“Are you glad to be back?” Dhaval asked, oblivious to her train of thought.
Delilah shrugged. For as nice as it was to see Dhaval and ogle Gavin again, the answer was easily “no.” She’d been unceremoniously shipped away to Saint Benedict’s, but it had become her home far more than the square two-bedroom cookie-cutter stucco house on Sycamore Street ever had. Delilah missed her old school, her friends, and her increasingly senile grandmother, in whose home she spent most of the past several years, as her parents had started to assume that Delilah would rather stay in Massachusetts than come home for a week over spring break, or a week around Thanksgiving or, eventually, for the entire summer. But Nonna was in a nursing home now, entirely lost to dementia, and without Nonna, Delilah’s parents couldn’t afford to keep her in school fifteen hundred miles away.
“Okay, don’t answer that,” Dhaval said, after she had been silent for way too long. “I’m happy to have you back. We need some quirk around here, Dee.”
“I’m happy to see you, too,” she said, leaning into her oldest friend. “And I’m happy to see Gavin all grown up.”
“I bet you are. You little demon.”
Delilah gave Dhaval a wicked grin. But then the bell rang loudly, startling her and signaling the end of the lunch break. When Delilah looked back to the tree, Gavin was already gone. She packed up the remnants of her lunch and followed Dhaval back inside.
By the end of the day, with only tiny glimpses of Gavin after lunch, Delilah’s curiosity got the better of her. What does he do after school? Does he meet up with friends? Does he have a job? The questions grew into a maddening itch inside her mind, and it reminded her of how it felt to lie in bed at Saint Ben’s, trying—but failing—to resist sneaking into the Fine Arts Building.
She followed at a safe distance as he walked away from school, paying the necessary amount of attention to the gardens, her phone, anything to look absorbed in her stroll and definitely not like a stalker, following a boy seventeen blocks home.
It wasn’t that weird, was it? How many times had her girlfriends snuck off grounds to walk past the dorms of the boys at Saint Joseph’s or had Nonna told her about walking past Grandpa’s house when they were kids, just to get a peek inside his living room? It had sounded so innocent when Nonna said it; couldn’t this be the same?
She didn’t even have to follow Gavin, really. She suspected he still lived in the same house, the one they all called the Patchwork House for how it seemed like every part of it came together in a different color and style and shape.
It was on a generous lot, nestled between rows of identical houses but encircled by a tall fence obscuring most of it from view and long since covered in exuberant, violet morning glory that bloomed every day of the year. From the glimpses she’d caught from the sidewalk while trick-or-treating—the only time she’d been allowed to get that close, and the only time the iron gates out front remained open—she knew the front room was all modern glass, the side parlor lined with wood shingles and a cozy bay window. There was a turret on the third floor and a portion with Victorian paint and elaborate embellishments carved out of wood.
Kids used to say the house was haunted, but it never looked that way to Delilah. It was stunning, thriving, like something out of an old story, or an ancient black-and-white movie. Teenagers had always bragged about egging the house on Halloween, but to her knowledge, no one had ever really done it. The house—like most strange things in Morton, including Gavin—was just different enough to make the town residents want to pretend it wasn’t there at all.
He turned a corner in the distance, and Delilah hung back, stepping behind the trunk of a large elm to watch. She waited for him to approach the fence, and she told herself that as soon as he reached for the latch at the gate, she would turn and walk home.