Read What We Saw at Night Online
Authors: Jacquelyn Mitchard
What We Saw at Night
Copyright © 2013 by Jaquelyn Mitchard
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States in 2012 by Soho Teen an imprint of Soho Press, Inc.
853 Broadway
New York, NY 10003
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mitchard, Jacquelyn.
What we saw at night / Jacquelyn Mitchard.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-1-61695-142-9
1. Xeroderma pigmentosum—Fiction. 2. Serial murderers—Fiction. 3. Survival—Fiction. 4. Racially mixed people—Fiction] I. Title.
PZ7.M6848Wh 2013
[Fic]—dc23
2012033360
Interior design by Janine Agro, Soho Press, Inc.
Interior art by Michael Fusco
v3.1
For Danny and Pamela
Hearts and minds
Être et durer
“To be and to last”
(the unofficial motto of Parkour)
Contents
Preview of
What We Lost In The Dark
“D
on’t move and don’t scream too loud, no matter what you see,” Juliet told Rob and me. “Promise? On pain of death?”
“I promise,” I said readily.
Rob shot me a furious glance. I forced myself to shrug with a chilly deadpan.
What else was I supposed to do?
Juliet was a force of nature. I could ask her why we might scream. I might as well chew on air. She wouldn’t tell us. She was my best friend—in fact, aside from Rob, my only real friend—and the sum total of what I truly knew about her would have filled a teaspoon. She’d probably spent two hundred days at my house, and I’d spent another hundred at hers. None of that mattered. Still, I was always guessing at how headstrong she was and how unattainably different … and we were about to see that proven all over again.
Rob shivered in the Washington Wizards team jacket his father had given him. It was meant to be comforting, to include
Rob in the real world. Rob was a natural athlete, especially when it came to basketball, but couldn’t play because of what he had, what we
were
. He could never be exposed even to the lights in a gym during a real game. The jacket was one of thirty or so. His dad stockpiled them, being a sporting-goods buyer. They were actually a kind of mockery. But Rob’s dad was such a sweetie that he would never have realized that. So Rob dutifully rotated among the Bucks, the Bulls, the Pacers, the Pistons, and yes … even the Wizards.
I was wearing my leather coat and two layers of scarves. It was April 8, but Iron Harbor didn’t know it was technically spring. At two in the morning, in the brick passageway between the Smile Doctors dentistry and Gitchee Gumee Pizza, we could see our breath every time we spoke. The temperature couldn’t have been much above freezing.
“I’m going to die,” I said. “And be cryogenized. Standing here.”
“Such a weenie,” Juliet said.
She didn’t seem to feel the cold. Ever. In a black bodysuit that made Rob stare and a black turtleneck sweater that gathered at her knees, Juliet braided up her waist-length dark blond hair and looped it into an elastic band. Along the left side of her face, from her cheekbone to her lip, she’d stenciled in iridescent face paint a line of blue stars that glowed in the faint light from the street corner.
Face paint! For a Tuesday night among the Nothings of Nowheresville, Minnesota. For the excellent true adventures of three people who had absolutely no lives.
“I’ve been called a lot of things,” I said. “But never—”
“A weenie? Consider yourself called,” Juliet interrupted with a wicked laugh. “In fact, I have called you a weenie myself.”
She had, in fact: the previous summer, when I balked at breaking into Valerie Meyercheck’s house again. After all, it was the
third
time. Valerie spent about ten days a year in Iron Harbor and the rest of the time whirling among her houses in Switzerland, Paris and Lake Forest. I’d finally followed Juliet inside, but I did
not
try on any clothes. Juliet took two sweaters, two of countless heather cashmere cardigans. Juliet insisted (and I believed her): no one who had a hundred color-coded sweaters could be sure if the moths had eaten some, or if the dear old family servant Valerie, probably called “Mammy,” had given them away to the poor.
Maybe I was a weenie.
Of course, none of us could trump what Henry LeBecque had called Juliet last fall, though we should have seen it coming for years: a “wannabe vampire.” As if she’d chosen to live the way we did. First off, how could any guy with a pulse dump Juliet, no matter what her limitations? Henry said he couldn’t stand being with a girl who basically had to go home every morning and sleep in her coffin.
