* * *
—
A sunny Saturday morning in April was something Bicycle usually savored. But her pale face showed no savoring when the big yellow Friendship Factory bus pulled up to the monastery. She clutched her bulky backpack to her chest while the driver got out and helped Sister Wanda attach Clunk to the luggage rack on the rear of the bus. Bicycle had insisted that the only way she could stand to go to this loathsome camp was if she could bring her bike with her, and Sister Wanda had finally given in.
Sister Wanda gave her a hug and a going-away present, a book titled Wheel Wisdom: Great Thoughts from Great Cyclists. “You probably won’t even get a chance to read this until you return, you’ll be so busy having fun with your new friends.”
Bicycle didn’t trust herself to talk, so she nodded silently. She squatted down to unzip her backpack and slide the paperback book inside.
As Bicycle stood back up, Sister Wanda continued, “I know you aren’t completely sure about this, child, but I’m sure enough for both of us. Think of what you will learn from this experience.”
Brother Otto was also there to see her off and he gave her his most sympathetic smile and a brown bag filled with snacks for the trip. When he leaned in for a hug, he whispered, “Good luck.”
Bicycle nodded again.
The bus was already filled with naughty little boys throwing spit-soaked wads of paper at one another’s heads and nasty little girls making fun of one another’s shoes. These were the children who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, or even perhaps shouldn’t make friends without a camp to force them to do so.
Bicycle sat down in the one available seat, her backpack in her lap with her helmet clipped onto a side strap. The boy next to her was wearing a T-shirt that said BE GLAD I’M NOT YOUR KID. He stuck a moist wad of paper in her hair.
The girl across the aisle looked down at Bicycle’s sneakers and squeaked, “Ewwww, those shoes have no sparkle!”
Bicycle tried to ignore them, but it was difficult.
The bus pulled away from the curb. Sister Wanda and Brother Otto waved good-bye until it was out of sight. “She’ll thank me someday,” Sister Wanda declared. “I hope,” she added under her breath.
* * *
—
The bus trundled through the traffic-clogged streets. After a few minutes, Bicycle got up and approached the driver. “Excuse me, sir, but could we stop? I really need to use a bathroom.”
“Awww, why dincha go before we left?” the driver asked. “We have to stay on schedule, ya know.”
“I’m sorry, but I really need to go,” she replied, shifting from one foot to another.
Another girl overheard her and chimed in, “Yeah, I need to go, too.” Then a chorus of voices started in the back of the bus. “Stop the bus! We need to go!”
The bus driver grumbled, “Kids!” but he pulled over at the next gas station. “Make it quick!” he yelled.
Bicycle grabbed her backpack and ran off the bus, but she didn’t head for the bathrooms with the rest of the boys and girls. She went to the back of the bus and had Clunk free from the luggage rack in no time. Before anyone noticed what she was doing, she’d attached her backpack to Clunk’s rack with a bungee cord, stuck her helmet on her head, and started pedaling away in the opposite direction of the bus and the Friendship Factory.
* * *
—
Early that evening, one of the monks went in to tidy up Bicycle’s room. He found a note under the pillow when he was making the bed. After he read it, he brought it straight to Sister Wanda in the kitchen, where she and Brother Otto were baking oatmeal cookies.
Sister Wanda read the note once, then twice, and fell back into one of the kitchen chairs. “Silent Saints preserve us all, especially this little girl!”
Dear Sister Wanda,
I figure you will be hearing from the camp pretty soon that I never showed up, so I wanted to tell you not to worry. I know it’s important to you that I make a friend. Maybe you are right. But the Friendship Factory is not the place I’m going to find one. There is only one friend that I want to make, and that is Zbig Sienkiewicz. Clunk and I are going to California to find him. I’ll send you postcards along the way to let you know I’m okay.
Bicycle
Sister Wanda sat staring at Bicycle’s note without seeing it, lost in thought. “She doesn’t want to make friends with any of the nice children I bring to meet her, but now she wants to take off for California to meet this mustache-faced bike racer!” Then she demanded of the oatmeal box in frustration, “How does that foolish child expect to get across the country by herself?”
