autistic gansey: the raven boys

literal thinking

All of the sources said that church watchers had to possess “the second sight” and Gansey barely possessed first sight before he put his contacts in.
It took Gansey a moment to realize that Ronan had made a joke, and by then, it was too late to laugh.
Gansey, misunderstanding, immediately asked her, “Why would you have to leave?”
“Coincidence?” Ronan asked. “I think not.” It was meant to be sarcastic. Gansey had said I don’t believe in coincidences so often that he no longer needed to.
He said, “I don’t think that minor children are required to get gifts for their parents. I’m a dependent. That’s the definition of dependent, is it not?”
Several exasperated faces turned on Gansey. Maura said, “Well, he’s not going to just go away because you don’t want to deal with him.”
“I didn’t say it was possible,” Gansey replied, not looking up from his splint. “I just said that it was what I would like.”
“His name wasn’t really Butternut, was it?” Gansey asked Adam in a low voice.

food sensitivities

Gansey said, “Tell me there’s no sauce on this burger.” Dropping the strap from his teeth, Ronan scoffed. “Please.” “No pickle, either,” Adam said

stimming

The area around him smelled strongly of mint from the leaf he chewed absently.
He ran his thumb back and forth across his bottom lip, a habit he never seemed to notice and Adam never bothered to point out.
Gansey was crumpled on his bed, earbuds in, eyes closed. Even with the hearing gone in his left ear, Adam could hear the tinny sound of the music, whatever Gansey had played in order to keep himself company, to lure himself to sleep.

special interest

Gansey couldn’t resist talking about Glendower. He never could.
But Gansey never minded retelling the story. He’d related the events like they’d just happened, thrilled again
he was wondering if it was more than the ordinary curiosity people possessed when faced with Gansey and his obsessive accessories. He knew Gansey would find him overly suspicious, unnecessarily proprietary of a search Gansey was more than willing to share with most people.
“We talking about Gansey the third and his New Age obsession?” the secretary asked.
what he found was that Richard Gansey III was more obsessed with the ley line than he had ever been. Something about the entire research process seemed … frantic. What is wrong with this kid? Whelk wondered
It was suddenly difficult not to be excited by the idea of explaining it all to her.
The easy way that he began the story, at once striding through grass and eyeing the EMF reader, let Blue know that he had told it many times before.
“If you’d just asked,” Gansey said, “I would’ve told you everything in there. I would’ve been happy to. It wasn’t a secret.”

masking and mirroring accents

Adam remembered finding him intimidating when he first met him. There were two Ganseys: the one who lived inside his skin, and the one Gansey put on in the morning when he slid his wallet into the back pocket of his chinos. The former was troubled and passionate, with no discernible accent to Adam’s ears, and the latter bristled with latent power as he greeted people with the slippery, handsome accent of old Virginia money.
It was a default answer, she saw; he fell back onto his powerful politeness when he was taken by surprise. Also, he was still watching Adam, taking his cues from him as to how he should react to her. Adam nodded, once, briefly, and the mask slipped just a little more. Blue wondered if the President Cell Phone demeanor ever vanished completely when he was around his friends. Maybe the Gansey she’d seen in the churchyard was what lay beneath.
A few minutes later, when Gansey climbed into the front seat beside the pilot, she saw that he was grinning, effusive and earnest, incredibly excited to be going wherever they were going. It was nothing like his previous, polished demeanor.
There was something about the timbre of his voice that surprised Blue. It wasn’t until he spoke again she realized he was using the tone she’d heard him use with Adam.
This Gansey, this story-telling Gansey, was a different person altogether from any of the other versions of him she’d encountered. She couldn’t not listen.
Gansey had always felt as if there were two of him: the Gansey who was in control, able to handle any situation, able to talk to anyone, and then, the other, more fragile Gansey, strung out and unsure, embarrassingly earnest, driven by naive longing. That second Gansey loomed inside him now, more than ever, and he didn’t like it.
some days Gansey wished that he could be him, because Adam was so very real and true in a way that Gansey couldn’t ever seem to be.
Gansey was first into the room, and he clearly hadn’t expected to find anyone there, because his features hadn’t been arranged at all to disguise his misery. When he saw Blue, he immediately managed to pull a cordial smile from somewhere. And it was so very convincing. She had seen his face just a second before, but even having seen his expression, it was hard to remind herself that the smile was false. Why a boy with a life as untroubled as Gansey’s would have needed to learn how to build such a swift and convincing false front of happiness was beyond her.

