What We Saw at Night - By Jacquelyn Mitchard Page 0,3
of her house or hooked up to an IV in a sterile hospital … or after an overdose with a note pinned to her pillow, which is how many lives end for people like us.
But this wasn’t death. This was life. The moment Juliet launched herself from the roof, she became a whirling constellation. I couldn’t see her face. A long line of glow-in-the-dark blue stars, outlined in silver, soared out above our heads between the buildings, wheeling in space, completing a full circle. Then the stars were gone. She’d already landed on the opposite roof—hooting in her victory dance—when my brain caught up to my eyeballs.
Juliet Sirocco had just traversed a twelve-foot gap, twenty feet off the ground … while performing a front flip in mid-air. She must have shed her sweater on the roof. That explained the feverish swirl of glowing stars. She’d stenciled them on her bodysuit, all up one leg and one arm, as well as her face. Rob fumbled for the switch on his Maglite. The faint beam flickered over the roof. Juliet was punching the air and grinning down at us. I broke my promise, because I screamed. I couldn’t help it. The word exploded from deep inside: “Amazing!”
“Shut up, Allie!” Rob hissed.
“What? That was pretty amazing.”
“She could have been killed!”
I had to laugh. “What else is new?”
The three of us met in the sandbox. In the sandbox, at night.
You think of a happy child. That child is playing in the sun. She’s picking flowers in a field with the sun’s rays painting threads of platinum in her hair. She’s running with a kite, her chubby legs just a little tanned with the balmy blessings of midsummer. Think about it: even the Sesame Street theme song begins with the words, “Sunny day, sweeping the clouds away.”
That sunny day would kill us.
We were happy children, I suppose, but we ran to the swings to play when kids our age were listening to bedtime stories. In the hospital, I’d once overheard a toddler telling his parents he’d seen ghosts in the Iron Harbor playgrounds, the ghosts of children. I remember I was afraid to speak to the nurse after that because I thought I might cry. We hadn’t come back from the dead, but we did live in a parallel universe. It was our own country, the night country. We lived there with our parents, many of whom chose to be Persephone and abide in the netherworld for the sake of love.
We also had each other.
I couldn’t even remember a time before the three of us were friends. So I knew from those playground days that Juliet would never stop. She was always the first to dive naked into Ghost Lake, black water so cold that it would freeze the blood in your veins. She was the first one to get a set of lock picks so that we could steal a joint from the back room of the guy who hand-loomed ugly ponchos for tourists. We got the weed but we only had one toke apiece. If you have XP, you really can’t smoke. Heat damage risk is huge. You can, however, drink. Juliet helped us celebrate the New Year last year by sneaking into the hot tub of a famous New York talk show host’s ski chalet, drinking the champagne we’d lifted from one of the twelve cases of Veuve Clicquot in his wine cellar.
But there was a flipside to Juliet’s adventurousness, the side that haunted Rob and me. She was the only one who took off, for weeks at a time, alone, away from us. First she had a legitimate reason: for four years, from ages eleven to fifteen, she managed to ski competitively. Sunlight be damned, she hurtled down the slopes swathed like a mummy in oversized goggles. But then, a year and a half ago, she’d suddenly stopped. Yet the disappearances continued. Like every month or so, for a few days or a week, we wouldn’t hear from her beyond a text saying C U Soon.
She always came back though. That was the silent mantra I repeated to myself whenever the absences seemed to reach a breaking point. Juliet always comes back.
JULIET CAME CLATTERING down the fire escape.
“Did you see me? Did you see me?” She was jumping around like one of the Cat Dancers on the pom squad at Iron County High where we were students but never actually went.