Logan
Joy has a particular flavor to it—liquid gold, like honey champagne. It bubbled through my veins when Delilah finally saw sense in what I was proposing and agreed to give us a go. I wanted to pull her close and kiss her, but no, I’d already promised I wouldn’t make her do anything she didn’t want to do, and I was a man of my word.
“This calls for a celebration,” I said.
“No parties,” Delilah said, rather snappishly, I thought, but I let it slide.
“I wasn’t going to suggest a party.” She wasn’t ready to go to parties with me, which was fine. Parties were so impersonal. “I’m going to cook for you and your mom.”
She goggled at me. “Why?”
“Would you rather we go to Freddy’s instead?”
Freddy’s was the local diner. It used to be your typical diner—metal and faux leather booths, greasy burgers and soggy fries, ’50s music. But it was recently bought by some wealthy hipster and now it was all gentrified. The booths were ripped out and switched to boxy wooden chairs, the walls were bare brick, the menu was written on a giant chalkboard behind the bar, and the drinks came in mason jars. The place became an overnight sensation. Every other Draycott kid had been in there and taken a selfie under the naked light bulbs and hashtagged the pictures with #freddysdraycott. We were bound to run into people we knew.
Delilah gave me a death glare. “No, I would not.” She took a deep breath and unclenched her fists. “Fine, you can cook for me and my mom. But you are leaving right after dinner. I have a ton of homework.”
“Deal,” I said and held out my hand for her.
She glared at it like it was a poisonous snake waiting to strike. I cocked my head to one side and raised an eyebrow. She shuddered as she put her hand on top of mine, which made me laugh again. Who would have known Delilah would have such a taste for theatrics? Honestly, I would probably be slightly disappointed if she wasn’t fighting me so hard. I loved scrappy, feisty Delilah.
“You know, if you supposedly care for me, you shouldn’t enjoy my suffering,” she said as we walked inside the store.
“I’m not. I’m just laughing at how stubborn you are.”
Delilah snatched her hand out of mine and grabbed a basket before I could comment. “Sorry, can’t hold hands because basket,” she said, waving it around with both hands.
“I’ll carry that.” I caught one of the handles and held tight when she predictably tried to yank it back.
“Fine.” She reached for another basket, but I stopped her.
“We only need one.”
We stood there glaring at each other, neither one of us willing to let go of the basket, until someone cleared his throat. It was an elderly man.
“You kids mind getting out of the way?” he asked.
Delilah flushed and stepped back, and I took the chance to claim the basket. When I offered her my free hand, she took it without comment. Thus began the most delightfully infuriating grocery shopping I had ever done.
“What are you going to make for me and my mom tonight?”
I grinned at her. “My signature pasta dish.”
“I hate pasta.”
Oh, Delilah. “Oookay. I’ll make my famous spicy garlic pork instead, then.”
“I hate pork,” she snapped.
“I can make it with chicken.”
“I hate chicken.”
I almost laughed out loud then. God, she was so feisty. “What do you not hate?”
“Food that isn’t cooked by my stalker.”
“Pasta it is.”
She scowled but didn’t say anything.
Despite Delilah’s insistence on being contrarian, I noticed after the first couple of aisles, we fell into an easy step with each other. Her hand was no longer curled up tight in mine, as if to ensure minimal skin contact. Instead, it hung nicely loose, like holding each other’s hands was the most natural thing in the world. I had to bite the inside of my cheek to stop the huge grin from taking over my face.
I paused at the cookie aisle. “One of my vices,” I said.
She shrugged and scanned the shelves. I pointed at a box of chocolate-flavored rabbit cookies.
“Ever tried these?” I asked.
A long-suffering sigh. “No.”
“You’re going to love them.” I popped a box in our basket. Our basket! “I started eating these because of Jade Rabbit.”
Delilah actually sneered at me, which made me love her even more. “What’s that, like some Asian fetish version of Jessica Rabbit?”
“What? No!” My eyebrows were up. “You’ve really never heard of Jade Rabbit?”
Another shrug.
“Jade Rabbit is—was—China’s moon rover. It was launched in…um, twenty thirteen or twenty fourteen or something, and it was supposed to explore the moon. They named it after Chang’e’s pet rabbit.”
Delilah stopped scowling. “I grew up listening to stories about Chang’e,” she said, and for the first time, her voice didn’t have any barbs.
