The Adventures of a Girl Called Bicycle

by Christina Uss

  “Ohhhhh…lllohhhh…hello?” The shape had the face of a teenage boy wearing a strange-looking hat. His outline was insubstantial but lit with a faint glow. He made a throat-clearing noise and said in a soft voice, “I’m sorry if I scared you.”

  “Well…,” Bicycle said uncertainly, and then yawned. Probably this was a dream and nothing to get too worked up over. “I might be more scared if I knew what you were. Are you a ghost?”

  The shadow-figure looked confused. “I’m not sure. Do I seem like a ghost to you? I seem like myself to me.” He touched his chest and rubbed his tummy. “Do ghosts get hungry? I think I’m hungry.”

  Whatever he was, Bicycle decided she wasn’t scared of him. She moved away from Clunk and felt around on her hands and knees until she found her backpack. She dug into her stash of food, pulling out some chocolate squares to offer him.

  “Oh, thank you!” he said.

  He reached out a hand to take the squares, but they dropped right through his palm onto the ground. He scrabbled at them with his fingers. The chocolate lay there without moving and his face fell.

  “Well, ghost I am, I guess.” He scratched an ear. “Last thing I remember, my best friend, Joe Branch, and I were pouring powder into our muskets behind this big tree, and then…then I’m sitting here with no musket and no Joe.” He looked around. “Just you and the trees and the stars.”

  “I’m sorry I don’t have anything you can eat,” Bicycle said, wrapping up the chocolate. She wasn’t used to having complete conversations with anyone other than Sister Wanda, and here was her second conversation of the day, although admittedly Mr. Spim had done most of the talking earlier. She racked her brain for something to say. What do ghosts talk about? Then she had an idea. “Do you have some unfinished business, anything like that? In most books I’ve read, ghosts usually seem to have unfinished business they need to complete. Think about it—why are you appearing now? Maybe you remembered a stash of money you needed to tell your family about? Some evil villain you want to wreak your vengeance upon?”

  The ghost thought, wavering in a breeze, and finally said, “Nah. I didn’t have much money, or even much of a family, and never knew any villains.” He paused. “I never even really had any plans other than going along with Joe to fight with the Missouri Volunteer Infantry. Say, is the war all done? Did everybody stop fighting?”

  “Yes,” Bicycle said. This boy must have been a casualty on this very battlefield. She did the math in her head to figure out how long ago the Civil War had ended. “They stopped fighting more than a hundred and fifty years ago.”

  “Well, that’s good,” he said. “Turns out, war’s not so great.” The boy looked at Bicycle and shrugged. “So. No unfinished business I can figure. Is there some other reason your books say that ghosts appear?”

  “They also haunt stuff,” Bicycle said. “Maybe you’ve woken up because you’re supposed to haunt this battlefield. To remind people that war’s a bad idea or something. If someone rests near this tree, you have to appear and share your ghostly wisdom.”

  He placed a hand against the rough trunk of the maple tree. “Huh. That could be it—I’m here to haunt this battlefield. Since ghosts don’t have to eat, that feeling in my gut might not have been hunger after all, but my ghostly wisdom rising up.”

  He started to fade away. Bicycle watched the spot where he sat until it was free of ghostly vapors, and then she lay back down, making sure her head wasn’t close to Clunk’s pedal this time. She was almost asleep when a voice whispered in her ear.

  “Hey, I thought of something. Unfinished business, maybe.”

  Bicycle sat up and sighed, getting into her most comfortable listening position. “Okay, tell me about it,” she said to the soldier’s apparition, which was gradually reappearing.

  “I was thinking about my friend Joe and how he could pack away food. He was a pie-eating champ. One time, he entered this contest and chomped up his pies so fast, he grabbed a couple of extra ones that weren’t even baked yet.” The ghost’s eyes crinkled up.

  Bicycle stifled a yawn and tried to look attentive.

  “Anyhow, Joe was planning on opening up a fried-pie shop in our hometown after the war. Five different types of fresh fried pies every single day. He never stopped talking about it when we were on the march with the infantry. He was gonna call it Paradise Pies. You ever had fried pie?”

