Chapter Text
It was autumn, and the crimson leaves of the maple just outside the Latin classroom’s only window waved gently in the wind, beckoning Ronan. The desire to be anywhere but here welled up inside of him, his leg bouncing with all his excess energy. He considered cutting class after Latin and spending the rest of the afternoon speeding down two-lane highways and taking in the golden hues of the autumnal Virginia landscape. But it was only the first week of classes and skipping this early felt excessive, even for Ronan.
Usually Latin was the only class Ronan found somewhat tolerable, but because it was the first week of school, they were reviewing basic noun declensions and verb conjugations. Whelk was currently lecturing about the importance of reviewing the conjugation for esse, the Latin verb meaning to be. Important or not, they had learned this freshman year and therefore it was too easy and boring to hold Ronan’s attention.
Ronan chewed at one of the leather bands on his wrist.
One row up and one seat over, Gansey was slouched forward, his head slumped against his hand. It occurred to Ronan that although his boredom was chronic and incurable, perhaps he could liven up his friend’s day. He opened his notebook to a clean page and scribbled a sloppy, rather unflattering doodle of Whelk. Above Whelk’s cartoonishly large head, Ronan drew a speech bubble and wrote: “ego stultior asino.” He crumpled up the paper and, when Whelk’s back was to the class, chucked it at Gansey.
Unfortunately, just at the moment that Ronan vaulted the paper into the air, Whelk turned away from the whiteboard. The ball of paper bounced off Gansey’s shoulder and skittered across the floor. Gansey reached for it but Whelk was faster. In the space of a few seconds, Whelk moved from the front of the classroom to Gansey’s desk, stepping on the crumpled paper before Gansey could grab it.
Speaking to a rather distressed Gansey, Whelk said, “Why don’t we see what Mr. Lynch had to say that was so important he couldn’t wait until the end of class?”
In an instant, the entire mood of the classroom shifted. All the boys in first period Latin, once weary-eyed and lethargic, were alert as can be, twisted around in their chairs watching Whelk, Gansey, and Ronan with rapt interest.
As Whelk lifted his foot and picked up the paper, Gansey looked over his shoulder at Ronan. Ronan winked at him.
“Let’s see,” Whelk said, his voice dry and weary. He studied Ronan’s note. “It seems like there is a drawing of…” Whelk held up the paper so Gansey and Ronan could see. “I assume this is supposed to be me?”
At the same time Gansey said, “Oh, I don’t think so,” Ronan declared, “Yep.”
Both Whelk and Gansey glared at Ronan, and Ronan knew that he could look forward to a lecture from both of them.
Whelk looked back down at the paper.
“It appears that I am saying something in Latin. I’m saying…” The sigh Whelk heaved was deeper than the Mariana Trench. “I am stupider than an ass. How very eloquent, Mr. Lynch.”
A handful of Ronan’s classmates snickered. A sharp, mischievous grin spread across Ronan’s face.
“Well, Mr. Lynch,” Whelk said, “If I’m so stupid and you’re so smart, why don’t you come up to the front and write out the conjugations for the future tense of esse?”
“Sure thing,” Ronan said, eager for the excuse to get up from his chair.
Whelk handed him a black dry erase marker, which Ronan flipped up in the air a few times before reaching the whiteboard. In a confident, messy scrawl, Ronan wrote: ero, erimis, eris, eritis, erit, erunt.
Ronan turned to face Whelk, a smug look on his face. Whelk arched an eyebrow.
“Are you sure that’s correct?”
Ronan bristled. “Of course.”
“Can anyone tell Mr. Lynch where his mistake is?” Whelk asked the other students.
The class was completely still and silent for a long moment.
“No one?”
One of the boys sitting in the front row slowly raised his hand. Ronan recognized him immediately. He was new, but they had several classes together. The boy always sat in the front row and Ronan never did, so Ronan had become well acquainted with the freckles on the back of his neck and the uneven cut of his light brown hair. Ronan sat directly behind him in English, a class he found so boring that watching the way the boy’s hair stuck in tufts when he scratched the back of his head was often the highlight of the class period.
Though he saw the back of the boy’s head more often than the front, Ronan knew well what the boy’s face looked like. He had seen it the first day of the semester, when he and Gansey were driving to school and they saw a boy in a worn Aglionby uniform pushing his bike up the hill. High cheekbones, a dusting of freckles, blue eyes. Blue eyes that were now fixed on Ronan.
“Mr. Parrish,” Whelk said. “Where is the error in Mr. Lynch’s conjugation chart?”
“The first person plural.”
When the boy in the front row spoke Ronan could hear the whisper of a Henrietta accent in the length of his vowels.
“That’s right. Will you go to the board and fix Mr. Lynch’s mistake?”
As Adam Parrish approached the whiteboard, he gave Ronan a small, apologetic smile. Ronan narrowed his eyes at him. He thought rather bitterly that if Adam Parrish truly felt bad about showing Ronan up, he wouldn’t have raised his hand in the first place.
Adam’s long fingers brushed against Ronan’s hand as he took the dry erase marker from him. Surprised by the touch, Ronan yanked his hand away quickly. Adam, however, seemed unbothered by the exchange. He used his hand to wipe away erimis and began to write the correct spelling: erimus.
He wrote in swift, fluid motions, the marker moving as easily as if it were his sixth finger. Though in appearance, the marker was nothing like Adam Parrish’s fingers. The marker was wide and cylindrical; its shape simple and wholly uninteresting. Unlike Adam’s hands, which were full of contradictions. His fingers were long, slender things interrupted by knobby knuckles. The edges of his hands were smudged blue with pen ink and dead skin dangled from callouses on the palms of his hands. These hands told a story, but Ronan could not intuit what that story was. He thought back to the day he saw Adam walking his bike up the hill to school and wondered idly where he had biked from, where he had been in the years before he came to Aglionby.
“Very good,” Whelk said. “You may both take your seats. Mr. Lynch, I’ll need to see you after class.”
Ronan rolled his eyes and groaned, knowing he was in for a detention.
Once they returned to their seats, Whelk began to lecture about uses of the future tense of esse. Ronan tuned him out and stared at the whiteboard. He stared at the word Adam had written. Erimus. Adam’s handwriting was squat and annoyingly neat. So neat, that though he had only written one word, it was Ronan’s hurried chicken scratch that looked out of place.
Erimus. Ronan stared at the word for so long that even after Whelk erased it from the board, Ronan could picture it clearly in his mind.
That night, Ronan dreamt that he was in Latin class. He was alone, and the whiteboard looked just as it had that day in class after Adam corrected Ronan’s conjugation.
Ronan scowled. Although he had had nightmares so harrowing and monstrous they made most horror movies seem juvenile, there was still something uniquely cruel about the classic school anxiety dream.
He stood up and walked towards the door, but as he did, the room elongated into a hallway, the door stretching further and further away from him. On either side the walls were floor to ceiling whiteboard with one word written over and over in neat handwriting: erimus erimus erimus erimus erimus erimus erimus erimus erimus erimus erimus
Ronan awoke, paralyzed, but he didn’t need to be able to move to see what he had brought back from his dream. It was written on the ceiling plainly in his view, the squat letters smug and taunting.
erimus
We will be.