Free The Night Sister by Jennifer McMahon Page B

Piper tried to slow her breathing. She wondered why they were bothering to hide; it seemed kind of mean, but exhilarating at the same time.
    Piper reached with her right hand, and touched Amy gently on the face. Amy turned and looked at her, smiling a conspiratorial smile, and then the smile faded. Amy looked so serious it made Piper’s stomach hurt.
    “You’re a better kisser than Jason Hawke,” Amy whispered, leaning close.
    “He saw us,” Piper said, her stomach tightening.
    “So what?” Amy shrugged.
    “So…he might tell or something.”
    “He won’t,” Amy said.
    “How do you know?” Piper asked. She imagined it: going back to school in a couple of weeks and everyone talking, whispering, the whole middle school buzzing with the news that Piper and Amy were—what—freaks? lezzies? Good God.
    “I just do,” Amy said. “He didn’t tell Margot now, did he? Jay Jay is nothing to worry about. Relax. It’s fine.”
    But it didn’t feel fine.
    “Piper?” Margot was in the tower now. “Are you guys in here?”
    Below them, they heard Margot tentatively start to climb the ladder.
    “Come on,” Amy whispered, tugging on Piper again, and they moved toward the next wooden ladder, the one that led up to the rooftop deck that was ringed with castlelike battlements. And what were they going to do once they were up there? It’s not as if there was any place to hide. Maybe they’d flap their wings and fly off the edge.
    Amy was giggling, one hand slapped over her mouth to quiet herself. It was all a game to her—the kiss, Jason seeing them, hiding from Margot.
    “Come on, you guys,” Margot called. “I know you’re up there. I hear you!”
    Amy pulled harder on Piper, urging her silently toward the ladder. As Piper did a clumsy gallop, her right foot plunged through the floor like it was made of graham crackers. Piper tumbled forward, her hand slipping out of Amy’s.
    She screamed, partly with the scraping pain on her shin and partly from the feeling of falling, the fear that she would go all the way down (all the way down to hell, maybe, as Grandma Charlotte had warned). But she didn’t. Something stopped her. She looked down and discovered that there were two layers of boards: the floor she had just fallen through was nailed to the top of the rafters, and the ceiling below was nailed to their underside. The boards on the ceiling had held.
    “Whoa!” Amy said, turning back, reaching to pull Piper out. “You okay?”
    “I think so,” Piper said, lifting her leg out gently and scooting back away from the rotten spot in the floor. Her shin was bleeding, and there was a two-inch-long splinter of wood poking out of the skin like a jagged and bloody thorn. Looking at it made her head swim. She imagined it went all the way down to the bone.
    “Oh,
man,
” Amy said, looking at Piper’s leg. She tucked a strand of pink hair behind her ear and leaned in for a closer inspection.
    “We should get your grandma,” Piper said, carefully keeping her eyes away from her leg. Grandma Charlotte had been a nurse in the war: Piper had seen pictures of her in a crisp white uniform standing before rows of hospital cots. Even though it had been over forty years since she’d tended wounded soldiers, Piper was sure she’d know what to do. When you’ve seen guys with their legs blown off by land mines, surely you could handle a splinter—even a giant one.
    “No way,” Amy said. “We can
not
tell her we were in here. She’d never trust me again. We can totally handle this. Trust me.”
    “But I…”
    “Shh,” Amy said. “Close your eyes.”
    Piper closed them a little, but not all the way.
    Amy reached for the splinter, expertly grabbed it between her fingernails, and gave it one quick tug. Piper wanted to scream a thousand bad words, but it hurt too much for her to do anything more than give a guttural cry.
    “Got it,” Amy said. Piper opened her eyes to see Amy holding the bloody sliver of wood,