Don’t move and don’t scream, no matter what you see,” Juliet told Rob and me. “Promise? On pain of death?”
“I promise,” I said readily.
Rob shot me a furious glance. I stuck my tongue out at him, and he smiled. I forced myself to shrug with a chilly deadpan.
What else was I supposed to do?
Juliet was a force of nature. I could ask her why we might scream. I might as well chew on the air. She wouldn’t tell us. She was my best friend—in fact, aside from Rob, my only real friend—and the sum total of what I truly knew about her would have filled a teaspoon. She’d probably spent two hundred nights at my house, and I’d spent another hundred at hers. None of that mattered. I was always guessing at how headstrong she was and how unattainably different . . . and we were about to see that proved all over again. Rob shivered in the Washington Wizards team jacket his father had given him. It was meant to be comforting, meant to include Rob in the real world. Rob was a natural athlete, especially when it came to basketball, but couldn’t play because of what he had, what we were. He could never be exposed even to the lights in a gym during a real game. The jacket was one of
thirty or so. His dad stockpiled them, being a sporting-goods buyer. They were actually a kind of mockery. But Rob’s dad was such a sweetie that he would never have realized that. So Rob dutifully rotated among the Bucks, the Bulls, the Pacers, the Pistons, and yes . . . even the Wizards. I was wearing my leather coat and two layers of scarves. It was April 8, but Iron Harbor didn’t know it was technically spring. At two in the morning, in the brick passage between the Smile Doctors dentistry and Gitchee Pizza, we could see
our breath every time we spoke. The temperature couldn’t have been much above freezing.
“I’m going to die,” I said. “And be cryogenized. Standing here.”
“Such a weenie,” Juliet said.
She didn’t seem to feel the cold. Ever. In a black bodysuit that Rob tried hard not to stare at and a black turtleneck sweater that gathered at her knees, Juliet braided up her waist-length dark blond hair and looped it into an elastic band. Along the left side of her face, from her cheekbone to her lip, she’d stenciled in iridescent face paint a line of these blue stars that glowed in the faint light from the street corner. Face paint! For a Tuesday night among the Nothings of Nowheresville, Minnesota. For the excellent true adventures of three people who had absolutely no lives.
“I’ve been called a lot of things,” I said. “But never—”
“A weenie? Consider yourself called,” Juliet interrupted with a wicked laugh. “In fact, I have called you a weenie myself."
She had, in fact: the previous summer, when I balked at breaking into Valerie Meyercheck’s house again. We’d broken into the Meyercheck house only once. Valerie spent about ten days a year in Iron Harbor and the rest of the time whirling among her houses in Switzerland, Paris and Lake Forest. I’d finally followed Juliet inside, but I did not try on any clothes. Juliet took two sweaters, two of countless heather cashmere cardigans. Juliet insisted (and I believed her): no one who had a hundred color-coded sweaters could be sure if the moths had eaten some, or if the dear old family servant Valerie probably called “Mammy” had given them away to the poor.
I should have taken one of the other heather gray sweaters.
Of course, none of us could trump what Henry LeBecque had called Juliet last fall, though we should have seen it coming for years: “A wannabe vampire.” As if she’d chosen to live the way we did. First off, how could any guy with a pulse dump Juliet, no matter what her limitations? Henry said he couldn’t stand being with a girl who basically had to go home every morning and sleep in her coffin.
He paid for it, though, a month later. Just before Halloween, the former librarian, Mrs. Taylor, died at ninety. Torch Mountain Home Cemetery also happens to be a place where a lot of kids like to drink. Nobody was thinking about the fact that they would dig old Mrs. Taylor’s grave a few nights before they actually buried her, and cover it with a piece of canvas and a blanket of sod. Henry never knew what hit him. His “friends” (loyal allies that they were) took off when they heard Henry scream and tumble into a black hole. He was lucky to have had his cell phone so he could call his parents to explain to them how he ended up alone in the deep bottom of a new grave in the snow on Halloween night. He was a weenie.
