What We Lost in the Dark Read Online Free

reckless grace of her spins and flips.
    Then, so quietly at first we never sensed a thing, Tabor began to spin into Juliet’s life, to spin his web.
    Tabor used my Juliet’s lust for freedom to push her past skiing, making her his live doll, his sexual toy—when she was not yet fifteen.
    Still, even then, when Tabor had her in his coils, “us” still meant the three of us. Even after last year, when Rob realized that he was as much in love with me as I had been with him since I was eleven, which should have ended it, we were the
tres compadres
. The primary “us” was the first “us” that existed—Juliet and me. Rob and me. Juliet and Rob and me.
    Only death parted us.
    We could have died from Parkour, but if you’re going to die young, and we probably were, you crave thrills. While Juliet was a skier, Rob and I would crawl into caves so narrow that Rob’s broad shoulders barely fit—caves that could have been home to rabid wolverines—just to do it. On our own skis, we went not down cliffs, but off the edges. Then Juliet took a bad fall, and doctors learned that her vision had deteriorated so much that she had the eyesight of a vole. She was through. She almost lost her mind.
    Break-ins and brewfests kept us going for a while. But then, just in time, before we turned to vices in a get-busted way, Juliet led us to Parkour. Every dull structure in our very dull town became something to vault, to conquer. We got bruises and blisters, big biceps, concussions, and brokenbones. We violated people’s privacy and we trespassed—on private and government property. And it was all ferociously magical until we scaled the Tabor Oaks, where we saw what crawled out at night.

3
THROWDOWN
    “If you want to stay, my father left your instructions on that empty desk over there,” Garrett Tabor said.
    “I’m not staying,” I said. “Screw that.”
    I could feel my guts constrict, like wet laundry. After Juliet, life for me was holding its breath. Would I let him make me go on holding my breath forever?
    “Allie, Allie, don’t look so scared,” Tabor said. “I’m not the big bad wolf.”
    “That’s insulting to wolves,” I said quietly. I breathed in, normally. “You should be scared. Someone is going to get you.”
    “Somebody already tried. You.”
    “You know that’s a lie,” I said. I thought of Juliet, silhouetted against the sky, arms and skis joyously outstretched. The year she had to stop was the first time that girls could compete at the Olympic level in the ski jump; Juliet could have been a pioneer. It didn’t seem possible, but at that moment, I hated Tabor even more. “Juliet wasn’t afraid of you.”
    “I don’t know. Do you know? Who knows her better? Me? Or you?”
    “No one knows her like I do,” I said.
    “You knew her as a childhood friend,” he said. “I was her friend when she was a young woman.”
    “You were her rapist.”
    Tabor’s charm slid off his face like snow off the hood of a hot car. Beneath the mask there was nothing. His face was the front of a locked building. He said, “You know that isn’t true.”
    “I know it is,” I said. “So did Juliet. So does my mother. Does your mother know?”
    With a visible gathering, Tabor rebuilt his countenance. He smiled like a stroke victim, just relearning how.
    “My mother’s dead,” Garrett Tabor said, his pleasant gaze unwavering. “She died in a car accident, on Christmas Eve. With her baby daughter.” Reflex almost prompted me to offer a condolence. I didn’t, though. He might not even have been telling the truth. He went on, “I know you don’t really put a lot of faith in my friendship with Juliet. But it was very real. You know, the last time I saw Juliet was right here. That beautiful girl, stretched out on a stainless steel table … but you don’t want to know about that.”
    My stomach began to boil. I thought of her the way they had found her, her teeth knocked out, her skin shredded, her lips ravaged