Delilah looked like she might silently blink herself into a faint.
“And when I got home that day,” he continued, “there was a snack on the kitchen table and a new Lego set—a present, okay? For getting through my first day. Until I was in the third grade, something from the house would take me to school. The tricycle or a wagon or even a small toy that grew warm in my hand, like it was reassuring me. The house has a way of slipping into things that are inanimate. It takes care of me. It always has.”
She seemed to try to make a few sounds before anything came out. “Slipping into. . . what?”
“I don’t know what it is, really,” he admitted, and when he looked at her incredulous expression, he wanted to tell her how many times he’d tried to puzzle it out, too. Was it spirits? Some sort of spell? Was it just. . . magic? In any case, it was his reality, his family, his life. “Things inside House can come alive in a way that I don’t think things anywhere else can. When an object is inside House. . . it can be alive.”
Still, Delilah stared blankly at him, repeating, “‘Can be’?”
“I mean, it doesn’t hijack onto my clothes,” he said with a little laugh that wasn’t returned. “Though, I think the energy, or whatever it is, can leave, too, through power lines, or through roots in the soil. I’ve tried to figure it out because obviously nothing there can really explain it to me.”
He realized he’d said too much. Delilah had leaned away a little, eyes wide. Growing slightly panicked, Gavin told her, “I’m telling you this because I really like you. And I trust that you won’t. . . won’t tell me I’m crazy.” He ducked low to meet her eyes, weary. “Say something,” he urged, after at least another half a minute had passed.
“But it sounds crazy,” she whispered.
A part of her had to believe it was true. Had she not felt the vine grasping her ankle? What would the human mind do to deceive itself?
“It’s crazy, yes. But the world is full of things that are crazy and wild and unbelievable.” When she didn’t say more, he added, “You of all people know this, Delilah. It’s why you love the idea of demon possession and things coming back to life. Is it so hard to imagine that objects might have life in them, too?”
Delilah looked as if she had been punched in the chest. “How do you know those things about me?”
He tried not to roll his eyes. “Anyone who pays attention knows that about you.”
“No one knows that.”
Gavin raised an eyebrow. “I’m paying attention in a way others aren’t.”
“So let’s say you’re telling the truth and you aren’t crazy. How does it work?” she asked. “Like, does everything. . . talk?”
He shook his head, his skin tingling faintly with the surrealism of the moment. “The things inside are alive, but nothing can speak because nothing has a mouth. Except the television, I suppose. But every single thing is alive. The rooms, the furniture, the paintings.”
“The curtains,” she breathed, playing with her lip.
“Yes, the curtains.”
“And the vines.” Delilah looked all around and down at her feet as if she expected something to have reached up and ensnared her ankle. “Is this why your parents never leave the house?”
He paused, wondering again whether he should lie. He started to, but the words got stuck in his throat, and instead the bare truth came out in a whisper. “I don’t have parents. I’ve been in the house for as long as I can remember.”
Delilah couldn’t process this, it appeared. She blinked a few more times and stared at him with her lips slightly parted. Gavin focused instead on her eyes.
“Where are they?” she asked, voice tight as if her throat was holding back more emotion.
He licked his lips, unable to look at her when he admitted, “I don’t know.”
“So they. . . just left?”
“Yeah. I don’t have any memories of my dad, but my mom. . . I know she was here at some point—there’s a picture—but. . . she left. She left me.”
“But you have food and—”
“I have everything I need,” he told her, because he did. Groceries were delivered each week, the account prepaid by someone—he’d never really thought to check by whom. When he was younger they were left at the front steps, but now Gavin always answered the door. That’s how he’d known Dave from the grocery store. Dave had been stopping by every week for years. How in the hell hadn’t he recognized Gavin? Beyond that, there wasn’t a single physical thing he needed that he didn’t have. Somehow House provided all of it.
“Aren’t you lonely?” she asked.
He shook his head.
“How. . . ?” she started and then stopped. “How is that even possible?”
With a smile, he explained. “It’s all I’ve really known, you know, so it doesn’t seem that impossible to me. I have some friends here at school. I have friends online. Things in the house move.. . . They take care of me. They always have. They would never leave.” He took a moment to look around the school yard. “It’s a bit like having a really big family, but no one speaks.”
Her jaw set, determined, when she said, “Then show me.”
The wind blew around them, picking up leaves and spinning them in the air.
“Okay.” He grinned because he suddenly loved everything about this conversation. It felt like he was exhaling a burning lungful of air after holding it in his entire life. And this girl, this gorgeous, crazy girl wasn’t running away screaming.
She caught his smile, her eyes narrowing in suspicion. “You’re really not messing with me?”
“I swear I’m not.”
“Why are you laughing?”
“Because, Delilah,” he said, running an index finger along his eyebrow, “I never expected the pretty girl who wrote me a note in the sixth grade to ask to be my girlfriend six years later, hear all this, and not run screaming.”
“Did you want to be my boyfriend?” she asked, eyebrows pulled close together. She looked preemptively mad, as if she were preparing for a fight.
