What We Saw at Night

“If you had a long life for sure, what would you do?”

“Nobody has a long life for sure,” I told Rob. “Especially people who jump off buildings.”

We’d had the what-if-you-weren’t-doomed-to-die conversation before, many times. But not recently, not since we’d started Parkour.

We were sitting in the Jeep, on the top story of the parking garage in Duluth: the one that widened in big concentric loops until it filled an entire city block at the bottom. It was the same one that the cop’s son had been caught scaling. In fact, the cop had inadvertently given us the idea. The sky was a deep blue, the kind of blue it turns just before kids like us can begin unwrapping our scarves and hats and sunglasses. And the best part? The part I want to kill myself for admitting?

Juliet wasn’t with us.

Three days had passed since the incident. The whole ride home that night, she’d been on this weird campaign that was probably based on diluting her own fear: She’d tried to talk to me about the incident as though it hadn’t happened quite in the way I thought it had. She’d dropped dismissive hints. (“Maybe you were thinking of that other night, before, and you thought you saw something …”) I’d dismissed her dismissal: I knew she was shaken. Juliet was cool. And not in the slang sense. She never got agitated. She was cool like a pool hustler.

The key to Parkour isn’t just strength, and it definitely isn’t daring. It’s absolute focus. From her ski jump days, Juliet was able to focus far better than Rob or I could. She’d applied that gift to Parkour, the gift for drilling straight down to the moment in front of her. Still, she was more challenged than we were, because even with contact lenses, her vision wasn’t 20-20 in either eye. Her poor vision was partly responsible for the bad fall that ended her fledgling ski career. Although she covered it up, she was losing a little more vision every couple of years. Dr. Andrew said that eventually laser surgery would correct the kind of loss she had, which was a complicated form of astigmatism. But no one would even try it until Juliet was eighteen.

“If I could live a long time and be sure of it, I’d travel,” Rob said. “I’d … you know. Take a sabbatical. The way professors do.”

Or Juliet, I answered silently. She’d gone on another “sabbatical” these past few days. Just up and disappeared. And I did hate myself for being relieved that I could spend time alone with Rob. The problem was that she could be so persuasive that there were moments I did doubt myself. The incident had been an adrenaline-drenched blur. Juliet’s excuse for her break from us was that she needed to “rest a little.” This would be like a promiscuous athlete who made $20 million a year announcing that he would spend the next few seasons as a Buddhist monk.

But like I said: it gave Rob and me time to talk. And I was not hallucinating this much: we did talk differently when Juliet wasn’t around.

We’d gone for sushi. We’d even tried out gruesome sounding combos, like Marching Dragon Tail. (It was awful.) Then we ran for the car—a sun below the horizon can still be dangerous—and Rob grabbed my hand without thinking to pull me along.

Feelings change fast when you’re a teenager. Mom told me that it still amazed her that she would start a school year thinking about one boy constantly, relating every song and every bite of food and every glance in the mirror to complete absorption in him … and then, a few months later, be able to look at him with cold detachment, noticing his blackheads and his girl butt. But my feelings for Rob hadn’t changed, ever, except to grow stronger. I fantasized about explaining to him why we should get married when we were eighteen, because it corrected for our presumed lifespan.

How could he not know? Or care? Being with Rob meant more to me than having a real grown-up life—whatever that even meant—in part because I didn’t think of my condition as really suited to having a big life, unless I could telecommute for everything. But I could have a home and a love. I could be happy. Eventually he would cave in and admit he was attracted to me.

Two nights earlier, I had cut my hair in face-framing tendrils. Tonight, I’d even tried alluring cologne. (An oldie called Shalimar; my mother said that her mother had used it; but magazines said that it turned guys on because it smelled like vanilla—in other words, like something they could eat like a cookie.) Predictably, Rob didn’t try to eat me like a cookie. As always, he treated me like a kid sister. Worse: a kid brother.

In the silence he said suddenly, “There are lots of places, like Paris, that are better at night. I’d keep a little room in some big city like LA, with just a Nerf basketball hoop and computers and my music and books. I wouldn’t even have a stove because I’d get takeout from a different place every night.”

