they would.
Then, in the full darkness of the night, we went back into the room. I switched on the room lights while Diane pulled the blinds and unpacked the syringe and ampoule kit I had taught her to use. She filled the sterile syringe, frowned and tapped out a bubble. She looked professional, but her hand was trembling. I took off my shirt and stretched out on the bed.
'Tyler—'
Suddenly she was the reluctant one. 'No second thoughts,' I said. 'I know what I'm getting into. And we've talked this through a dozen times.'
She nodded and swabbed the inside of my elbow with alcohol. She held the syringe in her right hand, point up. The small quantity of fluid in it looked as innocent as water.
'That was a long time ago,' she said.
'What was?'
'When we looked at the stars that time.'
'I'm glad you haven't forgotten.'
'Of course I haven't forgotten. Now make a fist.'
The pain was trivial. At least at first.
THE BIG HOUSE
I was twelve, and the twins were thirteen, the night the stars disappeared from the sky.
It was October, a couple of weeks before Halloween, and the three of us had been ordered to the basement of the Lawton house—the Big House, we called it—for the duration of an adults-only social event.
Being confined to the basement wasn't any kind of punishment. Not for Diane and Jason, who spent much of their time there by choice; certainly not for me. Their father had announced a strictly defined border between the adults' and the children's zones of the house, but we had a high-end gaming platform, movies on disk, even a pool table… and no adult supervision apart from one of the regular caterers, a Mrs. Truall, who came downstairs every hour or so to dodge canape duty and give us updates on the party. (A man from Hewlett-Packard had disgraced himself with the wife of a Post columnist. There was a drunken senator in the den.) All we lacked, Jason said, was silence (the upstairs system was playing dance music that came through the ceiling like an ogre's heartbeat) and a view of the sky.
Silence and a view: Jase, typically, had decided he wanted both.
Diane and Jason had been born minutes apart but were obviously fraternal rather than identical siblings; no one but their mother called them twins. Jason used to say they were the product of 'dipolar sperm penetrating oppositely charged eggs.' Diane, whose IQ was nearly as impressive as Jason's but who kept her vocabulary on a shorter leash, compared them to 'different prisoners who escaped from the same cell.'
I was in awe of them both.
Jason, at thirteen, was not only scary-smart but physically fit—not especially muscular but vigorous and often successful at track and field. He was nearly six feet tall even then, skinny, his gawky face redeemed by a lopsided and genuine smile. His hair, in those days, was blond and wiry.
Diane was five inches shorter, plump only by comparison with her brother, and darker skinned. Her complexion was clear except for the freckles that ringed her eyes and gave her a hooded look: My raccoon mask, she used to say. What I liked most about Diane—and I had reached an age when these details had taken on a poorly understood but undeniable significance—was her smile. She smiled rarely but spectacularly. She was convinced her teeth were too prominent (she was wrong), and she had picked up the habit of covering her mouth when she laughed. I liked to make her laugh, but it was her smile I secretly craved.
Last week Jason's father had given him a pair of expensive astronomical binoculars. He had been fidgeting with them all evening, taking sightings on the framed travel poster over the TV, pretending to spy on Cancun from the suburbs of Washington, until at last he stood up and said, 'We ought to go look at the sky.'
'No,' Diane said promptly. 'It's cold out there.'
'But clear. It's the first clear night this week. And it's only chilly.'
'There was ice on the lawn this morning.'
'Frost,' he countered.
'It's after midnight.'
'It's Friday night.'
'We're not supposed to leave the basement.'
'We're not supposed to disturb the party. Nobody said anything about going outside. Nobody will see us, if you're afraid of getting caught.'
'I'm not afraid of getting caught.'
'So what are you afraid of?'
'Listening to you babble while my feet freeze.'
Jason turned to me. 'How about you, Tyler? Want to see some sky?'
The twins often asked me to referee their arguments, much to my discomfort. It was a no-win proposition. If I sided with Jason I might alienate Diane; but if I sided too often with Diane it would look… well, obvious. I said, 'I don't know, Jase, it is pretty chilly outside…'
It was Diane who let me off the hook. She put a hand on my shoulder and said, 'Never mind. I suppose a little fresh air is better than listening to him complain.'
So we grabbed our jackets from the basement hallway and left by the back door.
The Big House wasn't as grandiose as our nickname for it implied, but it was larger than the average home in this middling-high-income neighborhood and it sat on a bigger parcel of land. A great rolling expanse of manicured lawn gave way, behind it, to an uncultivated stand of pines bordering a mildly polluted creek. Jason chose a spot for stargazing halfway between the house and the woods.
The month of October had been pleasant until yesterday, when a cold front had broken the back of Indian summer. Diane made a show of hugging her ribs and shivering, but that was only to chastise Jason. The night air was merely cool, not unpleasant. The sky was crystalline and the grass was reasonably dry, though there might be frost again by morning. No moon and not a trace of cloud. The Big House was lit up like a Mississippi steamboat and cast its fierce yellow glare across the lawn, but we knew from experience that on nights like this, if you stood in the shadow of a tree, you'd disappear as absolutely as if you had fallen into a black hole.
Jason lay on his back and aimed his binoculars at the starry sky.
I sat cross-legged next to Diane and watched as she took from her jacket pocket a cigarette, probably stolen from her mother. (Carol Lawton, a cardiologist and nominal ex-smoker, kept packs of cigarettes secreted in her dresser, her desk, a kitchen drawer. My mother had told me this.) She put it to her lips and lit it with a translucent red lighter—the flame was momentarily the brightest thing around—and exhaled a plume of smoke that swirled briskly into the darkness.
She caught me watching her. 'You want a drag?'
'He's twelve years old,' Jason said. 'He has enough problems. He doesn't need lung cancer.'
'Sure,' I said. It was a point of honor now.
Diane, amused, passed me the cigarette. I inhaled tentatively and managed not to choke.
She took it back. 'Don't get carried away.'
'Tyler,' Jason said, 'do you know anything about the stars?'
I gulped a lungful of cold, clean air. 'Of course I do.'
'I don't mean what you learn from reading those paperbacks. Can you name any stars?'
I was blushing, but I hoped it was dark enough that he couldn't see. 'Arcturus,' I said. 'Alpha Centauri. Sirius. Polaris…'
'And which one,' Jason asked, 'is the Klingon homeworld?'
'Don't be mean,' Diane said.
Both the twins were precociously intelligent. I was no dummy, but they were out of my league, and we all understood that. They attended a school for exceptional children; I rode the bus to public school. It was one of the several obvious distinctions between us. They lived in the Big House, I lived with my mother in the bungalow at the east end of the property; their parents pursued careers, my mother cleaned house for them. Somehow we managed to acknowledge these differences without making a big deal of it.