“You haven’t told anyone else this, have you? About the house? I mean, the way you talk about it makes it sound like he lives there alone or something. His parents wouldn’t just let him live in a haunted house.”
Delilah paused. Didn’t everyone assume he lived there alone? Had anyone ever seen parents? She opened her mouth to confirm, but something stopped her. Some tickling instinct, some agreement, internally, that this could go bad for Gavin if people found out that he was a minor, living without another human for more than a decade. “I haven’t told anyone else, and of course he isn’t alone.”
It wasn’t a complete lie.
“So, I’m just saying, you have this amazing imagination and draw all of these really creepy things and watch way too many movies and maybe, I don’t know.” He looked past her, out the window. “Maybe it’s two thirty in the morning and you should just sleep in my bed while I study.”
With a tight nod, Delilah curled onto her side at the foot of his bed, pulling the comforter over her legs. Dhaval sat quietly near her for a minute before standing and walking over to his desk.
Would she ever be able to sleep again? Wouldn’t she feel the need to be vigilant all the time, like anything in her room could come to life? But with the sound of Dhaval’s pencil scratching across paper and her own even breaths in the otherwise-quiet room, Delilah slowly let herself fall asleep.
? ? ?
The room was black, pitch-black. Without opening her eyes, Delilah knew Dhaval wasn’t at the desk, but had fallen asleep on the floor. He held her hand while she slept, and she smiled, squeezing it a little in thanks.
Fingers cracked together in her grip.
Fear spiked in her chest; ice filled her lungs. The hand was cold and hard, as if made of bones wrapped in the thinnest layer of brittle, dry skin. Delilah jerked her hand away, scooting back on the bed just as she heard Dhaval shoot up in the chair across the room and turn on his desk lamp.
“What?” he asked, eyes red with sleep and wide with alarm. “What happened?”
Delilah wiped her hand on the blanket, covering her mouth with her other one. A tight sob broke out. She knew she’d been holding a hand when she woke up. She knew it.
“I. . . ,” she started, choking. “There was something in my hand. A hand. Fingers. Something.” She was shaking so violently she could feel her breath fanning wildly across her palm.
“It was this, Dee. It was just your shirt.”
She blinked from a sleepy Dhaval to the steel-gray sweater he held in his grasp. It was hers, the very same one she’d worn at Gavin’s earlier that day.
She could still feel the stiff fingers between hers, hear the soft audible crackling of the brittle bones.
The house had climbed into her sweater and followed her home.
Chapter Nineteen
Him
Delilah was quiet at lunch the next day. Though quiet might not have been the right description. She said she’d forgotten her lunch, so she dragged him to the cafeteria and then barely spoke, instead spending the majority of their thirty-minute break picking at her Salisbury steak and tearing the individual stems off each floret in her pile of steamed broccoli.
She looked tired, eyes heavy and body slumped forward. Like her eyelids were too heavy to keep open. Each of her blinks seemed to last longer than the last, and Gavin made sure he was close enough in case the elbow propped on the cafeteria table gave out and she went face-first into her tray.
He’d asked her this morning if everything was okay, and she’d waved him off. He’d asked again after third period, when he heard she’d fallen asleep and snored through most of Mr. Burton’s US Government lecture.
On both occasions she’d given him a shake of the head and a small smile, even stifling a yawn. “I’m fine.”
Fine. Gavin was starting to hate that word.