The Almost Sisters(64)

Had the Lewy bodies sent her on some midnight errand? Wattie had told me that she slept restless. On very bad nights, when she was under stress, she would get up and try to go berry picking or to the state fair or, once, to her long-dead husband’s funeral. Wattie was a light sleeper, and her room was right next door, so she’d always caught Birchie and gentled her back to bed. But Wattie was resting tonight in the warm and loving arms of Blanton’s bourbon.

I ran to the window and peered out into the night. If it was my grandmother, I was about to show Birchville some nerdy-ass pajamas for about the thousandth time this visit, hopefully before she fell and snapped her neck.

It wasn’t Birchie, though. It was Lavender.

I could see her blond hair gleaming in the bright summer moonlight. She was already down the stairs and hurrying through the back garden, wearing a lemon-colored summer dress that shone bright as her hair.

Worst ninja ever, I thought.

She had a green bottle in one hand that I hoped was Sprite, and she was carrying something puffy in a plastic grocery bag. I squinted. Was that a pillow? A big white blanket, folded into a square? Either way, not things you want to see a thirteen-year-old toting off into a dark night full of boys.

She’d failed ninja, but her femme-fatale skills were way too precocious. Sneaking out into the night to meet a boy felt like the realm of junior year, not eighth grade. Add in the fact that she was carrying bedding and a bottle? She was heading toward things I hadn’t been ready to handle responsibly at thirty-freaking-eight. Digby and I could tell her exactly how this story ended.

Lavender was already disappearing around the corner of the house, but I was barefoot, robeless, and wearing enormous pink plaid pajama bottoms with a floppy black T-shirt that said keep calm and vanquish evil. I thought about levering the window open and hollering for her to get her twinkly little butt straight back inside, but I didn’t want to wake up the rest of the house. Birchie’s routine was sacred, and Rachel would She-Hulk out in mother horror. Lav wouldn’t hear me anyway. She probably had her earbuds in, listening to Selena Gomez sing a lot about hotness and kisses and touching and very, very little about chlamydia.

I changed my pajama pants for black leggings and trusted my huge T-shirt to hide Digby and my braless state, then ran quick and quiet as I could through the house to the back door. I didn’t have time to muck about finding socks and lacing my Chucks. Wattie kept a pair of electric-blue Crocs by the back door, her “garden shoes,” she called them. I stuffed my feet into them and headed out after Lavender. Except for the shoes and the pale pink lettering, I was ninja-ing it up pretty good.

By the time I got down the stairs and through the back garden, Lavender was out of sight. I headed around the house to the well-lit road around the square, unworried. I knew exactly where she was heading. I trotted down the street to the Darian house at a good clip, aiming for the far side yard.

She wasn’t there. Jeffrey’s bedroom window was primly closed and dark, but Hugh’s gaped wide open, letting out all the air conditioning. A neon-yellow fire ladder, the telescoping kind that the parents of second-story kids kept in the closet, hung all the way to the grass. Hugh had put it to unsanctioned use, shimmying down it and out into the night.

I pressed my palms to my eyes for a second, cussing myself for all kinds of stupid. Back when I was a teenager and first became acquainted with insomnia, I’d snuck out plenty to meet up with JJ. We’d take flashlights and sit up in the play fort at a nearby park, reading comics. Back then I’d pinged rocks off his window to get him to come out, because we hadn’t had cell phones. Now the pings were digital, and Lavender hadn’t needed to go to the Darian house to get Hugh. They’d arranged by text where to meet up. They were already heading there.

I didn’t think she was in danger. Hugh was a good kid. It was only that he was a breath away from driving and ready for more than she was on the romance front. She wasn’t mature enough to decide how far was far enough. Thirteen should not be out deciding this, unsupervised, with a high-school boy. It was her parents’ job to make sure she wasn’t, but Lav had slipped out through the gap between them.

I turned in a slow half circle, scanning the sleeping square.

Where would carless kids go on a summer night when they had a bag full of bedding and bodies full of hormones? When I was a girl, young couples met up in the historic graveyard behind the church. I started walking quickly toward it. There was a grassy dip between the Alston and Rhodes crypts, sheltered and private. Something about the proximity of God made French kissing there extra forbidden. Or maybe the silent rows of old gravestones and crumbling angels watching made second base feel more delicious.

One summer, out on a restless midnight ramble, I’d stumbled onto Jeannie Anne and whatever boy she was dating then in another grassy hollow behind my own family’s crypt. The one that held every local Birch who’d passed already.

A little voice at the bottom of my brain piped up to say, Every Birch but Ellis.

Now, there was a mental road I didn’t want to go down. The bones of my great-grandfather haunted the underdepths of my mind, even as I remembered seeing Jeannie Anne on her back in dewy grass, lip-locked with a boy who had one jeans-clad leg pressed between hers. His arm had been jammed way up under her T-shirt, so he could grope at her boob. His hand had looked like a living thing, squeezing and pulsing under her shirt’s thin fabric.

I’d apologized and backed away. They hadn’t even heard me.