What We Saw at Night - By Jacquelyn Mitchard Page 0,59

ma’am.”

“Give them turnout gear, then, ordinary fire suits and helmets.”

My mother squatted down next to me and lifted the edge of the blanket “What the hell are you idiots thinking?”

“You’re all heart, Jack-Jack.”

“Is it the full moon? First, your poor friend Nicola, and now Juliet’s in the hospital. There’s been about a full decade of weirdness packed into these past few days. How do I explain this?”

“You mean, what will people say?”

“No, Allie. It’s just you live almost seventeen years with a person and, suddenly, in one night, her best friend is in the hospital and she’s trapped under a car with her boyfriend.”

“Adolescence?” I offered.

Mom’s face twisted into a grimace and disappeared. I felt Rob’s fingers intertwine with mine. Then I closed my eyes and let the paramedics take over.

I was lying on a bed waiting for the okay to shower when Juliet appeared. She wheeled into my room, her leg extended on a padded board, a pole with an IV at her side.

“You have that syndrome that chronically sick kids get, like overdeveloped conscience syndrome,” she announced.

“You made that up.”

Juliet laughed. “I did. You have it though. You always feel like you’re inconveniencing somebody.”

“I am always inconveniencing somebody. I’m an inconvenient person.”

“But you’re not. We didn’t ask to be born this way, Allie. The world owes you one. Not the other way around.”

Bonnie came in and drew the curtain so that I could undress and shower. “Juliet, you need to leave. Jackie Kim’s orders.”

“Allie doesn’t have anything I haven’t seen,” Juliet said.

“I’m sure she wants her privacy,” Bonnie said.

“Actually, I’m fine if she stays,” I said. “Tell my mom. It’s cool.”

“She’s my best friend,” Juliet added. “I saw her boobs before she had boobs. Not that she really has boobs now.”

I swallowed, watching Bonnie’s face soften as I remembered the first time Juliet and I got bras. It was one of the summers when she had a month or six weeks off from the hours and hours of gym work and indoor running that was necessary for ski jumping. My mother took both of us to the mall, at night. (We didn’t have to wear full gear, just sunglasses, ball caps and long-sleeved shirts, so we looked only like lepers instead of aliens). Juliet wanted a push-up bra that wouldn’t adapt to the style. “They’re too far apart,” Juliet had told my mother. “What’s going to happen to me if they don’t grow and they stay pointing different ways? I’m going to have to get one stick-on cup for each one.” We ended up buying every conceivable bra, training and otherwise, just to be safe.

“I’ll give you twenty minutes,” Bonnie said.

I slipped out of my clothes and tossed Juliet her ski mask, which had been stuffed into my back pocket since last night. I gratefully spent the next twenty minutes rinsing the grime from my hair and teeth and every cleft and crevice of my body, before dousing myself with the hospital lotion that reminded me of home, since my mother used vats of the stuff. For me, it was like Vicks. Nicola told me once that when her older brother went to college and got a cold, rubbing Vicks on his chest for a cough made him homesick.…

I examined my scratched and blotchy face in the mirror. In my own home—in my own context—I never saw how truly pale people are who are never exposed to sunlight. My skin was perfect, but looked like the unblemished petal of a funeral-parlor lily. Blush might have helped, but there was no makeup called XP, for X-tra Pale. Searching that pale face, with its eyes in a state of perpetual alarm, I didn’t even recognize the real Allie. I didn’t know where she was. But the real Juliet was waiting outside. I pulled on my hospital pj’s.

Afraid as she had been, how much could Juliet know now? Did she know that someone had screwed with Rob’s phone?

I reentered the room, my burden of questions caged in the back of my throat, just as Rob waltzed in, waving a DVD. He wanted to make us whole again, or as whole as we three could be. I almost had to laugh. The DVD was “The Best of David Belle, Volumes I-III.”

“Let’s commence the theater portion of the entertainment, ladies,” he said, cleaned up and looking normal except for the purple hollows under his eyes. “Allie, your doctor said we could hang for another couple of hours.…” He broke off, seeing Juliet’s tight