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The noticeboard in Borden house had only held two notices in living memory. Possibly Noah could spin a fanciful tale of a time when there were three, but Gansey had only ever seen a faded reminder to recycle and an announcement about the hunting club’s schedule that had been a year out of date when he’d arrived at the school. Any difference at all would be noticeable. An A3 orange-and-cyan poster screaming out the details of the upcoming dance felt like overkill.
Somehow, Adam possessed the mental fortitude to overcome the poster’s allure, and Ronan had a filter that made anything involving the words ‘dance’ or ‘music’ or ‘Irish Singing Competition’ invisible to him. But Gansey was captured.
“There hasn’t been a dance before,” he said, scrutinizing the over-enthusiastic typeface that was almost certainly the fault of Henry Cheng. His disinterest in courting anything other than Welsh history meant that up until this moment, Gansey hadn’t realised how deprived he was of the charming, timeless art of taking girls to dances. “I wonder why not?”
Adam, just barely fighting reluctance and winning, stood by Gansey and studied the poster. “Aglionby doesn’t have a sister school,” he said. “So they probably didn’t see the point in arranging one. And now… maybe they expect people to invite local girls?”
“Do you suppose Blue would come if I asked her?” Gansey asked. He was going to invite her regardless of what they said, and she would probably laugh viciously and decline no matter how he did it. Possibly, asking a girl to a dance was a patriarchal act of oppression – he wasn’t sure, but she’d let him know.
“Can you imagine Blue at an Aglionby event? She'd end up biting Tad Carruthers.” Ronan considered for a moment and added, “If you don't ask her, I will.”
Gansey stared, and waved a hand at the point where Ronan’s shoulder jabbed into Adam’s arm. For the two of them, it was a flagrant display of affection. “Won't you be taking Adam?”
Adam and Ronan looked at each other, expressions a pronounced mix of surprise and repulsion. They reached the same conclusion: “We're not going.”
It was only later, when Gansey had thoroughly exhausted himself try to pre-empt Blue's every possible offence to an invitation, that he started thinking about Adam and Ronan.
Usually he wouldn't be surprised that they'd skip an Aglionby event - 'extracurricular' jarred with Ronan's self-image, and Adam always had something more important to do, like work or sleep or not being at an Aglionby event. But he had vaguely expected that they'd want to do something - well. Couple-y.
He knew his interest in the dance was largely based around the idea of Blue going with him, ideally in a dress, flaunting her legs and her wicked sense of humour. But he’d thought Adam could appreciate some traditional elements of a relationship, Adam who sent flowers and knew how to ask someone out without referencing Welsh monarchs.
He and Ronan were certainly keeping things low-key, even though two boys dating in a private school was a trite kind of secret. Gansey wondered, vaguely, if either of them would be ashamed to be seen with the other, even though they shouldn’t be, especially not in formalwear. Then, he wondered if they'd be able to attend together at all. The poster hadn’t said. The poster had presumed.
Even though it was somewhere near three in the morning – and if Gansey didn’t look at a clock, he didn’t have to know exactly how little sleep he’d be getting that night – he crossed the starlit boards of Monmouth to knock softly on Ronan’s door. From inside the room, he heard Chainsaw croak, and then the angry, exhausted sound of Ronan climbing out of bed.
“Ronan,” Gansey started, as soon as the door was opened and before Ronan could tell him to fuck off, “Do you suppose boys could take other boys to the Aglionby dance?”
Ronan dragged a hand over his face, because it was three in the morning and he’d gotten out of bed for this. “If you want to take Parrish then I don’t care, but you’ve got to ask him.”
“No, I mean in general. Would – I don’t know, would someone bar entry?”
“I really could not give less of a fuck,” Ronan said, and went back to bed. His contribution to the conversation had been minimal, but the gears in Gansey’s head were all turning as he sat down to fidget with model Henrietta. Surely Ronan should be able to dance with Adam, if he wanted. He felt an itch strangely like injustice, which wasn’t a feeling he was used to. He did, however, know several experts.
Adam and Ronan enjoyed lunch together the next day, sitting on Aglionby’s perfectly manicured lawn. They were close enough together that occasionally, scandalously, their knees brushed. If Gansey had been present, he might have started giving them significant looks, but he was running late and so Adam felt quite comfortable with the sliver of contact. It was nice.