not understood/accidentally offensive/words coming out wrong

The Aglionby boy appeared puzzled for a long moment, and then realization dawned. “Oh, that was not how I meant it. That is not what I said.”
To his credit, the Aglionby boy didn’t speak right away. Instead, he thought for a moment and then he said, without heat, “You said you were working for living. I thought it’d be rude to not take that into account. I’m sorry you’re insulted. I see where you’re coming from, but I feel it’s a little unfair that you’re not doing the same for me.”
He hadn’t meant to be offensive but, in retrospect, it was possible he had been. This was going to eat at him all evening. He vowed, as he had a hundred times before, to consider his words better.
He’d managed to offend again, with no effort at all.
After a moment, he said, “Sometimes I’m afraid he’ll never really understand me.”
I did tell him, right? I did say that we were to wait. It’s not that he didn’t understand me.
Words pressed against his mouth, begged to be said, but he kept silent.
But Gansey’s words had somehow become unwitting weapons, and he didn’t trust himself to not accidentally discharge them again.
“My words are unerring tools of destruction, and I’ve come unequipped with the ability to disarm them.

specifically coming across as condescending

She clearly hadn’t found him condescending. Which was probably because she hadn’t heard him speak.
“Sometimes he’s very condescending.” Adam looked at the ground. “He doesn’t mean to be.
“Really?” Gansey asked, so innocently startled by this that it was clear that Adam had been right before — he hadn’t meant to be condescending.
“God, I’m sick of your condescension, Gansey,” Adam said. “Don’t try to make me feel stupid. Who whips out repugnant? Don’t pretend you’re not trying to make me feel stupid.” “This is the way I talk.

honesty

Adam suspected Gansey’s preference was because Ronan was earnest even if he was horrible, and with Gansey, honesty was golden.
“So I think we deserve the truth. Tell me you know something but you don’t want to help me, if that’s what’s going on, but don’t lie to me.”
“I’m going to need everyone to be straight with each other from now on. No more games. This isn’t just for Blue, either. All of us.”
He wasn’t sure how to speak without hurting Ronan. He couldn’t lie to him.

“age-inappropriate”

Gansey himself sat at an old desk with his back to them, gazing out an east-facing window and tapping a pen. His fat journal lay open near him, the pages fluttering with glued-in book passages and dark with notes. Adam was struck, as he occasionally was, by Gansey’s agelessness: an old man in a young body, or a young man in an old man’s life.
In his best professor voice
He sounded so old, Blue thought. So formal in comparison to the other boys he’d brought. There was something intensely discomfiting about him
once again Blue got the sense that he seemed older than the boys he’d brought with him.
There was something very ancient about him just then, with the tree arched over him and his eyelids rendered colorless in the shadows.
“You haven’t been a dependent since you were four. You went straight from kindergarten to old man with a studio apartment.”
Malory had been the first one to take fifteen-year-old Gansey seriously, a favor for which Gansey would not soon stop being grateful for.

journal is comfort object

Gansey retreated to his bed, though he didn’t lie down. He reached for his journal, but it wasn’t there; he’d left it at Nino’s the night of the fight.
Whelk held his hand out for the journal. Gansey swallowed. He asked, “Whelk — sir — are you sure this is the only way?” The journal weighted his hands. He didn’t need it. He knew everything in it. But it was him. He was giving everything that he’d worked for away. I will get a new one.

alexithymia

He thought this feeling inside him was shame.
Gansey tried several different ways to think of the situation, but there wasn’t any way he could paint it that made it hurt less. Something kept fracturing inside him.
Gansey couldn’t begin to explain the size of this awfulness. He only knew that it burst inside him, again and again, fresh every time he considered it.
some complicated longing to settle an argument that waged deep inside himself.

overwhelming emotions

More than anything, the journal wanted. It wanted more than it could hold, more than words could describe, more than diagrams could illustrate. Longing burst from the pages, in every frantic line and every hectic sketch and every dark-printed definition. There was something pained and melancholy about it.
His bald expression held something new: not the raw delight of finding the ley line or the sly pleasure of teasing Blue. She recognized the strange happiness that came from loving something without knowing why you did, that strange happiness that was sometimes so big that it felt like sadness.
He couldn’t stand it, all of this inside him. In the end, he was nobody to Adam, he was nobody to Ronan. Adam spit his words back at him and Ronan squandered however many second chances he gave him. Gansey was just a guy with a lot of stuff and a hole inside him that chewed away more of his heart every year.They were always walking away from him. But he never seemed able to walk away from them.

