After a couple weeks I don’t care who sees me. I don’t care what they think. Sometimes it’s fun to pretend to be homeless, to be wild like Timothy Manning and his friends, always covered in dirt and ready for a fight. I like the look of pity the old man from Plaid Pantry gives me when he finds me in the alley rooting through the dumpster. He says, “Listen, you can’t go in there,” like he’s talking to an animal. I feel the urge to hiss or bare my fangs or scurry away on all fours.
I walk my mini-Moto around the neighborhood with a plastic bag tied around the frame, and when Derek sees me, he says, “You look like a bag lady! Ha-ha!” He chants, “Mick-ell, you smell, you smell like fuckin’ hell!”
Paul says to ignore him because he’s just a little shit anyway, and even though he’s not supposed to tell me this because it’s “anonymous,” he says Derek’s dad was in the program but disappeared and nobody’s seen him for a long time.
When Christmas comes, I have seventy-five dollars of can, bottle, lawn, and chore money saved in a barrel-shaped piggy bank that Paul keeps at the top of the closet in their bedroom. Grandma and Grandpa send me a check for fifty dollars that’s supposed to go to my college fund but Mom says we can put college off this year. Dad and Bonnie send me a check for another thirty-five with a note that says, “For the bike!”
Two days after Christmas, Paul takes me to Fred Meyer and we return at last with one yellow-and-blue Huffy Pro Thunder dirt bike in the back of his black mini-truck with the camper shell. I crawl into the back to wheel it out, careful not to scrape the new reflective pedals against the black metal truck bed. I bounce the rear tire lightly on the ground and pedal it up to the top of the hill on Breys Avenue to test it out, riding it down the block like a golden chariot. I feel the hot sweat on the back of my neck go cold in the crisp air as I fly down the street, the wind in my hair, the lightness of the frame, the feeling of escape, of freedom, an endlessness, no road too long, no destination too far. My world expands in front of me.
Tony is angry, standing arms folded on the porch when I get back. He says, “Why does he get a new bike?”
“He saved for it. He earned it. That’s how it works.” Paul closes the tailgate, replacing the blanket he keeps in the back just in case he needs a place to sleep.
“But why does he get one and I don’t? I could’ve earned it too.”
“You still can if you want.”
“He’s such a sneaky little shit. I do more chores than him. He doesn’t deserve a bike.”
I ignore him and pedal toward the school.
There is a circular concrete fountain the size of a swimming pool in the center of the wooded park behind Englewood Elementary. In the summer, on the weekends, the pipe that sticks up from the center shoots water ten feet in the air while kids gather under it to run and scream. Tony and I ran through it last year on a hot day, taking our shoes off to jump in. He was nicer then. We were on the same team. Now the fountain is empty and the park quiet, filled with the hush of wind through the needles on the big evergreens. Patches of sunlight cover the ground in yellow splotches as I ride down the dirt trail, jumping over the big knotty roots that cross it. I’m surrounded by the smell of pine and fresh mud. I ride back to the school.
I’m twisting through the hopscotch courts painted on the asphalt, in and out, over the three and around the five, when I see them. Timothy Manning and two older boys, both in dirty T-shirts, tossing a chewed-up green Nerf football in the center of the field. Timothy is skinny and small but carries himself like a much larger boy, his head high and his arms out. I heard he lives in a group home. Though they don’t look related, there’s a resemblance between him and the two boys as they toss the ball between them, a kind of low-hanging weariness to the jaw and the eyes, always a little dirt on the cheeks, alert like a pack of dogs.
They see me.
“Hey, man, nice bike!”
I pretend I can’t hear them and study the hard plastic yellow mags on the front tire, which are so much sturdier than the metal spokes on my old red mini-bike.
“I said nice bike. Can I see it?” Timothy Manning walks straight toward me.
“I just got it. It’s not broken in yet.”
“I don’t care. Let me see it. C’mon.” He grabs the handlebars. I yank them away and take off toward the back of the big yellow school building. I can hear their footsteps behind me, trying to imagine it like a game of tag, like everyone’s just messing around and I’m in on it. I cut through the rear parking lot and make a left into the breezeway between the school and the gym, thinking I can cut back through the park and get away but when I look up, the two boys block my exit in front of me. I stop.
“Don’t be such a wimp. We just want to see your bike. You should learn to share.” Timothy Manning walks up behind me, pushing me sideways on the concrete. I get up, holding my bike unsteadily as he grabs the seat. I don’t know what to do.
Behind the shaggy black hair of the boy in the dirty purple shirt, I see Tony emerge suddenly in the sunlight of the breezeway. I can’t believe he’s here. There’s a cosmic sense of timing to it. My big brother. The sixth grader. He’s twice the size of Timothy Manning.
I scream, “That’s my brother! Leave me alone!”
Tony has a strange look on his face. A kind of blankness as he walks, arms down as if in some kind of trance, right toward Timothy Manning and me.
“Oh, so you’re the big brother? You here to stick up for this little bitch? We’re supposed to be scared of you?”
Tony’s face reveals nothing. He is calm. He walks in slow motion right up to Timothy Manning and says, “No, I hate that little shit.” He picks up my yellow-and-blue Huffy Pro Thunder that I dug through trash to buy—seventy-five allowances, three thousand aluminum cans—and throws it into the brick wall of the gym. I watch as the handlebars break in half and the bike falls lamely on the red painted concrete. He walks away.
“Haaaaah ha aha ahah ha!” the boys scream. “Your brother hates you! Ha aha! What’d you think? He was gonna help? Whatcha gonna do? Cry? You gonna cry, you little bitch? You little baby.”
There’s a kind of cracking, something like a brittle bark that breaks in two while I stare at the bike on the ground and catch the back of my brother’s long blond hair as he disappears behind the gym.
I don’t understand it. I can’t form words or thoughts. My busted bike. My brother who is not on my side. I push through the boys to the corner where I stare at the broken Huffy. After a moment, I feel a rock in my back. Then another. I don’t move. I don’t even mind the rocks. I feel their hands on me as they each push me and walk away. I can’t take my eyes off the bike on the ground.
When were we together? Did I imagine that? Did I just imagine we survived something? That we came here to hide? He yells at Mom and she corrects him, telling him to control his temper. She uses those words she uses for the patients she treats at the mental hospital, those soon-to-be ex-con Dope Fiends from the state penitentiary in her “recovery” program. Terms like “borderline,” “violent,” “impulse control,” and “attention deficit.” She tells me about them because she tells me too much. She sees it in Tony. She tells me not to tell him but he knows. Of course he does. He sees it in her eyes. He is her science experiment, her personal psychology project. Like an animal in a cage, he’s supposed to respond to “positive reinforcement” or the establishment of a “token economy” with “strict boundaries.” He’s supposed to learn to say the sentence “I’m sorry, Mom, you are right and I am wrong.” When what he probably wants to say is, “Where were you? I was alone in that place for seven years.” I know he thinks I am on her side because of it. Because of the lines I say, the ones she wants to hear about what kind of family we are, what kind of mother she is, the lines I know to repeat since watching Phil nearly die in the street knowing there are worse things and fearing those things more, to be like those family roles that children take on, the ones we read about in the Al-Anon literature for “children in families struggling with addiction” that she leaves around the house. I am the chosen child, the superchild, the one who can fly. Tony is the angry child, the scapegoat, the one who must sink.