What We Saw at Night - By Jacquelyn Mitchard Page 0,6

was a part of something magical. It was like being on the earth instead of hiding inside it. And she was right about that part, too: we’d hidden all our lives.

IN JUNE, JULIET decided we were ready to try a gap leap to a cat grab and then swing down five stories to a ten-foot turn vault to the ground. She was going to set up a camera with a filter to film us. It would be the first “Dark Stars” video feat. Dark Stars would be our “Tribe,” which is what the Parkour “traceurs” call one another. (To perform Parkour was to “trace.” Juliet had memorized all the Parkour terms in French. I had no interest in the words, so I rarely used either the French or English. I was only interested in the action.)

Our launch pad was a six-story building under construction, perched on the bluffs above Lake Superior. Juliet had chosen the spot. From there we would land on the roof of an older neighboring five-story building: Tabor Oaks, an upscale apartment complex. Then we would “lache” (pronounced lachay): swing by one arm to the other from one balcony to the one below it. The bottom-most balconies were differently built, ten feet down and about five feet to the left or right of the balconies above—with nothing directly below them except open space.

If you missed that final move, you would plummet to the grass, thirty feet down. You’d be lucky if you only broke your neck. If you had a lot of momentum, and you kept flying, you’d eventually tumble down to the boulders washed by the waves below. I’d assumed that this was the motive behind Juliet’s choice for the Dark Stars on-camera debut: the thrill, so close to the certain death on the rocks of Lake Superior, and also so close to a bunch of rich strangers who had no taste for adventure.

Of course, Juliet must have known we might glimpse something. Only later did I realize that she’d always known.

OUR TRANSITION FROM the playground to the pit—to the end of an innocence we only saw in retrospect—was abrupt. If you had asked us, Rob and I would have said that we were very mature for our age. People think that, and say that, and we were among those who would have meant that, what with our life-threatening illness. But in fact we were, if anything, slow to “grow up.” I thought of drinking booze and smoking weed and (eventually) having sex as big markers of adulthood. I had no idea how sheltered we really were.

It began on a Thursday, right before I fell asleep in the morning.

Juliet zinged me a text: B ready.

I shot back: ?

Something new and big We R READY! READY 4 MORE! The CHALLENGE!

When?

2 morrow! Juliet replied.

And that was all.

Why so soon? I wondered tiredly. Why tonight?

THAT FRIDAY MORNING, before our epic night of “bouldering”—a Parkour word that supposedly combines the word “building” with “boulder,” from mountain climbing—I had a clinic appointment.

If I had to go to the doctor, it was usually after midnight. Many XP doctors and nurses (my mother among them) worked the red-eye shift for obvious reasons. All the patients in the XP Family Study got free care, so we tried to make it easier for those who did the caring. There were people who’d moved all the way from Wyoming and California. The Siroccos had moved from the Twin Cities, just to bring their kids to the XP Family Study at the Tabor Clinic—the most extensive treatment facility for XP anywhere in the world. They knew it was worth the headache and expense of travel to a lackluster ski resort town, all thanks to the Tabor family.

Dr. Andrew Tabor, who was around sixty, took care of us. His younger brother, Dr. Stephen Tabor, took care of the dead. (At least that’s how I thought of him.) He did research for the XP Family Study, too, but as the county medical examiner. He dissected bodies to figure out how to prevent what kills us, which is usually skin cancer—the worst kind. Every year after New Year’s Eve, the Tabors had a big party for the XP families, and Dr. Andrew would always give the same cheery toast.

“We’re THIS close. Forty years ago, my father, Simon, could never have believed how far we would come.”

Dr. Simon Tabor, who was easily a hundred and still kicking, founded the Tabor Clinic. Why he’d decided to make XP his life’s work, none