  Bicycle shook her head, trying to imagine it.

  “No? They’re these crisped-up pockets of dough and fillings. They’re taaast-eee. Joe had lots of ideas for new types of fried pies. Raspberry and chocolate, roast chicken and sweet potato.” If ghosts could drool, that’s what the boy was doing. He swiped at his lips. “So I wanted to know if he ever did open Paradise Pies. If he did, maybe I could go there and haunt it instead of this lonesome ol’ battleground. Could you find out about the pie shop for me?”

  Bicycle gave it some thought. “I can try, if it’s along my route. Where were you and Joe from?”

  “Green Marsh, Missouri, in the Ozark Mountains.”

  Bicycle got our her maps and flashlight and studied the roads of Missouri.

  “You’re in luck—Green Marsh is on my way. I can see if there’s a fried-pie shop in town.” She thought she might like to try a crisped-up pie pocket or two. “Wait, though—even if I find it, how will I let you know where it is? I want to help, but I don’t have time to backtrack. Can I mail you a letter or something?”

  The ghost pondered that one for a while. He was starting to look less substantial again. “I’ve only just figured out that I’m a ghost, you know. I’m not sure how this works. Thinking too much about it makes me feel sort of weak and wobbly.” His body wobbled in the night air as he spoke. “Maybe I could come along with you.”

  “How?”

  He scratched his faint chin and glanced around. “I guess I’d have to haunt something that you’re carrying with you.” They both looked at Bicycle’s pile of belongings. “Could I haunt your velocipede, there?” He pointed at Clunk.

  “What, my bike? You want to haunt my bike?”

  “Yep, I think I could haunt that and go right along with you back to Green Marsh.”

  He was looking very, very faint now, and rather pitiful. When he’d joined the army, he couldn’t have been much more than sixteen years old, and although more than a century had passed, he still looked very young.

  “What do you say?” He smiled hopefully.

  Bicycle looked at Clunk, and then back at the apparition. She didn’t want to ride a haunted bicycle on her first trip away from home, but lessons on helping others in need had been drilled into her by Sister Wanda. “Okay. You can haunt my bike. But you’d better not weigh anything, and whether or not there’s a pie shop, I’ve got to drop you off to haunt something else in Green Marsh. Deal?”

  All that was left of the ghost was his face. His teeth flashed in the darkness as he whispered, “Deal. Thank you, young miss.” And he was gone.

  Bicycle dropped back to sleep.

  Woken by the light of the rising sun on her face, Bicycle felt a gnawing hunger. She rolled over and opened up bags of dried bananas and apricots and walnuts, wolfing down mouthfuls of each. She stood to stretch and felt the muscles in her legs and back groan in protest. “Urrrrrgh,” she said to Clunk. “Something tells me today isn’t going to be as easy as yesterday.”

  She’d been in the habit of talking to Clunk for years. But for the first time ever, Clunk spoke back. “Good morning. Got any oil for the chain?”

  Bicycle’s eyes opened wide. She looked around, but no one was anywhere near her campsite. Leaning her head toward the bike frame, she asked, “Clunk, is that you? Are you talking?” She got excited. “Did riding fifty miles bring you to life?”

  “It’s me—Griffin. We talked last night? You said I could come with you?” The voice of the young soldier was emanating from Clunk’s handlebars.

  Bicycle rubbed her head and recalled her nighttime chat. “Right, Grif
fin, I sort of thought that was a dream. I forgot to ask your name last night. Mine’s Bicycle. Let me oil that chain.”

  “Pleasure to meet you, Bicycle. I’m Griffin G. Griffin, and I surely do appreciate the lift.”

  Bicycle took care of lubing the chain, crammed her belongings back into her pack, and tied everything to Clunk’s rack. She threw one leg over the bike’s saddle and sat down. Every body part that touched the bike twinged in pain, but she told herself to deal with it. “Okay, Griffin, here we go,” she said to her handlebars. She pedaled slowly away from the old Manassas battlefield.

