Mister Impossible by Maggie Stiefvater (good books for 8th graders .TXT) 📕

Well, older. Grizzled. This Ronan had walked and walked through this world. His cheeks were hard and chiseled beneath scrubby shadow. Deep crow lines formed around his eyes from decades of laughing and frowning into the sun. His shaved head had grown out just enough to show that his temples were gray, same as the hair that shadowed his jaw. There was one thick trail of nightwash that oozed from one of his closed eyes, but two tiny mice the size of walnuts were furiously working away at it with their paws and their tongues.

Old. Older than he imagines.

Hennessy wanted to say something to cut the moment, but she couldn’t. She was so angry, so tangled in the grips of this wild ocean, this distant sunrise, this lightening peak, this wearied Ronan from another time curled in an ancient tree. Why did it have to be this way? she kept thinking. Why did she have to be this way?

She longed for the Hennessy in the car, the one who thought she didn’t care about anything. What a splendid liar she was. She cared about everything.

After the mice were done, they scurried away into the darkness of the hollow of the tree, leaving Ronan motionless in the protective curve of the stump.

“Come back, Ronan,” Bryde said softly. “The nightwash will not have you this time.”

Silence. Just the barely heard sound of that slow, old ocean down below.

“Ronan Lynch,” Hennessy said.

Ronan’s eyes opened.

They were his eyes after all, bright blue and intense.

He looked at them both, this young, old Ronan.

“No more playing,” he said. He sounded tired. “We save the ley lines.”

Declan had been told a long time ago that he had to know what he wanted, or he’d never get it. Not by his father, because his father would have never delivered such pragmatic advice in such a pragmatic way. No, even if Niall Lynch believed in the sentiment, he would have wrapped it up in a long story filled with metaphor and magic and nonsense riddles. Only years after the storytelling would Declan be sitting somewhere and realize that all along Niall had been trying to teach him to balance his checkbook, or whatever the tale had ever really been about. Niall could never just say the thing.

No, this piece of advice—You have to know what you want, or you’ll never get it—was given to Declan by a senator from Nevada he’d met during a DC field trip back in eighth grade. The other children had been bored by the pale stone restraint of the city and the sameness of the law and government offices they toured. Declan, however, had been fascinated. He’d asked the senator what advice he had for those looking to get into politics.

“Come from money,” the senator had said first, and then when all the eighth graders and their teachers had stared without laughing, he added, “You have to know what you want, or you’ll never get it. Make goals.”

Declan made goals. The goal was DC. The goal was politics. The goal was structure, and more structure, and yet more structure. He took AP classes on political science and policy. When he traveled with his father to black markets, he wrote papers. When he took calls from gangsters and shady antique auction houses, he arranged drop-offs near DC and wrangled meetings with HR people. Aglionby Academy made calls and pulled strings; he got names, numbers, internships. All was going according to plan. His father inconveniently got murdered, but Declan pressed on. His father’s will conveniently left him a town house adjacent to DC. Declan pressed on. He kept his brothers alive; he graduated; he moved to DC.

He made the goal, he went toward the goal.

When he took his first lunch meeting with his new boss, he found himself filled with the same anticipation he’d had as an eighth grader. This was the place, he thought, where things happened. Just across the road was the Mexican embassy. Behind him was the IMF. GW Law School was a block away. The White House, the USPS, the Red Cross, all within a stone’s throw.

This was before he understood there was no making it for him. He came from money, yeah, but the wrong kind of money. Niall Lynch’s clout was not relevant in this daylight world; he only had status in the night. And one could not rise above that while remaining invisible to protect one’s dangerous brother.

On that first day of work, Declan walked into the Renwick Gallery and stood inside an installation that had taken over the second floor around the grand staircase. Tens of thousands of black threads had been installed at points all along the ceiling, tangling around the Villareal LED sculpture that normally lit the room, snarling the railing over the stairs, blocking out the light from the tall arches that bordered the walls, turning the walkways into dark, confusing rabbit tunnels. Museumgoers had to pick their way through with caution lest they be snared and bring the entire world down with them.

He had, bizarrely, felt tears burning the corners of his eyes.

Before that, he hadn’t understood that his goals and what he wanted might not be the same thing.

This was where he’d found art.

Declan stood in the small Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, looking at John Singer Sargent’s El Jaleo. The dim room, the so-called Spanish Cloister, was long and skinny. The walls were colorful with complicated Mexican tiles and lined with stone fountains and basins. El Jaleo was the only painting in the room, hung in a shallow alcove framed by a Moorish arch. Antique pots rested around its base, tricking the viewer into believing themselves part of the scene in the painting. A cunning mirror stole light from the hall and threw it subtly on the canvas. Gardner had renovated this room especially for El Jaleo, and every part of it was an extension of the painting’s