The Top Monk walked into the kitchen and read Bicycle’s note over her shoulder. He squinted in thought. “Sandwich,” he finally said.
Sister Wanda turned around to face him. “If you’re saying we need to send the police after her, I think that will push her to do something even more foolish. No, no, she’s going to come to her senses.” She rubbed her eyes with both hands. “Don’t a lot of children try running away from home at one point or another? They eventually cool off and come back, ready to make amends.” She exhaled slowly. “She’s a smart girl. She’ll soon realize that bicycling across the country isn’t something a person just up and does. I bet she’ll be home later tonight.”
“Sandwich,” the Top Monk said again.
This time, Sister Wanda wasn’t the least bit sure what he meant.
* * *
—
Bicycle didn’t feel foolish. She had thought and thought about ways to get out of spending spring break at the Friendship Factory. But it wasn’t until she’d gotten the photo from Zbig signed Your Friend, Zbig Sienkiewicz that it hit her: all that really mattered to Sister Wanda was that she make a friend, right? It shouldn’t matter if she made a friend at the Friendship Factory or somewhere else—like California. And she had a perfect way to get there: Clunk would take her across the country.
She’d studied U.S. geography last year with Sister Wanda, so she knew how many states lay between her and California. After staring at the picture of Zbig for a while, pondering the best way to get from the East Coast to the West Coast, she’d headed to the public library to make her own cross-country cycling map. She went to the reference section, took a pile of atlases to a table, and spent a long afternoon with a ruler and a calculator and the photocopy machine.
Sister Wanda’s rigorous instruction on how to read a map legend paid off. Bicycle knew that the thickest, straightest lines on the atlas maps were the interstate highways, where cars would roar by at high speeds and no bicyclists were allowed. Instead, she looked for the skinniest lines, the ones that meandered a more indirect way across each state—the local byways marked CR for “country route” or RR for “rural road.” A few states even had trails designed solely for bicycles and pedestrians. She traced those routes in green highlighter across each photocopy and stapled them into a thick packet. Adding up the mileage for each state, Bicycle figured she had to ride almost four thousand miles to get to California. She needed to be there on July 8. That meant she’d need to average about fifty miles a day. How hard could that be? she asked herself. Zbig and those other racers ride over a hundred miles every day for weeks on end. Fifty miles should be a piece of cake.
When Sister Wanda told her that she needed to pack for camp, Bicycle had instead secretly packed supplies for a long-distance bike trip. She raided the kitchen pantry and put bags of crackers, dried fruits, chocolate, cereal, and beef jerky in a pile. She folded her favorite T-shirts, leggings, and shorts; rolled up an old wool blanket; found a washcloth and soap so she could wash herself and her clothes on the go; and added a toothbrush and toothpaste, a flashlight, a penknife, bungee cords, some postcard stamps, and a tiny yellow spiral notebook with several pens to her pile. From the monastery’s library, she’d taken a pocket waterproof Polish-English dictionary so she could talk to Zbig in his native language when they met. Her photocopied maps fit nicely inside a gallon-sized Ziplock
plastic bag, along with a roll of duct tape to secure the map bag to her handlebars. She put her saved-up allowance money, $154.20, into an envelope and wrapped it in several layers of underwear. For Clunk, she put in an Allen wrench set, chain lube, a bike pump, and a tire repair kit. She covered the supplies with two extra-large rain ponchos, planning to use the ponchos as a kind of makeshift tent on the road, and crammed the whole wad into her backpack. She leaned two water bottles against it to slide into Clunk’s bottle cages. “Ready as I’ll ever be,” she judged.
The night before leaving, she went to bed and listened to the clock in the hall chime midnight. Too tense to sleep, she kept thinking about whether she ought to go through with her plan.
I showed up at the monastery in a T-shirt labeled BICYCLE, didn’t I? Therefore, if I am going to make any friends in life, they are probably going to be bicyclists. So why not start out with the best bicyclist in the world as my first friend? He’s even got the word NICE in his last name. When it works out perfectly and Zbig and I become great friends, Sister Wanda won’t be angry. She’ll see why I did what I did.
