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anxiousanimal · 6 years

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The Adam Parrish visual masterpost

Edit July 4 2018: added excerpt from chapter 33 of Dream Thieves. Thanks to @flowersalad for the suggestion!

Because there has been so much debate about what various parts of Adam Parrish look like, and because it can be hard to flip through four books to dig up the info you want, and because it’s his birthday and I am an idiot, I took on the task of collecting all (well, almost all) canon information about Adam’s visuals into one comprehensive post. Four books’ worth of quotes is under the cut, after the

Summary:

Build: He’s tall (the second tallest of the boys), described as “slender”, “long” and “wiry”. It’s easy to see where the twink/twunk debate came from because he’s often said to look “fragile”. This seems to be more about his face than anything else though. (He does work three manual jobs and lifts weights on a regular basis but on the other hand he doesn’t seem to get a lot to eat.)

Face: “Gaunt”, “strange”, “fine-boned”, “elegant”, “elongated features”, “wide-set eyes”. He’s tanned with fair, almost invisible eyebrows. His face tends to fascinate people. He looks tired and wary a lot because he is. There is not a freckle in sight. Sorry.

Hair: “Dust-colored”, “the same colorless brown as the tips of old grass ”. Unevenly cut.

Eyes: Blue and “pretty enough for a girl”. “Dusty lashes”.

Demeanor/mannerisms: Usually quiet, observing, can appear shy but isn’t. Hunched shoulders, cautious. Narrowed eyes. Pensive knocking. Hands in pockets. Elegant, controlled. Disdainful eyebrow.

The Raven Boys:

Chapter 2:

In the passenger seat was Adam Parrish, the third member of the foursome that made up Gansey’s closest friends. The knot of Adam’s tie was neat above the collar of his sweater. One slender hand pressed Ronan’s thin cell phone tightly to his ear.

Unlike Ronan, Adam’s Aglionby sweater was secondhand, but he’d taken great care to be certain it was impeccable. He was slim and tall, with dusty hair unevenly cropped above a fine-boned, tanned face. He was a sepia photograph.

Chapter 6:

And the third was — elegant. It was not the right word for him, but it was close. He was fine boned and a little fragile looking, with blue eyes pretty enough for a girl.

Despite the comeliness of the boy in the booth, it was not a pleasant millisecond.

Beside him, the elegant boy ducked his head. His ears were bright pink.

The elegant boy looked up and caught her gaze. His eyebrows were drawn together, remorseful rather than cruel, making her doubt herself.

Chapter 7:

He looked tired, up too late too many nights in a row working and studying.

I could tell him his grades are going to go to hell if he doesn’t cut back on his hours, Gansey thought, looking at the dark skin beneath Adam’s eyes.

In comparison to Ronan, Adam looked clean, self-contained, utterly in control. From somewhere, he had gotten a rubber ball printed with a SpongeBob logo, and he bounced it with a pensive expression.

Adam dropped the ball and caught it again. He had an almost mechanical way of snapping his fingers around the ball as it bounced back toward him; one moment his hand was open and empty, and the next, tight shut around it.

Bounce. Snap.

Instead of answering, Adam twisted his hand and released the rubber ball. He’d chosen his trajectory carefully: The ball bounced off the greasy asphalt once, struck one of the Camaro’s tires, and arced high in the air, disappearing in the black. He stepped forward in time for it to slap in his palm. Gansey made an approving noise.

Chapter 8:

"Excuse me, um, miss — hi. " The voice was careful, masculine, and local; the vowels had all the edges sanded off. Blue turned with a lukewarm expression. To her surprise, it was Elegant Boy, face gaunter and older in the distant streetlight. He was alone. No sign of President Cell Phone, the smudgy one, or their hostile friend. One hand steadied his bike. The other was tucked neatly in his pocket. His uncertain posture didn’t quite track with the raven-breasted sweater, and she caught a glimpse of a worn bit of seam on the shoulder before he shrugged it under his ear as if he was cold.

