Her mother paused, planting a fist on her hip. “What do you want, Delilah? You want life to always be one adventure after another? Why can’t you be happy here? Why do you always need adrenaline and wildness and things you can’t predict?”
Delilah felt her smile straighten. So this was how her mother saw her: reckless, unpredictable, and rebellious simply because she’d stood up for a boy six years ago and didn’t mind long hair on a bagger. The impression couldn’t possibly come from anything else; her mother hardly knew her. “No, Mom. I just want life to be interesting.”
“Well,” her father mumbled from behind his paper, “whether your life is interesting or ordinary, you still have to live it.”
Delilah felt strange and bent out of shape, annoyed at her inability to shake off a silly nightmare.
Because that’s what it had to be, she decided, not wanting to recount the horrific images and sounds that played over and over in her head, but wanting to find some thread that didn’t fit, any detail that would reassure her that nothing had really happened.
Gavin’s house is good, she repeated to herself while walking to school. His house is good and loves him; it would never do anything to hurt me. It’s just protective, like a mama bear protecting its cub. Like any new person in his life, I have to prove myself.
He was waiting for her at their tree when she turned the corner, a sketchbook open in his lap, head down, fingers smudging some part of his drawing. It was the same book Delilah had been looking at before she’d fallen asleep. She had to push down a visible shudder.
She crossed the grass toward him, the thin layer of icy snow crunching beneath the soles of her boots.
He looked up, nose and cheeks pink from the cold, and smiled at her. “Hey,” he said simply, pushing himself to his feet.
Delilah smiled back at him, reaching out to take his hand, warm and wrapped in thick brown gloves.
“Sleep okay?” he asked, a trace of worry in his voice.
Delilah shrugged, noncommittal, and they moved hand in hand toward the school. “What were you drawing?” she asked, nodding to the notebook he’d tucked under his other arm.
“Oh,” he said, taking it out and opening it to a page near the back. “It’s a weird one.”
Delilah looked down at the familiar ivory paper, at the smudgy fingerprints along the edges. She felt her face grow pale, counted out the time in her heartbeat.
Gavin had been sketching a spider. The same spiders from her. . . dream.
“What is that?” she asked, feeling her heart make its way to her throat.
Running a hand through his hair, Gavin peered down at it. “I don’t know, really. Just popped in my head, I guess. Like I said: weird.”
Delilah closed the book and took his hand again. “Come on. We’ll be late.”
? ? ?
Delilah’s headache still lingered from that morning.
She could feel Gavin watching her all through class, his gaze heated and pressing against her skin. For once she was grateful for the long lecture that day, boring as it was, because it gave her the perfect excuse to stay quiet, to try to sort out the tornado of questions in her head.
She tried to work out how Gavin could have known about the spiders, right down to the thick, hairy legs, the stripe of red along their round, brown backs. She ran her fingers over the insides of her wrists, looking for marks like the ones she’d felt cut into her by the blankets, but found nothing but the faint blue streak of veins beneath her skin. Intellectually, she knew it was just a coincidence, but why did it feel so strange? For a brief, terrifying moment she wondered if the house could have seen her dream, but pushed it away just as quickly, realizing how insane that sounded.
Delilah looked down to where a crumpled piece of paper had been tossed to her desk. She pulled it into her lap, glancing up to the teacher before opening it.
Are you ok?
A quick glance over her shoulder, and her eyes were met by Gavin’s. He nodded toward the note, motioning for her to answer it.