A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend (19 page)

 

Then on Sunday night as I was about to go to bed, with my pajamas on and my hair damp from a shower, I heard a ping at my window—and then another one. I looked down, and there was Heather. And an instrument case, and the kind of flashlight with a clamp and a snaky neck, and the moonlight shining round and white on her hair.

I opened the window and crossed my arms on the windowsill and leaned my head out while Heather set up all her things, her chair and her music stand and her score. She didn’t look up at me, and I didn’t call down to her. I didn’t want to disturb the spell that seemed to be upon us.

She lifted her clarinet up to her lips and played a long, low, reedy note.

I didn’t know about music in any kind of intellectual way. And Heather had told me before that she only played the clarinet badly.

But it was beautiful. Graceful and soft and melancholy. She tripped on a note once in a while, but it wasn’t a fast melody, and she always picked it up as if nothing had happened.

She showed me the night air and the moon, and the delicate precision in her slender fingers, and the controlled intensity of her breath, and I loved all of it.

No one had ever played music just for me before, and all I could do was enjoy it, disconcerting as it was. But when the music stopped, and I waited, she didn’t look up at me.

“Heather,” I called from my window. But still she didn’t look up. She got on with putting away her clarinet, and her music stand, and her flashlight, and her chair, efficient and businesslike as if she didn’t know I was up there only half breathing.

I went to bed telling myself, I will not, will not, will not pick over this with my brain, not when I’m going to see Heather in first period tomorrow. I will not.

So I tried to get to sleep—and picked over it with my brain until, an hour later, I remembered that I’d sworn not to do that. And so on until both me and my brain were mercifully too exhausted to do anything more.

I
turned over in my head what to do next, not pedaling to get anywhere but just to give myself something to do. I had stayed for twelve days. I had a hundred and eighty dollars from working at Pedal Power and a little more left over from my babysitting money.

I would not make it across Oklahoma and Texas and Arizona and New Mexico and California in the time that I had left. Even if I tried, it would only be stupid and dangerous. The sensible thing was to figure out where was the nearest place I could get on a Greyhound pointed in the direction of home. It probably would be less than one eighty for the ticket and food, and that way I wouldn’t have to talk to my parents about everything that had gone wrong. I would be able to pretend that everything was okay.

I didn’t do that.

The hard-coiled stubborn thing inside me said
no
, and I didn’t have the energy to argue.

I started pedaling, hard. So hard I could feel it in muscles and skin and bone, hot, painful. I burned from nothing and into nothing. I didn’t have a place to go anymore, I didn’t have a reason to go anymore—because I had betrayed all that—and I knew I wouldn’t get there. I’d be more likely to roast under the desert sun. So there was nothing except just to keep going forward, as long as there was any forward to go to.

I didn’t check my maps. I forgot all the usual advice: Drink before you’re thirsty, eat before you’re hungry, stop before you’re tired. I didn’t drink, didn’t eat, didn’t stop. I had become a spark of aimless and unstoppable determination.

Stretching legs that hadn’t really been stretched in nearly two weeks, not bothering to pace myself, I just pedaled. Legs up and down, forward and back, remembering the feel of water against my face, and the speed of the wind through my hair, and what it was like to fly so fast under no power but the strength of my own limbs. I felt my mind go blank, and my heart as well, and there was no need anymore to think or grieve or blame myself or anyone else. There was just existence, and survival, and speed.

Half an hour out, it seemed that the world was well and truly deserted, and I managed to hide myself inside a copse of trees and change my clothes. My jeans were biting at me from half a dozen different angles, and the skin inside my thighs had been rubbed red and raw. I didn’t notice until then that I wasn’t wearing my helmet—I buckled it on and tried not to flash back to the dire warnings of what will happen to your head if you don’t wear one. Now that I finally had a chance to catch my breath, my hunger and my melancholy rose up over me like a shroud.

I drank down all the water that I had left and kept going.

The hunger and fatigue came over me gradually. I hadn’t slept, hadn’t eaten since the ice cream the night before. The whole world started to seem dim and strange, as if I was traveling through a postapocalyptic landscape where there were no people at all, and I could only keep going until I died of thirst; or maybe I wouldn’t even be able to die, and I would just keep going on forever by myself, alone in a wasteland.

Finally, somehow, I found a decrepit gas station that charged me a ridiculous sum for three bottles of water, a bag of nuts, and a suspicious sandwich, which I wolfed down—it actually tasted slightly better than it looked—before starting back on my way.

When I collapsed, exhausted, with the bloody red of the setting sun in my eyes, I hardly knew where I was or where I’d been or how long I’d been going. There was a dull ache in my legs and my back that told me I’d probably done more than I should have, and that I’d regret it in the morning. Around me was a patchwork of fields, no different from what I’d been riding through all day, though a little more brown and yellow, and less green.

As I crawled into my tent, I was thinking about how dumb I’d been, how I was probably lost now, how I’d barely be able to move in the morning. But sleep fell over me before I had time to think about that.

I woke up with stiff muscles complaining in my legs and back and arms and neck. But I still had nothing in my mind except to just keep going and keep going and keep going, and I did, taking the sun as my guide and not bothering to figure out where I was until I finally limped into Tulsa. On the map, it didn’t look like a huge distance, but I’d covered a hundred and sixty miles in the space of two days. Far too much for my body to handle.

It meant that if I could just keep going like this, then I would make it after all. Distance equals velocity times time; I kept adjusting the time (I could spend more hours on the road, I could skip the break in the hottest part of the day) and the velocity (I could go faster. I could just make myself go faster). And it maybe, almost, barely worked out. I didn’t know whether that gave me hope or despair, and I tried not to think too much about the implications.

