“Obviously. I haven’t hung out with you under this tree for the last few weeks so I can know you less well.”
Looking back at her, he said, “It’s not like I have a weird kink like a foot fetish. I mean, I’m different.”
“Again,” she said, smiling, “obviously.”
“I live in. . . a house.” His words came out heavy as marble.
Her eyes narrowed as she considered him and he realized with a small laugh what he’d just said. Huffing out a breath, he dug both hands into his hair. “No. Right. Everyone lives in a house of some sort. It’s just that my house is different.”
“You mean because of the patchwork?” she asked, eyebrows lifted hopefully.
“No.” But then he understood her meaning, the way House came together on the outside. He was so used to seeing it that way and knowing each individual part just as that—individual—that he’d stopped noticing how it appeared so heavily seamed, so awkwardly plugged together. “Yes, actually. I mean, the reason it looks like that is the same reason you wear those little skirts and I wear jeans and boots.”
“Like, every room is decorated a different way,” she said, smiling that she seemed to be following. Except she wasn’t. The rooms weren’t decorated a certain way; they were a certain way.
“No, Delilah. The house, and everything inside it, is unique. Everything has its own style, because everything in the house is alive.”
Delilah laughed, clearly disbelieving. “Okay, Gavin. Sure.”
Blinking away, Gavin took a deep breath and considered his options. He could laugh it off, too, pretend that he was making a joke. But that would mean nothing else between him and Delilah could move forward. He wouldn’t really be able to be himself with her the way he suspected he would want to be. . . or maybe already did.
Or, he could try to make her believe.
“I realize how this sounds,” he started. “But I wouldn’t lie to you, or tell you this to mock you somehow.” Gavin looked back at her, his eyes tripping on a strand of hair blown across her face, stuck to her lip. Without thinking, he gently urged it away with a long finger. “I’ve always been a bit of an outsider, you know, but given how I was raised, how could it have gone differently? My first day of kindergarten, there wasn’t a parent walking me there but a tricycle that squeaked down the street next to me. Not with me on it. Next to me. It sat outside my classroom until I was ready to go home and then walked me all the way back. I hadn’t even known what school was until the moment I saw the other kids playing and understood I was supposed to go too. But even then, when I was five, I knew not to tell anyone. I knew to put my hand on the handle so it would look like I was leading it and not the other way around.”
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.”