“Refrigerator?”

“I’m not a barbarian.”

“What else?”

“A Murphy bed.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s a bed you pull down out of the wall. If you have one, you only need one big room. You know, with a table and a couch. A very big TV. Stands for the guitars. A Strat like Jimi Hendrix.”

“You don’t play guitar. A what like Jimmy who?”

“Never mind. I’m dreaming here.”

Rob was the only guy I knew who shared the exact same musical tastes as his father. (True, I didn’t know many guys. But every guy in Iron Harbor our age listens to rap.) Both Dorn males insisted that “all great music was created between the years 1966 and 1974.”

“Anyway, just one room to live in and one room to clean,” he added.

“Is this a guy thing? Like, it’s okay to do everything in one room?”

Rob sniffed. “Juliet told me she would live on a motorcycle and carry everything she would ever need in two saddlebags.”

My shoulders sagged. Even when Juliet wasn’t here, she was here. I couldn’t think of a response. She had one-upped me in absentia.

“It’s not appealing to me, to tell the truth,” Rob continued. “If I didn’t have to take care of it all by myself, I’d actually have a real bed and more than one room.”

“Why would you have to take care of it by yourself? Why wouldn’t you have a roommate?” Like me?

“You have to be on your own sometime. I’m just not really necessarily the kind who wants to. I’m not a solitary guy.”

I smiled in the gathering dark. That was a lie. But I was smiling because I had to strain to hear him. That was really the crucial difference: he spoke so much more quietly when Juliet wasn’t around. She made the air around her hum just by being in it. Every time we did Parkour, we clamped our gloved hands together and shouted, “Live once!” And that was okay. It ritualized Parkour, which should be a ritual. But tonight … sitting alone with him was a fantasy glimpse into the lives of two regular people, who had regular habits and did regular things.

“If I had a life for sure, a long life, I would be a judge,” I said.

“A judge? Now that would be difficult.”

“Not for me. I would be firm but fair.”

“I meant, practically, it would be difficult,” he said.

I laughed. “Night court. Someone has to be there. I think, being used to what you see at night, I would be more tolerant than a Daytimer. We aren’t very easily shocked.”

“Tolerance. So you wouldn’t be a hanging judge?” Rob said.

“Ha! So what would you do?”

“In my room? My studio would be downstairs. There would be an inside staircase, maybe a fireman’s pole. And since I don’t play guitar, I’d record. I’d mix. The old rock stars, you know, like The Beatles or the Rolling Stones? They would start their day at five or six at night. They would be in the studio until dawn. Like that old song, ‘Beth’ by Kiss. ‘Me and the boys will be playing … all night.’ So that’s what I’d be.”

“Why don’t we ever say: what we will be?” I asked without thinking.

“I guess we’re trained out of it.”

“I’m sick of being trained out of it. I’m opposed to thinking my early death is a foregone conclusion.”

Rob smiled. “Allie, you don’t face the facts. Never did.”

“Never will,” I said. “Facts are overrated. All geniuses ignore facts.”

He kissed me then.

We both pulled back, instantly. For a frozen moment, his eyes met mine as though we’d spit on each other or something.

Then, he leaned over and undid my seatbelt and his. He kissed me again, pulling me under him. The times I had been kissed before amounted to once, in eighth grade, by our then-neighbor, Eric. I had worried about how it would be when it happened for real, doing silly little kid stuff like kissing the mirror and my pillow. And of course, I’d only ever imagined it being with Rob. But now that it was happening … everything fit like finely chiseled wood, smooth and soft and funny, tasting like the wasabi we’d had with dinner. Then he stopped.

I said, “What? What?”

“Is this going to be our time?” he said.

“It is if you say it is.”

He blinked. “Here?”

“Not, well, not in the Jeep. I’m not a contortionist. But I want it to be with you, if that’s what you mean.”

“You don’t feel like you’re cheating on Juliet?” he asked.

My eyes narrowed. “What are you—?”

“I didn’t mean that … I, listen. If you were bi-curious, I think I would have brought that up a few years ago, Allie. But I feel like I’m cheating on the three of us. As you know, like a unit. The tres compadres.”

