What We Saw at Night - By Jacquelyn Mitchard Page 0,10

don’t bother me, because they don’t pity us, either. Then there are the guys who unwittingly pretend to be robots whose batteries have died; they stare into space with no emotion in an effort to convey a mysterious, hidden, deep soul that doesn’t exist. I’m not a violent person, but it would have been bad for me to have an automatic weapon just then.

This particular night also happened to occur during Juliet’s first year away from skiing.

She was miserable and restless, and was packing more attitude than usual. She said that the people on her ski team used to call her “The Great and Terrible.” I believed it. After that last winter, she’d returned home with a tiny tattoo just above her navel ring: the initials G.T. I don’t think that even Rob ever noticed it, although we’d all gone skinny-dipping many times. It was dark blue and hard to see in the dark, especially if you were distracted by the wink of the little piercing ring in the moonlight, which he would have been. But I saw why she’d earned the nickname that night.

The band started to play an old song from the distant past, with a chorus that repeated “more and more of you.” It must have struck a chord in Juliet, because she just got out there. We’d scoured our parents’ discarded jewelry (in lieu of being able to shop during business hours) and Juliet had picked out eight impossibly slender silver rings her mom, Ginny, used to wear as a kid. Juliet called them her “ringlethingles.” That night, she wore one ring on every finger.

Having balance like no one else, insanely agile in five-inch heels, she danced.

Danced.

The whole gym froze. It was as if someone had pressed a giant pause button. But the music played, even though the guys in the band stumbled over a few notes. No one came out to try to dance with her or even beside her. It was art: her hips in a perfect grind of a figure eight, her hands down at her thighs tickling an invisible piano, gradually working their way up to all that hair, her eyes closed in invisible ecstasy.

When the song ended, Juliet walked out of the spotlight and jerked her head at me. I had to snap out of my own trance. Passing Caitlin Murray and some of her coven, I heard a purr: “You know, there are ways you can make your living at night. On a pole.”

Juliet just kept walking. “Daytimers,” she said under her breath.

Rob was outside already. He hadn’t even witnessed the Juliet-Caitlin exchange. But he said something right, something I never could, even though I saw the same sea of parked cars. “Do you notice the irony in our society?” he joked. “Wannabe size-zeros in a crowd of beached whales. America is this obscenely fat society of self-deniers. It’s fried mayonnaise balls or death, and everyone buys into the hypocrisy. It’s sad. These moms need to get out of their cars and dance. Look how unhappy they are!”

Juliet beamed.

That night I knew Juliet had somehow united us in an unspoken belief: we had it over the Daytimers. We were smarter and funnier. And when Juliet whirled in a dizzying constellation over Gitchee Pizza, I knew this to be truer than ever. We could do things they could never do, but at night. Even most of the jocks with heads the size of fire hydrants couldn’t do Parkour. It was hard. Harder than hard. Demanding of body, in flexibility and strength. Demanding of spirit, in creativity and fearlessness.

Most of all, it demanded constant improvisation.

AS WE DROVE to Juliet’s house, I asked Rob, “Do you think she’s already tried this?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised at all, Allie-stair,” he said.

For Rob, it was “Allie-stair;” for Juliet, “Allie-Bear.” I could never figure out why neither of them had nicknames. It made me feel like a stuffed animal they tossed back and forth, like the little penguin on skis Juliet still slept with.

“Well, if she did, I’m glad,” I said.

“Why?”

“Because she’s still alive and that means it’s doable,” I said.

Before we even reached her house, Juliet was dashing out the front door with a sack that could have been Santa’s. Inside was a tripod plus a lot of power food, like bars and dried chili, as if we couldn’t have set everything up and then driven to the Gitchee for a meatball sandwich. We set up a camp in the little private beach park area about