What We Saw at Night - By Jacquelyn Mitchard Page 0,64

He never heard if she received it; she never thanked him. But it didn’t matter. She was alive. She was surviving, for now.

When the three of us were together at night with Angela, we were one again. Or at least we were one in playing our respective roles. But it was enough. All the annoying and hideous things that Angela did suddenly made me laugh. In them, I could see me and Juliet—one minute jumping out of trees, the next minute threatening to chop off her hair so she looked “more like the King of Parkour,” and another minute talking back to Jack-Jack because Mom wouldn’t allow her to trick-or-treat past ten at night.

The morning of October 31st, maybe an hour before dawn, Juliet reached into her pocket and handed me an old picture of us in our Halloween costumes: me as her penguin (yes, I loved her so much that I dressed as her stuffed animal) and Juliet wearing oversized ruby slippers, holding hands, knowing that trick-or-treating would be limited to a few homes who stayed up late just for us. Beneath it was a scribbled quote from Henry David Thoreau. I have traveled a great deal in Concord.

Juliet missed nothing; she just didn’t tell everything she knew.

“Thanks,” I murmured.

“Can I stay over?” she asked quickly. Angie and Mom had been asleep since midnight. Rob was pulling out of our driveway. I nodded.

She borrowed a pair of pj’s. We slipped under the sheets, huddled on one side of my big bed, as we’d done hundreds of times before.

I waited for her to speak.

“That’s really cool you got into college,” she said. “I’m happy for you.”

“Yeah … I’ve already started, in a way.”

“What do you mean?”

“Reading,” I said. “And writing. Just to get a head start. I might try to graduate in December. I have the credits.”

I debated whether or not to tell her more. Although some assignments were ordinary, others were instantly fascinating and demanding. One instructed us on the fundamentals of criminal research, the ways that experts used field notes and different kinds of observation to tighten the loop on criminals. Another discussed the ways in which traditional constants of human nature and behavior, in the anthropological sense, were some of the most reliable tools in modern criminal investigation.

In the past two weeks, I’d learned one fundamental lesson: the world changed, technology changed, but people did not.

I discovered that I was born to love this discipline. Seriously. All I lacked was the ability to go outside. But my freshman-advisor-to-be, Professor Barry Yashida, even wrote me a personal note. Not every investigator works in an urban lab, he assured me. One of his students was confined to a wheelchair and a computer speaking board by cerebral palsy, and, though she never left the first floor of her house, she was a full-time, respected LAPD officer in their major crimes unit. I didn’t think I would ever have that kind of future. But it was encouraging to hear. I would begin online in January.

Meanwhile, I learned more than I ever wanted to about serial killers, even after my brief summer research. For instance: Bellevue, Washington, seems be serial killer central. You would probably find half the missing persons in America, there or at least their skulls. Also, until they fell apart, serial killers compartmentalized. In their “professional” lives, they took strays, prostitutes and addicts and homeless women and runaways: the earth’s restless whose last known address was a street corner. Tony Costa, who cut up girls and buried them in the woods on Cape Cod, had at least two wives … and three kids. Charles Manson was expert at spotting needy throw-away girls. But for every rule there was also an exception. For instance, Ted Bundy was different: his victims weren’t the lost. They were nurses and university students and school kids. He could look preppy and speak with intelligence. People trusted him.

People trusted Garrett Tabor, a doctor’s son, an inspiration to young athletes.

I’d also started the readings for a psychology class that explored masculinity in American culture. They were drawn from fiction and non-fiction as well as scientific studies. Each text, in its own way, considered what it means to be an American man and how women and their thinking influenced the idea of maleness. One of the sections touched on sexual deviance, and the prevailing theories of why rape and sexual battery, or any kind of battery, had nothing to do with masculinity. Yet somehow they were almost