The House

by Christina Lauren

  She was so wispy, such a slip of a girl. Gavin imagined laying her on her side on the grass and playing notes up and down her skin.

  “Mr. Timothy?”

  His eyes blinked to focus, and he realized Mr. Harrington was staring at him. “Yes, sir?”

  “We’re covering Poe this week, Gavin. And I’ve asked you which of his works you chose to read and discuss with us. Unless, of course, you were hoping to be able to read and discuss Miss Blue’s thoughts instead?”

  Gavin felt a smile spread across his face. “I should be so lucky. But no, I’m happy to discuss ‘The Oval Portrait.’”

  Finally Delilah had an excuse to turn around and look at him. Her eyes were wide and burning with curiosity. She wouldn’t follow him home again—he was pretty sure she would listen to what he’d said the day before—but she wasn’t nearly done with him either.

  Chapter Five

  Her

  Delilah strode across the lawn, ignoring the weight of a dozen pairs of eyes on her back as she bravely walked over to the loner beneath the tree.

  I should be so lucky.

  Ever since English class and Gavin’s scandalous comment, her mind had been filling with a hundred different interpretations of what he’d said. Her heart rate seemed to accelerate with every step until she felt like, once she reached him, she might crack open and spill everywhere.

  Gavin sat on the grass, leaning against his oak tree, reading.

  “What did you mean ‘you should be so lucky’?” Delilah blurted, and then cringed. She’d wanted to walk over, start out with something friendly. A greeting, maybe. Hi. Let’s start over again after yesterday. First question: How is it possible you’re even cuter now after all these years?

  Instead she’d cracked and spilled after all.

  He looked up slowly from his book, as if he couldn’t break his attention away until he’d finished his sentence. And then he smiled. “Hi, Delilah.”

  “Hi,” she said, shifting on her feet while she waited for an answer. Finally, she asked again, “What did you mean?”

  He patted the grass next to him. “I wasn’t speaking in code. I just think you’re fun to try to puzzle out.”

  “I’m the puzzle?”

  “To me, you are.”

  Reluctantly, she sat down and tried to force her blush back into her veins. “Why didn’t you want me to see your house yesterday?”

  He considered his answer for a few breaths before admitting, “Because I know all the rumors. I guess it makes me uncomfortable to imagine you there.”

  Delilah felt a heavy wave of defeat. Was it because of how the rest of the town talked? Did he think she was saying those things too? Or was it that he simply didn’t want her there, which was. . . a different thing altogether.

  “I’d never talk about your house, you know,” she said.

  His long thumb traced the spine of the book he’d been reading, and she shivered, imagining what it would feel like for that same finger to move up and down her spine. “I know, Delilah,” he said, but he didn’t look up.

  Was this it, then? This was going to be the extent of their relationship: She stared at him for almost a solid hour her first day back at public school, followed him home, and then humiliated herself again today. She pushed up from the ground, ready to stand.

  Gavin wrapped his fingers all the way around her forearm, with plenty of finger left to spare. “Don’t go yet. I still need to hear at least a couple of stories about the horrors of Catholic school.”

  “‘Horrors?’” she asked, sitting back down. Nothing horrific came to mind. Only unending detentions in the corner and bored, undersexed teenage girls causing drama where there wasn’t much need for it.

  “Exorcisms,” he suggested, pursing his lips thoughtfully. “Abusive nuns. Haunted dorms. Give me something good, Delilah.”

  She inhaled and held her breath, staring at him. He was too good to be true, saying just what she needed him to say to show her she wasn’t wrong about him. “How about the wild tangle of lesbian orgies?”

  His eyes widened playfully. “I’m all ears.”

  “Well, in that case you’re going to be disappointed. No abusive nuns either, or exorcisms, at least none that I witnessed. But everyone was sneaking in booze and drugs and boys.”

  “Boys?” His eyebrows inched up slowly.

  Delilah laughed, loving that this was the most shocking contraband. In truth, she didn’t have much experience with boys. She’d kissed a few, snuck one into her room to see what making out felt like in a bed, but never more than that.