  Griffin quickly settled into his mobile haunt and began chattering about the nice weather and the road’s smooth surface, what an improvement it was over cobblestones or hard-packed dirt. The first car that passed them made him yell in surprise.

  “That carriage is out of control—it’s going too fast! And where are the horses?”

  Bicycle calmed him down and explained the invention of cars and how they moved without being pulled by animals. When Griffin asked if they ran on steam like trains did, she said they ran on something called gasoline. He then asked if the gasoline made things move inside the car the way steam did inside locomotive engines, and she admitted she didn’t have the faintest idea how gas made cars go.

  The next car made Griffin whoop in surprise and laugh in amazement. So did the next, and the next, and the next. “How many of these things are there?” he asked. After being passed by a bunch of different vehicles, he announced that he liked pickup trucks the most. When a tractor drove by pulling a flatbed wagon stacked with straw, Griffin yelled, “Look, that machine-riding man’s waving at us. Wave back, Bicycle, wave back!”

  She did. Bicycle really wanted Griffin to be quiet, but she didn’t say so. She felt sorry for him. After all, he’d been a ghost ten times longer than he’d been alive. Instead, she gritted her teeth and politely listened to everything he had to say and explained the modern world as best she could.

  The road they were on was surrounded on both sides by green hills and fenced farms, and herd after herd of contented cows grazed in the sun. Bicycle pedaled up one green, grassy, cow-covered hill and coasted down the other side. Pedaled up another green, grassy, cow-covered hill and coasted down the other side. And so on. And so on. Griffin must have been lulled by the repetitive motion because he quieted down, and Bicycle started counting cows to keep her mind off her aching body. Ten more cows, she found herself bargaining with her legs to continue pedaling. Pedal past ten more cows and you’ll get a break.

  When Bicycle reached six hundred cows, she wasn’t pedaling another inch. She rolled the bike toward a half-blown-down red barn and dismounted with a whimpering groan. She set up camp on a flat patch of ground on the side of the barn hidden from the road, attaching one poncho end to a worn wooden fence post and the other to Clunk.

  Griffin spoke up when Bicycle sat down to eat a little meal. “You’re pretty good,” he said. “I’ve never seen a girl move so far so fast. This is much better than walking!”

  “Yes, it is, but I’m going slower than I should be,” Bicycle said, discouraged. “I didn’t make it fifty miles today.” Yesterday, leaving the Friendship Factory bus had seemed like a brave and brilliant idea. Today, a sharp sliver of doubt was beginning to poke holes in her plans to befriend Zbig Sienkiewicz. How could the world’s greatest bike racer be friends with a girl who complained about cycling after only two days in a row?

  She tried to shake off the aches. Tomorrow’s another day, she thought. Maybe the second day of a long ride is always the hardest.

  * * *

  —

  The second day, however, had been a breeze compared to the third day. When Bicycle got on Clunk after sunrise that morning, her hands, her feet, and especially her bottom did not want to be there. Her leg muscles felt like they’d probably always hurt, even if she lived another 150 years. She stopped looking at the green, grassy, cow-covered hills around her and focused on the little gray strip of road in front of her. Push the left pedal, push the right pedal, moan a little. Push the left pedal, push the right pedal, moan a little more. Push moan push moan push moan mooooooan. Was Clunk too small and too old for this? Or was she too small and too young for this?

  At the first town Bicycle rode through, she wanted to stop at a convenience store for a breather, but she waited until she pedaled past a bank with a big clock outside so she knew what time it was. She wasn’t sure if it was spring break week outside D.C., so she thought the best thing to do was to stop at stores before or after regular school hours so she could blend in with other local bicycling kids. The bank clock showed a couple of minutes past eight, so she pulled in at the next store she saw.

  Bicycle browsed the revolving rack of flimsy ten-cent postcards. Most of them were blurry photos of churches and old brick buildings. She had just picked out one of a historic monument that said MY SISTER ATE SOUP HERE 1873 when the store’s candy display caught her eye. She sternly reminded herself she had a budget of two dollars per day, then decided that she could spend her whole two dollars right now as long as she read every candy bar’s nutritional information. She picked the one with the highest number of ingredients and calories she could find.

