What We Saw at Night - By Jacquelyn Mitchard Page 0,13

to the balcony floor and crawled past a potted pine to get to the edge of it. I was already ten steps down when I heard Rob say, “Juliet! Juliet! Come on.”

The rain began to fall, hard, cold drops on my hot face.

Rob said again, “Juliet! He’ll see you!”

Juliet didn’t seem to care who saw her. She descended languidly, almost like a ballet dancer, and leaped the last few feet to the ground. The rain began pounding. The inside of my eyeballs were wet.

After a fevered sprint, Rob and I threw ourselves into the car. Juliet ran around in the dark, picking up her tripod. When she jumped into the back, I turned to her. She was messing with the camera, dripping wet though not breathing as hard as either Rob or me.

“I think this stuff is okay,” she gasped. “I was scared it blew into the lake!”

I couldn’t seem to catch my breath. “Was that girl … what was wrong with her?”

Juliet lifted her shoulders. “She looked like she was passed out. And he was trying to wake her up.”

Rob didn’t even seem to be listening to our conversation. “We triggered some alarm when we landed on the balcony—which is why the lights came on … right?”

I said, “That girl looked dead.”

“Dead drunk maybe,” Juliet dismissed, drying her camera with her shirt.

“He was doing, like CPR, right?” I asked, mostly to myself.

“Good date gone bad,” Juliet replied. Her voice was flat. “It scared the hell out of me, though, when that light went on.”

The lightning crashed again. We heard a hollow boom—a tree or a light pole down. It happened all the time.

Then Rob said, “Who has a date in a room with no furniture?”

We all turned to the apartment. It was dark.

I woke up screaming, my sheets drenched with sweat.

At least Angie and Mom weren’t there.

You try to breathe through things like that. Out with the bad air. In with the good air. Out with the bad mind pictures, in with the good mind pictures. That girl’s face was slack and rubbery. She was a young person with an old person’s skin. A dead person’s skin. I felt my throat constricting.

My little sister has allergies. So we probably occupied the only house in Iron Harbor except the hospital and the assisted-living facility that had air conditioning. I rolled out of bed in my T-shirt and underpants and tugged at the window—panicking when it would not open, forgetting I had to slide the latch—then finally laid my face against the blackout screen and sucked in as much piney air as my lungs could hold. In the distance, I heard birds chirping. Back in bed, I began to text Rob.

Then I realized it was noon on a Saturday. Rob and Juliet were asleep.

As I should be. My mind raced, wondering why I didn’t have alternative, non-lethal pursuits and alternative non-criminal friends. Maybe I could stay away from Juliet for a little while. There was still Nicola. True, school was out for the summer, but she’d be on yearbook committee with me next fall, right? We could plan ahead. We could even do some non-yearbook stuff. We’d gone to the movies precisely six times in my life. Once I’d stayed over at her house, too. Plus her dad collected all these old pinball machines, all with horror themes, that were definitely fun. He also had the first edition of every single Stephen King book, signed. That was sort of cool.

Come to think of it, I would probably have been better friends with Nicola if Juliet hadn’t taken up so much real estate in my friendship pasture. But how could I call Nicola out of the blue? I hadn’t seen her for months. (Hi, Nicola! I just saw a girl who was possibly dying and I’m totally creeped out, so I don’t want to hang with my best friend.…) My thoughts wandered back to the penthouse.

The dead-looking girl probably was dead drunk.

Why wasn’t there any furniture in the apartment?

The guy was probably a construction worker. Maybe he’d snuck in there with his girlfriend and they’d gotten wasted.

Why was he trying to revive her?

They were just two innocent people looking for some privacy.

Why was her face bone gray like that?

Not for the first, fifteenth, or fortieth time, my friendship with Juliet disturbed my sleep—though I was sure, not hers.

I had knockout pills I could take. I only needed them once a month, when I had cramps. Some XP kids had to take them