NOS4A2(37)
Vic put her still-damp sneakers in the dryer to bang around and went upstairs to have a bowl of Lucky Charms in front of the TV. She dug her emergency tablet of Ecstasy out of her pencil case. In twenty minutes she was feeling smooth and easy. When she closed her eyes, she felt a luxuriant sensation of moving, of gliding, like a paper airplane on an updraft. She watched the Travel Channel, and every time she saw an airplane, she held her arms out like wings and pretended to soar. Ecstasy was motion in pill form, as good as flying through the dark in an open-top convertible, only you didn’t have to get off the couch to go for a ride.
She washed out her bowl and the spoon in the sink and dried them and put them back where they belonged. She turned off the TV. The hour was getting late, she could tell by the slant of the light through the trees.
Vic went back into the basement to check her shoes, but they were still wet. She didn’t know what to do with herself. Under the stairs she found her old tennis racket and a can of balls. She thought she might hit against the wall for a while, but she needed to clear a stretch first, so she started moving boxes—which was when she found it.
The Raleigh leaned against the concrete, hidden behind a stack of boxes marked for the Salvation Army. It baffled Vic, seeing her old Tuff Burner there. She had been in some kind of accident and lost it. Vic recalled her parents talking about it when they didn’t know she could hear.
Except. Except maybe she hadn’t heard what she thought she’d heard. She remembered her father saying she would be heartbroken when he told her the Tuff Burner was gone. For some reason she had thought it was lost, that he couldn’t find it. Her mother had said something about being glad the Tuff Burner was out of the picture, because Vic was so fixated on it.
And she had been fixated on it, that was true. Vic had a whole framework of fantasies that involved riding the Tuff Burner across an imaginary bridge to faraway places and fantastic lands. She had ridden it to a terrorist hideout and rescued her mother’s missing bracelet and had taken it on a ride to a book-filled crypt where she’d met an elf who made her tea and warned her about a vampire.
Vic moved a finger across the handlebars, collected a thick gray pad of dust on her fingertip. All this time it had been down here gathering dust because her parents hadn’t wanted her to have it. Vic had loved the bike, and it had given her a thousand stories, and so naturally her parents took it away.
She missed her stories about the bridge, missed the girl she had been then. She’d been a better person then and knew it.
Vic continued to stare at the bike as she put her sneakers on (they were now both toasty and stinky).
The spring was in almost perfect balance, felt like July in the direct sunshine and like January in the shade. Vic didn’t want to walk along the road and risk having her mother spot her on the way back, so she steered the Raleigh around to the rear of the house and the path into the woods. It was the most natural thing in the world to put her leg over it and start riding.
Vic laughed when she climbed onto it. It was too small for her, almost comically so. She imagined a clown squeezed into a tiny, tiny clown car. Her knees rapped the handlebars, and her butt hung over the seat. But when she stood on the pedals, it still felt right.
She took it downhill, into shade that was ten degrees colder than out in the sun, winter breathing her in the face. She struck a root, grabbed air. She didn’t actually expect to come off the ground, and she screamed, a thin, happy scream of surprise, and for a moment there was no difference between who she was and who she had been. It still felt good, two wheels spinning below and the wind grabbing her hair.
She did not take it straight to the river but instead followed a narrow trail that cut sidelong across the face of the hill. Vic burst through some brush and came out among a pack of boys standing around a fire in a trash can. They were passing a joint.
“Gimme a toke!” she shouted as she rode by and mock-snatched at the little reefer.
The kid with the joint, a scrawny doof in an Ozzy Osbourne T-shirt, was so startled he choked on the lungful of smoke he was holding. Vic was grinning as she rode away, until the kid with the joint cleared his throat and yelled, “Maybe if you come suck us, you f*ckin’ hoor!”
She continued on and away through the chill. A parliament of crows, roosting in the branches of a thick-trunked birch tree, discussed her in the gravest of terms as she rode beneath them.
Maybe if you come suck us, she thought, and for one cold moment the seventeen-year-old girl on the child’s bike imagined turning around and going back to them and getting off and saying, All right. Who’s first? Her mother already thought she was a whore. Vic hated to disappoint her.
She had felt good for a few moments, racing across the face of the hill on her old bike, but the happy feeling had burned itself out and left behind a thin, cold rage. She was no longer entirely sure who she was angry with, though. Her anger didn’t have a fixed point. It was a soft whir of emotion to match the soft whir of the spokes.
She thought about riding to the mall, but the idea of having to put on a grin for the other girls at the food court irritated her. Vic wasn’t in the mood to see people she knew, and she didn’t want anyone giving her good advice. She didn’t know where to go, just that she was in the mood to find some trouble. She was sure that if she rode around long enough, she would come across some.
For all her mother knew, Vic had already found trouble, was lying naked and dead somewhere. Vic was glad to have put such an idea in her head. She was sorry that by this evening the fun would be over and her mother would know she was still alive. She half wished there were a way to keep Linda from ever finding out what had happened to her, for Vic to vanish from her own life, to go and never come back, and how fine that would be, to leave both of her parents wondering if their daughter was alive or dead.