  Holding up his hands, he qualified, “No, I mean obviously boys are much less illegal than drugs, but presumably harder to sneak in?”

  “Not necessarily. I mean, you would be hard to dress up as a girl and sneak inside, even in the dark. You’re about seventy feet tall. But most boys our age can pass a little easier for female.”

  He snorted. “Now it’s settled. You have to go back to Catholic school just so we can see if you can sneak me in.”

  “Sneak you in where?” she asked, voice low and meaningful. “My room?”

  But she’d gotten carried away, forgotten herself and how new this delicate friendship was. His smile wilted slightly. “Maybe just into the building to start.”

  “Sorry. I seem to always act crazy around you. I’m not usually like this. I swear.”

  “What are you usually like, then?”

  She considered this. “Bored. Looking for someone to ask me about exorcisms and hauntings.”

  He looked past her, contemplating the school in the distance. “I’m not quite sure what to do with you, Delilah Blue. You seem intent on making me your friend.”

  “Because I like you,” she said plainly.

  “Still?” he asked, smile stuttering back to life.

  “I think I like you differently now than when we were eleven. Though not necessarily. Maybe I liked you this way then, too.”

  But he didn’t press, didn’t ask what she was hoping he would ask: What way? Tell me how you like me, Delilah. Instead, he shrugged as if it all made sense and told her he was always happy to have another friend.

  • • •

  “How could I forget that all you ever wanted to do was watch scary movies?” Dhaval groaned. He looked like he was on the verge of an enormous pout. “We could go over to Seneca Park and sip some booze from my flask and talk about boys.”

  “I don’t drink,” Delilah reminded him. “And are we openly talking about boys in public now?”

  He shrugged. Delilah had always known Dhaval was gay. It may not have been an actual conversation they’d had, but they hadn’t really needed to. Two summers ago, Dhaval told her he’d kissed Aiden Miller on the last day of school, behind the bleachers. Delilah was only mad that his first kiss happened before hers. She cared as much about who Dhaval chose to kiss as she did for what shoes he chose to wear: It mattered only that neither hurt him.

  “My parents give me one night out a month,” he told her. “One. I don’t care if you drink. I’ll drink and you can tell me all about the wild Catholic-school parties.”

  Delilah snorted. “Why does everyone think it’s like that?”

  “Isn’t it?” His face relaxed into a grin. “You had a single room last semester. Don’t break my heart and tell me you never snuck a guy in.”

  She gave Dhaval a stern look. “I want to see a movie. I don’t want to head over to the big city and drink in a park.”

  “Not all of us were lucky enough to attend boarding school outside of Boston,” Dhaval said, in the worst Boston accent Delilah had ever heard. “Maybe trips to Wichita parks are the highlight of our week around here.”

  She slipped her arm through Dhaval’s and led him to his car. “Slasher flick. My treat. I promise you’ll have fun.”

  The Morton Theater was run-down and exactly how Delilah remembered it. Had anything changed? Her bedroom was still an almost blinding purple, and she slept on the same, tiny brass daybe
d. Her parents seemed to be wearing the same clothes, styling their hair just the same. The crack in the sidewalk out in front of the house was still there. It felt as if time had stopped while she was away and the only person who’d kept growing, and growing was Gavin.

  Delilah paid for the tickets and dragged a reluctant Dhaval in behind her. “Popcorn?”

  “No,” he said sulkily.

  “Candy?”

  The promise of sweets seemed to penetrate his foul mood. But as they moved closer in line for food, Delilah looked up and saw Gavin just beside the concession stand. Every time she saw him she couldn’t believe that he was real. He didn’t look like anyone she had ever seen. He was so wonderfully, perfectly odd.

  “Did you know he worked here?” Dhaval hissed in her ear. “Is that why we’re here, you fiend?”

  Gavin looked up and offered a tiny smile, a little wave.

  “No!” Delilah hissed back. “These are the details you need to share with a friend who’s been gone for six school years!” She tried to return Gavin’s smile but was sure it came out wobbly. His eyes lit with amusement as he watched the whispered exchange.

