What We Saw at Night

Instead of going to Nicola’s funeral, we decided to make a Dark Stars video in her honor. We couldn’t have gone to her funeral without attracting an offensive and inappropriate amount of attention, anyway; like all funerals, the service was held when people were generally awake. That’s one thing you learn hard and fast about XP: nobody is ever really equipped to deal with a ski mask, sunglasses, umbrella, and layers of (hopefully) reflective clothing at a midday gathering. But any guilt dissipated as we approached Watching Rock in Rob’s Jeep.

I will say this: for the first time in a very long while, we were the tres compadres again, united by a single purpose. We weren’t just going to boulder tonight. We were going to boulder in a way that made Parkour and David Belle look soft. We would live hard and fast for a girl who no longer could. And for the first time in a very long while, I truly didn’t care what Juliet was thinking. She was here. With us. For Nicola. At least I hoped. That was all that mattered for now.

Watching Rock is tall, thirty feet at its flat top, overlooking Lake Superior. The legend is that its name derives from a lonely woman who stood waiting for her absent husband, a merchant seaman off gallivanting in Canada. There are three outcrops, like tongues, that extend out at three different levels—one about six feet up, one about five feet above that, and one close to the summit.

We laid a pile of narrow gym mats (again, courtesy of Rob’s father) around both the lower shelves, but there was nothing we could do to break our fall for the topmost. It jutted directly above a sloping, rocky incline.

There was some kind of unspoken agreement with Juliet that these few days would come and go without question, so long as she didn’t leave us. It was a pantomime of our friendship. Still, Rob and I pretended to be only friends, and Juliet played her part as the wild girl who’d try anything. We all tried to “feel it,” and eventually, we did become transfixed. Rob began to talk about next summer and how we could check out the Precambrian volcanic outcroppings along the shore, and then drop fifteen or sixteen feet into water that had been a mastodon’s swimming pond.

I let him talk. I just hoped there would be a next summer for the three of us. At the base of my mind was the solemn unspoken thought: tonight was our only tomorrow, and we would bet the limit on every hand.

“Speaking of volcanoes,” Juliet said, “how about we light a fire?

We decided to light a flame for Nicola, to honor her. You weren’t supposed to make a fire on public land without a permit, so maybe it was some sort of weird rebellion. Still, it helped me feel not quite so bad about missing out on Nicola’s funeral. When the little campfire was lit, we turned on some tunes and danced around it. Juliet was wearing some kind of big old velvet hat, and I’d pulled out my fake-rhinestone-beaded inside joke of a ski mask, an atrocity that my Grandma Mack knitted for me two Decembers ago. It was some kind of confused homage to the Dolce and Gabbana ski mask that was hand-studded with Swarovski crystals, the one that cost a few hundred bucks. (The idea was that I’d “sparkle” during the wintertime if I ever had to go out during the day.) Like all hand-knitted things, it was heavy and itchy and hot.

Juliet must have seen me fidgeting. Before even putting it on, she tossed me her plain black ski mask, spun from the lightest, warmest stuff—which probably cost three times as much as mine, anyway.

“I should have the gaudy one, Bear!” she said. “Remember, you’re the one who doesn’t approve of labels. I’m keeping this one. It matches me.”

I had to laugh. For that brief fire-lit moment, Juliet was once again Juliet.

“That’s my best friend,” I heard myself whisper to Rob.

“I thought I was your best friend,” he whispered back.

I felt a pang and squeezed his hand while Juliet pulled on my mask.

BOULDERING IS JUST like Parkour, of course: it’s not you “against” an obstacle; it’s you in harmony with it. The challenge is linking destinations together in the most creative way possible, the tradition being that everyone waits for each member of the Tribe before moving on to the next challenge. The patience comes when you’re all hyped up and still have to summon the will to encourage the others.

Juliet went first, scaling Watching Rock’s lowest outcropping with such speed and agility that anyone else would have thought she’d been an expert her whole life. We forgot to film her she was so beautiful, twirling in a victory dance, punching the air with her gloved fists. We prepared to follow. Having been so close to an open flame for so long, we were sweating hard. But the night was forgiving, warm and moon-bright, everything awash in silver that reminded me of old coins.