“Stop,” I said. My heart thumped so hard I thought it would burst out of my ribcage. “Let’s just go back to talking about the future we aren’t going to get instead of talking about the girl any guy would have the hots for, or feelings for, or give anything to get over.…”

“Any guy but me.”

“You don’t?”

“I used to, but now I don’t. Please let me finish. If we do this, now, we can’t be the tres compadres anymore. We can’t be the three friends together. We’ll be two and one. Is that okay with you?”

Was that okay with me? Why did he have to bring up long-term consequences of instant gratification?

Rob added, “Maybe us being here, right now, this way, it’s a sign. Although I don’t believe in signs.”

“Since when?”

“I never did,” he said.

“I mean, since when do you not want Juliet?”

“Since I kissed you just then.”

“But you did before.”

“Allie, there you go. This is a fact. You can’t be jealous of before.”

“Oh,” I said.

I drew in a deep breath, and then settled back into the cold Jeep cushions. The moment had not just been broken; it had been broken and then stepped on. Gradually my pulse slowed.

“Let’s see how you feel after we make short work of this building. We came here to trace, right?” I had to say something. Both of us were strung wire tight and needed to do … anything. I honestly didn’t know if it was our moment to do everything.

Rob grinned, as if nothing had happened at all. “You’re on,” he said.





What we planned wasn’t so dangerous, unless you missed your footing or your grip. But we weren’t going to miss.

I pulled on my gloves.

Rob went first, roped to me, while I filmed him with his camera. Something had changed tonight. It was as though we’d done Parkour all our lives, instead of for three months. From the roof of the parking garage, down floor-by-floor, he perfectly “derived” (as Parkour speakers say) his relationship to the space—walking that little beam, then hanging from it, as though it were as wide as a boardwalk on the beach. He finished with a standing jump and a flip off onto the grass.

I applauded and stowed the camera in my flat front pack.

As I prepared to take my turn, while Rob raced back through the parking garage, something came over me. I decided what the hell, to be a girly girl for once. I yanked off my skullcap and my headlamp and let my newly-shortened hair fall free. For the first run, I’d be roped to Rob anyhow and he’d be filming, so I would be able to see by the light from his camera.

The all of a sudden Rob was beside me, roping our waists together. Before I began, he kissed me again. It was a long kiss, hard and involved, as if we were both preparing for a battle I’d win. As if we both believed the future would be wide open: some sappy happily-ever-after fairy tale. It was a beautiful lie, and I grasped it tight. We both did. I began my first passage down the wall and turned fast to leap and grab the edge of the next level. Focusing, my breath even, I made my way one more level down.

Vaguely, somewhere above, I heard a car start. I tried to ignore it. Focus was all. But the car kept revving, like some kid horsing around. Had Rob and I missed someone? Rob couldn’t have been messing with me. Besides, I knew the sound of his Jeep. Anyway, the rope was still taut; he was on the other end.

Then I heard the squeal of tires.

Rob yelled, “Christ, no!”

There was a clatter and his headlamp went out. Camera light: gone. Rope: slack. Darkness. Nothing.

Steady. Steady, Allie.

The car corkscrewed down the shadowy interior of the parking garage, plunging toward the street. I couldn’t stop the car; I was tethered to Rob. Not unless … I unhooked the rope. Who knows what had happened to him up there? My fingers trembled. I stopped breathing. Parkour is all about using momentum in your favor, turning jumps into rolls where you can’t get hurt—

So I jumped.

Without preparing, I hurtled into the air and became a part of it, twenty feet straight down. Tried to roll but only hit. Snap. A thunderbolt in my right forearm, a lightning flash behind my eyes. My arm felt heavy and numb. It’s broken, I realized with curious detachment. The kind of break that would tear skin. Not my head. Not my neck. But it was hard, sickeningly hard.… I reached out with my left hand. No grass. This is how mistakes happen. And deaths. You can’t derive what you can’t see. I must have landed on concrete, not the lawn where Rob had beamed up at me only minutes ago.

Rob.… Was he hurt?

I tried to sit up. No, no, no.