It didn’t escape Blue that his slightly accented voice was as nice as his looks. It was all Henrietta sunset: hot front-porch swings and cold iced-tea glasses, cicadas louder than your thoughts. He glanced over his shoulder, then, at the sound of a car on a side street. When he looked back to her, he still wore a wary expression, and Blue saw that this expression — a wrinkle pinched between his eyebrows, mouth tense — was his normal one. It fit his features perfectly, matched up with every line around his mouth and eyes. This Aglionby boy isn’t often happy, she thought.

But she was stymied by his blush at the table; his honest expression; his newly minted, uncertain smile. His face was just strange enough that she wanted to keep looking at it.

"Talk," he said. In his local accent, it was a long word and it seemed less of a synonym for speak than it was for confess. She couldn’t help but look at the thin, pleasant line of his mouth. He added, "I guess I could have just saved a lot of trouble by coming up to talk to you in the first place. Other people’s ideas always seem to get me into more trouble.

Something about Adam told her that this was a boy she could have a conversation with.

He just leveled her with a very steady look. It wasn’t an expression that left room for folly.

Adam said only, "I’m glad I came back. " Turning his long self around, he began to push his dolefully squeaking bike back the way he’d come.

Chapter 14:

Adam’s mother answered his knock. She was a shadow of Adam — the same elongated features, the same wide-set eyes. In comparison to Gansey’s mother, she seemed old and hard-edged.

The ripped knees of Adam’s camo cargo pants appeared first, then his faded Coca-Cola T-shirt, then, finally, his face. A bruise spread over his cheekbone, red and swelling as a galaxy. A darker one snaked over the bridge of his nose.

Now Adam looked at Gansey. There was something fierce and chilling in his eyes, an unnamable something that Gansey was always afraid would eventually take over completely.

Chapter 15:

There were three boys in the doorway, backlit by the evening sun as Neeve had been so many weeks ago. Three sets of shoulders: one square, one built, one wiry.

What it did was make him look more fragile and dirty, somehow, like a teacup unearthed from the soil, but Blue didn’t say that.

No one volunteered immediately to go first, so she offered the deck to Adam. He met her gaze and held it for a moment. There was something forceful and intentional about the gesture, more aggressive than he’d been the night he approached her.

Chapter 21:

But it was very difficult to imagine Adam as a raven boy as he greeted her, his hands neatly in his pockets, scented with the dusty odor of mown grass. His bruise was older and therefore more dreadful looking.

Adam kept walking, but he didn’t look away. He seemed shy until he didn’t.

Adam stopped walking. Blue, a few feet ahead of him, waited as he frowned at the things in his hands. He held the journal very carefully, like it was important to him, or perhaps like it was important to someone who was important to him. Desperately she wanted him to both trust her and respect her, and she could tell from his face that she didn’t have much time to accomplish either.

Adam’s face melted into a grin, an expression so unlike his usual one that his features needed to completely shift to accommodate it.

Chapter 23:

Beside her, Adam shielded his eyes. He looked at home here, his hair the same colorless brown as the tips of old grass, and he looked more handsome than Blue remembered.

Chapter 32:

She looked at his face, fragile and strange under the bruise. It was easy to read him as shy or uncertain, she thought, but he really wasn’t either. Noah was. But Adam was just quiet. He wasn’t lost for words; he was observing.

Chapter 39:

He held Adam’s gaze for a long, long moment. There was something unfamiliar in Adam’s expression, something that made Blue think that she didn’t really know him at all.

Chapter 41:

She felt a little like she’d been approached by a wild animal, and she was at once flattered by its trust and worried that she’d scare it away. After a moment, she carefully stroked a few fine, dusty strands of his hair while she looked at the back of his neck. It made her chest hum to touch him and smell the dust-and-oil scent of him. "Your hair is the color of dirt," she said.

She wondered what it would’ve been like to kiss this hungry, desolate boy.

