These are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
“Love, Delivered” copyright © 2020 by Erin A. Craig
“The Social y Distant Dog-Walking Brigade” copyright © 2020 by Bil Konigsberg
“One Day” copyright © 2020 by Sajni Patel
“The Rules of Comedy” copyright © 2020 by Auriane Desombre
“The New Boy Next Door” copyright © 2020 by Natasha Preston
“Love with a Side of Fortune” copyright © 2020 by Jennifer Yen
“The Green Thumb War” copyright © 2020 by Brittney Morris
“Stuck with Her” copyright © 2020 by Rachael Lippincott
“Masked” copyright © 2020 by Erin Hahn
Cover art copyright © 2020 by Liza Rusalskaya
Al rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.
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ISBN 9780593375297 (trade) — ebook ISBN 9780593375303
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Love, Delivered
The Social y Distant Dog-Walking Brigade
One Day
The Rules of Comedy
The New Boy Next Door
Love with a Side of Fortune
The Green Thumb War
Stuck with Her
Masked
About the Authors
“This is it!” Mom said brightly, opening the door to my new room with a grand, ceremonial swing.
I stepped over the threshold, eyes wide as I took in the high arched ceiling, the oak window seat, and my lamp—a bust of Edgar Al an Poe I’d made in ceramics class, already assembled and looking hopelessly out of place against the stark white wal s.
You and me both, buddy.
“What do you think?” Dad asked, coming up behind us. “Just a second,”
he cal ed down to one of the guys from the moving company.
“This is it,” I echoed, trying to muster enough cheer to appease them.
“Do you like it?” Mom asked, pushing back one of the curtains the previous owners had left behind. It was some sort of floral chintz and would be coming down the second I was alone. “We were going to wait and let you pick for yourself, but then on the tour—this just screamed Mil ie.”
It was a cool room, I couldn’t deny that.
It just wasn’t my room.
But it was now, I supposed, no matter how I felt.
Mom and Dad were both scientists. Researchers who specialized in viral pathology. Mom had gotten a pretty sweet job offer at the University of Michigan, working in the hospital labs during the summers and spending the rest of the year as a professor. Dad was going to stay at home while he worked on writing his first book. Some dry textbook he swore would be in freshman biology classes al over the country.
Not a fun book, like the thril ers and mysteries I read.
I’d never seen them so excited before.
We were supposed to leave Memphis in May, al owing me to get through school and stil spend part of the summer with my friends, getting to do al our favorite things together one last time. I’d have June, July, and August to settle in and hopeful y meet some new friends, just before senior year would start.
But then COVID-19 broke out and literal y everything fel apart.
I didn’t finish the school year. I didn’t get one last concert or film festival, no last Grizz game or barbecue nachos, no cupcakes from Muddy’s bakery.
I didn’t even get to say goodbye.
Our house—our old house—already had an offer on it, with most of our stuff packed away into boxes and bins when the governor closed the schools, then the stores, then the state.
“Stay at home?” I remembered shouting at my parents with an anger completely uncharacteristic of me. “How do you stay at home when we have no home?” I’d burst into tears and run up to my room before they could answer.
Mom and Dad had talked late into the night, their furtive whispers fil ing the house. I could hear them wondering what to do, wondering if they were making the right decision, wondering how we’d get through any of this.
Less than twenty-four hours later, everything was decided for us. The hospital in Michigan wanted both Mom and Dad working there. Pronto.
In the blink of an eye we were supplied letters certifying that my parents were essential, pledging that our movers were essential, swearing up and down that the new house was essential.
Everything was essential but my misery.
“The light is different here,” I said, feeling both sets of their eyes on me now, their concern as heavy as the semi truck parked along our drive.
Our lane, as my father insisted cal ing it.
Back in Memphis we hadn’t had a driveway. Now we had a lane. Of our own.
A lane and a garden and a little old supply shed, painted barn red and outfitted with scal oped white trim.
There was no way to deny it. We were country now.
“Different?” Mom repeated, glancing about the room as if she could find the source of my discontent and eradicate it as she would a virus.
“It’s softer,” I said, joining her at the window and looking out at the open fields. “Greener.”
“Al those trees, Mil ie,” Dad said, patting at my back. “Look at al those pines.”
“They’re pretty,” I admitted.
And they were. But they didn’t hold a candle to the magnolias currently bursting into bloom across my backyard right now.
My old backyard, I reminded myself.
“Coming, coming!” Dad shouted as a mover cal ed up the stairwel .
“Let’s get through this day and we’l celebrate tonight, al right?” He kissed my mom’s forehead before jogging downstairs.
“Celebrate?”