“Do you think we should warn Blue?” he asked Ronan, “Just so she can brace herself.”
“God, I hope he asks her mother. She’d laugh him out of the house.” Ronan knocked his knee against Adam, who knocked it back.
“Maybe we should warn Gansey,” Adam said, considering. “The consequences of relegating Blue to ‘girl’.” The sting of experience in his voice made his words heavy. Ronan’s answering laugh was harsh and delighted.
“Morning, lads,” Henry called out to them both, crossing the field towards them. He was smiling an industrial sort of smile, a getting-things-done kind of smile. In one hand he wielded a dangerously large binder. For some incomprehensible reason, Gansey was striding along beside him. Gansey seemed to be aware of Henry, and he didn't look annoyed, put-upon, beleaguered or irritated. Ronan considered the possibilities that could lead to this, and very quickly saw the danger.
“Is it too late to pretend we haven’t seen them and leave?” Ronan asked.
Adam hesitated, but exhaled. “Maybe it won’t be that bad.”
“So,” Henry said immediately as he stopped in front of them, “Gansey and I just had a meeting with student services.
“Oh, God,” Ronan whispered. Adam, who had not been woken up at three in the morning and didn’t know what was about to happen, looked on weakly.
“It turns out that Aglionby is not allowing gay couples to attend,” Henry said. His tone was grave, burdened by everything that was wrong with the world, and with Aglionby student services in particular.
Adam, who still hadn’t realised that the matter hadn’t been settled yesterday, wasn’t sure why he was being told this. “That’s a shame?” he offered, attempting to placate Henry’s intent stare. “…were there any gay couples wanting to go?”
Henry thrust a hand out to point at him, and Ronan, and the point where their knees touched. Adam winced. “The fight for gay rights in this country is so far from over,” he declared. Beside him, Gansey nodded, like this conversation being about Adam and Ronan made sense to him. His eyes were shining. “Until two boys like you are able to do something as innocuous as attend a dance together, I don’t see how we can claim to have made progress at all. Gay youth have it hard enough without this kind of oppression. The harassment you two must face.”
Adam muttered something under his breath that sounded suspiciously like the word ‘bisexual'. Ronan said something much louder about the kind of harassment he was facing right then.
Bravely, Henry ignored them both and kept talking. “I’m here to champion your cause.”
“Gansey, why are you letting this happen?” Ronan asked. Adam elbowed him, but only on principle.
“It’s important,” Gansey replied, “Don’t you think? Something actually worth taking a stand about.”
Henry ignored the insult to all his other campaigns and nodded. “You two don’t need to do a thing. We’ll make sure you can get to that dance.” They left together, in a blaze of righteous justice that Adam and Ronan both found very hard to look at.
“Just to be clear,” Ronan said, “dances are stupid.”
“Tickets are eighty dollars, and it opens with a thirty minute toast to the school and the donors,” Adam agreed. “Well. They said we don’t have to do anything?”
Ronan rolled his eyes. “Yeah, sure. Like this isn’t going to come up again.”
Adam sighed and squeezed his hand.
As punishment for making them talk to Henry Cheng, when Gansey suggested that he could ask Maura if could take Blue to the dance, Adam and Ronan told him it was an excellent plan.
As punishment for them telling him it was an excellent plan, Gansey required Adam and Ronan go with him to Nino’s on his apology mission. And, whether or not he’d intended it to be punishment, he managed to claw back some standing with Blue by inviting her to join his new crusade.
“It’s about time someone challenged Aglionby,” Blue said every time she walked past with a tray of something. “It’s all steeped in ‘traditions’ and dicks and awful machoism, designed to keep everybody else out. I can’t believe they forbade Adam from dancing with Ronan.”
“That’s not even close to what happened,” Adam attempted, but the other waitress had yelled for Blue to stop faffing around and Blue had had to stride off to either work or explain why human rights wasn’t faffing. Adam felt inhumanly tired. “Did you tell her someone actually forbade us?”
“Well,” Gansey said, a little uncomfortable, “She was terribly mad. And Maura wasn’t very kind about it, either.”