The car. I heard it. It was coming. I could see it. Lights down around the back of the garage … then appearing again—bearing straight towards me down the exit ramp. I squinted in the glare of the headlights. The driver aimed that car like a gun.

Roll, I commanded myself. Roll over that useless, limp, pain-shriek arm. Hide. Where? The fountain nearby? The one we’d passed on the way back from sushi? Jerking up to my knees, I crept behind the lip of the giant stone bowl. The light grew brighter, the engine louder. This was the end. Not by the sun. By the night. By some maniac.

The car revved and roared. I begged my brain to go black. And then—

Another screech. And a shout: “Allie!”

I peered over the lip of the fountain. Rob seemed to be sprinting toward me in slow motion, like some cheesy old film of runners on a beach. “Allie! Allie!” The car was speeding away now. I could see the silhouette of the driver: a shadow puppet. Shouting to himself? Or talking to someone beside him.… My brain began to slip pieces of information back in, like cards into a deck.

The car was small and sleek, a dark metallic convertible with the top up. Too dark to see color. But it was the same: Blondie’s. His car. Here. But how? Why? Trying to scare me into silence? No. Trying to silence me into silence. For good.

Another card: a vague mental picture as the convertible vanished into the night. There was someone else, hunched over in the passenger seat—someone small, who sat up as they cleared the turn onto Canal Street.

The final card: Rob, cradling me against him.

“My arm is broken,” I gasped. My voice sounded funny. I realized I was whistling through gritted teeth. “Don’t move me.”

Rob laid his windbreaker over my shoulders, more a gesture of gallantry than utility, since I was drenched in sweat and his jacket was filthy. Then he used his shirt to tie my arm to my rib cage.

“I don’t know why I’m doing this,” he said. “I saw it in a movie.”

As I lay there, he forgot there was an elevator and sprinted up five flights to get the Jeep. “Hold on, Allie,” he shouted over his shoulder, and despite the agony that was now rolling through me with the immensity and intensity of a cement drill, there was a spurt of satisfaction. My boyfriend was taking care of me.

IN THE ER at Duluth Summit Hospital, a woman doctor and the trauma nurses took a quick look at my arm, then shuttled Rob and me into an X-ray room. There we waited with a guy who was so drunk that he clearly felt no pain at all despite a head wound the size and shape of golf ball, and a little kid who either had a 104-degree fever or was under sedation. I wouldn’t have minded some sedation.

“Do you have any nausea? Did you hit your head?” the doctor asked. She wasn’t that old—mid-thirties, maybe—very slender with thick blond hair like Juliet’s in one of those pretty, no-nonsense bobs like mine was attempting. She wore big red-framed glasses that should have looked absurd but didn’t. She could have stepped right out of an ad for the young professional woman. She peered into my pupils with a little penlight.

“My arm,” I said. “I didn’t hit my head at all. The only nausea I have is from the pain. And somebody tried to kill me, incidentally. The tire tracks are right there.”

“Dilaudid,” the doctor replied. “Two milligrams.”

“If this is a police matter,” the nurse said. “Then—”

“We have time,” the doctor interrupted.

The room was dark, which was a comfort, and the staff moved fast, which also was a comfort. They led me into a little curtained cubicle.

Rob sat down next to me on the bed and turned the lights off. The doctor left. Then she came back in and turned on every light there was.

“Please leave the lights low,” Rob pleaded.

“I need to examine Miss.…” She glanced at her clipboard. “Kim. Allison Kim, is that right?”

“Yes,” I said. “More or less. Alexis.”

The doctor flipped on a huge new control panel of lights, the size and intensity of a space station. She shot Rob a cold glare. “You need to leave.”

The syrup of the Dilaudid was beginning to distance me from the throbbing bawl in my forearm.

“I’m her friend.” Given what had happened earlier in the car, the description stung. I’d already moved to the boyfriend-girlfriend stage. Though technically, Rob still was only my friend, nothing else.

“Young man, just step outside for a moment. I don’t want to have to ask for security.” Rob—dirty, scraped, and practically hyperventilating— must have looked to her like a Yeti.

When Rob stepped outside the curtain, the doctor said, “Sweetheart, tell me how this really happened. Nobody has a right to hurt you.”

