What We Saw at Night - By Jacquelyn Mitchard Page 0,9

and then went to the neurology lab. They did a bunch of peering into my nose and eyes and making tones I had to raise my finger if I heard. Then I went in to wait for Dr. Andrew.

I liked him. For an older graying guy, grandpa-aged, he always smells good and he’s super-fit, like all guy doctors (although not most nurses, I’ve observed). I would sometimes see him jogging when I got up at night before dinner.

He gave me a hug, per usual. “You lost weight,” he said.

“Nah, just buffing up,” I told him. I had lost a few pounds from Parkour, and although I was five-six with big shoulders and strong legs, it showed.

“Nothing else? No problems?”

“Well, I have this chronic problem with sunlight. I can’t get a base tan.”

Dr. Andrew snickered. “And how’s that career in stand-up comedy coming along?” He flashed a big fake smile that would have looked dumb on anyone else his age, but on him it was just sweet and goofy.

The drill took an eternity of two hours, like it always does. But I was grateful, as I always am, not to have to endure a full checkup every month.

Nothing about me had changed. That was good news.

Once I was home, I only had four or five hours to sleep—not enough. I was also freaking out, because hang-dropping your way down a ladder or the monkey bars is one thing, but trespassing on private property is another. Juliet kept insisting they were the same.

I texted her: 2 Tired.

She texted me: 2 Chicken.

I texted her: Bring it.

She wrote back: Live once!

Rob picked me up around nine, after I was finished with what little school work I was going to do. It was June and junior year was a week away from becoming a memory. The gloves I’d bought for traction were already getting worn, but the light, grip-soled shoes were still good.

“Are we both insane?” I asked him, when I got into the front seat of the Jeep.

He smirked.

Without XP, Rob would have been able to run Iron County High. There would have been minions and maids hanging off him. Instead, he was a shadow presence, like the rumor of a spectacular guy. He supposedly had “friends.” We all supposedly had “friends.” I was on the yearbook committee. Once a month they met at my house. Nobody knew what to say to me. Melanoma yet, Allie? Or—did you hear that Kayla and Jeremy broke up? She was out for two weeks … she’s on antidepressants. Random gossip about strangers unknown to me.

They tried, at least the nice ones. When Juliet was still skiing, I’d mostly hung with Nicola Burns. I really liked Nicola, and we still did things sometimes—rarely, but enough that we could say we were “friends,” with quotes. The key: she never pitied me.

Regrettably, in eighth grade, I’d also briefly hung out with Caitlin Murray, who went through this brief period of trying to be a saint. I don’t know what inspired it. She’d been a horrible, spoiled child, a cosmetic surgeon’s daughter, and had matured into a horrible, spoiled teenager. But then her parents got divorced; her mom was briefly single before marrying a guy who had been a singer in some ancient band. Maybe for a while, Caitlin felt the cold wind blowing through the cracks of the universe and briefly identified with the doomed and the lost.

Then she did something to Juliet, and I never spoke to her again.

It was Homecoming Dance of freshman year, although technically we were never really “freshmen” or “sophomores.” Because we had tutors and because we did everything fast to get it over with, we were a year ahead of everyone else. There’s so much happy bullshit and plain old babysitting in school that it would otherwise take us two and a half years to get through all four. At least that’s my understanding.

Anyhow, our parents wanted us to try to have normal friends to the degree we could. We didn’t blame them. They had normal friends in high school.

We tried to do what normal friends do. Go to the dance. Stand by the wall. Watch the Daytimers e-lab-or-ate-ly pretend to not notice you, until one of them bursts into tears because, Oh! She just feels so bad for you, and all her girlfriends have to run to the bathroom to comfort her! Meanwhile, most guys stand there and do boob-feeling pantomimes like some kind of idiot puppets. I have to admit, these guys