For a war.
As if he could have said no. He nodded slowly. It seemed predestined, he realized, that this girl would walk back into this dirty, rumbling school with an unending tangle of words and innocence trailing behind her. And that the first thing she would want was him.
Chapter Seven
Her
So he was hers. She grinned so fiercely she felt like she might growl. That crazy hair, the dark, playful eyes. The lips—she couldn’t even imagine. That neck and those shoulders, ropy arms and torso that went on forever.
She’d consider the rest later.
“I think you might be a little unbalanced,” he said, watching her reaction with a smile.
Delilah shrugged. “Probably.” She moved closer, closer than she’d ever been to him, and reached up to put her hands flat on his chest.
Gavin sucked in a giant breath, startling her, and squeezed his eyes shut so tight his face contorted as if she’d hurt him. But when she tried to pull away, he stopped her with his palms covering the backs of her hands.
Had he been touched before? “Haven’t you had girlfriends?”
He opened his eyes. “A couple. But I didn’t want them for long, and none of them made me feel this way.”
“What way?”
“Relieved. Maybe a little terrified.”
She dropped her hands this time before he could stop her. “I terrify you?”
“Yes.”
“That’s. . . not good, is it?”
“For me it is,” he said, and followed it with a little one-shouldered shrug. “I’m just overwhelmed by you. I finally have you. I don’t want to mess this up.”
She considered his expression. He looked almost desperately hopeful.
• • •
Gavin walked her home, away from the scrabbly bushes surrounding school to the neat lawns of her neighborhood. Tiny pastel houses were set back an equal distance from the street and only an arm
’s length away from each neighbor.
Delilah didn’t think these houses would look very interesting to Gavin, having grown up in a sprawling, living mansion, but even so, he looked around her neighborhood with barely concealed hunger. “What time do your parents get home?”
“My mom gets home around four. She does hair down at the Supercuts. My dad used to be a manager at the plant.”
“What does he do now?”
Delilah shrugged, surprised that Gavin didn’t already know this. The rest of the town seemed to. Looking at the dark windows of her house, she wondered if one or both of her parents were watching her from the living room. What would they think, seeing her talking to this tall, slim shadow on the sidewalk? She found she didn’t really care and was more surprised it hadn’t occurred to her sooner. Her parents had lots of opinions, but most of them seemed to be about unimportant things. Delilah wondered where Gavin would land on their spectrum of relevant worries. Knowing them, they wouldn’t think to look out the window to see who had walked her home, but they had noticed this morning that her skirt was an inch shorter than the one she wore yesterday.
“Is your dad home?” Gavin asked, prompting.
“He might be. He’s looking for work. I guess there isn’t a lot in this town for managers right now.”
Gavin nodded as if this made sense, but Delilah had to wonder what he knew of parents being out of work and what it cost to run a household. He worked in a movie theater for a few hours a week. How much money could he really have? She could hardly ask that. Who did he talk to about careers and school? What did he do if he got stuck on his math homework?
“You should go in,” he prompted, lifting his chin toward the porch. Her mom now stood there, waving.
“I know. But I don’t want to.”
“You’re not going to go in there and freak out on me, are you?”
She looked up at him, stretched to kiss his cheek but made it only to his jaw. “See you tomorrow.”
Chapter Eight
Him
Gavin lay on Bed that night, long legs stretched nearly to the footboard. He was getting too old for this room, but he’d been here since he was seven and had finally decided to move out of the nursery. Here, blue wallpaper lined the walls and model airplanes hung from wire, twisting errantly from the ceiling above.
He’d gone through an aviator phase when he was twelve, right after watching a documentary about the Wright Brothers on Television. He could still remember how he’d talked about the program for weeks and how content House seemed to just listen. He’d jabbered endlessly about wing warping and gliders, and it had seemed to understand, the flowers in Parlor Painting nodding encouragingly each time he paused to take a breath.
He remembered how boxes of books on aeronautics and aerospace engineering had magically appeared on the porch—silently ordered, silently delivered—how encyclopedias had found their way onto Table near Bed. He’d pored through volume after volume, read countless biographies, even found plans on building models to scale. But no maps. Not a single atlas or globe to be found. It was the first inkling Gavin had that although House provided him with everything he’d ever thought to want or need, it might be trying to keep him from the one thing he’d never really paid much attention to in the first place: the outside world.
As he usually did when these sorts of thoughts occurred to him, Gavin shuffled it to the back of his mind, along with all other equally unpleasant things. This was the only life he’d ever known, after all. And hadn’t he always been happy? Or at the very least, content? He’d always reasoned that everyone lived their lives in one type of box or another; his was just a bit more oddly shaped than the rest.
And now Delilah wanted to come here.
Gavin had no idea what to make of this, having never been wanted so sincerely—and so fiercely—before in his life. Other girls had been curious, maybe using him to explore their own borders of what felt safe and what felt dangerous, but with Delilah it always seemed clear that if either of them was to be handled carefully, it wasn’t him. She was like a firecracker standing too close to a match: all potential energy, still wrapped up so neatly. He wanted to watch her explode.