“You’ll have to tell me about Chang’e sometime. Jade Rabbit landed successfully and everything seemed fine, but then it turns out it couldn’t go into its dormant state, which it needed to do to survive the super-cold lunar nights. Its machines started to break down, and China could no longer control its movements. Basically, Jade Rabbit was slowly freezing to death. But the worst and best part was that Jade Rabbit started tweeting about its oncoming demise,” I said.
“The rover tweeted?” Delilah arched her eyebrows.
“Well, some people in charge of Jade Rabbit’s social media accounts tweeted. But the tweets were amazing. I actually saved them, just ’cause I loved them so much. Hang on…” I took my phone out and located them. I cleared my throat. “‘Although I should’ve gone to bed this morning, my masters discovered something abnormal with my mechanical control system. My masters are staying up all night working for a solution. I heard their eyes are looking more like my red rabbit eyes. Nevertheless, I’m aware that I might not survive this lunar night.’”
Delilah looked the way I felt when I first read Jade Rabbit’s message, like she was being pulled between laughter and tears.
“Just like any other hero, I’ve only encountered a little problem while on my own adventure. Good night, planet Earth. Good night, humanity.” My voice trembled a little at the end, but I could be forgiven for that; no one could possibly read Jade Rabbit’s dying message the whole way through without getting a little wobbly.
Delilah looked at me like she was finding a whole new way of thinking of me, because none of the old ways worked, and she had to shift her whole perspective. Something jumped in my stomach, sending warmth shooting through my chest. She must’ve seen it, she must have felt it in my voice, in my story; the beauty of us.
“Dee—”
“That was the stupidest shit I’ve ever heard,” she said flatly, grabbing a box of Goldfish crackers.
I shook my head, and god, I loved what an asshole Delilah could be. I couldn’t wait to laugh about this with her months down the road. I’d pull her close and remind her what an absolute brat she was to me in the early days and she’d grin and tell me it was worth it, and then our lips would meet in a kiss as hungry and sweet as the kiss we had after our first date.
Back in the car, Delilah retreated once more into a shell. I didn’t push her. We had all the time in the world, and the silence wasn’t entirely uncompanionable. When I pulled up in front of her house, she started to open her door then stopped with a sharp intake of breath. She stared out the windshield, her mouth slightly open, her face pale.
“What is it?” I asked.
She pointed to a car parked on the curb across the street. “That’s Mendez’s car. Brandon’s ex-partner,” she added when I didn’t reply.
“I take it she doesn’t often drop by unannounced?”
Delilah clenched her jaw. “Not before he died. Now she likes to drop by with doughnuts and all these questions about Brandon—” She swallowed and looked at me, her eyebrows knitted together. “What if she suspects something about Brandon’s death? He was always complaining about how she could never leave things alone. What if she’s been digging and she knows—”
“Hey, calm down,” I said, taking her hand. Delilah was so scared about Mendez, she didn’t even recoil at my touch. “I won’t let anything bad happen to you.”
Her eyes narrowed, and the curl appeared again in her upper lip. “Right, my seventeen-year-old stalker is going to protect me from the big bad cop.”
“Dee—”
“Whatever, it’s fine. I’ll be fine.” She took a deep breath. “All right. I’m okay. Let’s go find out what the hell she knows.” She got out of the car and wiped her palms on her jeans.
We walked slowly, the distance from the car to the house stretching impossibly long. Delilah’s anxiety was contagious; I half expected cops to jump out of the bushes and pounce on us.
Delilah unlocked the front door and led the way in. “Mom?” she called out.
No answer. She turned back to me and shrugged, closing the door. “Maybe I was wrong, maybe that wasn’t Detective Mendez’s—”
As though the very mention of Mendez summoned her, there was a knock on the door. We stared at each other, then Delilah frantically motioned at me to hide in the kitchen.
“Why?” I mouthed.
“Just go!” she hissed. She watched as I left and hid behind a corner. Once I was out of sight from the front door, she took a deep breath, brushed down her top, and plastered a halfway-decent smile onto her face. I slunk behind the wall so I wouldn’t be seen.
“Detective Mendez, hi,” Delilah said.
“Hi, Delilah.”
A slight pause, then Delilah said, “Can I help you with anything?” the same time Detective Mendez said, “Is your mom in?”
“She’s still at work,” Delilah said.
“Right. Well, that’s okay. I’d like to speak with you, actually.”