Yet no matter how many times she went over this in her mind, Bicycle wasn’t convinced that Sister Wanda wouldn’t be angry forever after this. This was a big deal.
When she’d climbed on the Friendship Factory bus, though, she knew she had to do it. Right or wrong, she needed to get away from those…those…those kids.
Now she was on the road, moving as fast as she could. It was too late to wonder if she’d done the right thing. She focused instead on pedaling the first mile of the four thousand that lay ahead.
Bicycle wound through city streets and biked over the Fourteenth Street Bridge. She felt a little thrill after crossing the Potomac River and realizing she’d left D.C. behind and entered Virginia, her first state. California, here I come, Bicycle thought, squeezing Clunk’s handlebars.
She joined a paved bike path with a few other cyclists. According to her map, this path would last for about twenty miles, which would be the longest she’d ever ridden in her life. After that, she planned to pedal thirty more miles to make her goal for the day.
Pacing herself, she stopped after an hour at a water fountain and took a drink. As she started refilling her water bottle from the fountain, she heard the unmistakable whirring-whizzing noise of bicycle spokes behind her. She turned to watch three cyclists come racing up dressed in matching red jerseys with the word SPIM’S in white across the front. They gave her serious nods and one-finger waves and were gone down the path in a moment. Another, much flabbier cyclist dressed in the same uniform came wheezing up more slowly. He was pedaling a very expensive skinny racing bike that creaked and groaned under his bulk. A leather briefcase sat in a basket attached to the handlebars.
“Good morning,” he panted, nodding at Bicycle and stopping his bike. “Did some other riders come by here?” Beads of sweat dripped off his nose and chin. He pulled a small dark-blue sponge from his jersey’s back pocket and dabbed at his face.
Bicycle said, “Yes, sir, they just came by. You can probably catch them if you hurry.”
“I certainly can,” he agreed. But instead of following the other riders, he rested his haunches back on his bike seat. He lifted a water bottle from his basket and drank its last dregs.
Bicycle took the bottle from him and started refilling it from the water fountain.
“How kind,” the man said. “My company, Spim’s Splendid Sponges, started a program this month encouraging employees to bike to work instead of driving. As I am Mr. Spim, company president, I felt I needed to set a good example for my workers, and so forth.”
Bicycle handed him back the bottle.
After a long drink, he asked, “Are you on your way to soccer practice or some such thing?”
“No, sir,” said Bicycle. She thought his sponge company must be a pretty great place if they wanted employees to ride bikes to work. “I’m on my way to San Francisco to attend the Blessing of the Bicycles, and I’d better keep moving. I’ve got more than forty miles to go today if I’m going to stick to my schedule.”
Mr. Spim let out a long whistle. “The Golden State of California? Excellent! Do you know, when I was younger, I rode my bicycle from Great Britain to Africa and back again? I pedaled in circles around the decks of the ferries, so crossing the English Channel and the Strait of Gibraltar still counted as cycling miles, you see. Those were the days!” He slapped his side, and his considerable tummy jiggled and wiggled. He looked down at it with some disbelief, as if he’d been ambushed by this unfamiliar flabby body somewhere between Africa and here. “Ahem. Well. Tell me about your journey. Do you have maps? Places to stay along the way?”
“I do have maps, and I’m going to camp out with my bicycle,” Bicycle answered. “I planned it all last week.”
Mr. Spim gave her a pleased look. “A single week of planning, eh? Well, what more do you need when adventure awaits? I once led an expedition to the South Pole with one night of planning. What fun!” He smiled, remembering. Then his smile faded. “But those sorts of things are best done when a person is young and has inherited lots of money. It’s amazing how quickly funds run out when adventuring. At some point, a man must accept that he must work for a living. And seek excitement and challenge wherever possible, like on the bike path to one’s sponge factory, for example.” Another rider wearing the same red-and-white jersey came buzzing by them. “Oh, rot! I must continue slogging onward. Can’t let those employees of mine get too far ahead. I also don’t want to delay you,” he said. “I am not one to stand in the way of a journey. But before I go, I’m willing to share some of my traveling advice with you. I’ve sailed some seas and trekked some trails, let me tell you! So, if you’re willing to listen…” He paused hopefully.