“Don’t look yet!” Juliet called back at us. “I have to go through this mentally before it happens.” Biting my tongue, I watched Juliet stretch, an old habit from her days as a competitive skier. She patted her hands over her clothing, to make sure nothing was sticking out or unbuttoned. She checked her shoes to make sure the laces were tied. Then she ran off into the darkness. Rob nudged me as we heard Juliet’s light step on the fire escape, far down the cobbled passageway. The metal was old and rusty and probably a decade out of code. Most public things moved about forty years behind schedule in Iron Harbor. Who would know better than we? Most people were careless enough not to lock their doors. A lot didn’t even bother, for the convenience of the only three teenagers who might be out all night, whose parents either were fine with what we did, or never bothered to stop us. Besides, we could easily get around anybody who dared to try to keep us out. There was no fire escape, roof terrace, restaurant back entrance, abandoned cabin, unlocked deck door on a lakeside mansion . . . no unused boat, construction site, or gated park that Rob, Juliet and I didn’t know about—even before we all got our driver’s licenses the past winter. The three of us had been born within four weeks of each other. What were the odds? December was obviously a very good month for freaks. Now the streets of Iron Harbor—all twenty of them, plus the
resorts in the hills around the tiny town—belonged to us.
“What do you think she’s doing?” Rob said.
He noticed me shivering and pulled me close to him.
My heart skittered. I resisted the urge to say: Hold me tighter. My fingers flickered at the level of my chest in the ASL sign for “I want”: the one we taught my little sister to use to ask for food when she was two and spoke only baby Chinese.
But Rob didn’t see. He never saw. My sign language was from me to myself, a sort of prayer, like the way people cross their fingers behind their backs when they tell a lie.
It wasn’t a lie, though. It was the central truth of my so-called emotional life. For the past three years, Rob’s touch could brand itself in a way I would be able to feel the next
morning when I lay in bed, as though I’d been bruised and there was a sort of pleasurable agony in probing the injury.
Rob could pull the pin on my emotions just like that, and then leave me on fire as he walked away. He had no idea, of course. Worse: it was the effect he wanted to have on Juliet,
and never would. He hunched down on his heels and started picking at the
mortar between the cobblestones. We waited. One, one thousand. Two, one thousand. Three, one thousand. . . .
You can think a lot in three seconds, I’d learned from being in an MRI machine.
My mother knew how I felt about Rob. I never told her.
I didn’t have to. My mother should have been a clairvoyant on TV and made us all rich. (“I see an older man, very handsome, a thick head of hair. He’s with a baby. He wants you to know they’re both happy.”) People would have believed her. She could see: through walls and straight into my skull.
And phones? She could name the person at the other end of the call by the tone of my voice or who I was texting by the number of keystrokes. A telling example of how my mom operates: about six months ago I got dressed for the night and came down for dinner. There, at my place at our butcher block table, was this little pink bag. In the bag was a year’s supply of birth control pills.
“Well,” I said. “Uh, thanks. I was hoping for a fancy digital camera for my next birthday. Which isn’t for quite some time. What’s the occasion?”
“Just in case,” my mother said.
My little sister, Angela, who’d just turned nine, started laughing so hard that milk came out her nose. I’d bet that Mom had sat her down beforehand with a matter-of-fact “Allie’s a young woman now,” and “sexual feelings were a part of every young woman’s process of maturity.” Having been adopted at the age of the three by a single mom (who happened to have an older biological daughter with a life-threatening disease), Angie was disturbingly wise beyond her years. Either that or just disturbed.
“I hope these have a really long, uh, shelf life or whatever, because I don’t have acne and Mr. Right isn’t anywhere around,” I said. “Or even Mr. Wrong, for that matter.”
“I was thinking about Rob Dorn,” Mom said.
“So have I, but he thinks about Juliet.”
“Are they . . . ?” Angela put her fork down. Spaghetti sauce was way too volatile a condiment for this conversation.
“Most certainly negatori,” I said. “Rob has the same chance with Juliet as Howard.” (This in reference to a custodian of indeterminate age, who had worked at the hospital and clinic since shortly before time began. All of us knew Howard because he never seemed to really leave. Any time any of us had ever been there, he was either pushing the big rubber dumpster through the halls or lying down inside it, singing some of his favorite religious hits.)
“I just thought you should have them,” Mom said.
“Isn’t this the kind of thing you’re supposed to find hidden away somewhere? Then start crying and saying your little girl is all grown up?”
My mother sighed. “That would be conventional,” she said.
Right. “Conventional” was a bad word in our house.
Even now, I couldn’t tell if she would be happy if I actually took the birth control pills or if I didn’t. So I kept them in my underwear drawer. I was the one who almost cried whenever
I saw them, because I knew I was the last person on earth who would ever need them. . . .
Juliet’s voice shattered my thoughts from somewhere in the shadows above us.
“Live once!” she shouted. “Ready?”
“For a year now,” Rob muttered. “What stupid thing is she doing now?”
“She’s okay,” I said, and I called softly, “Ready, Juliet!”
“She doesn’t have a light,” he pointed out.