“Shit, the camera,” Rob said. “Let me—”

“Hey!” Juliet’s cry pierced the air. An instant later, she tumbled end-over-end to the ground. Her head, neck, and shoulders thudded on the bouldering mat. Her waist hit the bare earth. Around her thigh, I saw a thick darkness spread like wings across the dirt.

“Juliet!” I sprung towards her, skidding on the pebble-strewn slope.

The gash at the back of her leg was bleeding freely. What happened next seemed to pass in stop motion: Rob and I made a chair of our arms to carry her to his Jeep. I sat with her while he gathered up the mats and lowered the rear seats. I scrambled into the back with her. Tough as she was, Juliet cried and clung to my hand all the way to the hospital. Rob called her parents.

Twenty minutes later, we screeched up to the ER.

Officer Sirocco met us there, along with a familiar nurse who helped Juliet lie facedown on a gurney. “You guys are keeping this place in business,” the nurse muttered to me. I was grateful. The good nurses never panic about anything. If I had been carrying Juliet’s severed leg in my hands, she would have made some joke about people who can’t keep it together. From my perspective, it looked as if Juliet was gushing blood like an oil well, but the nurse asked if Juliet felt cold or was sleepy, and Juliet screamed “NO!”

The nurse grinned. “Good girl.”

And then they were gone. Rob and I waited in the lounge, mindlessly consuming a bag of taco chips. After a while, my breathing evened. Rob took my hand and held it gently, and when I looked down, I perceived how we must have looked to the rest of the people in the room. We were filthy, caked with dust and streaked with dirt and blood (and taco chips)—and, oh, right wearing ski masks like terrorists or bank robbers. In that instant, we both pulled our ski masks off our heads, in unison, as if we were synchronized swimmers. I was going to suggest we either leave or wash up, when the same nurse appeared and told us that Juliet had been given some light sedation. A surgeon was about to stitch her leg.

“She asked for you, Allie,” the nurse said.

I glanced at Rob. He shrugged. “Go ahead. I’ll wait for you.”

I followed the nurse down that familiar mint-green corridor. Juliet lay flat on her belly in an emergency cubicle, her father at her side, with layers of blankets over her arms and back. Only a grim section of her leg was exposed, a crooked nasty gash running from just above the back of her knee to her left butt cheek. I kneeled down by the foot of the table and patted her grimy sleeve.

“Leave for a minute, Dad, okay?” she whispered.

“I should wait for your mother, anyway,” Officer Sirocco replied in a toneless voice. He shot me a stare that I couldn’t read, and then pulled the curtain shut behind him and the nurse.

“I won’t do it anymore,” Juliet hissed at me between clenched teeth. “I promise, Allie. I’m afraid, and I won’t do it anymore.”

“Do what?”

“Any of it. I promise. Just be my friend and stay with me, no matter what.”

I nodded. “I’ll always do that, Juliet.”

“No matter how it seems.”

“Forever, Juliet.” I swallowed. I felt sick. I wondered how I could have ever been scared of her. For the first time ever, I saw her as the victim she was.

“WE’RE PARANOID,” ROB said as he drove me home. “No one could have put anything down that could have hurt her. Not while we were actually climbing. No one could have known she would fall.”

I nodded. “That’s true. I just feel weird. And I feel like our weirdness is spreading all over everything.”

Rob drummed the steering wheel. “Do you want me to take you home?”

“No,” I said. “I want to stay out. And up. With you.”

We ended up back at Watching Rock. All we found on the rock where Juliet was cut was a sharp tab from a soda can, wedged into a crevice. We couldn’t be sure anyone had put it there on purpose. That, and the mat we’d forgotten in the mad dash to get her to the hospital.

I’m still not sure what came over me. I mashed my lips against his almost as soon as we were out of the Jeep. He pressed against me. Seconds later we’d collapsed on top of the mat, and I caught a glimpse of the starry October night as I shut my eyes.