“Wait,” I said, as she turned the lights on again. “Please turn the lights off first.”

“You have other, older bruises—”

“I have Xeroderma Pigmentosum. The bruises are the least of my worries.”

At the mention of XP, the doctor blinked, then stood up and snapped off the lights. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“Rob is my best friend. We were doing Parkour stunts on a building and this crazy person came along in a car and Rob dropped the rope. I fell off a wall. That’s all.”

“He didn’t hit you?”

“He’d rather break his own arm. We’ve been friends since we were babies.”

The doctor hooked a piece of her blond hair behind one ear. “It must have been a big wall.”

“It was. I fell from the third level of that circular garage, you know, about a block from Orchestra Hall. Near Shimata, the Japanese restaurant.”

“That’s quite a fall. Why did you say someone tried to kill you?”

“Did I say that?”

“You did say that.”

“Because after I fell, a car drove up over the sidewalk and drove straight at me, and then turned away. But not until the last minute.” I licked my dry lips. The air around me seemed fuzzy. A police officer had arrived. He leaned against the wall of the cubicle. Even though he was wearing a light linen jacket, a black T-shirt, and cowboy boots, you could tell he was a cop. Maybe I could tell because I was so used to seeing Tommy Sirocco try to act like a regular person and look just silly at it.

“Did you see a license plate, Miss Kim?” he asked, without bothering to introduce himself.

“No. But I’ve seen the car before. I think I have. Up in Iron Harbor, where I live.” I told him about Red Beach and the sports car.

The cop smirked. “Guy probably lives here in the cities. Gets his thrills playing games with his car.” He tapped his notebook. “Can’t be too many Italian sports cars around here. I’ll run it.”

“You go to the Tabor Clinic, for XP,” The doctor said to me. It wasn’t a question; it sounded like an accusation. “Why are you down here then?”

“The bigger the building, the better the trace. Don’t you do anything for fun?”

I could see the doctor’s smile in the faint glow from her penlight. “I knit,” she said.

“Oh.”

“Joking. I surf.”

“On Lake Superior? Dude!” The drugs were sillyficating my already loopy brain.

“Yes, but I come from San Diego. We aren’t talking about me.” She tried to stop smiling, but she was having a hard time. So was I. “So you’ve been doing this a while. Hence the other bruises. I’ll apologize to your boyfriend.”

“We wiped out a lot last spring. And yes, it is harder at night.”

“It’s borderline,” she said. “No, it’s clinically insane to do it at night.”

“We use headlamps.” I tried to point to my head with my right hand but the pain made me breathless. “Now, I wish you would call my mother, Jacqueline Kim, who is a nurse. Although she’s going to need the ER when she hears this.”

“Do you have a permission to treat?” the doctor asked.

“In the outside pocket of my front pack,” I said.

You don’t leave home without it, in case you fall down in the street and wake up lying on Miami Beach at high noon.

“Both bones are broken, the radius and the ulna, Allie. You need a screw in there. I am a reconstructive and hand surgeon, which is good luck. Everything else is bad luck. We need to act before there’s more swelling, and that’s part of the bad luck. And I have to do it in a situation that won’t hurt you, and quickly, and with your whole body draped in … I’m thinking out loud now … Helen!” A nurse appeared, as though she had been waiting to read her lines. She was chewing gum, and her red hair, unlike my own, came directly out of a box. I liked her immediately. “Let’s get Brent and Martina to find out which OR is open stat. We need to repair this girl’s arm and get her and her boyfriend home before daylight.”

“Is she a vampire?” the nurse said.

“Yes,” the doctor said. “So don’t piss her off. I need the OR with low light and a microsurgical headlamp.… Allie, would you like us to call your mother right now? Or afterward? You aren’t seventeen yet.”

“Please, afterward. My sister is asleep. Might as well let her sleep. Because she won’t be … won’t be.…”

“Be sleeping for a while. I get it. This will hurt worse later than now. We’ll med-flight you to Divine Savior, so I need to warn the doctors there.”

