What We Saw at Night - By Jacquelyn Mitchard Page 0,11
a quarter of a mile down the road from Tabor Oaks … and ended up eating a whole lot more than we needed.
“Stupid,” Juliet muttered after we’d finished, standing up and burping. She could make a burp both graceful and adorable. “Now what do we do? My stomach’s about to explode. It’s going to take hours to digest.”
“We have to wait hours anyway,” said Rob. “Why are we out here at ten o’clock? What the hell are we going to do except offer ourselves as a sacrifice to mosquitoes until everybody is nighty-night?”
With the mention of the word nighty-night, the combination of two power bars and bowl of mush hit me like a cloud of pixie dust. “I’m … just so … tired.…”
Juliet laughed. “Go ahead, Allie-Bear. We’ll wake you at the stroke of midnight.”
I WAS CURLED up in the back of the Jeep when Rob roughly shook my shoulder.
Apparently I’d been asleep for two hours. The first thing I noticed when I stumbled out of the door was that the wind had kicked up.
“That weather crap has nothing to do with us,” Juliet said. “Unless it’s pouring.”
I scowled at the waves. Mist tickled my cheeks. “Why didn’t you guys wake me up and tell me this was off?” I asked. “There’s no way we can trace now.”
“Of course we can.” Juliet laughed. “It’s fine. And we just got back. We went to Gitchee for pizza and hung around talking to Gideon. He’s getting married again, by the way. This makes five times, a Northern Minnesota record.”
I ignored her. You would never try anything on a wet surface or if you were sick or out of whack, even a little. David Belle—the son of Parkour’s creator and really the person who pioneered the sport—is no show-off. He says bare feet are the best shoes. And everything he did, he did with grace and safety. But I also knew I could calm those waves easier than I could stop Juliet going up that building.
A tall rock wall already had been built around the construction site, probably meant to shelter any cars there if the lake was feeling frisky. We could have walked around to the front entrance. Instead, Juliet sprinted to the wall, grasped the top, pulling up to a standing position, and dropped onto a vast concrete slab that would eventually become the parking garage. I glanced at Rob. He took off after her. I had no choice but to follow.
Juliet and I wore La Sportive Fireblades because they fit narrower feet. Rob had K-Swiss. That kind of shoe costs over a hundred, easy. Rob’s dad got the shoes for us for practically nothing, because of his job. He’d also bought us rock-climber gloves, with “sticky” pads on the fingertips and palms.
In less than a minute, we were up the side of the skeleton of that new building, though we’d agreed we wouldn’t make this a speed course. We adjusted our headlamps. Faces in the dark are always silvery, but Rob’s was lighter, almost glowing. The waves were slapping down now. I could see whitecaps in the black abyss. When I was really little, and we moved to the north shore, the waves used to keep me awake—until my mother told me that they were saying, “Shush. Shush.”
Years later, long after the time they had put me to sleep, I thought of them as saying, “Now? Now?”
My pulse pounded as we stood silently on one of the construction workers’ platforms and studied the roof next door. It looked further than twelve feet away, the distance Juliet had assured us. (Later, I would find out it was twenty feet.) To me the roof appeared tiny, distant—as though we were going to try to jump from a mountaintop onto a dinner plate. Rob said, randomly, that the building was much nicer than the taller one upon which we were perched. Juliet sniffed. Of course the building was nicer: It was old, with thick walls, and the apartments were huge. Each took up half of one of the floors. Except the top floor. That was all one even huger apartment.…
“So we’re going to land on top of some rich person’s roof like a bunch of giant raccoons,” I said.
“Yeah, but one at a time,” Juliet said. “Remember, you drop and roll. No one will care. It’s two in the morning. And anyhow, the bedrooms are in the front bit, not back here.”