The Dream Thieves:

Chapter 1:

Adam Parrish, gaunt and fair;

As always, his features intrigued Blue. They were not quite conventionally handsome, but they were interesting. He had the typical Henrietta prominent cheekbones and deep-set eyes, but his version of them was more delicate. It made him seem a little alien. A little impenetrable.

Chapter 5:

Ronan sometimes dreamt of Adam, too, the latter boy sullen and elegant and fluently disdainful of dream-Ronan’s clumsy attempts to communicate.

Chapter 13

Blue craned her neck to see what they were looking at. It was just Adam. He sat in the reading room by himself, the diffuse morning light rendering him soft and dusty. He had removed one of the tarot decks from its bag and lined each of the cards faceup in three long rows. Now he leaned on the table and studied the image on each, one at a time, shuffling on his elbows to the next when he was through. He looked nothing like the Adam who’d lost his temper and everything like the Adam she had first met. That was what was frightening, though — there’d been no warning.

Chapter 33:

Beside him stood Adam, his strange and beautiful face pale above the slender dark of his own suit.

For a moment, Adam said nothing. He was not Gansey, he did not dazzle, he was a pretender with a flute of false champagne in his slender hand made from dust. He looked at Mrs. Elgin. She looked back at him through her eyelashes. With a jolt, he realized that he intimidated her. Standing there in his impervious suit with its red-knotted tie, young and straight-shouldered and clean, he had pulled off whatever strange alchemy Gansey performed. For perhaps the first time in his life, someone was looking at him and seeing power.

Chapter 48:

Adam cocked his head witheringly.

Chapter 51:

She looked at him again. He was handsome and he liked her and if she hadn’t told him the truth, she could have dated him like a normal girl and even kissed him without worrying about killing him.

Epilogue:

Ronan’s second secret was Adam Parrish. Adam was different since making the bargain with Cabeswater. Stronger, stranger, farther away. It was hard not to stare at the odd and elegant lines of his face.

Blue Lily Lily Blue:

Prologue:

Adam Parrish stood beside her with his hands shoved into the pockets of his grease-stained cargo pants. He looked tired, but his eyes were clear, better than when she’d seen him last. Because Persephone was only interested in important things, she hadn’t considered her own age in a long time, but it struck her as she looked at him that he was quite new. That raw expression, that youthful hunch of his shoulders, the frantic sprawl of the energy inside him. (BLLB prologue)

His eyes fluttered, his dusty lashes resting on his cheeks. (BLLB prologue)

Chapter 1:

Adam Parrish, curled over himself in a pair of battered, greasy coveralls, asked, “Do you?”

The walls were dust and rock, roots and chalk, everything the color of Adam’s hair and skin.

Chapter 5:

Adam absently tapped a finger against his own wrist, a gesture somehow disconcerting and otherworldly.

Adam’s expression was ferocious and pleased; Gansey was at once proud to know him and uncertain he did at all.

Chapter 20:

They regarded each other. Adam fair and cautious, Ronan dark and incendiary.

Chapter 27:

Adam was quiet as he weighed the options. His face was strange and delicate in the sharp light of Gansey’s head beam. Swiftly, and without explanation, he reached out to touch the cavern wall. Although he was not a dream thing, he was now one of Cabeswater’s things, and it was hard not to see it in the way his fingers spidered across the wall and in the blackness of his eyes as they gazed at nothing.

Chapter 32:

How narrow-shouldered he was beside this other man. It was hard to see where he’d come from without a close look at their faces. Then one could see how Robert Parrish wore Adam’s thin, fine lips. Then it wasn’t hard to see the same fair hair, spun from dust, and the wrinkle between the eyebrows, formed by wariness. It was actually not a difficult thing at all to see that one had sired the other.

Chapter 37:

Adam raised a diffident eyebrow at the scene. “Who’s ‘them’?”

He was standing, very still, his hands by his sides. His chin was tilted up in a wary, fragile sort of way, and his eyes narrowed at nothing. Unlike Ronan and Henry, he was dustless. Gansey saw the jerk of his chest as it rose and fell.

