“No,” she snapped. “We wouldn’t.”
As they left the greenhouse and the thorny leaves to soak in their puddle of moonlight, Onny heard a faint creak behind them. The telescope that was once tilted toward the heavens had swung toward them, moved, perhaps, by the gust of wind when Byron opened the door. Onny told herself it was nothing, but part of her couldn’t shake the thought that it was as if they had drawn the attention of something, as if the telescope lens had focused in on them.
As if they might’ve accidentally caught the gaze of the stars.
And what about our kiss?…
For some reason, those words whipped around Onny’s head as she and Byron walked in silence up and out of the garden path and back toward the twinkling lights and autumn moon hovering over the Halloween party. If she and Byron walked in together from the grounds, it was going to look… odd. What would she say? And then what would they do? They’d have to skulk around the dark corners of her house waiting for people to try to hook up—which, first of all, was gross—all because the flower needed to “witness a kiss”? What if Alexander saw them? What would he think? The thought of Alexander reminded Onny that she had totally left him with the promise of “gettinghim a drink.” How long had it been now? Onny was about to pull out her phone, when Byron held out his hand in warning.
“Do you hear that?” he asked.
Off to the side came the faint sound of giggling and splashing water, which only mean one thing:
“Someone’s found the folly house,” said Onny.
“What in the world is afolly house?”
Onny didn’t answer. Instead, she crept down the garden path to the right. The gravel beneath her feet soon transitioned to a slab-stoned walkway that wound past little ornamental pools and toward a tiny ivory pavilion draped in black silk and overlooking the murmuring creek that ran through the property. In the night, the tiny two-person villa looked like a pearl dropped from the slender, careless boughs of the nearby willow trees.
“Wow,” said Byron softly.
Wow was right.
The folly house wasutterlyromantic.
Andutterlyisolated.
When they were planning the party, her parents hadn’t thought to block off the garden, despite Onny’s suggestion.
“That’s ridiculous,” Antonio had scoffed. “Why would anyone want to be far away fromourparty in some tiny, dark room?”
Yes. What could someone possibly wish to do in a tiny, dark room completely unchaperoned?Onny had thought.
Antonio Diamante was a little innocent about the ways of Onny’s classmates.
“Well, let’s hope you don’t find out,” Corazon had said, rolling her eyes.
Now Onny grimaced. She glanced between the flower sprig in Byron’s hand and the pathway to the folly house. The last thing she wanted to do was run around her own house looking for people kissing. Which meant there was only one thing to do, and the path to do so was straight ahead.…
“Just so I’m understanding this correctly,” said Byron in a harsh whisper. “You want us to hide in there to stalk our horny classmates so that the flower can see a kiss?”
“Yup,” said Onny.
“You realize that it is highly unlikely that akissis what that poor flower will witness.”
Onny shushed him.
“Good to see we’re really leaning into the ‘morally depraved’ inspiration behind our costumes,” grumbled Byron.
At that second, a couple stumbled out of the dark. Byron and Onny immediately ducked behind a bush.
“There goes our chance,” said Byron. “Nowcan we go back to the house?”
“No way,” said Onny. “I give it… ten minutes,max,before some other couple tries to get into the folly house.”
And that was how, minutes later, Onny found herself standing inside the silk-draped folly house with Byron. Moonlight sifted through the silk. A faint ring of LED lights around the railings cast the pavilion into a dim glow. A slender knoll of grass surrounded the back entrance of the folly house and wasall that stood between them and the stream flowing outside. Onny shuddered from the cold. Last week, the autumn nights had been cool, but not oppressively so. But somehow winter’s breath seemed to have snuck in to silver the late-autumn nights.
On the other side of the folly, hardly five feet away, Byron leaned against a pillar with his arms crossed.