Mom nodded and ruffled my dark blond locks. They were long overdue for a trim. I’d planned on getting a haircut during spring break, but by then the salons were closed. Dad very helpful y volunteered to lop it al off with his clippers.
Um, thanks, no.
I’d taken to wearing it in a giant topknot instead.
“We made it here,” she explained. “There were a lot of moments we didn’t think it would happen. But we did. And that’s worth celebrating, isn’t it?”
“I suppose so.” I ran my finger along the red curtains. They real y were terr
ible.
I wanted to say more, but a burly mover stepped into the room, his arms impossibly laden down with boxes marked MILLIE.
“We’l think up something fun,” she said. “I promise.”
—
“I’ve never hurt so much in my entire life,” I said hours later, col apsing onto the rug.
The movers had left and for the first time, it was just the three of us in the house. It was simultaneously too quiet yet alive with a host of unfamiliar sounds. The old wooden floorboards squeaked and something in the basement Dad cal ed a sump pump kept issuing unexpected and startling thuds. We hadn’t had a basement in our old house and the one here was ful of spiderwebs and weird shadows.
It felt like that calm before the storm in any horror movie. The happy family moves into a new-to-them-but-stil -very-old house, and things are good but night fal s and then…
I paused, waiting for something weird to happen.
A box mysteriously toppling over.
A flock of birds flying into the window.
Blood seeping down the staircase.
Nothing stirred and I begrudgingly rol ed over.
Mom lay sprawled across the couch, her feet propped on too many throw pil ows. She was rubbing at her temples as if warding off a headache. Dad was on the floor beside me, trying to stretch out a kink in his back.
“What a day,” he said, wincing as his spine cracked. “That’s better. What are we doing for dinner, Mol y?”
“There’s nothing in the fridge,” Mom said, opening her eyes. “We’l have to go grocery shopping tomorrow.” She paused, self-correcting. “We’l have to place an order for groceries tomorrow.”
“Think they’l deliver, al the way out here?”
“We’l see. Why don’t we order in tonight?” She pul ed out her phone, fiddling with it for a second before frowning. “I don’t have any data, do you?”
None of us did.
Or reception.
This explained a lot.
My phone had been unnatural y quiet al day. I’d worried my friends in Memphis had already forgotten about me, but maybe there was a whole slew of messages waiting for me, they just couldn’t deliver.
“Maybe a neighbor has open Wi-Fi?” I swiped hopeful y through my settings.
“What neighbors?” Dad asked as the available networks list came up completely blank.
I stared at it uneasily. This was it. This was where al the scary movie stuff would start happening and there would be no way to cal for help.
“What…what do we do now?”
Mom pushed herself off the couch. “I think I saw an actual phone book someplace.”
“What good wil that do? There’s no network.”
Her laugh carried across the hal . “There’s a landline in the kitchen.”
I’d noticed the olive green phone on the wal when we’d first walked through the house. It was one of those old rotary ones with the round plate you swung in a circle to enter the numbers and a spiral cord that hung almost al the way to the floor.
“Does it actual y work?” I asked, trailing after her curiously.
Mom laughed again, her amusement tinkling through the house and almost making it feel like home. She pul ed a surprisingly slim yel ow pages from a cabinet drawer and blew off a layer of dust.
“Mom, that thing has to be a decade old.”
She flipped through the sections, undeterred.
“Looks like our choices are pizza or…pizza.”
“Pizza it is,” I said, leaning against her shoulder to read the ads.
“Which sounds better—Big Mike’s Pizza Haven or Slice of Bliss?”
“Bliss me, baby,” Dad voted, groaning as he flipped over. “I feel like Big Mike has already done a number on me today.”
Mom reached for the phone before pausing and pul ing out her trusty rol of disinfecting wipes. She’d been carrying them around the house al day, wiping down handles and cabinet doors. She cleaned off the handset, then began dialing. I liked the clicking stutter of the numbers rol ing back.
“Hi, we’re new to the area and wondered if you deliver out to the west side of town…we’re on Milner Avenue?” She recited the address and listened for a long moment to his response. “Perfect! We’d like to order a large pepperoni and mushroom. And—we weren’t able to check online—do you have any salads?…Great! The Garden Melody, family-sized.”
From the living room, Dad groaned. I curled the cord around one finger, watching as my skin turned purple, then white.
“And garlic knots, if you have them.”
He cheered.
“Better make that a double order,” she said, rol ing her eyes at me with a grin.
“Okay…yes…Cash. That’s perfect….Thanks! We’l see you soon.” She hung up the phone with a victorious click. “Here in thirty. Apparently they’re not far. Just down Davis Way,” she said, joining Dad on the floor. “Oh. This was a mistake. Throw me a pil ow, Mil ie? Or twelve?”
