“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.