Wild Awake - By Hilary T. Smith Page 0,46

it. Even if he doesn’t think so now, I’m pretty sure Skunk really means it. Or used to mean it, anyway. I eye the bass again.

“Make you a deal. You bring that bass back inside and I’ll consider fixing my brake pads.”

Skunk cocks his head, wrench in hand. “What kind of a deal is that?”

“What do you mean, what kind of a deal is that? You indulge my ridiculous neurosis and I’ll indulge yours. It’s perfectly fair.”

Skunk smiles, and when he does he looks less like a meaty thug and more like a big, shaggy bison.

“I’ll think about it,” he says.

chapter twenty-two

I’m sitting at the piano, listening to the metronome tick. But tonight, for some reason, I just can’t make myself practice. The piano sounds too bright, like a voice in a commercial. Instead of melting into its embrace, I chafe at it, like a hug from a relative you secretly hate.

I remember my first-ever piano lesson with Dr. Scaliteri, a month after Sukey died. She stared at me for a long time, perched on her silver ball, and asked me a question that drove a wedge between that moment and everything that came before it: “Great art requires great discipline, Kiri. Are you ready to be disciplined?”

She had me play nothing but scales that day, up and down the piano in every key, making me do them again and again if I fumbled a single note. My despair at getting them right was a strange sort of rescue from the larger despair clawing at my life, like wrestling with a difficult crossword puzzle when you’re alone in the wilderness with two broken legs and no hope of making it out alive.

Great art requires great discipline.

I lift my hands back onto the keys and grudgingly start on a scale. But tonight, it’s not discipline I need. I remember the time I asked Sukey where she went at night when she snuck out. It was the summer before Mom and Dad kicked her out, back when you could still hear music pounding behind her door anytime you walked by. I was sitting on her bed, watching her paint, her black brush flicking over a rectangular canvas, her hair pulled back in one of my fuzzy pink hair elastics because she was always losing her own.

“I go to Kits Beach and watch the ships,” said Sukey.

“Why?”

She shrugged. “Because they’re beautiful.”

“That’s really all you do?”

I’d been expecting boyfriends, drinking, all the usual things Sukey got in trouble for. But somehow this felt more luminously dangerous, more thrilling, like swallowing fire.

She dabbed her brush in violet and touched it to a spot of green. The lizard Sukey was painting seemed to come alive and wriggle, as if her touch was all it took to make it real. She smiled.

“That’s really all I do.”

The memory kills me. I pull my hands off the keys and stand up. I’ll go for a bike ride. Just a little one. A starter adventure. I’ll go out and explore and find some ships of my own.

At first, I stick to familiar streets, making a wide circle around the neighborhood. The leaves in the treetops form a starry tunnel overhead, bathed now and then in orange lamplight. I turn left when I get to Arbutus, then right and then left again. Pretty soon I’m in a neighborhood I’ve never been to before, with brick houses and flower beds so perfect it looks like they were unpacked, fully grown, from a cardboard box. I roll past a park where people are playing late-night tennis under spotlights and a short strip of restaurants where the smell of frying onions is sharp in the air.

Each street I turn down is a revelation. With every push of my pedals, I can feel the map getting bigger, new squares and lines and landmarks appearing like new levels in a video game. When midnight rolls around, I’m way down in East Van, cruising down Commercial Drive. I roll down the street, eyeing the record stores and hippie clothing shops and dimly lit bars. Up ahead on my left, I can see a small crowd of people gathered in a playground, all of them on bicycles—fixies and road bikes and one recumbent covered in yellow reflectors. With their blinking lights and shiny helmets, they look like a flock of fireflies. I swoop closer to get a better look. There’s maybe twenty people, mostly college kids, with some people my age and a few older-looking riders thrown in