“What about change from the other night?”
I sighed. I actually had a substantial chunk left from the date, but I’d been hoping to squirrel it away for future expenses. No such luck, apparently.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’ll get your stupid magazine.”
“Don’t forget the stupid Shake ’N Bake.”
I flashed her a ha-ha-you’re-so-hilarious look and headed for the back door.
The screen door smacked shut behind me. I crossed the back porch, the ill-kept backyard lawn, and made a beeline for the old wooden shed. My bike, a sickeningly pink Schwinn, had disintegrated into a pile of rust flakes about two years ago. My mom’s bike was virtually dustless, its gears still slick with black oil. She liked to hit the local trails, and Dad kept it in good working order for her. Dad enjoyed the dreadmill himself, however, and didn’t ride with her.
His bike had suffered the same fate as mine. We’d all gotten bicycles for Christmas my fifth-grade year, a plan to get us all in shape with family fun rides. We’d ridden together only once, on New Year’s Day, as part of a resolution to do more activities together. I’d fallen off my bike, bloodied my nose, and shredded my shins, and Dad’s gears had devoured his favorite pair of sneakers. Only my Mom had come out of the ride with a positive experience.
I leaned, one foot on the lawn, the other tucked into the spiky foot of the pedals. At that moment, I wondered just where the hell the urge to go riding had come from. Fresh air sounded great, but adrenaline sounded better. Slinging down the dock ramps behind the Ralphs’ at blasphemous speeds made my hair stand on end just thinking about it. Part of me just wanted to go—not be at home, not be at school. Maybe in alien solitude I could find some answers.
Probably not, but worth a shot.
I took off down the driveway and out into the street.
The winding roads out of my neighborhood passed by in a blur. I focused on the spring of the handlebars, the rasping-groan of the tires against the asphalt, the rattling clink of the gear chain slipping between cogs. I breathed in the smell of eucalyptus trees and wet, freshly cut grass. I listened to the suburban melody of Sunday morning lawn mowers, dogs barking, and cars roaring to life.
I hadn’t been on a bicycle in almost a year, but it was doing its magic just minutes into my ride. I weaved between the street and the sidewalk, flying up driveways, and hopping off curbs. I played Ride-The-Gutter, I played Eyes-Closed. I didn’t make it past three seconds with my eyes shut, but I came out of each attempt with my heart hammering in my chest. My cheeks hurt from smiling by the time I skidded out in front of the grocery store.
I locked the bike up out front and shuffled inside.
Stabbing florescent lights, the cold white opposite of the dreary gray outside, slapped me awake and out of my musings. What the hell was I here for? I snapped my fingers a few times like a beatnik poet to get my bearings. Shake ‘N Bake. And a Cosmo. If it’s new.
I never understood my mom’s love of Cosmo—I was only fifteen, as inexperienced as that age only sometimes alluded to—but I couldn’t imagine that the subject of the tips inside really warranted “50 New Ways to Rock His World” every month. A bit of quick math told me that if Cosmo had been running for at least ten years, it had given six-thousand new ideas to Knock His Socks Off. Call me crazy, but I don’t think even brain surgery was that complex.
As I wandered through the aisles, looking for the Shake ’N Bake, a voice drifted over my musings. Finally, an arm tugged my shoulder and turned me around. A mangled scream choked out of my throat, but I was too terrified to do anything.
“Lucy!”
Morgan, standing in front of me, holding my upper arm with one hand, threw the carton of eggs she was holding. It arced behind her and exploded on the tile, sending runs of yellow and clear goo streaking in a starburst around the broken Styrofoam.
I held my hand over my heart, the universal sign of you just scared the hell out of me.
“Holy crap! I’m sorry, I just…I saw you and I didn’t think. Of how. Of what you’re… I mean…”
I raised an eyebrow. Her skin was flushed a bright scarlet. Her usually gorgeous curtain of blonde hair was half mangled into a ponytail—with wide unintentionally loose crescents of hair dangling at strange angles around her head. She wasn’t wearing any make-up, and her skin looked sallow and greasy.
“Are you okay?” I asked her. I only got to the you part before she hugged-tackled me into the Hamburger Helper shelf.
I sucked in a deep breath through my nose, inhaling a strange scent. She smelled like old fear. I pictured her in the cute dress she’d been wearing for the date night, but an unfamiliar bulky denim jacket covered her top half. Her bare calves sported long lines of dull red scratches, and her sandals and feet were caked in dirt. She wandered through a long stretch of green shrubs next to a chain-link fence, clutching a cheap blue plastic flashlight in one hand and her cellphone in the other. Her face was cast in stone, but her eyes, wide like a doll’s, gave everything away. Only the passing strobe of the cars on the freeway lit her trembling body.
The image cracked and fell apart. I was staring at Morgan now, who was holding me at arm’s length and staring at me. I covered my mouth, a thrill of fear poisoning my stomach. What was I seeing?
“Sorry,” I said, and went right to my go-to excuse. “I’m still… My head.”
I touched the back of my head, and this time I felt a sharp stab of pain. I winced, the only real one so far, and probed the tender flesh again. Something crunched under my fingers, and I knew it was blood drying on a long gash on my head. A goose-egg the size of a plum rose from the center of the dried-up cut. I sucked in another breath.
The back of my head had only been scraped, nothing more. Not cut, not swollen. My hand fell loosely from the back of my head. Morgan caught the horrified look on my face.
“Luce, what’s going on? Your mom told me what happened, but I didn’t know if… I didn’t know if you told them the whole story.”
Anger. A bright red cherry of it, burning the back of my eyes. The next person to ask me in gentle baby tones if I had been raped was going to get a fist in the mouth. Still, the rational part of me, somewhere napping in the back of my head, knew I was being a child. Everyone just wanted to make sure the worst hadn’t happened.
Of course, it had, but not in the way they imagined.
“I told her the whole story,” I said. “I’m okay. Just a little shell-shocked I guess.”
Morgan nodded, but the look of gentle probing pity didn’t recede. It was a mask I was seeing on every face all of a sudden. “Okay.”
She didn’t believe me.
“Morgan, it was scary and awful and a nightmare,” I said. “But that’s all. I didn’t even get robbed.”
That didn’t help my case, I realized. It made the whole thing hinge on implausibility. What band of thugs knocks out girls for kicks and makes a run for it? None, that’s who. It sounded like a lie because it was one, I reminded myself. People around me were smart, and I was pissed off because of it.
“Okay,” Morgan said again. It was the “okay” that I hated so much. It was a crazy person’s okay. If I had told her that a tribe of pygmies had saved me from my attackers, she would have given me the same okay. There wouldn’t even be a change in inflection.
Of everyone in the world who would believe me unconditionally, I thought it would be her.