Bicycle put an expression of polite listening on her face.
Mr. Spim harrumphed and puffed out his chest. He held up one finger. “First, don’t be afraid to eat strange-looking things. Strange-looking to the eye is often heaven to the tongue! Second”—he held up a second finger—“always have a sponge or two close at hand. Many’s the time a sponge has saved my bacon.” He clicked open his briefcase and handed her a small pack of assorted sponges. “Third”—he raised one more finger and waggled all three of them at Bicycle—“never, and I mean never, turn your back on a zebra. Those things may look like pretty striped horses, but they can be really ferocious when they want to be! Take it from an intrepid old traveler!”
Bicycle couldn’t think of a response to this, so she relied on her training from Intermediate Listening. “Yes,” she said gravely, trying to nod like an intrepid young traveler.
Mr. Spim put his foot on a pedal. “I believe wonderful things are in store for you. Best of luck, young adventurer!” With a glow of resolve in his eyes, he rode off.
Bicycle watched him go and said to Clunk, “See? Our first day and I already know to be careful around zebras. This is going to be much better than that horrible Friendship Factory ever could have been.” She shoved the sponges into the top of her backpack and followed after Mr. Spim. Although she expected to catch up to him wheezing alongside the path, she didn’t see him again. Maybe offering advice had given him a second wind.
When the bike path ended, she ate some dried fruit and crackers to celebrate. “This is it, partner, we’ve officially gone farther than we ever have before,” she said to Clunk. “This isn’t that hard at all. We’ll be in California in no time!”
Several hours and hundreds of pedal revolutions later, Bicycle reached a WELCOME sign on the outskirts of Manassas, Virginia. Bicycle knew from her American history class with Sister Wanda that Manassas was the site of a huge Civil War battle, and she followed some historic markers that pointed her down Route 29 to the battlefield itself. She looked around at the neatly mown green grass dotted with trees and decided it would be a nice spot to stop for the night.
She pulled off the road and into a stand of maple trees. “We don’t want anyone notic
ing we’re here,” she said to Clunk as she unfastened her backpack from the bike’s rear rack. “Sister Wanda might send someone to look for us, and we’re not ready to be found.”
Bicycle picked the tree most hidden from view to camp under and, using her bungee cords, fashioned a makeshift tent by securing one side of her green rain poncho to her bike and the other side to the tree. She laid the second poncho down on the ground with the blanket on top and stretched out. It felt wonderful to lie down. She chewed on a piece of jerky as the sun set and thought about getting out the Wheel Wisdom book to read, but her eyelids were unusually heavy. “Maybe I’ll go to sleep now, Clunk, and then we’ll be ready to get started early tomorrow.” She yawned, the shadow of Clunk’s frame lengthening over her as the sun dropped below the horizon.
* * *
—
“What did you say?” Bicycle asked sleepily, opening her eyes. She felt quite disoriented, expecting to see the white walls and wooden floor of her room at the monastery, but instead finding herself surrounded by nothing but dark and the smells of grass and wind and damp. Then she pushed herself up on one elbow, banged her forehead on Clunk’s pedal, and recalled exactly where she was.
“Owwwww,” she complained, rubbing her head.
“Ohhhhhhh,” called a low whispery voice.
Bicycle’s eyes went wide, and she jerked around to face whoever or whatever had made the noise. There was nothing there. She stared into the shadows. Wait—what was that? Sort of a misty movement? She kept staring and tried to remember if she had packed a flashlight in her backpack, and where exactly her backpack was at this moment, and wondered if she’d bang her forehead on Clunk again if she moved around to look for it. Before she worked any of that out, her eyes adjusted to the darkness and she made out the indistinct shape of a person sitting atop a tree root next to her blanket. The low sound came again, but this time Bicycle stayed absolutely still.
The Adventures of a Girl Called Bicycle Page 3