He paid for it, though, a month later. Just before Halloween, the former librarian, Mrs. Taylor, died at ninety. Torch Mountain Home Cemetery happens to be a place where a lot of kids like to drink. Nobody was thinking about the fact that they would dig old Mrs. Taylor’s grave before they actually buried her, and cover it with a piece of canvas and a blanket of sod. Henry never knew what hit him. His “friends” (loyal allies that they were) took off when they heard Henry scream and tumble into a black hole. He was lucky he had his cell phone to call his parents and explain and them how he ended up alone in the deep bottom of a new grave in the snow on Halloween night.
He
was a weenie.
“Don’t look yet!” Juliet called back. “I have to go through this mentally before it happens.”
Biting my tongue, I watched Juliet stretch, an old habit from her days as a competitive skier. She patted her hands over her clothing, to make sure nothing was sticking out or unbuttoned. She checked her shoes to make sure the laces were tied. Then she ran off into the darkness.
Rob nudged me as we heard Juliet’s light step on the fire escape, far down the cobbled passageway. The metal was old and rusty and probably a decade out of code. Most public things ran about forty years behind schedule in Iron Harbor. Who would know better than we? People were careless enough not to lock their doors. Many didn’t even bother, much to the convenience of the only three teenagers who would be out all night, whose parents either were fine with what we did, or never bothered to stop us. Who dared to try to keep us out?
There was no fire escape, roof terrace, restaurant back entrance, abandoned cabin, deck door on a lakeside mansion, no unused boat, construction site, or gated park that Rob, Juliet and I didn’t know about—even
before
we all got our driver’s licenses last winter. The three of us had been born within four weeks of each other. What were the odds? January was obviously a very good month for freaks. Now the streets of Iron Harbor—all twenty of them, plus the resorts in the hills around the tiny town—belonged to us.
“What do you think she’s doing?” Rob said.
He noticed me shivering and pulled me close to him.
My heart skittered. I resisted the urge to say:
Hold me tighter
. My fingers flickered at the level of my chest in the ASL sign for “I want”: the one we taught my little sister to use to ask for food when she was three and spoke only baby
Chinese. But Rob didn’t see. He never saw. My sign language was from me to myself, a sort of prayer, like the way people cross their fingers behind their backs when they tell a lie.
It wasn’t a lie, though. It was the central truth of my so-called emotional life. For the past three years, Rob’s touch could brand itself in a way I would be able to feel the next morning when I lay in bed, as though I’d been bruised and there was a sort of pleasurable agony in probing the injury. Rob could pull the pin on my emotions just like that, and then leave me on fire as he walked away. He had no idea, of course. Worse: it was the effect he wanted to have on Juliet, and never would.
He hunched down on his heels and started poking at the mortar between the cobblestones. We waited.
One, one thousand. Two, one thousand. Three, one thousand.…
You can think a lot in three seconds, I’d learned from being in an MRI machine.
My mother knew how I felt about Rob. I’d never told her. I didn’t have to. My mother should have been a clairvoyant on TV and made us all rich. (“I see an older man, very handsome, a thick head of hair. He’s with a baby. He wants you to know they’re both happy.”) People would have believed her. She could see through walls and straight into my skull. And phones? She could name the person at the other end of the call by the tone of my voice or who I was texting by the number of keystrokes.
A telling example of how my mom operates: about six months ago, I got dressed for the night and came down for dinner. There, at my place at our butcher block table, was this little pink bag. In the bag was a year’s supply of birth control pills.
“Well,” I said. “Uh, thanks. I was hoping for a digital camera for my next birthday. Which isn’t for quite some time. What’s the occasion?”
“Just in case,” my mother said.
My little sister, Angela, who’d just turned nine, started laughing so hard that milk came out her nose. I’d bet that Mom had sat her down beforehand with a matter-of-fact “Allie’s a young woman now,” and “sexual feelings are a part of every young woman’s process of maturity.” Having been adopted at the age of the three by a single mom (who happened to have an older biological daughter with a life-threatening disease), Angie was disturbingly wise beyond her years. Either that or just disturbed.
“I hope these have a really long, uh, shelf life or whatever, because I don’t have acne and Mr. Right isn’t anywhere around,” I said. “Or even Mr. Wrong, for that matter.”
“I was thinking about Rob Dorn,” Mom said.
“So have I, but he thinks about Juliet.”
“Are they …?” Angela put her fork down. Spaghetti sauce was way too volatile a condiment for this conversation.