The first time we’d been together, there had been a rush, an urgency, a fumbling sort of frantic-ness that blotted out most of the memory of the actual event. Honestly, I didn’t remember much except the pounding of my own heart and a vague hope that the contraception had worked. But tonight, after the initial hungry attack (mostly on my part) there was sweetness and slowness and tenderness that I knew I would remember as long as I had a memory. I had a fleeting thought that I finally understood the term “making love” because that’s what it was: love in the purest sense, wishing someone else well, wanting him to have the best, your best and every best.

Afterward, I was conscious only of his heart pounding: a gentle drumbeat. I lay against his bare chest. Wrapped in the darkness and the filthy blankets, exhausted by the night’s weird drama but still consumed by the closeness of Rob, this boy, my dream realized and tangled up in me in every way, my lids grew heavy. The last thing I remember was him mumbling something about setting his phone for four, so that we’d beat the early hikers and the sunrise.

WHEN MY EYELIDS first fluttered open, I thought that I was dreaming. The glare was intense. I half sat up, and was hauled back down by the blankets swaddling Rob and me.

“Rob, help! Oh shit! It’s morning!”

Panic opened a vein of adrenaline in my lower belly. It was past sunrise: after seven, easily. Fingers trembling, I moved quickly to pull on my black turtleneck and pants and haul one of the blankets over my head, while Rob did the same. The times we’d been caught out unprotected in daytime were times we could count on one hand. The light itself was crackling, trippy; for a Daytimer, I imagine it would be like waking up underwater. We lowered ourselves to the ground, Rob grabbing his sunglasses out of his backpack. His disembodied voice struggled to keep me calm, insisting we would come back later for the mats; the important thing was to get into the car and home because our parents would have the cavalry out by now.

“Why didn’t your phone work?” I gasped, crawling quickly toward the Jeep.

“Who knows? Don’t worry about it. Get in and we’ll get the blankets up on the windows.” His exposed fingers slithered up to the door handle. The car was locked, the keys visible in the ignition, my backpack with my own phone visible on the seat.

“Did you lock it?” he hissed, feverish.

“No! Obviously. No way.”

“Get under the car,” he commanded. “Just lie still.”

Before I could protest, he shoved me under the car and scrambled under after me. Fortunately, the Jeep had a high carriage and plenty of room. He snatched up his phone and scowled. “Well, that explains it. The battery’s dead. We just have to wait.”

“Jesus.” I fought to keep from squirming. Joggers or hikers would probably come by. It was a beautiful October morning in a popular park.

“Holy shit,” Rob said.

“What?”

“My battery isn’t dead, it’s gone. Somebody must have messed with it at the hospital, or … maybe while we were sleeping? You didn’t—”

“I fell asleep!” I rolled over so I was facing him. In the shadows, his red-rimmed eyes looked as frightened as mine must have. “Who came last night? Who saw us?”

“Allie, you have to tell me everything. I know you and Juliet made some kind of pact, but something happened while we were asleep.”

I couldn’t keep it bottled up inside any longer. It wasn’t fair to Rob, either. And so I told him everything. I started with the trap door in the lawn outside Tabor Oaks, and the text I received. I told him how I called the police. I told him about Juliet’s tattoo, and the hair-twin Tabor cousins, and how I suspected Nicola’s death wasn’t an accident after all … and now this.

Helpless, we lay under the Jeep, holding hands and praying. It seemed as if hours passed, but maybe it was only minutes until we heard a sound. Voices approached, scuffling footsteps—and a tiny face suddenly appeared behind Rob’s head.

A puzzled little girl, younger than Angela, said, “You are not supposed to play under the car.” Then she stood.

Another pair of feet joined her, parallel to her tiny hiking books. “Dad, those big kids are playing under the car.”

“Go over by Mom and Lacey,” a man’s voice stated. “Right now.”

Rob loudly cleared his throat. “Sir, please,” he called. “Please. I apologize, but I need your help. Just dial this number.” Slowly, Rob recited his father’s cell phone, one digit at a time. “My dad will answer. He will tell you that everything I’m going to say is true. My friend and I are under this car for a good reason. We have Xeroderma Pigmentosum. XP. It’s a rare genetic—”

“Yes,” the pair of hiking boots interrupted. “My name is Marty Brent. We’re from Chicago. I’m here with my wife and kids. We’re cycling, and I seem to have found your son.” The man paused. The shoes shifted slightly from their shoulder-width stance. “Are you Rob Dorn?” he called down.

