The Adventures of a Girl Called Bicycle

by Christina Uss

  Bicycle felt it was much too early in the morning for such unspeakable words to be spoken. There hadn’t even been a mention of breakfast yet.

  “We’re going now? Can’t we talk about this at all?” Bicycle asked Sister Wanda, panic rising in her voice.

  “I told you, there is nothing more to be said,” the nun answered. “We’ll bid farewell to Dr. Alvarado, pack our bikes in the trunk of the taxi, and get you to the Factory. As soon as you’re settled there, the taxi can get our bikes and me to the nearest train station for my trip back to D.C. I’ll ship my bike to the Nearly Silent Nunnery in Kentucky once I’m home.” A small cloud of dust appeared on the horizon and began moving closer. Sister Wanda put her hand over her eyes and squinted at the dust cloud. “That must be the taxi now.”

  Bicycle pleaded, “Maybe there is nothing more to be said for you, but there is a lot more to be said for me! Won’t you take a minute to listen?” The nun calmly bent down to tie her sneaker. Bicycle’s voice rose. “Don’t you remember how to listen?”

  Sister Wanda straightened up and gave Bicycle a blazing blue stare.

  Bicycle swallowed and very quietly added, “Please?”

  Never taking her eyes off Bicycle’s face, the nun sank slowly into a no-nonsense cross-legged position. “I am listening,” she said.

  Bicycle took a deep, deep breath. “I know you think you are doing the best thing for me, commanding me to make friends. I don’t want to break your rules, believe me! That’s why I took off biking—I was trying to do what you want but in the way that I want. I swear I made a friend already. Let me tell you about Griffin, the ghost. I know you think he’s imaginary, but he isn’t, and I don’t know exactly how we became friends, but I’m sure we did. And Dr. Alvarado said yesterday that the Fortune was acting like a friend to me, too. I don’t need to get changed or fixed by the Friendship Factory. I can do this. Can you give me just one more chance to make a regular human friend my way before you lock me up at the Factory? Please?” Her eyes wide, she put every ounce of agonized hope she had into the last word.

  Dr. Alvarado emerged from his tent, rubbing his face. “Anyone thinking about breakfast yet?”

  The Fortune beeped at him and he came over to read its display. Hush. My sensors indicate this is not the optimal time to interrupt.

  Sister Wanda’s face was unreadable. “Are you finished?” she asked.

  Bicycle nodded.

  Sister Wanda stood up. She took her own deep breath. She let it out in a noisy sigh so big it seemed to come up from her toes. “No.”

  Dr. Alvarado was watching the approaching dust cloud. “Is that the taxi you called coming our way?” he asked.

  Bicycle could not believe her ears. “No?” She thought she’d come up with a pretty good speech, especially on an empty stomach.

  The Fortune beeped. No?

  “That doesn’t look like a taxi,” Dr. Alvarado said. “All black. But it is parking right over there. Looks like whoever is driving is coming to have a chat with us.”

  Sister Wanda picked up Bicycle’s backpack and helmet and handed them to her. Bicycle took them automatically, noticing the figure getting out of the car behind Sister Wanda. She squeezed her backpack in shock and shouted, “No!”

  Sister Wanda put her hands on her hips. “There’s no need to start shouting, young lady.”

  “No, not no to you, no to her.” Bicycle pointed at the bony woman striding menacingly toward them. “That’s the lady in black from the auction! The one I thought you were when we hit you with the tomatoes. The bike thief!”

  Two burly men in black T-shirts and slacks also emerged from the car, and the bony woman said something to the men over her shoulder, stabbing her finger toward Bicycle and the Fortune.

  “And she brought more thieves to help her!” Any thoughts of Friendship Factories were now secondary.

  Dr. Alvarado clapped his hands together. “Bike thieves before breakfast? I really do need to get out of the lab more often. Can I be of some assistance?”

  Sister Wanda faced the oncoming trio and squared her shoulders. “Oh, bike thieves, is it?” she asked. “We’ll see about that.”

  The Calamity Cab Company taxi chose that moment to crest the hill and pull over.

  Sister Wanda turned to Bicycle, putting a firm hand on her shoulder and propelling her toward the taxi. The nun opened the rear door and guided Bicycle and her backpack onto the seat. “Go on ahead now and wait for us at the Friendship Factory in Calamity. The doctor and I will take care of these bike thieves.”

  The way she said the last two words left Bicycle in no doubt that the bony lady in black had met her match.