“They have rooms for us. Darkrooms. As though we’re developing.…”

The doctor patted my thigh. “I’ll see you upstairs. But you’ll be out of it by then. You’ll have a tiny scar. And no jumping off any more buildings.” She stopped and peered back through the curtain. “For a while.”

I heard her stop and say, “I’m very sorry, Rob. Most times, when you hear hoof beats, it’s horses. But sometimes, it’s zebras. You can stay right there and we’ll bring some pillows and blankets to make you comfortable. You did good work getting her here and immobilizing her arm. She should be ready to leave by four, four-thirty. I’ll go with you in the helicopter.”

I BECAME PROBABLY the only patient in the history of Duluth Summit Hospital to be medevac’d in order to beat the dawn. I had never seen the sunrise from high in the sky, and of course, I’d never been in a helicopter. From the way they appear to move, so fleet and graceful, you imagine they’d feel swift and weightless as a dragonfly. But the experience was like being shaken in a soup can, hot and noisy and bumpy, each voice echoing and the chuffing of the blades deafening, infernal.

Except for the patient, everyone’s issued big rubber ear muffs. They all end up shouting, straining to be heard over the sound of the rotors. The ride was also weirdly unstable, scary, not the flying carpet of efficient medical reassurance you expect for those in the worst case. In the worst case, though, most of the injured are probably zonked.

After an eternity, we landed. The rosy pink glow of morning filled the air as the door opened. The doctor said, “Give her … blur of numbers … Dilaudid … blur of words … push. No, right now. Before you move her again.”

I went flying again, but without leaving the bed. My mother’s stern, sweet face loomed over me, then Dr. Andrew’s … and then nothingness. My last thought was that this was the closest I’d been to sunlight in a long, long time.

I SLEPT AND woke. There was Rob: cleaned up and childlike, with little-boy comb marks in his wet hair. He sat in the chair beside my bed, in a dark room where a small lamp was softly shaded. Only after smiling at him did I notice the dark circles under his eyes.

“What time is it?” I sounded like a frog. My throat had never been so parched.

“Seven.”

“All this time, just two hours?”

“It’s seven at night, Allie.”

“Oh, wow.”

“Juliet just left,” he said. “She said to give you a kiss from her.” He kissed me, on the forehead.

I wanted to say, what about us? What about last night? I’m sure that about a billion girls everywhere on earth were saying just that, in those precise terms, at that exact moment. Rob added, “Now, I want to give you a kiss from me. But I don’t know if I should.”

“Well, I think you should at least give me some ice chips.” At that moment, I realized that I had already been chewing ice chips. The drugs created a very weird set of feelings, as though I were remembering my present, instead of my past.

He chewed his dry lips.

“Maybe it was a sign. Your getting hurt,” he said.

“A sign of what?”

“That we weren’t supposed to be together. Like that.”

“You don’t believe in signs,” I croaked. “Maybe that was a sign that you should believe in signs.” Abruptly I felt weary and nauseated and dizzy, as though the doctor had somehow misconnected some of my strings so that I had a pulse on the front of my elbow instead of my wrist. “I don’t feel like kissing or debating kissing, Rob. I feel like sleeping.”

“Go ahead.”

“Okay.” I shut my eyes. Then I opened them. “Did you see your film?”

Rob smiled, and I had to reconsider the kissing.

“It was awesome. That was sweet of you, Allie.” His smile flickered. “I had my phone on to film you, too, and when you fell, I was running to you but I tried to get the license plate. I didn’t. But it’s an Alfa Romeo. There are only three Alfa Romeos in Iron County. One belongs to Warwick Quinn, you know, the anchor.…”

I thought I had said something wrong, something that I wouldn’t remember I’d said until he left the room. “I know who he is.”

“And the other two belong to Stephen Tabor.”

“So that was Dr. Steve who tried to wipe me out?” I tried to sit up, and moaned so loudly that a nurse hurried into the room and pushed my pain medicine button. I collapsed back against the pillows and winced. “That would be funny if it wasn’t so nuts. The country coroner is trying to kill me? For what, body parts? And that girl in the apartment, too? The only problem being, of course, that the guy wasn’t Dr. Stephen?”

“That’s the weird part.”