“If Ronan and I wanted to go to that dance,” Adam said, with careful enunciation, “which we do not, two things would happen. The headmaster would consider making a very small scene, and decide against it, and the rest of the school would not care. Why would anyone care?”
Gansey suspected that the rest of the school might care just a little about elegant, unknowable Adam Parrish and dangerously handsome Ronan Lynch together. He was campaigning for their right to wear suits and stand near each other and give each other those looks that they thought no one else noticed, and his reasons were not wholly altruistic.
“Anyway,” Blue said, somehow fitting her words in the time it took her to pass their table. “I can write a letter of complaint, if you like. I sent one to the mayor, once, about inadequate recycling policies.”
Gansey’s eyes glowed as he imagined the contents, and watched Blue pass in a rush of dirty plates and political motivation. “Blue is on our side,” he pointed out, as though there had ever been a scrap of doubt.
Ronan said, “Do you know what I miss? Glendower. This side quest is incredibly engaging and all, but-”
“Henry’s going to stage a protest,” Gansey said. “Politics. I honestly never saw the appeal, but perhaps something can be done with them.”
Adam had foolishly chosen to sit by the window, and was trapped in the booth by Gansey. Ronan, with no barrier to exit, let his gaze drift to the door. Adam kicked him under the table. “Don’t you dare,” he hissed.
Blue stopped by just long enough to let them know, “My aunt is gay,” but not which one, or if it was actually all of her aunts, a frothing quantity that seemed to grow every time they all tried to sit around the same table.
“I think I’m forgiven,” Gansey remarked, staring after her in much the same way he liked to see Ronan stare at Adam. “Although she didn’t say yes to coming with me. Perhaps she’ll martyr herself – only attend if the two of you can, as well.”
Adam’s head pressed heavily into the wall beside him. “You know,” he said, “I really don’t think that’s what ‘martyr’ means. In spirit, if nothing else.”
“You’re probably right,” Gansey agreed sadly.
When Ronan met Adam after his shift a week later, Adam’s expression was so mournful Ronan had to wonder if someone had died. Or something. Their dignity, perhaps.
“They’re in the newsletter,” Adam told him, scrubbing his eyes with dusty fingers. “Their ‘protest’ I mean. There’s a petition.”
“A petition in the Aglionby newsletter,” Ronan repeated, almost impressed by how tedious it was. “How do you know? Don’t tell me you read it.”
Adam’s cheeks reddened by one defensive fraction. “Gansey’s always in it.”
“Oh my god, Parrish.”
“They only referenced ‘affected students’,” Adam pushed on, “But, I mean. People know who Gansey cares about.”
The last was said with a smug undercurrent of pride that Ronan shared, briefly, before he remembered how grating that care currently was. Still, he considered. “Does it matter?”
Adam thought it through, tension held in his shoulders, before he let it go with an exhale. “I suppose not.”
Ronan jabbed an elbow into his side. Adam jabbed back.
“The administration,” Henry said vehemently. He made it sound like it should be a point on its own, though possibly there had been points before it – Adam had stopped listening, out of self-preservation. “I know I’ve said it before, and I don’t say it lightly, but they are fascist. And bigoted.”
Ronan was studying the spikes of Blue’s signature on the petition form, and wondering if anyone would care that she wasn’t a student or that she was a girl, or that it was directly above the signature of a boy who had been dead seven years. He considered Blue coercing Noah into signing, and dismissed the thought immediately – Noah was supportive, when he wasn’t dead and horrifying. He’d probably have all sorts of encouraging, no-homo appreciation to offer next time he manifested. Ronan couldn’t wait.
Adam nodded whenever someone gestured to him, skimming the copy of Blue’s letter. As a piece of writing, it was art – angry and creative, brimming with passion and venom and altogether more emotion than such a small creature should be able to hold. It had delighted Henry immensely.
Gansey waved a hand at Adam. Adam nodded. Ronan wondered if they’d noticed he’d angled his deaf ear towards them.
“’We don’t need to cater to gay students, because there aren’t any at Aglionby’,” Henry said in an awkward imitation of the vice-principal’s accent. “Can you believe he said that?”
Ronan could believe he said that.
