During junior high, I began sneaking out at night.  Sometimes just to walk around.  It freaked me out a little, the dark, and the wind through the trees, and the lean of shadows.  All the world asleep except a prowling girl.  In Hawaii for high school, the night even lovelier than the day, whole groups of us met at midnight or 2 a.m., and went to the beach or to parks.  We never considered the danger of it.  The best nights were the ones in which nothing happened.  No drinking or recklessness.  We’d lie on our backs and stare at the sky and tell stories.  We’d invent all that was to come.  The ceaseless adventures awaiting us, mere months away really, since most of us were seventeen.

Of course we were caught once or twice, revealed by gas levels in the cars, or the occasional insomniac parent.  I remember those nights as a kind of twilight between the school girl and the unknown woman.  We weren’t wild kids.  No vandalism or drug use.  A small rebellion, to do at night almost exactly what we did during summer days.  Sometimes we swam.  Dropped into the dark water, and spooked one another with shrieks about rocks shaped like sea creatures.  The water pulling at us.  Fingers of seaweed grasping our legs.  The delicious terror of all we didn’t know.