“You don’t know that. She could have had it in a fanny pack under her sweater.”
Until recently, my little sister actually assumed that people with XP could see better in the dark, like cats. Which is absurd: on average, we probably see worse. A lot of people with XP damage their eyes with light when they’re little before they even know they have it. Rob and Juliet and I kept headlamps and little Maglites in our backpacks if we had to pick a lock or peer down a ravine or around a dark corner.
“Are you right where I left you?” Juliet called, very far away. “You have to watch every second of this. You’re my witnesses!”
I called back, “We’re right here!”
One of the things you learn pretty quickly if you live your life at night is that—unless you’re literally standing on someone’s front porch—you can pretty much be as loud as you want. No one will hear you or see you. Definitely, no one will care. We had Juliet’s dad to thank in part for our freedom, of course. Tommy Sirocco was one of the Iron County sheriff’s deputies, and he worked the midnight shift solely because his family’s life was set up around his daughter. Whenever he spotted Rob’s Jeep, Officer Sirocco would quietly turn his squad car away to give us privacy.
I heard a shuffling and loud scraping above. Rob tensed.
Juliet was making her way across the flat graveled roof of Gitchee Pizza. The Indian name for Lake Superior is Gitchee Gume; that wasn’t just something Longfellow made up for a
poem. (Hiawatha was real, too, by the way.) The second floor of Gitchee Pizza housed the apartment of its owner and founder, Gideon Brave Bear—also a genuine Indian, a Bois Forte Chippewa; he got pissed if you used the term “Native American.”
Every kid in town ate at least one meal a week at Gitchee. Fortunately, in addition to being a very good purveyor of pizza, Gideon was also a very stereotypical drunk. He wouldn’t have
heard Juliet if she had been up there setting off fireworks.
We heard the scraping again, and then a few short taps.
“Juliet!” Rob cried out. “What the hell?”
Then Juliet jumped.
For a shattering instant, I thought I was a witness to my best friend’s death: a spectacular original suicide, for an audience. It was just the kind of stunt Juliet would pull, the shocker we would never see coming. My mind slowed to syrup as I waited for her body to hit the ground between Rob and me. Juliet had always sworn she would die her own way. Not in some bed in the darkened living room of her house or hooked up to an IV in a sterile hospital . . . or after an overdose with a note pinned to her pillow, which is how many lives end for people like us.
But this wasn’t death. This was life. The moment Juliet launched herself from the roof, she became a whirling constellation. I couldn’t see her face. A long line of glow-in-the-dark blue stars, outlined in silver, soared out above our heads between the buildings, wheeling in space, completing a full circle. Then the stars were gone. She’d already landed on the opposite roof—hooting in her victory dance—when my brain caught up to my eyeballs.
Juliet Sirocco had just traversed a twelve-foot gap, twenty feet off the ground . . . while performing a front flip in mid-air. She must have shed her sweater on the roof. That explained the feverish swirl of glowing stars. She’d stenciled them on her bodysuit, all up one leg and one arm, as well as her face. It was her way of saying Screw You to Nothing Time in Nowheresville. Rob fumbled for the switch on his Maglite. The faint beam flickered over the roof. Juliet was punching the air and grinning down at us. I broke my promise, because I screamed. I couldn’t help it. The word exploded from deep inside: “Amazing!”
“Shut up, Allie!” Rob hissed.
“What? That was pretty amazing.”
“She could have been killed!”
I had to laugh. “What else is new?”
Jacquelyn Mitchard’s first novel,
The Deep End of the Ocean, was named by USA Today as one of the ten
most influential books of the past 25 years – second only to the Harry
Potter series by J.K. Rowling (but second by a long shot, it must be
said.)
The Deep End of the Ocean was chosen as the first novel in
the book club made famous by the TV host Oprah Winfrey, and transformed
into a feature film produced by and starring Michelle Pfeiffer.
All
of Mitchard’s novels have been greater or lesser bestsellers – and
include The Most Wanted, A Theory of Relativity, Twelve Times Blessed,
The Breakdown Lane and Cage of Stars. Critics have praised them for
their authentic humanity and skilful command of story. Readers identify
because they see reflected, in her characters – however extreme their
circumstances – emotions they already understand.
Mitchard’s
first story of adventure and her eighth novel of realistic contemporary
fiction is Still Summer (August, 2007). In the same month, the paperback
version of her most critically acclaimed novel, Cage of Stars (August
2007), appears from Warner Books.
Mitchard also has embarked on four novels for young adults.
The Unfinished Life of Addison Stone
