What We Saw at Night - By Jacquelyn Mitchard Page 0,15

missing me, but both of them were scared to talk about what we’d seen.

By that morning, crying felt like a job.

The word clicked in my brain.

It was summer. School was out. I should do what normal kids my age did. I decided to get a real job.

THE FUNNY THING: my own mother didn’t even need a job. We could have paid off our house and bought new clothes every season and gone to Italy in August on what my father sent. But for the very first time, I understood why my mother needed to work. She needed a goal, a distraction, a purpose.

Still, what could I do?

Literally, I had no talents. I could type people’s papers. I couldn’t work at Gitchee; Gideon lit the place like a hockey rink. I could be a server in a dark restaurant, like that one in California where the waiters were blind. None were dark enough here. I could clean houses at night. I was good at harassing my little sister.… A-ha.

I decided I was a babysitter. I made advertisements.

REST EASY!

EXPERIENCED BIG SISTER

CAN BABYSIT AND CLEAN 4 U NIGHTS.

AMAZING REFERENCES

Okay. “Amazing” was pushing it. Not counting my mom, I had two: Gina and Dr. Andrew. I could add Juliet’s dad. He was a cop, although he’d never seen me do anything that required talent except paint my nails while eating popcorn.

I pressed send. Then I waited.

I GOT TWO calls that day: two more than I expected. There isn’t a lot of demand for sitters who only work the graveyard shift. One came from a single dad who was clearly drunk when he left the message. I didn’t call back and neither did he. The other came from a young woman, Tessa—a nurse at Divine Savior, no less, who worked midnights—with an infant named Tavish. (I had to ask twice if I was pronouncing it right. TA-vish.) She’d just moved to Iron Harbor into a building on Lakeshore Road. Although it couldn’t be the same building, as in that building (could it?) I decided to go and talk to her anyhow. We made a date for the following Tuesday.

And almost as soon as I hung up—at least that’s how it felt—Juliet called.

She sounded as chirpy as though we’d just spent the previous night on an online body-butter-buying binge.

“Rob and I went to Duluth to scout,” she said all in one breath. “We found some good stuff for us.”

I blinked. My throat caught. “May you be happy always,” I replied.

“It’s a long drive though,” I heard Rob chime in from the background. “You take an hour or more to get there, you don’t have much time.”

“But once you find spaces for traces, you have places to go to,” Juliet added. “You don’t have to search. You just sing.”

“And you have the soul of the poet!” I managed. “What about me?”

“We didn’t think you’d be into it,” Juliet said.

Right, but you were into each other.

“So do you want to be into it?” Juliet said.

“Well, let’s see,” I said. “I’m busy. Cheer practice is Monday and Wednesday.…” Then I exploded: “It’s been ten days since we did that building but who’s counting and neither one of you bothered to do so much as text me more than five times, and that was only Rob! Why should I want to do anything with you?”

“We love you,” Juliet said.

I hung up.

THAT NIGHT, I found myself in the Jeep with Rob and Juliet. We weren’t going to do Parkour. We were going swimming.

Normally we’d borrow a boat from the snazzy side of Ghost Lake. But no one owned a boat that fit our needs: conveniently located and not very well tied up. We ended up in the bass boat owned by the gym teacher, Mr. Callahan—one of the few boats we used with the owner’s permission.

Once we were out in deep water, Rob and I jumped in. We gasped as we splashed. It’s never warm. It’s so cold in fall that you could die, like the people on the Titanic. In summer, it’s cold enough to be a shock. The water always smells of pocket change, like old nickels and dimes, because of all the minerals in it. Minerals are why there are beaches on Lake Superior that have inches of black sand on them, and agates and garnets and gold that old people are always finding because this was all once a volcano. There was also a lot of glacier action and earthquakes and such that, for me, it was