Hell, he was the match. He wanted to make her explode.
He squeezed his eyes shut and let out a frustrated sigh, saying, “You’re too small,” to Bed.
Almost as soon as the words were out, a great metallic groan rang through the room. Bed trembled, springs creaked, and the scraping of metal against metal rattled all around him.
Gavin waited calmly as Bed stretched beneath him, growing more than a foot beyond its original length and several feet wider. Sometimes he wondered if House realized he’d grown at all, or if everything inside still imagined him as the tiny boy they’d raised.
“Better,” he said. “Thanks.”
Gavin looked around then, eyeing the sky-colored paper, the childish clouds on the ceiling. He couldn’t let Delilah see this.
“I think maybe a redecoration is in order.” He paused, wondering what would be an acceptable substitute. How did seventeen-year-old boys decorate their rooms, anyway? “More black,” he finished, satisfied that this would at least be a step in the right direction.
The room cooled, and House rumbled deep within its foundation, a gentle admonishment.
But Gavin ignored this, heaving himself off Bed and crossing the room. He peered out to where the sun hung low in the sky, its golden fingers just visible behind the rooftops of houses in the distance.
The yard sprawled out beneath him, a kaleidoscope of blossoms still visible beneath the thin layer of frost. Delilah had known about the apples, but Gavin wondered what she would think when she saw roses blooming in January or a garden full of vegetables still thriving in the throes of winter.
She’d seemed completely unruffled by his secret earlier, at school, but it was one thing to accept the idea of a house living and breathing and growing all around you and quite another to actually see it. How would she react to Ferns that picked themselves up, settling beneath whichever Window had the best view of the sun? Or Lamp, who followed him from room to room because there weren’t actual light switches on any of the walls? Or Hall Table, who was one of the few pieces of furniture that never moved during the day but creaked as it prowled through the halls in the middle of the night?
She wanted to come here to see the sideshow that was his life. A part of him worried she’d see the fire burning that nobody ever tended, or Grandfather Clock that told him exactly what he was late for, and she would run out the gate and never speak to him again.
But another, darker part of him worried that she wouldn’t. That perhaps Delilah Blue was every bit as brave as she appeared, and would stay. And it was this possibility that frightened him more than all the others combined, because Gavin was fairly certain that once Delilah walked through the front door, he’d never want her to leave.
• • •
Gavin took the long way to school, still not sure what he would say the next time Delilah asked to go home with him. He trudged through the slush as he considered this. She would, he knew. It was just a question of whether he’d even get one word out before she asked again.
She was waiting near the front entrance, her bag in a forgotten heap at her feet. Gavin spotted her long before she spotted him, his gaze moving from her braided hair down to legs that peeked from beneath the bloom of her pleated skirt.
Gavin didn’t know a lot about girls, but he knew enough. He knew that when most girls wore things like that, they hoped to drive boys crazy. But it didn’t take a genius to know that by wearing what she considered to be a boring uniform, Delilah was completely clueless about what she was doing to him, or to any other boy for that matter. She just didn’t think much about clothes. But the innocent slip of leg below the knee, all wrapped in knitted tights and boots, was enough to make him wonder about the parts of her he couldn’t see.
She blinked over to him just as he crossed the street. Delil
ah’s eyes widened, a smile lighting up her face, and the twist in his stomach was back, even tighter than before.
“Hi, Delilah,” he said, trying to swallow the crack in his voice.
“Hi, Gavin,” she said back, gray-green eyes moving over every one of his features. “Finish your paper on Poe?”
“I did. You?”
Delilah pivoted and began walking toward the school. “I did, but it took forever.”
“Why? You probably already covered Poe in freshman year at Saint Benedict’s.” They climbed the steps, and Gavin held open the door, breathing in her apple-blossom scent as she passed.
“I still had to do a lot of research.”
He looked over at her, wondering about her mysterious little smile. “I’m sure you just forgot some of the smaller details.”
“Or maybe there are just too many distractions in my English class,” she said.
Gavin considered this, taking in her teasing expression. “Well, Mr. Harrington is very distracting,” he said with a small grin.
“We could be distracted at your house,” she said in a whisper. “I’m sure you’d make an excellent tutor.”
He swallowed and blinked away, but just as easily as he’d turned awkward, Delilah laughed, reaching out to take his hand in hers. She lifted the edge of his sleeve and stared down at the black ink there, the words he’d written just this morning:
She takes your voice and leaves you howling at the moon.
“What is that?”
He tugged his sleeve down and blinked behind her, to where several students watched their interaction with interest. “It’s from a song I love.”
They stopped when they reached Delilah’s locker. “Are you sure about this?” he asked finally. “The house is a lot to take in.” He looked around them again, then back at her. “Being with me is a lot to take in, as well.”
Her eyes flamed, and she stretched up on her toes, her lips almost touching the shell of his ear. The halls were a whirlwind of activity, but none of it seemed to matter to either of them.
“I’m sure.”