The note of fear was sharp in Delilah’s answer. “Me?”
I closed my eyes. Her voice came out too high, brittle with fear.
“Yeah, we got a call earlier today claiming that Brandon’s death wasn’t an accident, and I was in the neighborhood, so I thought I’d stop by, see if you might have heard anything…” Detective Mendez’s voice trailed off. It was an old trick that begged the person you were questioning to fill up the silence.
Delilah fell for it. “Oh, wow. Do you know who made the call?”
My hands tightened into fists. I hated having to listen to my Delilah being tricked into making mistakes like this.
“That’s not for me to disclose.” Meaning she didn’t know. I breathed a sigh of relief. “Do you have any idea who might have done anything to Brandon?”
“Well, he was your partner. Your guess is as good as mine.”
I rolled my eyes to the ceiling, squeezing my pendant with frustration. Now Delilah sounded defensive. She was really bad at this. Was it just me, or was her distaste for Brandon painfully obvious? If she revealed Brandon had been abusive, Detective Mendez would know Delilah had a strong motive for killing him, and from there, it wouldn’t take long at all for her to piece together what happened.
“Did he tell you what he was working on before the accident?” asked Mendez.
Silence. I could only assume Delilah either nodded or shook her head in answer.
“You were here the day he was killed, right?” Mendez pressed.
“I—yes. I was upstairs. I’ve told the cops everything—”
I closed my eyes. Come on, Dee. She was too rattled, too defensive. I could see the hole she was digging for herself. It was a deep one.
“Do you recognize this?” Mendez said, taking out a photograph from her back pocket. From my vantage point, I couldn’t tell what it was, but Delilah’s face paled visibly. “I found it in Brandon’s car,” Mendez said. “It matches one of the drugs we traced back to Draycott.”
“I—I don’t do drugs, you can ask—” Delilah squeaked.
“I know, Dee, you’re a good kid,” Mendez said. “Tell me, what do you know about what Brandon was looking into before he died? I think you know something.”
Delilah opened and closed her mouth, but nothing came out.
“Let’s go over the day of the accident again. Did you see or hear anything before you came down to the garage? Anything out of the ordinary?”
I didn’t think twice before stepping out from the kitchen. “Hey, do you have any oregan—oh, sorry, am I interrupting something?”
Delilah glared at me like a caged tiger, frightened and angry. Probably wondering what the hell I was doing, why I was out here. Probably thought I’d make things worse. I ignored her and walked up to Detective Mendez and shook her hand.
“I’m Logan. I’m Delilah’s boyfriend.” Delilah’s boyfriend. The title slipped out as easily as an eel wriggling out of a fisherman’s grip. So natural, the way it rolled off my tongue, as though I’d always been her boyfriend.
“I didn’t know you were dating somebody,” Detective Mendez said to Delilah.
Delilah schooled her expression into a smile. Good girl.
“We’re keeping our relationship on the down low,” I said. “Nobody else knows we’ve been dating for months. Detective Jackson—was—kinda protective, so…”
“Gotcha,” Detective Mendez said. “Well, it was nice meeting you, Logan. Would you mind giving me a minute with Delilah?”
“Sure.” I turned around then stopped. “Actually, I sorta overheard your last question and, uh, we didn’t wanna get in trouble with our parents, but…” I glanced at Delilah. “I think we should tell her, Dee.” Sincere, that was what I was going for. Sincerity, tinged by the slightest bit of hesitation, the way any teen would feel.
“Tell me what?” Mendez said.
I ignored Delilah’s frantic, confused face and said, “The day Detective Jackson died, I was upstairs with Delilah. She’d let me in the night before, and we were, uh, you know, um, messing around—”
Understanding dawned on Delilah’s face the same time it did on Detective Mendez’s. Mendez turned to Delilah and said, “Is this true?”
Delilah nodded. “I was scared, I didn’t want to tell anyone because I’d get in so much trouble, and with Mom going through so much already, I didn’t want to tell her I was upstairs with a guy. I kept thinking, Brandon would have a fit. I mean, I know that makes zero sense because he’s, you know, gone, but still.” She lowered her head. “I’m really sorry about lying.”
Detective Mendez gave us both a kind smile. “Don’t worry about it. I know what it’s like to be young and in love.”
To her credit, Delilah managed not to look revolted at the L word. She merely simpered at the detective and took my hand in hers.