No one was talking to Adam. It wasn’t difficult to understand this: Adam didn’t look like someone you could talk to, just then. There was something more frightening about him than there was about the circle. Like the bare ground, there was nothing inherently unusual about his appearance. But in context, surrounded by these brick buildings, he didn’t … belong.

Adam’s eyes slid over to him but his head didn’t turn. It was the stillness that made him seem so other.

Chapter 39:

Leaning over the pool, Adam saw his face. He hadn’t noticed that he didn’t look like everyone else until he got to high school, when everyone else started noticing. He didn’t know if he was good-looking or bad-looking — only that he was different-looking. It was up to interpretation whether the strangeness of his face was beautiful or ugly.

He waited for his features to disappear, to smudge into a sensation. But all he saw was his Henrietta-dirt face with its pulled-down thin mouth. He wished he wouldn’t grow up to look like his parents’ combined genes.

Chapter 44:

Both of the boys were unsettling — Adam Parrish, in particular, had a curious face. Not as in, he was a curious person. But rather that there was something peculiar about his facial features. He was an alien, handsome specimen of this western Virginia species; feather-boned, hollow-cheeked, eyebrows fair and barely visible. He was feral and raw-boned by way of those Civil War portraits. Brother fought brother while their farms ran to ruins —

Adam Parrish smiled a little; it took two years off his age in a second. He had teeth on both his top and bottom jaw.

The Raven King:

Chapter 13:

Adam stepped in front of the glass, his hand over his eye, looking at his gaunt face. His nearly colourless eyebrow was pinched with worry.

Chapter 14:

His expression, if possible, turned more disdainful than it had over Henry Cheng.

He was sort of half-smiling, but in that way people did when they were annoyed rather than when anything was funny.

He spread his hands out at the still-empty restaurant, as if he, too, was amazed by the turn this conversation had taken.

Now Blue also spread her hands. It was a rather less elegant gesture than Adam’s, more like a fist clench in reverse.

He merely raised an eyebrow in reply, an action that warmed the temperature of Blue’s blood by a single degree.

Adam’s mouth went very thin, like he was about to retort something, but in the end, he just swiped his keys from the table and walked out of the restaurant.

Chapter 18:

Adam was crouched in front of it, staring unflinchingly into the headlights’ brilliance. His fingers were spread on the asphalt and his feet braced like a runner waiting for the starting shot. Three tarot cards splayed before him. He’d taken one of the floor mats out of the car to crouch on to keep from dirtying his uniform trousers. If you combined these two things – the unfathomable and the practical – you were most of the way to understanding Adam Parrish.

“Parrish,” Ronan said. Adam didn’t respond. His pupils were pinhole cameras to another world. “Parrish.”

Just one of Adam’s hands lifted in the direction of Ronan’s leg. His fingers twitched in a way that conveyed don’t bother me with the absolute minimum of motion.

Ronan crossed his arms to wait, just looking. At Adam’s fine cheekbones, his furrowed fair eyebrows, his beautiful hands, everything washed out by the furious light. He had memorized the shape of Adam’s hands in particular: the way his thumb jutted awkwardly, boyishly; the roads of the prominent veins; the large knuckles that punctuated his long fingers.

Adam’s fingers tensed, and then he sat back. He blinked, and then blinked again, rapidly, touching the corner of his eye with just the tip of his ring finger. This didn’t suffice, so he rubbed his palms over them until they watered. Finally, he tilted his chin up to Ronan.

“What the hell’s wrong with your eyes?” Ronan asked.

Adam’s pupils were still tiny. “Takes me a while to come back.”

Chapter 21:

For Adam, it meant linking in to the ley line that pulsed beneath the forest, unwrapping himself and allowing the bigger pattern inside. It was a process that was both eerie and awesome to watch from the outside. Adam; then Adam, vacated; then Adam, more.

He glanced behind to make sure Adam was following; he was, looking at Ronan with narrowed eyes.

