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Ronan makes it through his mother’s wake, stands and shakes hands and says some appropriate things at the right times. Declan keeps a wary eye on him, but the worst hangover of Ronan’s life keeps his claws retracted. Or maybe he’s just numb. He nods at neighbors; he eats a small sandwich. He feels like his bones are disintegrating, and that seems about right.
Later, before the burial, he throws up for twenty minutes behind the church. Adam Parrish finds him there and watches for a while until he says, “You’ve got puke in your hair,” and hands Ronan a bottle of water. And that’s how Adam ends up shaving Ronan’s head in the upstairs bathroom at St. Agnes, while the rest of the Lynch family trudges out to the gravesite.
*
Adam was the only one from the long-term care facility who stayed for the burial, or tried to. But then again, Adam was the only nurse’s aide who ever treated the Lynch brothers like real people: the one who drove Matthew home after he fell asleep in Aurora’s room. The one who pulled Declan aside when she stopped eating. The one who told Ronan that he didn’t have to be nice, but he couldn’t say that shit where other residents could hear.
Two nights after the funeral, when Adam opens the back door that opens onto the St. Agnes parking lot, Ronan is drunk. He looks at Adam and says, “You knew my mom,” and Adam takes him upstairs and rubs his spiky shaved scalp while he pukes again, this time in Adam’s toilet.
“This is fucked up,” he tells Ronan. But he still gives him Advil and water and a pack of peanut butter crackers, and puts him to bed.
*
“You’re like, a kid,” Ronan says in the morning, when he looks around the room. He frowns, disoriented, at the pile of textbooks on the floor next to Adam’s bed. There’s a student ID on a lanyard. “How old are you?”
“Nineteen,” Adam says, frowning back.
Ronan squints; he might still be drunk. “You’re my age? I thought you were in your twenties.”
“I went to school with you,” Adam says, incredulous. “What the fuck?”
“What the fuck,” Ronan echos thoughtfully. “Why do you live here?”
It’s not exactly what he means to ask, but he has a headache like the world is ending and can’t think how else to say it. His brain tries and fails to recalibrate, while Adam’s expression slides from surprise to annoyance.
“I just do,” he says defensively. “I rent this room. Last night, I thought you were looking for me.”
“What the fuck,” Ronan says again, and his head throbs uselessly.
“I thought you remembered,” Adam says quietly. “I went to Aglionby sophomore year, I thought you knew.”
A disgusting thought bubbles up in Ronan’s mind. He tries to wet his tongue. “Is that why you were so nice to my mom? Because you recognized me?”
“No, of course not. That’s just what I do.”
“Oh.” And Ronan feels worse and worse. “Right. It’s just your job.”
Adam sighs. “No,” he says, sounding exasperated. “I didn’t say that.”
“So what, then, you’re just nice to everyone? Just that nice?”
Adam doesn’t respond, but his face says plenty. He looks parental and condescending; he looks a little like Declan.
Ronan’s stomach churns. “You really are a saint, Adam. Saint Adam, right here in the church.”
When Adam uncrosses his arms and stands up, the adrenaline starts moving through Ronan’s wasted body so fast that it almost makes him shudder. It feels good. He can feel the fight already and he likes it, wants it, thinks it might fix everything if someone would just punch him in the face already.
But Adam stops, mouth open, and just stands there. Ronan can hear the sound when he swallows, can see the moment he decides what to say.
“I just meant that I knew her, Ronan. That’s all.”
After he walks out, Ronan sits down on Adam’s bed. He feels ashamed and grips the bedspread in his fists.
*
“I was going to community college, just one class while I saved some money, and then I’m starting school next month. I deferred, that’s why I’m not there yet.”
Adam’s standing outside the Stop & Shop in a T-shirt, holding a single plastic bag of groceries in one hand and a jug of laundry detergent in the other. He talks fast, a little like he’s nervous, a little like he’s running late and annoyed about it.
“I rented that room for the summer ‘cause I can’t stay at my folks’ place, and I was nice to your family because I liked your mom, and I’m sorry she passed, but you’ve got to stop doing this.”
He gestures at Ronan, who's sitting in a shopping cart with a bottle of beer in his hand. He bought a six-pack from a cashier who looked sixteen and too scared to card; now he’s been in the parking lot for an hour or two, long legs scrunched up so he’s just knees and boots and scowl.
“I’m grieving,” he says slowly. “Can’t drive home, might as well finish it.” He lifts the bottle in a little salute.
Adam sighs. “Do you want me to call your brother?”
“You could take me home, instead,” Ronan tries.
“No I can’t, Ronan. That’s not how this works.”