  She didn’t hesitate to obey Sister Wanda this time. She shut the cab door while Sister Wanda handed the driver some bills and instructed him to leave her at the Calamity Friendship Factory. In moments she was watching Sister Wanda, Dr. Alvarado, and the group of menacing people in black grow smaller in the taxi’s back window until she lost sight of them completely.

  * * *

  —

  The taxi ate up the miles with no effort at all. Far too soon, they reached Calamity. Its cozy main street was lined with low brick buildings. The taxi cruised past an elementary school, a playground, an all-day-breakfast restaurant, and a neighborhood of small houses. The taxi driver slowed and stopped next to the sidewalk outside a windowless two-story concrete structure.

  “Friendship Factory, here you go,” the driver said.

  Bicycle climbed out mechanically, dragging her backpack and helmet behind her. She stood stoop-shouldered in front of the glass door with the letters FF painted on it. It looked nothing like a camp. It looked like a factory. One where hard and unpleasant labor was done. Bicycle stared at the door and wasn’t even surprised that the building looked practical and ugly and un-camp-like. Camps were supposed to be fun. Forced friendmaking was going to be work.

  The taxi pulled away, and Bicycle wondered what the Friendship Factory did with you if you couldn’t make the three guaranteed friendships. Would you have to stay forever? She was about to ask the Fortune what the odds were of her being imprisoned for the rest of her life at the Calamity Friendship Factory when she slapped her forehead.

  “Wait! Sister Wanda forgot to put my bike in the trunk!” she yelled too late as the taxi turned a corner and was gone. Bicycle took another look at the concrete building and decided she wasn’t going in there until Sister Wanda dragged her in.

  Before anyone could come through the glass door and ask what she wanted, she hurried back toward the center of town. She sat on a swing in the playground and wondered how the Fortune 713-J would get down the hill without her pedaling it. Did it have some autopilot feature that Dr. Alvarado could activate? Then she wondered what Sister Wanda was doing to Miss Monet-Grubbink. Sister Wanda could be both an irresistible force and an immovable object, but no matter how much that frustrated Bicycle, she had to admit the nun took her job as a guardian very seriously.

  The road back to what she was thinking of as “The Lady in Black’s Last Stand” stayed empty for quite some time. The sun moved upward in the sky until it shone right in Bicycle’s eyes, so she went to sit in the shadow of the schoolhouse, where she still had a good view of the road. She nibbled a snack from her backpack and finally saw a cloud of dust moving along the road toward the town. She squinted to see better. And whimpered.

  It wasn’t Sister Wanda and Dr. Alvarado coasting down the hill with the Fortune 713-J in tow. It was the bike thieves’ black sedan. As it came closer, she could see the front wheels of both of the Fortunes and Sister Wanda’s pink cruiser poking out of the half-closed trunk.

  “Holy spokes! They stole all three bikes?” Bicycle blurted out, and then immediately cast around for somewhere to hide. She squeezed into the playground’s miniature wooden playhouse. She peeked out the little window as the car pulled up and parked in front of the all-day-breakfast restaurant. Bicycle was confused when she saw Sister Wanda and Dr. Alvarado get out o
f the backseat, and became even more confused when the lady in black and the two hulking men emerged to walk at their side. They all looked…friendly with each other. Bicycle shrank back from the window and listened to them talking in the still morning air.

  “I told the taxi to drop her off at the Friendship Factory,” said Sister Wanda. “This town isn’t big, so I’m sure it’s close. I’ll ask for directions from the folks in this restaurant. We haven’t had a chance to eat yet. After I go over and get my girl settled, would you like to join us here for breakfast?”

  The lady in black nodded. “Allow us to buy forrr you.” She rolled her r’s so they sounded like a cat’s purr. “It’s the least we can do to seal the deal.” She smiled a crocodilian smile. “We’ll wait forrr you inside while you rrrun yourrr errrand.”

  She’s inviting the bike thieves to breakfast? Seal what deal? Did Sister Wanda get brainwashed? Bicycle thought. Drugged? She narrowed her eyes as a nasty thought occurred to her. Did Sister Wanda agree to give them the Fortune to teach me some kind of lesson? Did she decide that is what’s “best” for me? She watched them file into the restaurant.