“Yes, I’m Rob and this is Alexis Kim. We can’t come out from under here.”

I stole a lightning fast peek, anyway. I saw the lady with the little girl and the baby, and the bikes, and the molded plastic helmets, and restraining devices with rounded aluminum tubes, and thick mesh straps, and the saddle bags and backpacks and bottles. I remembered that I used to think that parents were selfish when they did things like this: stuffing kids into snowsuits to go sledding, or bundling them up in life jackets to go rafting, or saddling them up on mountain bikes. I thought they did it just to prove that even though they had kids, they didn’t have to give up doing the things they loved.

Maybe it takes actual sunlight (mixed in with a corresponding dose of panic) to have a true a-ha moment. But only then did I truly get Jack-Jack. Parents—the good ones, anyway, never did anything for themselves if their kids were involved—no matter how weird or unfathomable. Jack-Jack stayed up knitting even though all she wanted was to sleep; Dennis Dorn, Rob’s dad, collected NBA jackets for his son in every imaginable size and design; Tommy Sirocco kept Nothing Town safe in its Nothingness. But on top of that, they only wanted to be merchants of nostalgia, for their kids’ benefit. Right now, Marty from Chicago was lamenting this strange turn of events. He was happy to help us, but he was pissed. He wouldn’t be able to provide a fun experience his kids would look back on, even only in a photo, as a bright pin on the psychological map of devotion.

That was what it must mean to be a parent: the never-ending celebration of a bond, no matter how tenuous and fleeting. It was the sole reason parents made such a huge deal out of documenting everything and anything. And there was a paper doll chain of all those parents, from Rob’s parents to Juliet’s parents to my mother to Marty, joined together: a magic circle of protection around their kids, anybody’s kids. But the circle wasn’t magic. Nothing could protect their kids from the world. Besides, we kids couldn’t wait to bust through that paper-doll chain, ripping it to shreds on our way out.

“Your dad’s coming,” Marty said. “But he sent an ambulance. Don’t object, I know. You probably think it’s dumb. But he’s worried, and I would be worried. They called the hospital and apparently your friend was already in there, and naturally your parents thought you were hurt when you didn’t come home, before sunrise?”

“It’s how you live, when you have XP,” Rob said.

“I’m sorry,” the guy said. “That’s a bummer.”

“Don’t be sorry. We should be thanking you. We just got caught by the sunrise. We came out here to make a video for a friend,” Rob finished awkwardly. “She had it way worse than we do.”

Nicola.

Right. In theory, we’d come out here for her. I tried to justify how sick and ashamed I was by desperately thinking that my recent epiphany explained everything: No, we weren’t creating this video tribute (that never happened) for you, Nicola; we were creating it for YOU, Mrs. Burns, who tried to take your own life after learning you would never see your daughter again … but that line of thinking only made me want to vomit. There was only one reason we were trapped under Rob’s car right now. We’d only come out here for ourselves.

Rob shifted on his side in the gravel and rolled over so he was facing me again. A faint, sad grin played on his lips. “Allie, when we’re older, we should open a night water park, completely lit with solar fixtures from below.”

“Instant millions,” I said. “In Las Vegas.”

The sound of sirens whooped, at first far away. Then, there they were, the paramedics around the Jeep, debating what to do, at least for the two minutes it took Jackie to arrive in her all-terrain minivan.

“Why are you standing there?” Mom barked at the multitude of booted feet.

“We’re assessing effective transport,” a firefighter said.

“Use some of those tarps to make a canopy and give them both Hazmat equipment to put on while you get them to the hospital. That sun is lethal.”

“We aren’t carrying biohazard suits, ma’am.”

“Give them turnout gear, then, ordinary fire suits and helmets.”

My mother squatted down next to me and lifted the edge of the blanket “What the hell are you idiots thinking?”

“You’re all heart, Jack-Jack.”

“Is it the full moon? First, your poor friend Nicola, and now Juliet’s in the hospital. There’s been about a full decade of weirdness packed into these past few days. How do I explain this?”

“You mean, what will people say?”

“No, Allie. It’s just you live almost seventeen years with a person and, suddenly, in one night, her best friend is in the hospital and she’s trapped under a car with her boyfriend.”

“Adolescence?” I offered.

Mom’s face twisted into a grimace and disappeared. I felt Rob’s fingers intertwine with mine. Then I closed my eyes and let the paramedics take over.





I was lying on a bed waiting for the okay to shower when Juliet appeared. She wheeled into my room, her leg extended on a padded board, a pole with an IV at her side.

“You have that syndrome that chronically sick kids get, like overdeveloped conscience syndrome,” she announced.

“You made that up.”

Juliet laughed. “I did. You have it though. You always feel like you’re inconveniencing somebody.”

“I am always inconveniencing somebody. I’m an inconvenient person.”

“But you’re not. We didn’t ask to be born this way, Allie. The world owes you one. Not the other way around.”

Bonnie came in and drew the curtain so that I could undress and shower. “Juliet, you need to leave. Jackie Kim’s orders.”

“Allie doesn’t have anything I haven’t seen,” Juliet said.

“I’m sure she wants her privacy,” Bonnie said.

“Actually, I’m fine if she stays,” I said. “Tell my mom. It’s cool.”

“She’s my best friend,” Juliet added. “I saw her boobs before she had boobs. Not that she really has boobs now.”

I swallowed, watching Bonnie’s face soften as I remembered the first time Juliet and I got bras. It was one of the summers when she had a month or six weeks off from the hours and hours of gym work and indoor running that was necessary for ski jumping. My mother took both of us to the mall, at night. (We didn’t have to wear full gear, just sunglasses, ball caps and long-sleeved shirts, so we looked only like lepers instead of aliens). Juliet wanted a push-up bra that wouldn’t adapt to the style. “They’re too far apart,” Juliet had told my mother. “What’s going to happen to me if they don’t grow and they stay pointing different ways? I’m going to have to get one stick-on cup for each one.” We ended up buying every conceivable bra, training and otherwise, just to be safe.

“I’ll give you twenty minutes,” Bonnie said.

I slipped out of my clothes and tossed Juliet her ski mask, which had been stuffed into my back pocket since last night. I gratefully spent the next twenty minutes rinsing the grime from my hair and teeth and every cleft and crevice of my body, before dousing myself with the hospital lotion that reminded me of home, since my mother used vats of the stuff. For me, it was like Vicks. Nicola told me once that when her older brother went to college and got a cold, rubbing Vicks on his chest for a cough made him homesick.…

I examined my scratched and blotchy face in the mirror. In my own home—in my own context—I never saw how truly pale people are who are never exposed to sunlight. My skin was perfect, but looked like the unblemished petal of a funeral-parlor lily. Blush might have helped, but there was no makeup called XP, for X-tra Pale. Searching that pale face, with its eyes in a state of perpetual alarm, I didn’t even recognize the real Allie. I didn’t know where she was. But the real Juliet was waiting outside. I pulled on my hospital pj’s.

Afraid as she had been, how much could Juliet know now? Did she know that someone had screwed with Rob’s phone?

I reentered the room, my burden of questions caged in the back of my throat, just as Rob waltzed in, waving a DVD. He wanted to make us whole again, or as whole as we three could be. I almost had to laugh. The DVD was “The Best of David Belle, Volumes I-III.”

“Let’s commence the theater portion of the entertainment, ladies,” he said, cleaned up and looking normal except for the purple hollows under his eyes. “Allie, your doctor said we could hang for another couple of hours.…” He broke off, seeing Juliet’s tight lips.

We were all on edge. Who wouldn’t be? My mother was right about a full decade’s tragic weirdness packed into less than a week. But also, we just weren’t used to being awake during the day. It made everything feel strange.

“I have popcorn and ginger ale being delivered—although not beer, which my father frowned upon for some reason,” he said. “Cheesy popcorn for you, Juliet, if you share.”

He paused. “Can I see your wound?”

