December Park(51)

Is this part of the game, too? “Why the hell do we gotta walk?”

“Because I don’t have a bicycle.”

I gaped at him, still clutching the hand grips of my dirt bike. “Are you kidding me?”

“No,” he replied.

It occurred to me that I’d never seen him riding a bike. For the past couple of weeks, we had just happened to walk everywhere—to and from school, down to the Quickman, even to Scott’s house on the days we all went over to watch horror movies. It had never crossed my mind that Adrian didn’t own a bike. What kid didn’t own a bike?

“Well,” I said, “you can ride on my handlebars.”

He eyed my bike warily. “How does that work?”

“You just get on and ride while I pedal and steer.”

“Get on,” Adrian repeated, his voice low and laced with uncertainty. Again he adjusted his glasses, then ran his tongue over his upper lip.

“Yeah, man. It’s no sweat. Really.”

“I don’t know . . .”

“Listen,” I said. “I promised to meet you out here and follow you to wherever without knowing a single thing. I think you can at least trust me to hop on the goddamn handlebars, chickenshit.”

I thought the chickenshit was overkill and he might react to it the way he had reacted to Michael laughing at him. However, I was surprised to see an awkward grin crack one corner of Adrian’s mouth—a grin I couldn’t help but return.

“Yeah, okay, but if you drop me, I’m going to kick your butt.”

“You couldn’t kick my butt if you had a tractor trailer for a foot,” I said, and we both started giggling.

I wheeled my bike across the yard. It was a green and white Kent with worn handgrips and Garbage Pail Kids stickers stuck to the frame. It paled in comparison to Michael’s stellar Mongoose, but it was mine, and I couldn’t imagine not having it. Out on the street, I straddled the bike and held the handlebars steady.

“What do I do?” Adrian said.

“Just hop on.”

“Like . . .”

“With your butt. Climb on backward.”

“I don’t know if . . .”

Jesus Christ, I thought.

“You won’t go fast, will you?”

“No,” I said.

“Promise?”

“Holy shit, Adrian!”

It took him three attempts to hoist himself up. Once he had situated himself, I proceeded to pedal up Worth Street. His grip on the handlebars tightened. Since Adrian weighed less than my other friends he should have been easier to transport, but he possessed no sense of balance, so it was like transporting an unwieldy sack of potatoes on my handlebars. The backpack strapped to his shoulders didn’t make it any easier.

Afraid of getting his feet caught in the spokes of the front wheel, he kept his legs straight out ahead of the front tire. I knew he wouldn’t be able to keep it up for long, and I waited for his legs to give out. Yet he managed to keep those scarecrow legs out ahead of us all the way down Worth Street and halfway down Haven Street. By the time we reached Governor Highway, he was perched perfectly on my handlebars, his legs tucked up beneath him, like a chimp on a swing.

The streets were eerily quiet, which was not unusual for a Sunday evening. Even the highway was fairly calm. The shops in this part of town were shutting down for the night, their lights winking out one at a time.

I pedaled harder, running parallel to the highway, the cool early-evening air drawing tears from the corners of my eyes. On the handlebars, Adrian unleashed a strangled cry. He’s going to have a heart attack, I thought, yet the notion did not cause me to slow down. In fact, I pushed us harder, and, accompanied by a second sheep-like bleat of fear from Adrian, I hooked a sharp right, hopped the shallow curb, and drove us straight through a copse of trees.

I’ll have to explain to his mother, that creepy old witch, how I killed her son, I thought, pedaling faster. Around me, the world was a colorless blur. She’ll put a curse on me and turn me into a toadstool or a talking frog.

Like a maniac, I threw my head back and laughed. No doubt little Adrian Gardiner was soiling his drawers right about now. Less than a second before we hit one of the highway intersections, the traffic lights changed. We bulleted through the intersection, and someone blasted their car horn at us.

Adrian groaned, and his feet shot out ahead of him again.

“Hold on!”

We crested a hill, and then it was nothing but a gradual downslope. I took the hill faster than necessary, the streetlamps smearing to runny blots of light in my peripheral vision. Of course, with Adrian hunkered down on my handlebars, I couldn’t see directly ahead of me. But I had ridden this stretch of roadway since my early adolescence, and I knew every bump, groove, and pothole like I knew the contours of my own mattress or which floorboards outside my father’s bedroom to avoid at night when sneaking out of the house.

I burned through the intersection of Point and Counterpoint and squeezed the hand brakes just as my rear tire fishtailed halfway around. We came to a stop mere feet from the guardrail that separated the roadway from the wooded embankment. The silence that filled my ears an instant later was like a sonic boom.

Almost wetly, Adrian dripped off my handlebars to the pavement. I eased my bike down on the ground and went over to where Adrian crouched in a ball. His shoulders hitched, and I thought, Great. I made him cry. All of a sudden I felt like a world-class *.