“too serious”

Things seemed to weigh heavily enough on Gansey as it was.
His voice was peculiar. Formal and certain.

~awkward

He knocked fists with Adam. Coming from Gansey, the gesture was at once charming and self-conscious, a borrowed phrase of another language.
“I don’t know what else to say.”
“‘Sorry,’” she recommended.
“I said that already.”

clumsiness and disorganisation

It wasn’t that he meant to be careless — as Adam told him again and again, “Things cost money, Gansey” — it was just that he never seemed to realize the consequences of his actions until too late.
[Ronan] stopped the recorder and said, “You’re dripping gas on your pants, geezer.”
Gansey crashed onto the driver’s seat.
Then there were the notes, made with a half-dozen different pens and markers, but all in the same business-like hand. They circled and pointed and underlined very urgently. They made bulleted lists and eager exclamation points in the margins. They contradicted one another and referred to one another in third person. Lines became cross-hatching became doodles of mountains became squirrelly tire tracks behind fast-looking cars
Not the tidy stacks of an intellectual attempting to impress, but the slumping piles of a scholar obsessed.
It looked like the home of a mad inventor or an obsessed scholar or a very messy explorer; after meeting Gansey, she was beginning to suspect that he was all of these things.

EfficiencyTM

Gansey derived a large part of his pleasure from meeting goals, and a large part of that large part was pleased by meeting goals efficiently. There was nothing more efficient than aiming for your destination as the crow flew.

RulesTM

They didn’t even have the authority to choose an alcoholic beverage. They couldn’t be deciding who deserved to live or die.

Likes mechanical things (not counting the camaro because that’s just Too Many Quotes to compile)

He liked the little knobs and toggles and gauges of cockpits, and he liked the technological backwardness of the simple clasp seat belts.

not understanding/realizing things

Again, his face was somehow puzzled by the fact of their hand-holding.
It hadn’t occurred to Gansey that if the Camaro had been operating properly, fleeing would’ve been an option.
Gansey didn’t understand, but he nodded.
And now Gansey was a king here, and he didn’t even know how to use it.

difficulty reading people/nonverbal cues not impacting him

Gansey suspected that none of them was being completely honest with their replies, but at least he’d told them what he wanted. Sometimes all he could hope for was getting it on the record.
One of Ronan’s eyebrows was raised, sharp as a razor. Gansey strapped his journal closed. “That doesn’t work on me.
He didn’t believe she was really offended; her face didn’t look like it had at Nino’s when they’d first met, and her ears were turning pink. He thought, possibly, he was getting a little better at not offending her

need for certainty

What Gansey needed out of life was facts, things he could write in his journal, things he could state twice and underline, no matter how improbable those facts were.

generally unusual ways of thinking

An astonished Roman historian commented, You look under rocks no one else thinks to pick up, slick.

general “strangeness”

Adam leaned toward her as if he was about to say something, but ultimately, he just shook his head, smiling, like Gansey was a joke that was too complicated to explain.
“ARE YOU LISTENING, GLENDOWER? I AM COMING TO FIND YOU!” Gansey’s voice, ebullient and ringing, echoed off the tree-covered slopes around the field. Adam and Blue found him standing in the middle of a clear, pale path, his arms stretched out and his head tilted back as he shouted into the air.
“You find it not normal?”
She could tell that he very much wanted her to say that he wasn’t normal, so she replied, “Oh, I’m sure it’s quite normal in some circles.”
He looked a little hurt, but most of his attention was on the meter, which showed two faint red lights. He remarked, “I’d like to be in those circles.
Gansey couldn’t keep the exasperation from his voice. “‘Strange’ doesn’t help me. I don’t know what ‘strange’ means.”
He was himself, but he was something else, too — that something that Blue had first seen in him at the boys’ reading, that sense of otherness, of something more, seemed to radiate from that still portrait of Gansey enshrined in the dark tree.

not knowing other people don’t know things he knows

“Gansey, seriously,” Adam interrupted, to Blue’s relief. “Nobody knows what quiddity is.”
“Nobody knows who Ned Kelly is, either, Gansey.”

Born This Way

A small voice within Adam asked whether he would ever look this grand on the inside, or if it was something you had to be born into.

just. this. the way he knows to think this, the way he instinctively compares them to aliens that humans mistreat and that he logically shouldn’t love.

They were like aliens, Gansey thought. Aliens that we have treated very badly for a very long time. If I were a tree, I would have no reason to love a human.

consult the map again.