  “I had no idea,” Dhaval whispered. “I never come to the damn movies, remember? I can’t ogle hot boys in the dark!”

  Delilah straightened her shoulders and walked up to where Gavin leaned against the vacuum broom he was holding. He took his time looking her over, from the top of her shoes to her mouth, her cheeks, and finally her eyes. “Hi, Delilah.”

  She felt completely naked somehow. “I didn’t know you worked here.”

  He shrugged. “We spent most of our last conversation pondering how to break me into your old school. We hadn’t covered my employment status yet.”

  “True.” Delilah thought there might be a swarm of sparrows in her chest. Why did he have to look at her so intensely? If he wanted to know her every thought, she would just tell him. “I didn’t realize movie theaters were still using those.” Delilah pointed to the roller vacuum. And then she smiled because he’d smiled, and it was slow and kind of flirtatious.

  “Yes. Theaters are still using them.” His smile turned a little secretive, and it added a tiny bite to his words.

  “Right. Obviously.” The next words flew from her mouth. “Can you put the vacuum broom away and come watch the movie with us?”

  Something clouded his eyes, but it didn’t feel wholly unfriendly. Conflict, maybe, or confusion. “Sorry, I need to stay out here.” He stood straight up and nodded to where Dhaval waited a ways behind her. “But you two enjoy the show.”

  “I’m sure we will,” Dhaval drawled, moving to Delilah as soon as Gavin had turned around a corner and hissing, “Girl, you have it bad.”

  She groaned, feeling defeated, but it came out sounding a little breathless. “I know. I act so abnormal around him.”

  “I’ll admit, he’s not that bad-looking. I guess I just never noticed before,” he said. “There’s something about him.”

  “‘Not bad-looking’? Dhaval, that boy is sex on a stick.”

  Two nicely groomed dark eyebrows inched upward. “Delilah Blue, what do you know about sex on a stick?”

  “Nothing,” she said, grinning. “I don’t need to have ridden a roller coaster to know what one is, do I?”

  A laugh burst from Dhaval and filled the nearly empty theater. “That school back East did something to you.”

  • • •

  Delilah and Dhaval sat in the fourth row, with their feet up on the seats in front of them. Every time someone got stabbed, Dhaval shrieked and Delilah groaned. The gore was overdone. The fake blood too thick, too scarlet. Real blood, in such quantity, was deep and rich, like the heart of a rose.

  A dark figure appeared in Delilah’s peripheral vision just before Gavin moved into view. Even though he tried to make himself as small as possible as he made the rounds with a tiny flashlight—presumably checking to ensure that no one was causing trouble or having sex in the theater—he cut a long, crooked silhouette when he passed in front of the screen.

  Dhaval immediately dropped his feet from where they rested on the seat in front of him, but Delilah kept hers in place. She hoped Gavin would stop, tell her to put her feet down and give her a playfully stern look. Maybe he would even lean over and touch her leg. Maybe he would sit down with them after all.

  “Delilah, please put your feet down,” he said, but he didn’t give her a second glance before he moved on.

  She watched him walk back up the aisle on the other side. “Well. That was anticlimactic.”

  Dhaval laughed and put his feet back up. “You can only be a flirt if he notices you.”

  “He notices me,” she insisted. On-screen the killer was breaking another man’s fingers one by one, and for a moment Delilah was distracted.

  But then she broke her attention away and looked at Dhaval. “Have you ever seen Gavin with his parents?”

  Dhaval closed one eye, thinking. “Mom used to know his mom. She says she’s kind of a hermit now, never comes out of the house. There was something freshman year, about Social Services coming to the school to talk to him and his teachers. Some random teacher said his parents didn’t come in for a mandatory meeting or something, that they’d never seen them. It was all anyone could talk about—that Gavin Timothy didn’t have parents, that Gavin Timothy had killed his parents and was living alone in that crazy house.” Dhaval shook his head and reached for another handful of popcorn. “Ridiculous. Anyway, after a few days it just went away. I guess she showed up eventually.”

  • • •

  A new routine grew out of the lunch hour. Dhaval walked Delilah to the edge of the lawn and then thought of some reason or another why he needed to go hang out with his friends near the basketball courts, when there wasn’t a single bone in his body that had any natural inclination for the sport. Delilah would walk the rest of the way over to where Gavin sat, reading beneath the tree.

  And over time, Gavin stopped reading during her approach and would instead watch her walk from the lawn’s edge to where his feet rested, practically miles from his smile. Her journey would feel like it was happening in stop-action; with his eyes on her like that, she would turn into the most awkward girl alive.

  Looking at Gavin on a hazy Tuesday afternoon, Delilah felt like she was behind in the race to shed her childhood skin. He was tall, with stretching, growing muscles. The hair on his arms was dark. She could see a hint of chest hair beneath the collar of his shirt. Chest hair! She was so scrawny. She barely had boobs.

  It seemed like Gavin finally couldn’t take it any longer. “Delilah?”

  “Mmm?”

  He wiped a hand over his face. “Are you. . . staring at my chest?”

  Delilah nodded, moving her eyes up his neck to his face. “Yeah. Why?”

  “Well. . . shouldn’t it be the other way around?”

  Oh. Delilah almost choked on her tongue.

  “I mean—” he started, backtracking.

  But Delilah didn’t want him to take it back. “Aren’t girls supposed to mature faster than boys?” she asked, interrupting him. “I feel like I’m sitting next to a man. I’m not even done blossoming.” She considered this and looked down at her own chest. “God, I hope.”

  “‘Blossoming’?” Gavin asked, with a slow-growing grin. “I can’t believe you aren’t more embarrassed to say that out loud.”

  “And,” she continued, ignoring him, “I think you won the puberty race.”

  “The what now?”

  “Look at all these high school kids around us; they look tiny compared to you.” Gavin looked away from her face when she said this and out to the distance, where their classmates went about their business of socializing and eating and shooting hoops. “You have chest hair.”

  It was his turn to look down at his shirt. He admitted, “Some.”

  “And I have demi-boobs.”

  Half of a smile flirted with his lips, and when he blinked down to her chest, Delilah though
t the skin on her neck and cheeks might ignite. “Your boobs are fine,” he said after a lengthy inspection.

  “Fine. Yes. Thank you. Be gone, feeble insecurities. My boobs are fine.”

  “More than fine. Stunning. Perfection, even. Better?” He was outright laughing now.

  “A little.”

  “And puberty race? Really?” He was attempting teasing and skeptical, but he really just looked proud.

  Laughing, she mumbled, “Shut up, Gavin.”

  He split open a thick collection of short stories, sly eyes slanting a smirk in her direction. “Do I get a trophy?”

  “Yes. Made of chest hair.”

  • • •

  But Wednesday afternoon he didn’t watch her walk to him; instead he watched Dhaval walk away. “Why doesn’t Dhaval ever come over here with you?”

  “Because he knows I want to be here with you, alone.”

  Gavin swallowed awkwardly, as if this weren’t plainly obvious, as if they hadn’t spent their last lunch together talking about puberty and breasts and his body beneath his shirt. He looked past her to the school building. “Do you think he wants to be your boyfriend?”

  “Dhaval?” She laughed. “He’s about as straight as a rainbow.”

  Gavin’s face scrunched up slightly with confusion. “Rainbows aren’t. . . Oh.” He looked up to where Dhaval walked in the distance. “I had no idea.”

  “Then you have the world’s worst gaydar. He practically comes out every time he opens his mouth.”

  Gavin was too lost in contemplating this to smile at Delilah. Instead he sat very still, thinking very hard, for what felt like far too long.

  “What are you thinking about?”

  “Do his parents know?”

  “That Dhaval is gay? I doubt it.”

  He pulled his lower lip between his teeth and blinked his eyes to Delilah. “How does that work? You share a house with someone and don’t know something so important.”

  Delilah shrugged, feeling like the context of the conversation was eluding her. “I don’t think he wants his parents to know yet. He just wants everyone else to know.”