  Bicycle barely waited until she was outside the store to rip open the wrapper. She bit into the candy bar and closed her eyes for a second at the wonderful comfort of chocolate, caramel, nougat, and peanuts filling her mouth. She found the wherewithal to climb back on Clunk and start pedaling again, using one hand to steady the handlebars and the other to feed herself more blessed mouthfuls of the candy. It was the best breakfast she’d ever had.

  Griffin piped up. “I know a lot of good traveling songs. Would you like to hear some?”

  She swallowed. “Uh…I don’t know,” she said. That wasn’t true. She did know. She wanted peace and quiet instead. But she didn’t want to be rude.

  “Don’t you worry, it’s no trouble!” And he began to sing: “I come from Al-abama with a banjo on my knee, I’m going to LOU-isiana, my true love for to see…” Griffin’s voice seemed to reverberate down from the handlebars into the rest of Clunk’s steel frame, producing a twangy sort of amplification.

  “I know that one.” Bicycle smiled in spite of herself, surprised to have something in common with a ghost soldier. After she finished her candy bar, she joined in, panting between words. “Oh! Susanna, Oh don’t you cry for meeeeee, for I come from Alabama with a banjo on my knee…” The song seemed to help convince her muscles to persevere. As Griffin kept singing, Bicycle got into a rhythm, moving her pedal strokes in time to the sound of the lyrics.

  She finally hit fifty miles near dusk and stopped with a great sigh of relief. She pushed Clunk up a grassy slope to set up camp under a tall oak tree, noticing some flickering lights out along the darkening horizon. She watched them for a while until she recognized she was looking at a distant drive-in movie screen. Bicycle felt a moment of homesickness sweep over her. She wondered if the Mostly Silent Monks were watching a Clint Eastwood movie back at the monastery. She also wondered if Sister Wanda and the monks missed her. She began to unpack with a pang of self-pity. This was nothing like riding around the block in her neighborhood. Who knew 130 miles would be 130 times harder than one mile?

  Griffin started humming, and she looked over at the bike frame and realized she was grateful to have some cheerful company. She arranged her rain ponchos and blanket, and pulled out her pen to write a postcard to the monastery.

  Somewhere in Virginia, Under a Tree

  Dear Sister Wanda and Mostly Silent Monks,

  I am well. Please do not worry about me. Clunk is doing a good job of moving me along the roads. Did you know Virginia has at least 947 cows? I’ve been counting.

  Bicycle

  She considered adding a line about meeting a Civil War ghost named Griffin and bringing him along with her to find a Missouri fried-pie shop, but then she thought better of it. Mentioning ghosts might push Sister Wanda to ca
ll the Virginia State Police to come find her and drag her back home. Instead, she added a P.S. that she thought would set Sister Wanda’s mind at ease:

  P.S. I’m using everything you taught me, from good manners to geography, and promise I will think to myself every single night, “What have I learned from this?”

  She would drop this postcard in the first mailbox she saw.

  Bicycle spent her fourth morning struggling up a steep and sunny stretch of road. At home she didn’t think about her speed much, but on these long country roads, her mind started to mutter, Am I going fast enough to get to California in time? How much farther? Are we there yet? When can we stop for a snack? She wanted to reassure her muttering mind that she could average ten miles per hour because it made the math of how-much-farther easy, but right now her pace seemed to be somewhere between Unhurried Tortoise and Elderly Sloth.

  She watched a black-and-yellow butterfly fluttering along next to her head. She admired it until she noticed it was fluttering faster than she was biking. It soon outdistanced her and flittered away up the road. “Slow down, you…you…insect!” she yelled. “Why does this have to be so hard?”

  Griffin asked, “Is it harder than it should be? Maybe this old bike isn’t working right. We did drop a couple of screws a while back, but I can’t figure where they came loose from.” Since he’d starting haunting Clunk, he had been pretty good at checking for problems with the bike from the inside out, like spotting if the tires were low on air or if a brake was rubbing on the wheel.