If it's really bleeding, will we feel it down here?

"You should see this," Dog said.

He came over yesterday to lure me and Cam out to see an eclipse of the moon that night. Cam looked interested, if a little dubious.

"Isn't that at two-thirty in the morning or something?"

"Past your bedtime?" Dog asked.

"Some of us have to get up in the morning," Cam said.

Dog looked at me. I was in my usual spot -- wrapped up in everything I could find in the middle of the bed.  I had on the jacket Dog left the last time he was here, and he smiled just a little when he saw it.

"It's really worth seeing," he said to me.

I shook my head. I've seen eclipses before.

"This isn't just any eclipse," Dog coaxed, as if I'd said it.  "This one's going to be blood red.  It'll be like having Mars up close and personal."

"I'm up for it if you are," Cam said to me.  He looked at the jacket I was wearing as if he hadn't seen it before, and glanced at Dog.  But he just added, "It's not like we have to travel or anything."

I don't think so, I said.

Cam looked at me again, surprised, and I felt vaguely guilty.  I haven't been talking; I haven't been able to.  But somehow Dog coming over like this, asking us to go out not to see a new group or a club but the night sky loosened me up. It made me feel like I was ten years old again, a bad girl sneaking out of my room in the middle of the night with that book about the stars someone gave me.  

I didn't know what anything was about back then.  I didn't know I was a catastrophe.  I was just my family's child.  Waiting until my parents were asleep, hiding in the dark under a sycamore tree too skinny to give me shelter by day, looking at my star book by the glow of a tiny flashlight I bought at the drug store for a couple of dollars, was the worst I could be accused of at that point.  

It felt bad enough. It felt great.  I was easy to please in the bad girl department. And they must have had even lower expectations, since they never caught me.  One summer I went out almost every night, and still they never caught on.

I'd painted the lens of the flashlight pink with my mother's nail polish.  The book said that a white flashlight was too glaring.  You had to color it pink.  They even suggested nail polish, and it wasn’t like I ever used that kind of thing.  So I'd waited until my mother went to the store, and I'd used her really good polish -- the stuff she saved for weddings and funerals.  Another betrayal of my parents' trust by their dastardly daughter.

"All we have to do is go outside," Dog said.  "Nice of it to fall in the middle of the week like this.  No crowds.  All the losers with jobs will be asleep."

"Thanks," Cam said.

"Almost all of them."

"Again, much appreciated."

Dog looked at me expectantly.  I shook my head again, but he didn't back off.

"You could use the air," he said.

Cold air. No, thanks.

"We'll bundle up. Bring a flask."

I don't drink, dummy.

"Maybe you should start."

Cam looked like he didn't know whose side he was on.  "Fine," Dog said.  "We'll bring cocoa."

"Look, if she doesn't want to -- " Cam began.

"Your government needs you," Dog talked right over him.

I gave him the look that deserved, and he smiled sardonically.  "It's true," he said.  "NASA wants the volunteer nerd squad looking for meteors hitting the moon.  It's the kind of thing you can only spot during an eclipse."

Now Cam looked skeptical, too.  "Since when are you an astronomy geek?"

Dog shrugged. "What can I say?  When the universe starts acting up, I like to watch."

He smiled at me like we were alone in the room.  "A blood red moon," he said.  "When are you going to see that again?"