Chapter 27:

Blue and Adam regarded each other. She sucked in her lip; he lifted a shoulder. They were both sorry.

Adam leaned to bump his knuckles against Gansey’s.

Chapter 31:

Adam gently closed his locker.

Adam smiled cheerily. Ronan would start wars and burn cities for that true smile, elastic and amiable.

Chapter 36:

Now Adam turned to him, intense. “What does that mean? How did you know it was different than just being her friend?”

“Nothing,” said Adam, a lie so outrageous that they both looked out into the yard again in silence. He tapped the fingers of one hand on the palm of his other.

“Ronan kissed me,” Adam said immediately. The words had clearly been queued up. He gazed studiously into the front yard.

Adam continued peering out the window. The only tell to the furious working of his mind was the slow twisting together of his fingers.

Adam released his hands from each other. “I think that’s what I needed to hear.”

Chapter 39

After a few moments, he heard the door ease open behind him and Adam joined him. Silently they looked over the dancing lights in the fields. It was not difficult to see that Adam was working intensely with his own thoughts.

Chapter 45:

“Fuck,” said Adam vehemently. He had begun to shake, though his face had not changed.

Chapter 52:

And he had Adam’s mind here in the dream with him. In the real world, he was scrying in the passenger seat again, and in this one, he stood in this ruined forest, hunched over, face unsure.

The real Adam was standing with his head turned to the side as an unreasonable facsimile of his father screamed in his face, the cadence of his voice perfectly and eerily matched to the real Robert Parrish. There was a firm set to Adam’s mouth that was less fear and more stubbornness.

Adam met Ronan’s gaze, even as the duplicate version of his father kept screaming at him. The strain of whatever energy balance he was doing was visible on his face. “Are you ready?”

Chapter 56:

Adam just looked at it in a distant way, his hands clasped together as if they were cold.

Chapter 64:

Shaking his reddened wrists free of the ribbon, Adam first touched the top of the Orphan Girl’s head and whispered, “It’s going to be all right.” And then he climbed out of the car and stood before Gansey. What could they possibly say?

Gansey bumped fists with Adam and they nodded at each other. It was stupid, inadequate.

Chapter 66:

Beside Blue and Henry, Adam was dry-cheeked and dead-eyed, but the Orphan Girl hugged his arm as if comforting a weeper as he stared off into nothingness.

Adam suddenly sat down. He said nothing at all, but he covered his face with his hands.

Adam looked up from where he was folded in the grass. His voice was small. “What about Cabeswater?”

Epilogue:

He waited, hands in the pockets of his pressed khaki slacks, looking at the clean toes of his shoes and then up again at the dusty door.

The door opened, and his father stood there, eye to eye with him. Adam felt a little more kindly to the past version of himself, the one who had been afraid of turning out like this man. Because although Robert Parrish and Adam Parrish didn’t look alike at first glance, there was something introverted and turned-inward about Robert Parrish’s gaze that reminded Adam of himself. Something about the knit of the eyebrows was similar, too; the shape of the furrow between them was precisely the shape of the continued difference between what life was supposed to be and what life was actually like.

He knocked on the cabinet beside him, once, thoughtful, and then he took out the BMW keys. “I’ll do that,” he said.

Opal - a story

Adam had taken the cassette from Ronan’s hand, working Ronan’s fingers loose and putting his own fingers between them. For a moment Opal, hidden, had thought they were going to kiss. But instead, Ronan pressed his face against Adam’s neck and Adam quietly put his head on top of Ronan’s head and they did not move for a long time.

Adam’s feet were long and hairless and vulnerable looking. His anklebone protruded like his wristbones did, as if his feet were just very strange hands. He had little bits of dark sock lint stuck to his skin, and it came off in a stripe when Opal rubbed at it.

#adam parrish #trc #the raven cycle #trb #the raven boys #tdt #the dream thieves #bllb #blue lily lily blue #trk #the raven king #trkopal #opal short story #opal story

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