What We Saw at Night - By Jacquelyn Mitchard Page 0,5
breath. I’d never flown in an airplane or had sex, at least with anybody else.
“I can show you how to be safe,” Juliet encouraged.
“Yes, I could absolutely see how safe you were up there,” Rob replied.
Juliet stopped in the middle of the street, her hands on her hips. “It’s a discipline, Allie. It’s called Parkour, Rob. It was invented, like, fifty years ago in France, and it’s based on strength, speed, skill, self-confidence and safety.” She opened her blue eyes wide. “Safety? Get it? It’s a way of getting so strong you can move as fast as you want past obstacles, or over or under them, without ever being hurt.”
“I’ve seen the videos on YouTube,” Rob said. He was already in the driver’s seat.
“One of the founders said it’s a way of touching the earth and everything on it, being part of it instead of just having it shelter you.” Juliet ran over to Rob’s side of the car. “We’ve had enough shelter, don’t you think?”
“I’ve seen the memorials too.” Rob made air-quotes. “ ‘He died doing what he loved.’ That’s as stupid as one of those stories about how some fourteen-year-old kid’s uncle shoots him while they’re deer hunting and everybody’s okay with it.”
Juliet kept smiling. “Everybody dies,” she said, turning her face so it was out of the light. “But not everybody really lives.”
Within a month, Juliet had converted half of Rob’s barn into our Parkour Skill Gym, with mats and parallel bars Rob’s father had scraped together from work. I wasn’t surprised by how easily Rob caved, and frankly I didn’t care. I’d become alive, like Juliet. I would wake up at sunset sick with pain in my belly and shoulders from the endless crunches and handstands. This is how she must have felt during ski training, I thought. And when that ended … what was she going do with all that excess energy? Within a few weeks, I could leg-press two hundred pounds and do a handstand on the bars.
The three of us were all over the playground at the elementary school, and then all over the bleachers at the high school. At first, we ran the bleachers sideways, skipping up one row at a time to the top, for agility. After we could do that without tripping, we would swing our way down the supports. Rob even stopped saying the word “safety” every five minutes. He was in the thick of it, too. I could hear it in his laugh.
We used the playground equipment to practice vaults until we could hurtle the little merry-go-round touching it with only one hand. (In Parkour terms: a passement.) But while Juliet and Rob mastered the backflip right away, I needed a hundred tries to run up a wall and hurtle backward to a standing position. I never landed like they did. Although I will say in my defense: everything I’ve ever read says that the backflip is not really a Parkour move as much as a show-off move, since the point of Parkour is to get you quickly from one place to another, defying obstacles.
After a series of my progressively more embarrassing wipeouts, Juliet said to Rob, “She’s un-teachable. Allie, how did you ever learn to do a backflip off a pier?”
“I can’t backflip off a pier,” I snapped, with what little breath hadn’t been slammed out of my body.
When I finally mastered it, though, I couldn’t stop. I must have done thirty in one night.
Once in a while, we saw the beam from one of the police cars: Juliet’s dad or one of his friends. They must have thought: Nice. What good, clean fun we were having, just playing like the kids we were.…
At the beginning, my mom, who—did I mention?—has always had a problem with boundaries, would walk into my room and say, “You’re burning through the Ibuprofen. What are you guys doing out there? This doesn’t seem prudent, Allie.”
But I rarely had a cut or scrape because I soon learned to drop and roll. I would land on the balls of my feet and then tumble to a standing position. To a bystander, it would look like I’d whammed myself, but it was a way of harnessing momentum to land lightly. The feeling of being able to run to the end of a wall twelve feet up and make this controlled dive into mid-air … and knowing you weren’t going to twist an ankle or break your collarbone.… Juliet was right about the sensation. It