“That’s the weird part?” I was the one on drugs, yet the previous eight hours of our lives had contained more sheer weirdness than the previous eight years. “What’s the weird part?”

“He’s not here,” said Rob. “Dr. Stephen’s not here. Dr. Andrew and Dr. Stephen are in London for the week, for some graduation or something.”

“But he owns the apartment building.” Just as fast as I’d been worked up, I was slipping back down into the welcome haze of the drugs. “Where Tessa and Tavish live—you know, the lady I work for and her baby. Where the body was.”

“The car’s in his garage on this kind of lift thing he has to stack his sports cars up when he’s not using them.”

I squinted at him. Since when had he become an expert on cars? “How … you … know?”

“I told Gina, your mom’s friend, that I saw a car like he has. And she said he must be from Chicago. That’s Dr. Stephen’s baby. He would never let anyone else drive it. There’s no way it’s the same guy you saw that night. There’s no way it was the same guy who tried to sideswipe you. Are you sure, Allie?”

“Sure … and not so sure.”

“I mean, are you sure that you saw anyone in there, I mean the second time?”

“Rob, I’m tired. My head hurts and my arm kills. I’m sleepy.”

“I’ll let you sleep for a little while,” Rob said. “The cop is out there. I’ll tell him to come back.”

WHEN I AWOKE, only Juliet was in the room with me. She stood over my bed. For a moment, alone with my best friend, I was afraid. Then, I took a deep clean breath. Juliet kissed me on both cheeks. Funny: it was something we’d decided to do on a whim about a year ago: kiss each other on both cheeks Euro-style. It was an inside joke that never really took. We hadn’t done it in months. The last time we had, our lives were a lot less complicated. Or at least mine was.

“I can’t leave you alone for one day,” she said. “Much less a couple of weeks.”

Was this her way of saying she was sorry she hadn’t been with us? Was it her way of saying she was sorry she hadn’t protected me from Blondie? What the hell was it her deliberately obscure way of saying?

“You’re supposed to have a close relationship to the earth, but not that close!” she joked. Leaning near to my cheek, she added, “Bear, quit scaring the hell out of me. I never thought I’d say I was glad anybody had a broken arm, but when you consider the alternative.…” She clucked her tongue.

What’s wrong? I wondered. Her voice was off. Her posture was too posey-phony. She stood like an actor in a play, as though she wanted everyone in the cheap seats to see how very sincere she was. It wasn’t the drugs playing games with my brain. Everything about her was false.

She turned toward the door. “Rob, how much of this do you think is Allie-Bear seeing things? Or did a phantom really try to knock you off the parking lot?”

“Somebody did,” Rob said. He came in without knocking, not that anyone expected him to. “Somebody really did. It’s absolutely not funny, Juliet.”

“It sounds like a foreign movie,” she replied.

“Juliet, it happened just like I said, before she woke up.”

Rob’s voice flattened. “I got the ripped up elbow to prove it.”

“You’re hurt?” I said, trying to sit up, to look in his eyes.

He hesitated at the foot of the bed. “I jumped away from that car and cut my elbow up. It’s nothing.”

“I thought the rope was around your waist.”

“It was. I was just adjusting it when I heard the car behind me. Basically, I wanted to tie it, so I could adjust the camera … I had it in my hands for a couple of seconds, right at the wrong time.”

There was something wrong in his voice too, something wrong with what he said. It sounded rehearsed.

“It couldn’t have been the guy from that night,” Juliet explained, as though I was a trauma victim, as though Rob had not just admitted to breaking focus with me before Blondie ever came along. I’d never considered the mechanism by which the rope went slack. That would have happened only if Rob had been hurt. That’s when it hit me: He’s ashamed. Rob hadn’t been messing around with the camera. He’d dropped the rope. Which meant he’d dropped me. Out of fear. He’d had my back, literally, and he’d let go.

“Maybe it’s some effect from her medication,” Juliet said. “That makes her keep thinking she sees him.”