“What’s not how what works?
“You’re in a parking lot,” Adam says emphatically, like that’s answer enough. “I have work,” he adds, “and this is… concerning.”
In the end, he calls Declan, and Ronan doesn’t remember anything after crawling into the backseat of the Volvo.
*
They don’t see each other again until winter, outside Gansey’s Cambridge apartment on the solstice.
That fall, Ronan had gotten better at shaving his own head. Got worse at sleeping, got arrested but not charged. Got better, maybe, overall.
Adam had stayed the same, except actually he’s worse, because college was supposed to save him, but it didn’t. Harvard is Aglionby but worse, because it was supposed to be the end and not just the means, but it isn’t.
Adam leans back against the brick wall and peers at Ronan as he walks up, like he can’t quite make him out. “Are you OK?” he says.
Ronan knows that look, that suspicious scan. “I’m sober,” he says, and Adam relaxes like he expected.
“Right now or generally?”
“Eight days. Wait-- nine.”
Adam nods and then asks, “Would it be helpful if I wasn’t drinking?” He’s holding a bottle of beer mostly as a prop, at this point.
“Fuck if I know,” Ronan shrugs. “I’m supposed to have my triggers figured out by now, but I don’t.”
“You don’t know what makes you drink?”
Ronan crosses his arms. “I mean, I think we all know, generally, what makes a person drink too much.”
“The human condition?”
“That’s exactly what I tell the doctors,” he says, snapping his fingers and pointing at Adam, “but they’re all hung up on the trauma.”
Adam’s not sure it’s a joke, but he laughs once anyway. “You would say that,” he mutters, but some worry he’s had squirreled away since the summer relaxes.
Ronan kicks at the snow on the ground. “So what’s new?”
“I met Gansey.”
“I heard. Did he remember that you went to Aglionby sophomore year?”
Adam’s turn to shrug. “I learned my lesson and led with that in the intro, so we’ll never know for sure. What’s new with you?”
“Nothing, the same. Sorry about puking in your bathroom so much last summer.”
There isn’t much to say to that, so Adam just says, “You kept the hair, I noticed.”
Ronan’s lifts his chin, the way he knows he does when he’s embarrassed. “I liked how it felt.”
*
“I don’t think I’m an alcoholic, I think I should just-- not drink, mostly.”
Adam puts his hands up in surrender, eyes still closed. “I think absolutely nothing about this conversation, and I don’t want to have it with you.”
Ronan is hungover in Adam’s bed, Adam’s borrowed bed in this borrowed house, because he didn’t drink anything for eight months and then drank four cups of punch on an empty stomach. Adam is hungover next to him because he also drank four cups of punch on an empty stomach. It’s going worse for Ronan, here in some Harvard kid’s house on the Cape, some person Adam knows but doesn’t trust.
Adam rubs at his forehead and scowls into the silence. “This place sucks.”
“It’s great, if you like douchebags and swimming,” Ronan counters, as he rolls into the recovery position.
“I thought I liked swimming, but it turns out I just liked that my parents never looked for me in the creek growing up.”
There’s a rare pause as Ronan chooses his words. “That seems negligent,” he observes.
“You have no idea,” Adam mutters. “Are you ever going to kiss me?”
That makes Ronan move immediately, abruptly, sitting up in bed and then groaning about it. “God, Parrish, you really want to talk about this right now? I gotta call my sponsor in like five minutes.”
Adam looks up at him, using one hand to shade his eyes from the light coming in the window. “I thought you weren’t an alcoholic.”
“Yeah, but he doesn’t know that yet. What the fuck, Adam.” They look at each other, Ronan closing one eye at a time, watching Adam’s face shift left and right in his vision. “And yes, by the way. If you want me to.”
They bail on everyone that day, an Irish goodbye around noon while the group puts lunch on the grill. It’ll sever a handful of Adam’s budding friendships, which suits Adam fine, and they spend the next two nights on Gansey’s couch in Cambridge.
Finally, on Friday, Adam gets the key to his RA room, and they sit on the floor and talk about Aurora. How it’s been a year since she died; how she really was Adam’s favorite resident. What Ronan thinks she would have said to him, about the drinking and the haircut and the time he broke his wrist when he spun the car into a tree.
“She’d have been mad about the tree,” he tells Adam, and Adam shakes his head.
“She would've been mad about the drinking," he says.
Ronan swipes a tear off of his cheek. Says, “This is fucked up." And, "I should've kissed you."
And that's how Adam ends up kissing him, on the floor of his crappy single, until the AC goes out and they walk to the corner store for iced tea.