“Write your routine, Ronan. Now. While I watch. I want to see it."

7:45 A.M.: The most important meal of the day.
8:00 A.M.: Feed animals.
9:30 A.M.: Repair barns or house.
12:00 P.M.: Lunch @ that weird gas station.
1:30 P.M.: Ronan Lynch's marvelous dream emporium.

"What does this one mean, Ronan?"

It meant practice makes perfect. It meant ten thousand hours to mastery, if at first you don't succeed, there is no try only do. Ronan had spent hours over the last year dreaming ever more complex and precise objects into being, culminating in an intricate security system that rendered the Barns largely impossible to find unless you knew exactly where you were going. After Cambridge, though, it felt like all the fun had run out of the game.

"I don't ask what you do at work, Declan."

6:00 P.M.: Drive around.
7:15 P.M.: Nuke some dinner, yo.
7:30 P.M.: Movie time.
11:00 P.M.: Text Parrish.

Adam's most recent text had said simply: $4200.

It was the amount Ronan had to send to cover the dorm room repairs.

*11:30 P.M.: Go to bed.
*Saturday/Sunday: Church/DC
*Monday: Laundry & Grocery
*Tuesday: Text or call Gansey

These last items were in Declan's handwriting, his addendums subtly suggesting all the components of a fulfilling grown-up life Ronan had missed when crafting it. They only served to depress Ronan more. Look how you can predict the next forty-eight hours, seventy-two hours, ninety-six hours, look how you can predict the rest of your life. The entire word routine depressed Ronan. The sameness. Fuck everything.

Gansey texted: Declan told me to tell you to get out of bed.

Ronan texted back: why

He watched the morning light move over the varied black-gray shapes in his bedroom. Shelves of model cars; an open Uilleann pipes case; an old scuffed desk with a stuffed whale on it; a metal tree with wondrously intricate branches; heaps of laundry curled around beet-read wood shavings.

Gansey texted back: don't make me get on a plane I'm currently chained to one of the largest black walnut trees in Oregon”