I glared at her. “Why is this about my mental problems instead of some freaky stranger? I don’t take medication. Just sleeping pills and not very often. And hallucinating cars and dead people isn’t a side effect.” On the other hand, I wished I had imagined it. A little crazy in exchange for a lifetime of fear? It would have been a good deal. Before I could raise my voice even louder, my little sister burst in with my mom. Angela took one look at me and started to cry.

“Angie, I’m okay,” I said. “I’m really, really okay.”

“I don’t want to go to school,” Angie sobbed, leaning against Juliet. “I should stay here and read to you.” Despite my pain and confusion, I almost laughed. I saw my mom’s lips twitch.

“You can come back right after school, Angela,” Mom said.

Juliet kneeled down and hugged Angela. “Pick which pocket,” she whispered.

Through her tears, Angela mustered a grin. She was nine and greedy as a crow. She pointed to the right side of Juliet’s suede jacket.

“I can’t fool you!” Juliet cried. She pulled out a tiny bottle of nail polish, the kind of garish pink-orange only a girl who’d just recently stopped using her hands as shovels could have loved. I felt vaguely sick. I could have scripted this scene myself. Angela had always worshipped Juliet in a starstruck sort of way. Juliet was everything glamorous and carefree that I wasn’t, like someone on the red carpet, at least by the standards of Iron Harbor. In turn, Juliet had always treated Angela like a midget princess: first bearing gifts of sequined hair bands and matching plastic clogs with light-up Disney princesses on them, then nail polish to compliment the skinny jeans, butterfly tops, and chocolate bars as big as her head. “If Allie was really going to stay sick, wouldn’t I be crying too?”

Angie nodded.

“So, I’m not crying. After she takes you to school, your mom is coming right back here. And Rob is here. And I’m here. And we’ll take care of her.”

My sister’s gaze focused on Juliet. “Okay,” she said.

“Okay.”

Mom cleared her throat. “Let’s give Allie some time alone with her friends. We’ll be back soon.”

When my sister was gone and the door closed, I asked Juliet, “Are you psychic or a sociopath? Nail polish?”

She looked at me as if I were the one who’d been body-snatched. “I’m logical, Allie. I figured that she would be here, and I figured she would be upset the first time she saw you.”

“You’re good.”

She didn’t respond. No, having performed a magic trick, Juliet then decided to disappear down a rabbit hole. Poof! How convenient! Yes, it seemed that she’d forgotten she had to be somewhere right at that moment, somewhere else. She started busily fussing with her hair and her jeans. If body language could be translated into speech, Juliet’s would have announced: Well, my work here is done. Attempting to muddy the brain of a drugged, post-surgical girl was my mission, and now I’m history.

She kissed me. Her “love you” was light, the drop of a leaf.

The door closed.

I waited for Rob to say something. Finally he did. Of course, they were the words every girl fantasizes when she wants to stab herself through her own heart. “Allie. I hate to do this.”

“Don’t then.”

“I have to.”

“Just don’t.”

“I don’t think I’m good enough for you, Allie. Not after what happened last night.”

“What really did happen?”

“I heard the car. And he was coming right at me. And I …”

“And you let me go. You dropped the rope to get away.”

He stared down at the floor and squeezed his eyes shut. “Yeah. Which is why I can’t be with you. I don’t even have the right to be your friend.”

I forced myself to take a deep breath. “Everybody gets scared Rob. You acted out of instinct. You knew I could take care of myself.” The words sounded as if someone else were speaking them. I couldn’t tell if it was the drugs or the pain.

He shook his head, still avoiding my gaze. “I should have held on to you. No matter what. But I let go.”

“Well, I shouldn’t do Parkour if I can’t take care of myself,” I said quietly. Maybe it was the drugs, but I added the thing you should never say, even if you’re being tortured. “Don’t you want to be with me?”

Rob straightened and shrugged. Finally he looked me in the eye. “The question is, how could you want to be with me? Shh. Don’t answer.” He leaned over and kissed my hair. “I’ll come by tomorrow.”

“You don’t have to,” I said. “I have a lot of thinking to do.”

Rob bit the inside of his cheek. “Okay. That makes sense,” he said. I watched him leave. The door closed behind him. We were no longer the tres compadres or even a Tribe of Two. I was alone: a Tribe of One, a single Dark Star.