hands. Adam threw the phone away from himself in surprise. “WARNING!” it shrieked, three feet away and flashing on the grass. “THE RESULTS OF YOUR SEARCH ARE: SOME PERVERTED SHIT! WARNING: THIS IS SOME PERVERTED SHIT RIGHT HERE!” On the other side, Ronan was laughing so hard he wasn’t actually making any noise at all.
“Fuck!” said Adam, processing an adrenaline comedown. The phone continued to present its best impression of a howler. “Jesus H. Christ!” Ronan moaned faintly, beside himself. “Seriously?” The phone spoke in Gansey’s best bad impression of a british accent, for no reason that Adam could discern. “This is what that whole thing was about?” Ronan nodded still laughing, illuminated intermittently by the horrible phone. “God!” said Adam, and threw himself back into the grass. He’d been trying to be nice , or well, whatever.
As his adrenaline faded, the continued blaring of the phone mutated into something quite funny, and then suddenly, hilarious. “UNLESS YOU’D LIKE TO SEE SOME REALLY FUCKED UP KINK SHIT,” said Gansey’s shitty accent from the phone “CLOSE THIS PAGE NOW!” Adam slapped Ronan in the chest, mostly on principle, pointedly not giggling as moths gathered in the light of the phone.
Amidst the noise and light, the large, black shape of a bat dipped low over the clearing and darted silently, out of sight.