I tossed a pair at her.
“So…” I waited til she and Dad were situated comfortably, listening to the seconds tick by, marked by the grandfather clock in the hal .
“Tomorrow…Big day.”
They were both due at the hospital lab at nine on the dot, leaving me here to start making headway on al of the house stuff. It had sounded terribly impressive at first—I would be the one deciding where everything went, creating order from the chaos.
Now, looking around, it just felt like a lot of work.
“Big day,” Dad agreed. “Look, Mil s—I know it feels like we’re leaving you in the lurch…”
I scanned the wal of boxes waiting to be unpacked. “It is a little overwhelming.”
“And it’s so not how we wanted this to happen,” Mom said, rushing in.
“This outbreak has just…derailed a lot of stuff. We’re so, so fortunate to have this set of problems and not others,” she added quickly. “But I do want to ful y acknowledge this is not ideal for you. But…we’re going to be home al weekend to help. We’re certainly not expecting you to do this al yourself.”
“But if we came home tomorrow night to a total y straightened house and a gourmet meal…” Dad waggled his eyebrows at me.
Mom swatted at him with one of the pil ows. “Steve!”
I picked at the label on the nearest box. LIVING ROOM—BOOKS. “It’l be fine. I’l just…choose a room and start opening stuff, right?”
“I’d go with the kitchen,” Dad recommended.
“Yeah, about that. We don’t have any food,” I pointed out.
“We’l order groceries,” Mom promised. “I’l do it on my lunch break at the lab. And the cable company is supposed to be out here tomorrow, so we’l be up and running soon.”
“And that’s…safe?” I asked, an uncomfortable knot lodging beneath my sternum. I didn’t want to admit how much the idea of germs now scared me.
Particularly to my parents, who were around them daily. “I mean, I thought the whole reason Aunt Carla couldn’t come help us was because we’re supposed to be social distancing, or whatever.”
“That’s true, but Carla is staying away more for her protection than ours.”
Mom’s sister had lupus, which could make it harder to fight COVID if she was infected. Corona. I stil wasn’t sure what term I was supposed to be using. No one else seemed to either.
“And the cable company assured me they’re taking every precaution.
Masks, gloves, the works.”
“They have masks?”
There’d been reports of shortages.
Mom shrugged. “Wear yours, just to be safe.”
We fel into silence, each thinking of the day to come. The gears of the grandfather clock wound up to count out the quarter hour. The sump pump thunked again.
The doorbel rang.
“That was fast.” Dad started to hoist himself up but crashed back. “Nope.
Not happening.”
“Mil , can you get it? There
’re a couple of twenties in my wal et,” Mom said, rubbing at her hip.
It wasn’t until I stomped to the front of the house that I realized how dark it had gotten. Guiltily, I flicked the outdoor lights on, il uminating an empty porch. Opening the door, I peered out into the dusky twilight.
Spring peepers sang their little frog songs, and I was certain it was the prelude for a machete-waving maniac to come striding around the corner.
“Hey there,” a voice cal ed out from the yard.
I tensed, then immediately shook it off. Neither Jason nor Michael Myers were known for their chatty banter.
I real y was going to have to stop it with the scary movies living out here.
“Sorry we didn’t have the light on,” I said, squinting. A form came out of the darkness. “Oh.”
The guy’s mask covered his face from the bridge of his nose down to his chin. It was homemade, with a floral print, probably created from the remnants of a fabric scrap bin. He was tal and lanky and looked about my age—as far as I could tel .
“Didn’t want to startle you,” he said, gesturing to the mask with his shoulder. His hands were ful of boxes and the bag of salad was looped around his forearm.
“I like the flowers.”
He laughed. “My mom made it for me. I begged her to get some cooler fabric. They’ve got to make something with the Pistons logo, right?”
“You like basketbal ?” I asked, instantly warming.
“Yeah. It sucks they put the season on hold. I mean…there was no way we were going to make the playoffs this year, but stil …”
“We were,” I defended quickly. “The Grizzlies, I mean. I’m from Memphis. Was.” A flush of red flared across my face. “We just moved here.”
“Yeah, I saw the sign in the yard. Do you play?”
I nodded.
I can’t be entirely sure, but I think he smiled. His eyes narrowed into little crescent moons, framed by impossibly thick sooty lashes. “Cool. Me too.
Maybe we can do a pickup game sometime. When al this is over. I’m Luka,”
he added.
“Mil ie.”
His eyes curved at the corners—he was smiling again, maybe. “I guess I should probably give you your food now, before it gets cold.”
“Right. Here,” I said, thrusting the money out at him before quickly dropping my hand, horrified at how easy it was to forget I wasn’t supposed to go near him. “How do we do this?”
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