Joy pounded through my veins. We were holding hands because she wanted to, and now it was no longer her against the cop, it was Us against the cop.
“This means you were here at the house during the time of the accident,” Detective Mendez said, and now her attention was completely on me.
It was unnerving, to be under that stare. Detective Mendez wasn’t the type to pluck her brows into delicate arches; they sat atop her eyes like two fat, angry caterpillars.
“Yeah,” I said, after a half beat.
“When did you leave?” she asked, and suddenly her notebook was out of her pocket. Then came her pen, shining like a little sword.
I shuffled through my memory of that day, when I’d hid in my usual spot, deep in the backyard, my camera aimed through the gaping back door of the garage. When would have been a good time to leave?
“About eleven, I think?” Delilah said, coming to my rescue, what a champ, what a perfect girlfriend she was. “Brandon called for—” She paused, stumbled.
I didn’t understand why Delilah halted, why she looked like she could burst into tears, but Detective Mendez did.
“Brandon called for you?” she said, the two caterpillars now trained on Delilah. “Didn’t you say you went down to see if he wanted anything from the supermarket and found him that way?” That way. Even now, even when she was homing in for the kill, Detective Mendez was well-mannered enough to say “that way” instead of dead.
“Yeah, well, it took quite a while for Dee to get downstairs, because we had to, you know, get dressed and stuff, and then she snuck me out, and the accident probably happened then,” I said.
“I’m so sorry for not telling the truth,” Delilah said, and if I didn’t know any better, I would’ve believed her. Everything about her was steeped in regret—her eyes shiny with tears, her mouth twisted with sadness, her voice wavering but brave. “I can’t stop thinking about it. At night I lie in bed and I ask myself, ‘If I’d come down sooner, could I have stopped it? Could I have helped? If I’d learned more about cars and jacks and all that stuff, maybe I could’ve lifted it, maybe…’”
I pulled Delilah close, rubbing my hand up and down her arm soothingly.
“Hey, no, don’t do that to yourself,” Detective Mendez said, all sympathy now. “It’s no one’s fault. It was an old jack, and Brandon hadn’t maintained it well. There was nothing you could’ve done.”
Delilah nodded, tasking a deep breath.
“Well, it was probably just a prank call,” Detective Mendez said.
“People do that? To cops?” Delilah asked, her voice tinged with anger. “About someone who died?”
“All the time,” Detective Mendez said. “Normally I wouldn’t even be here, but like I said, I was in the area and I thought I’d drop by, see how you and your mom are doing.”
“Thank you,” Delilah said. “That’s really nice of you.” She sounded like she meant it.
“All right, I should get back to the station. You kids stay out of trouble now.” She gave us a quick smile and strolled back toward her car, giving the garage a couple of glances along the way.
Once the door was closed, Delilah snatched her hand out of mine and sagged against the wall. “God,” she whispered. Then she turned to face me and I got that jolt again, because her eyes were no longer bright with anger or wide with fear. “You gave me an alibi,” she said.
I resisted the urge to hold her hand. Careful, tread gently, this is new territory. “I was serious when I told you I love you. I won’t ever let anything bad happen to you, even if it means sacrificing myself. Look, Dee, our fates are tied to each other’s now. If you go to jail, I go down with you as an accessory. Doesn’t that tell you how serious I am about us?”
Curiosity flared in her eyes, another new emotion. “What is it you like about me?”
Careful. This was my chance to really get her to see, to understand why we were meant to be with each other. “You know those old couples who have been together forever? When you ask them how they met, they’d say something like, ‘I saw her walking inside the library where I worked and that was it. I knew.’ This is exactly like that. I saw you and I knew.”
“Well, that’s a load of crap,” she muttered, but there was no sting in her voice. There was something else, something dawning, wary, but there. A new understanding.
“It’s how I feel about you.” I took her hand, and she didn’t fight it. I could leap to the skies, I was filled with so many bubbles. Delilah had let me save her. All along, she just wanted someone to save her, someone to be on her side. And I’d shown her I was that someone.
“Feelings change.”
“Mine won’t.”
“We’re seventeen,” she said. “Our feelings change from minute to minute.” She wanted to be convinced, to be courted, to not be an easy kill.
“Mine won’t,” I said, again, pulling her close. I caught a lock of her hair gently, tucked it behind her ear, and leaned in. My lips brushed her cheek, soft, and I whispered in her ear, “I promise.”