“This school,” Henry said, labouring under the weight of his indignation. “Pretending they’re diverse because they drag the same six boys out for the brochure every time. It’s intolerable.”
Adam and Ronan could agree on ‘intolerable’, at least.
“The petition got quite a lot of support,” Gansey said, glancing over the signatures. His eyes catching on every poorly-disguised spike that was clearly also Blue’s, given away by the handwriting and the fact the signatures spelled out things like ‘Chip Cummerbund’ and ‘Spud Wensleydale.’ “If the faculty cares as little as you think, it’s likely to work.”
“Excellent,” Adam told him, “Then you’ll be able to go to the ball and bask in the admiration of everyone but us.”
“It’s not a ball,” Gansey said, suddenly looking worried. “Is it? I told Blue it was just a dance, I’m not sure she could manage a gown.”
“That aside,” Henry said, smoothly re-railing the topic, “It will be a victory for all future, queer students of Aglionby.”
Under the table, Adam squeezed Ronan’s hand. When the others were caught up enough in social change not to hear, Adam murmured, “I think we need to do something.”
On the day of the dance – which was a dance, and not a ball, Gansey checked twice – Gansey received a call from the head of student services, stating that Mr Parrish and Mr Lynch were very welcome to attend the dance together so long as it would get Mr Gansey and Mr Cheng to stop calling on their behalf.
It was excellent news, and Gansey celebrated by finalizing the arrangements he knew Adam and Ronan would never have gotten around to making on their own – a suit for Ronan, because Gansey knew he’d outgrown his, and a corsage, picked out by Gansey and not Blue even though she bullied him for being sentimental.
He had arranged to meet them with Henry outside of Aglionby, so that they could share in the victory. Gansey was there on time, with the flowers; Henry was there ahead of him, sans flowers but with impeccably styled hair. Blue was there with Gansey, ‘on principle’, in a dress the colour of the Camaro that must have been Orla’s once. It would have shown an impressive amount of leg on Orla. On Blue, it showed an inch above her ankles which, while still tantalizing, could have been more tantalizing. Gansey knew to keep his mouth shut about that, however.
Adam and Ronan failed to appear. In their place, Gansey’s phone buzzed twice in quick succession.
We went out of town for the weekend, Adam’s text read. Going to miss it. Sorry.
Ronan’s text read see u next week loser, and Gansey tried to be charmed by the fact he’d texted at all. It did not work. Surprise refused to manifest in him, and instead Gansey got to steep in the uncomfortable knowledge that he had, quite possibly, been meddling. Still an excellent cause, still a wonderful outcome, still absolutely no chance that Adam and Ronan were the people to appreciate him for it.
He did, however, still have people who appreciated him for it.
“All that crusading,” Henry was saying, his thoughts thundering along the same rail as Gansey’s, “and if it isn’t for anything, then the school won’t be nearly so inclined to take petitions seriously next time. Our reputations could be at stake.”
“We can’t ruin it this year,” Gansey said, pressing his thumb to his lip, “Or they’ll have a harder time of it in future.” He looked at Henry. Henry looked at him. Their eyes were gleaming. He turned to Blue and said politely, “I’m so terribly sorry. But I think I’m going to have to stand you up.”
“Christ,” she said, and did not look the least bit upset. “I’m still coming.”
Blue unleashed on Aglionby on her own was a dangerous thing. A political fiend in a violently orange dress who was actually very likely to bite Tad Carruthers. Gansey resolved himself that anyone who ran afoul of Blue probably deserved the consequences.
He put out an arm to Henry. Henry took it. They beamed at each other, bright and young and industrious, and breezed passed the staff at the door. The staff at the door looked at each other, prematurely aged.
Blue did not bite anyone, and after she threw a glass of water in Whittaker’s face, the lacrosse team declared her a firecracker and spent the rest of the night annoying her. Gansey discovered Henry Cheng was very good at dancing, so long as you had no idea what good dancing looked like and assumed the only thing that mattered was enthusiasm.
Adam and Ronan drove to a town a safe distance away from Henrietta and Gansey and Henry Cheng, and bumped shoulders and noses, and kissed, and it was easy and it was wonderful and it was just for them.