“That would involve seeing part of my ass, and that’s off limits to mere mortal eyes,” Juliet replied.

“Not what I hear,” Rob said. “I’ve heard it’s a staple of cyber-assity.”

“If you let me keep all the cheesy popcorn, I’ll show you,” Juliet said.

“Juliet, I’d rather have the popcorn. I’ve seen your fabled ass covered and uncovered since you wore your big girl Huggies, and it’s not one of the seven wonders of the ass-ential world.”

“Rob, you wound me even more!” Juliet cried. “If there were an Iron Harbor Parade of Asses, it would be on it, at position one or two.”

“What about Caitlin Murray?” Rob asked.

Together, Juliet and I said, “Seriously?”

Juliet added, “That ass has all the stability of, like, Nerf.…”

Then I ruined it. Maybe even on purpose. I wasn’t sure. But I couldn’t put on an act anymore. I said to Rob, “Did you get sunburned at all?”

He shook his head. Without a word, Juliet started wheeling past him. We both watched her disappear into the hall.

“Wait,” I whispered.

I jumped after Juliet and clamped my hand down on her shoulder.

“You’re together,” she said. “It was a dumb promise.” She smiled, not stopping, and waved one hand. “No, Allie-Bear. It was dumb. When you care about someone, and you’ve done it, you can’t just stop. It’s fine. It lets me off the hook.”

“No, Juliet. That’s not it. It’s way more important that I talk to you than him.”

I ran back to the room where Rob was now greeting his dad, displaying the DVD and assessing the bags of junk food. “Rob, I have to talk to her for a while,” I informed him. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Mr. Dorn. I mean, Dennis.”

Rob nodded. “I get it. Come on, Dad. We’ll go to my room. The view’s better. My sun-block shade has graffiti.”

The four of us laughed uncomfortably. Rob’s dad, looking far older than his fifty-something years, closed the door behind them.

I turned to Juliet and sat on the bed. “We’re alone. We have two hours.”

“I have to tell you things you don’t want to know,” Juliet said. Her ski mask still lay perched on her extended leg, seeming to mock me, us, the whole situation.

“I already know more than you think I do. I know about my mom’s friend, Gina. And about the doctor, Lauren Wilenbrand.”

Juliet’s eyes bored into mine. “You see how that works?”

“What do you mean?”

“Dr. Andrew is Gina’s boss. Dr. Andrew is Lauren Wilenbrand’s boss. Gina is training for a certificate as a nurse practitioner in genetic disease. Lauren wants to be chief resident. Garrett’s so good at this. He doesn’t have to just keep secrets. He’s the puppet master. He gets women to keep secrets for him. It’s all to their advantage. Me, too.” Juliet raised her own hospital scrubs, pointing to her tattoo on her belly. “I’m worried, Allie-Bear.”

I nodded, suddenly thinking of Nicola again, suddenly angry. Afternoon sunshine threatened us from a tiny crack in the blackout shades. “In hospitals, this is the time most people die,” I finally muttered.

“I thought they died just before morning,” said Juliet.

“That’s all night is, just before morning,” I said. “People start dying right after dinner and they die all night.”

“True enough,” Juliet agreed.

“So you owe it to me to tell me everything. I’m not going to leave you. I just need to know. From the beginning.”

Juliet wheeled herself over to the end of my bed and let out a deep breath. “First of all, those years when I was competing, they were years without rules,” she began. “So I went from a life that was only rules to total freedom. Or as much freedom as I could have. My mom couldn’t come with me every time. It cost too much. When she didn’t, well, like everyone else, of course, she trusted Garrett. Before he was a coach, Garrett trained to be a nurse. No big shocker, he’s a Tabor. But he’s also an RN. Did you know that? Who better to manage your daughter and be sure about her cares and precautions?”

I couldn’t answer. I couldn’t even really focus on her specific words as she went on and on. She barreled right into their relationship. The first time they had sex, Juliet was fourteen and a half, in eighth grade. A year after we’d gone to buy our first bras, a year after she began having her periods. As she spoke, I wanted to give Penguin back and embrace them both. I wanted to hold her like the child she still was.

“No one knew what we did,” she said. “Because of XP, I always had a private room, so that no one could jump up and open the drapes on some beautiful snow-blinding Utah slope. Garrett did a bed check every night. He was never intrusive, but nobody tried to stuff their beds with pillows and sneak out for beers. We were all too competitive.”

It began with the massages he gave Juliet to keep her from cramping up. They simply grew longer and more intimate. Garrett made sure his suite always adjoined hers. What hotel wouldn’t want to provide for the little wonder girl who gutted her way through the hills in the sky despite her grave skin disease? To the Juliet she was then, this was a love affair, the best way to break out of the prison built by our genes. What she was describing to me now was in fact the rape of a little girl. She didn’t articulate it as such because he still had hooks in her. Juliet said that there was nothing between them sexually anymore, and there hadn’t been for years. But he enticed her with freedom.

Later that fall, in November, Garrett Tabor planned to take a break from coaching and join Stephen and Andrew on a research mission in Bolivia. Now that Dr. Andrew’s sons were both on staff, he could take a break for research, too, which was his real passion. Dr. Andrew was insanely certain that using retroviruses to implant normal DNA into our lousy DNA would basically get our genes to repair themselves. That’s making a very long story very short. The most famous retrovirus is HIV, the one that causes AIDS. AIDS used to go so fast and just gallop through people and kill them because how quickly retroviruses mutate. You’d be treating one thing and the cells would change and you’d be facing another strain of virus. That’s why something awful can turn out to be so useful. The retroviruses can cause cells to mutate back to the way they were before they changed into the light-sensitive mutation that causes XP. And then, all the new cells after that would be normal, at least theoretically. They could even do it on unborn babies.

They can do this with animal cells in the lab now, easy as peanut butter and jelly. Vets use this kind of treatment all the time for horses who rip ligaments racing or jumping. So the work Dr. Andrew and his brother and his son were doing with XP could someday, many generations from now, lead to a world with no sickle cell and no Huntington’s disease and no cystic fibrosis, the killers of the young. When I thought of it in that way, I felt not like an experimental animal, but proud: a pioneer, like Juliet had made me with Parkour.

“Even if they can do that, and say they can, what about cancer?” Juliet said.

“You’re going to get squamous cell cancer sometime in your life. That’s the nature of the beast. Big deal,” I said. Squamous cell skin cancer is gross and it leaves a scar where they remove the superficial skin, but it’s not usually a lethal type of skin cancer. Some XP people have them all over. I’ve never had one. Rob had one, on his shoulder, despite his face getting all those huge blisters when he was a baby.

“I mean melanoma that goes all the way.”

“If they get it early, like Rob, it’s completely curable.”

“But you’ll get it again, somewhere else on your body.”

“Juliet, you have to die of something!”

“Whatever.” She turned her back to me and continued in her detached monotone. According to her, even Dr. Andrew wouldn’t reveal the specifics of some genetic mutation among the children of certain families of one “tribe” in Bolivia. But it meant that, although they suffered the same symptoms of harm from sunlight as every other XP kid, they didn’t develop melanoma. Finding a way to make XP a chronic illness was one giant leap in eradicating it. If people with XP could live the same way as people with diabetes or high blood pressure, they could have real lives.

Hearing all this, my heart thumped with excitement. But it also thumped with fear, because something else was clearly on her mind. That was when she dropped the bombshell: last October, Garrett had promised to take Juliet with him when he joined the research team. He promised to make her first among equals in the study—although, by virtue of being Dr. Andrew’s patient, she’d have been in the first pool, anyhow.

That was how they reconnected.

“But weren’t you going out with Henry LeBecque?” I asked.

That was a front, she explained. Besides, Garrett’s father and his uncle would be there, safeguarding her.

I stared at her, not sure what to believe, not sure how much she believed. “You considered it? What about your parents?”

Juliet scoffed. “No! What works with them is: I don’t bring anything up until the last minute. Then, they won’t stop me. With this, I could say it’s for credit, for college, or something. Besides, I can’t tell anyone. Which means you can’t tell anyone, either.”