I was starving, and thirsty, and I thought that I would fall apart if I had to walk another step farther. So I checked myself into the first motel I found, and didn’t even bother to get my packs off my bike before I went up to my room and fell into bed. There was still a part of my heart that winced whenever I poked at it, and whenever I stopped for long enough to catch my breath, I started poking again. I kept telling myself that things would look better in the morning, and then rolling over to try once more to go to sleep.

Things did look better in the morning, kind of. I had air-conditioning, for one thing, and a clean blanket, and the sun streaming in through the plastic blinds, and inane morning chatter on the TV.

I gorged myself on bacon and pancakes in the motel restaurant, and then I went out around the back to get my bike.

Huh, that’s weird, I thought at first. I thought for sure that’s where I parked it. Behind the hotel where it wasn’t in sight of everyone who might come wandering by, securely affixed to the metal stairs. But then, I wasn’t thinking all that clearly the night before. If I was thinking, I would’ve brought some of my stuff inside instead of leaving it all on packs on the bike. Maybe I locked it somewhere else and forgot.

I walked the perimeter of the property, casting my eyes everywhere, toward trees and lampposts and anything that looked solid enough to lock something to.

I walked it twice. A bike doesn’t walk off just by itself, and it’s too big to lose, and even if I hadn’t been smart enough to lock up my panniers I did lock my bike with a four-star lock, guaranteed against theft in sixteen states.

Finally something caught my eye, lying balefully in the grass: I picked up a sawed-through piece of a bike lock.

I didn’t want to believe that it could be mine. But I had to be sure, so I took out my key and slid it into the keyhole.

It turned. The broken pieces of the lock fell apart into the grass.

 

 

As I started to get my head around the impossible—my bike was gone, stolen—I tried to work things through in my head. At first I had trouble thinking anything but Ohgodno, Ohgodno, Ohgodno, Ohgodno, and then various chains of thoughts started to float up to the surface.

But who on earth would steal two plastic boxes containing absolutely nothing useful? A handful of weeds and feathers and roadside debris, and ashes? They had to still be around here somewhere. Unless the thief had left without checking the panniers—but that didn’t make any sense, they were too heavy.

I forgot, for the moment, about figuring out food, or shelter, or transportation; I was still locked into a state of panic. In that moment, nothing at all seemed as important as finding Julia’s things—it was too big to deal with all at once, so all I could do was chew at the nearest corner. I set myself to walking in loose concentric circles in the brush around the motel. Time and again, something glinted at me, and I realized that it was only a bit of trash, a food wrapper.

And then, finally, something made me draw in my breath and try not to hope. Two clear boxes, dumped carelessly on the grass. But the lips had stayed firmly sealed; everything was there. Everything was fine. I counted my treasures; I counted them again. I wouldn’t have known exactly how many there were supposed to be, but I had my feather, and my Hot Wheels car, and my grimy little action figure, and my bit of candle, and all of a sudden I was okay. I was okay, even though I had no money and no transportation and no clothing that I wasn’t wearing.

I let out one great sigh of relief that started me crying again, this time in stifled little sniffles. I had checked out of my room already. I didn’t have a place to have a nervous breakdown, or the luxury of being able to cry. All I could do was blink at my tears.

The best and the worst part of it all was that I knew exactly what I was going to do, because there weren’t any other options. I wasn’t going to get far on ten dollars—and the credit card was so that I could have some alternative to being homeless and stranded if worst should come to worst, not so that I could have a happy fun summer vacation on my parents’ dime. That left the bus, and the train.

A dignified defeat, at least. I could charge the trip, and pay them back later—and of course I would have to call my parents, to explain what was going on.

I got to the bus depot in little spurts, stopping strangers on the street for directions. There I was, a teenage girl, no possessions, looking for a bus to get out of here, looking like a runaway or an addict for the anxiety on my face and the way I looked like I hadn’t slept in years. I saw people turn away when I tried to approach. Not that I could blame them.

The bus depot depressed me. Sticky concrete on the floor, patches of old dried gum, families huddled together. A pair of kids fighting over whose turn it was to play the Game Boy. I started hunting around for schedules, and as I was standing there, not really waiting in any particular line, a woman in a bus uniform came up and asked me if I needed help.

“No,” I said. And then “Yes,” and then “No” again.

I couldn’t handle it. I felt bent and broken; this me who was bravely going to the bus station and being very independent and mature wasn’t real. It was crumbling from under me and now I was emptied out. I didn’t have the strength to get home, and I didn’t have the strength to ask for help.

I went outside and tried to keep myself from crying, wiping my eyes over and over until I thought I could speak again.

I took the cell phone out of my pocket to call Mom. No. My pride was too much. Before I had decided to, I was dialing Ollie’s number.

“Cassie,” he said as he picked up. “I haven’t heard a word from you in, like, forever. I was starting to wonder if you were dead.”

“No,” I said quietly. “Not dead yet.”

“So that’s something, then.” I could just about hear his nervous smile. The way he was trying to ignore anything that had ever happened between us.

“You can say no to what I’m going to ask you,” I said. “It’s okay, because I can still call my parents, and I can still get a bus ticket, and it’s really—I guess we’re not good enough friends for me to impose on you like this.”

“I haven’t said no yet.”

I stayed quiet for a while, choking down my nervousness. “My bike’s gone. Somebody sawed through the lock.”

Silence, for long enough that I worried that my phone had dropped the call. “That thing’s worth more than my car!”

“And I . . . It’s not like I don’t have any other way to get home, Ollie. But I don’t know how to keep going on by myself. I need somebody to not say I told you so.”

“Where are you?”