What We Saw at Night - By Jacquelyn Mitchard Page 0,14

routinely because they could never get used to the reversed biorhythmic schedule.

I rummaged in the drawer and took two of them. Then I prepared to do my whole sleep ritual, which I had neglected the night before. I made my Goodnight tea with honey. I put fresh sheets on the bed. I jumped in and out of a dangerously hot shower, smeared myself with my one vanity—expensive cream that smelled of the Caribbean Islands I would never see—and pulled and pegged my blackout shades so the room was utterly lightless. Then I got out my big sleep mask, the one that was ten inches long and lay across my face like a soft log filled with flaxseed and lavender … and after all that, I still could not banish the lurid image: the guy with the platinum streak down the back of his head, jerking that girl’s limp body up off the white carpet.

But that’s what you did to revive someone. It wasn’t gentle.

Right?

And if he really was a guy who was working on that new apartment and in there with his wasted girlfriend, the last thing he’d want is for her to barf all over a pristine sea of total whiteness. Of course she wasn’t dead. If she was dead, there’d be blood. And gunk. Bodily fluids. I’d spent half my life in a hospital; I knew. That place was spotless. Still … living-but-passed-out people shouldn’t be that pale.

On the other hand, what was I basing this on? The number of passed-out-drunk people I’d seen in my life numbered zero.

I lay back on the bed. The best way to put yourself to sleep is to listen for a sound that’s almost outside your ability to hear. I closed my eyes and searched for the loon and finally found it, a sound as familiar to me as my own music after all these years, yet still, even during the day, lonesome and eerie. My legs began to tingle. Please, let the pills kick in, I thought. Please.

I woke up at eleven that night and quickly grabbed my phone.

Rob had texted: Sleeping in.

Juliet had texted nothing.

THREE DAYS PASSED. Then three more. I didn’t hear from Juliet once. She didn’t answer any texts or calls. Here we go again, I thought. Another vanishing act. Rob became oddly withdrawn too, claiming he wasn’t feeling well. I couldn’t argue with sickness. The nights seemed to grow longer, even though summer shortened them. This was supposed to be our time together.

I devoted myself to not thinking about Rob or Juliet. Not thinking about best friends is almost a discipline in itself. I tried to start a journal. Unfortunately, I’m no writer, and the entries kept coming back to Rob in ways that were at best embarrassing and at worst excruciating. I wondered if he was as shaken by what we’d seen as I was.

Of course he was. That’s why he was ignoring me.

On day seven, I decided to capitalize on our shaken-ness.

Spending as much time in a hospital as we do, you learn a few things—namely that certain ER admittances must be recorded by the police, and while names are never given, you can deduce an identity from certain details: age, ethnicity, and reason for showing up in the first place. Juliet taught me how to access the police records the night we pushed Henry LeBecque into that open grave. (Male Caucasian, 17 yrs old, intoxicated, admitted to Tabor Clinic ER for panic attack, 12:17 A.M., November 1. Released 3:45 A.M. after exam.) I scoured the records for any sign of the woman with the gray skin. But there were no matches. In fact, not a single woman had been admitted to the ER the night or morning of our little stunt. So if that guy with the blond lightning bolt had been trying to revive her, he must have succeeded.

On day eight, I found myself crying.

Why wouldn’t Juliet and Rob return my calls or texts? What had I done? Was I going to spend the entire summer—or worse, the rest of my life—without the two people who knew and understood me better than anyone in the world? That night, I even tried to sleep, which was a very weird feeling, trying to fall asleep without all the daytime sounds of Iron Harbor to provide my bedtime lullaby. I clung to the belief that Juliet and Rob were going through some variation of what I was going through, that both of them had to be