  Bicycle could not be separated from the Fortune like this. Directly disobeying Sister Wanda a second time was something Bicycle could hardly bear to do, but the thought of losing her freedom and another bike—another new friend!—at the same time was even more unbearable. She ran to the black sedan and wrestled the Fortune out of the trunk and onto the road.

  “I’m stealing you back,” she whispered. “We’re going to get each other out of here.”

  Bicycle ran with the Fortune across the sidewalk to the shady rear of the playground and strapped her backpack to its familiar spot on the rear rack. “Is there a way out of town that keeps us off the main road?” she asked.

  We can head through the desert on an old cattle track. It will eventually join a road to the California border. Are we continuing on to California? Sister Wanda said no. The probability that she meant it is 100%.

  “There’s no time to talk about it now! Just tell me which way to go.”

  The Fortune promptly flashed directions to the old cattle track, and Bicycle clapped her helmet on her head and navigated across an alley behind the park. They soon left Calamity behind. She only stopped to forage in her backpack for food when they had reached a hard-packed dirt trail that didn’t look like it was trod by anything but cattle hooves.

  She unearthed an ancient granola bar from her backpack and ate it while she rode. When the sun hit the top of the sky, Bicycle stopped and the Fortune set up the cool tent again, this time camouflaging the outside to match the yellow-brown landscape. They’d gone miles without the slightest indication of anyone following them. Bicycle had tried to keep her mind on her legs pushing the pedals, but the Fortune’s statement Sister Wanda said no kept bubbling up in her mind. She took a drink of water and asked her bike, “If I keep going to San Francisco and make friends with Zbig like I planned, what are the odds that Sister Wanda will decide she was wrong and not send me to the Friendship Factory for the rest of my life?”

  Odds of Sister Wanda deciding she was wrong: 3,720 to 1.

  Whatever 3,720 to 1 was, it was not nothing. “So you think there is some possibility? Even a tiny one?” Bicycle knew she was grasping at straws. “How about this: What are the odds that you and I are going to make it to the Blessing of the Bicycles without getting caught again?”

  94.6% in our favor. Those odds are better because I am very helpful, the Fortune blinked. But Sister Wanda knows where we are going. The chances she will find you at the Blessing and send you to the Factory are equally high.

  “Let’s stop talking about the odds, now, thanks,” Bicycle said. Of course Sister Wanda knew where she was going. This escape was temporary. But it was her last chance to make friends with Zbig and prove the nun wrong. She pulled out her tiny spiral notebook and a pencil, determined to work out a foolproof friendship plan. Failure was not an option.

  She thought as hard as she could about her trip so far. Why had she gotten along so well with Griffin? And could she call Jeremiah and Estrella friends, too? Why not Chef Marie? Or Bird Tattoo—Carlos—and his buddies? How long did you have to spend with someone before they were technically your friend? Did both people need to agree you were friends at the exact same time? And did it matter if your friends could talk? She thought she’d like to count The Cannibal as a friend as well—was that allowed? And why did Dr. Alvarado think the Fortune liked her? She wrote down every one of these questions and found herself absolutely stumped.

  “Fortune, do you feel that you’re my friend, like Doctor Alvarado said?” she asked the bike, desperate for some solid answers.

  YES.

  She thought about how her heart had felt when she saw the Fortune’s wheel sticking out of the bike thieves’ car trunk. “Yeah, me too. Exactly what made us become friends? Do you have some data on that?” she pressed.

  The bike began scrolling down a complicated explanation that sounded exactly like Dr. Alvarado, blinking about an illumination of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Bicycle sighed.

  “Sorry, I don’t speak physics. Answers are no good if they’re not in a language I understand,” she said to the Fortune, and then stopped. Language. Understanding someone’s language. She tapped her pencil on her notebook. When she’d begun her journey sixty-two days ago, she’d packed up the Polish-English dictionary because she knew being Mostly Silent around Zbig would get her nowhere. She’d always intended to learn to speak a little of Zbig’s native language to impress him when they met, but that part of her plan had been pushed to the back of her mind until now.

  She dug to the bottom of her backpack for the not-at-all-waterproof Polish dictionary The pages were now floofed apart, and the whole thing was twice as thick as it had been when she’d originally taken it. She thumbed to the F section and looked under “friendship” and groaned when she saw there were six different words for it in Polish depending on how friendly you wanted to be. She flipped through until she found a section on “greetings” and started learning to pronounce some words as quickly as she could.

  “Hello. How are you? Hello,” she said. “Dzień dobry. Jak się masz? Dzień dobry!” