on three we take off, me pedaling and him pushing. I’m pedaling as fast as I can, and the bike is wobbling, and just when I think I’m going to go over, he steadies it.
“I’ll be right beside you until you get so good at it you’re ready to fly down the beach.”
We go like this for a while—me pedaling fast, him pushing. The bike wobbling, him holding on, my feet hitting the ground. Over and over again. Nothing on earth but Miah and me and this bike. Every time, I hit the brake too hard and nearly fly over the handlebars.
“Go easy on the brake. Worse comes to worst, you’re going to fall. But if you do, screw it. You’ll be fine.”
“I don’t want to fall.”
“But you might. The sooner you accept that fact, the better, Captain.”
“This is some bullshit life lesson, isn’t it?”
“I’m just here to teach you how to ride a motherfuckin’ bike.” He wears an easy grin, like, Everything’s good, I’m just messing around. But there’s a sudden edge to his voice that I’ve never heard before.
“Whoa.”
“What?”
“That.” I point at him. “That tone. What’s up with you?”
“Nothing.”
“Bullshit. It’s not like you to blow me off and then pretend nothing happened and then be all, Everything’s great, everything’s fine.”
“Maybe you just don’t know me very well.” And it feels almost like he’s testing me.
“Maybe if you’d tell me what’s going on with you, I’d know you better.”
“Listen, I’m good, Captain. I’m fucking great. I’ll be even greater if you learn how to ride this bike.”
I narrow my eyes at him, just to let him know that I don’t buy any of it, not for a second.
“Now come on. Let’s do this.”
“Fine,” I say. “But we are not done talking.”
I take off, mostly to get away from him. He runs beside me. “Pedal hard, pedal fast.” I pedal harder and faster so that he can’t keep up. The last thing I hear him yell is, “Chin up. Eyes forward.”
And then it goes quiet. I’m pedaling and pedaling, and in a few seconds I realize he’s no longer there. For one instant, I take it in—the air on my face, the wild, exhilarating rush of sailing past the world. I am completely and utterly free. I want to keep going. I want to go faster and faster until I go soaring off into the sky like in E.T. I want to fly above the earth and the clouds and the sun.
Suddenly the pedals are spinning too fast and furious for my feet. I brake too hard and nearly go over, a dust cloud billowing around me. But I steady myself, digging my feet into the road, coughing up a lung, and when I turn around, I see him sprinting toward me.
He nearly tackles me, and we’re laughing and I’m jumping up and down, only I get tangled in the bike, and then we both go toppling over into the dirt of the road. We lie there catching our breath, and the trees and sky are our ceiling.
We blink up into the blue. I tell myself to let the silence be. To let him talk when he wants to. If he wants to.
I quiet my heart and my pulse. I quiet my brain, which is saying, He’s changed his mind. That’s what yesterday was about. You don’t really know him. You’ll never know him, no matter how naked you both are. This is what you get when you let yourself care too much. Even if he says the thing you dread most—“I don’t like you anymore; I never liked you or loved you because you are unlovable”—you are going to be okay.
I tell myself to live right now in that blue and to stop bracing myself for the worst. I lie perfectly still until the blue surrounds me, until it moves through my veins and holds me there, part of it.
From the ground he says, “My mom had a panic attack in a grocery store last week. My sister called the inn yesterday to say she’s been in bed since it happened. She hasn’t gone to work or eaten, and Kenzie’s trying to look after everything. I had no idea.”
“Is she okay? Your mom?”
“She will be, to the extent that she’s ever okay. The first episode I remember, I was six, only I didn’t know what it was. I thought she was playing a game….” His voice trails off. “So that’s where I was yesterday. I had to