I chewed a nail. I wasn’t sure how to respond to any of this. But she kept going.

In the past, Juliet’s disappearances, her sabbaticals, her so-called “periods of reflection” had all been stolen time she spent holed up with Garrett. Sometimes, she even used the all-purpose, fail-safe excuse; she said that she was with me. I felt sicker and sicker. Was I suddenly her therapist? It was a job I didn’t want. But I listened anyway: to tales of Juliet and Garrett Tabor traveling to Minneapolis, sleeping in blackout rooms where waiters brought them caviar and champagne at midnight. These hotels, Juliet said, were frequented by foreign businessmen; the staff had a policy to avert its eyes from unusual couples. Tabor told the desk that Juliet was his daughter (Juliet was always swathed in expensive scarves and huge sunglasses); no one could have believed that a father shared a bed with his college-age child. So he was careful to get a double-king room. Even then, the relationship had been much more than sex: One Thousand and One Arabian Nights in reverse, with a harem of one. Garrett told Juliet of cities, like Las Vegas (which might as well be Jupiter to Juliet and me) where lives were lived on the reverse clock, like our own lives. They could be happy there, together—

“What about the women his own age?” I finally shouted. “What about the Daytimers? Like Dr. Wilenbrand. Like Gina—”

“I know about them,” she interrupted. “They’re a front for the sake of his family. Like Henry was for me. Don’t you see that? We had to keep up appearances.”

“What about your dad?” I said. “How could he not know?”

“He sees what he wants to see. When it comes to me, he’s no detective. He sees you. He sees Rob. He sees how you have my back. He sees our cozy little world of three, doing crazy stunts at night, but never getting into any real trouble.”

My jaw clenched. Jack-Jack was right again. People do see what they want to see.

“I haven’t been with him that way in a long time, I swear. But I can’t give him up. I told you the truth.” She sighed, that defeated adult-stranger sigh I’d gotten used to hearing. “He’s Garrett Tabor. And I was a kid. He treated me like an adult. He treated me like an equal. Also, it was like being with a genie. You made a wish for an escape, and there it was.”

“What about what we saw at Tabor Oaks?” I demanded.

“We only saw him once, Allie-Bear. I’m not sure what you saw that other night. And I’ve been over it with him. He made a bad choice. He picked up some woman in Duluth and brought her back to his dad’s apartment. He was lonely. He was confused. He swore it was a one-time thing.… But still, you’re right. There’s too much. I mean … Nicola Burns. No one will ever forget that. It changes everything, forever. It made me start to think about my life, and my mother, and what I’ve done to them that they don’t even know about. I was only fourteen, Allie.”

“But now you’re almost seventeen.”

“And then maybe I can be with him. You know, legally. I mean, it happens. People used to get married when they were thirteen.”

“Listen to yourself right now,” I said.

We were silent.

“My leg hurts,” Juliet said.

“I’ll go find a nurse.”

My head felt as if it were about to explode. I was grateful for the chance to bolt out the door, to stretch and jump and run in place, to punch the flat of my hand with my fist because I couldn’t take a bat to the walls and the windows. Tabor. Tabor. Tabor.… The name was everywhere I looked. This hospital was called Divine Savior, but our wing was The Tabor Clinic. Our savior was Dr. Tabor, the founder.

“My friend Juliet is in pain,” I told a nurse who was unfamiliar to me.

“Are you Jackie Kim’s girl?”

“Yes. I’m Allie. And I don’t know if you can give me some Tylenol? I don’t know if it’s in my orders. But I have such a headache, I’m afraid it’s going to make me sick.…” Which it did. All of a sudden.

I ran to the nearest washroom.

Garrett Tabor had killed Nicola. I knew it as sure as if he’d pointed a gun at her and fired. Only he knew where that poor dark-haired girl was now, the girl he left stripped on the floor like a broken doll. He would have been happy to explain to Juliet how killing Rob and me would have been an accident.

I never got another chance to speak to Juliet alone that night. As it happened, I ended up getting a shot for my first migraine—orders from Dr. Lauren Wilenbrand—along with an order to lie with cold packs over my eyes for the rest of the afternoon.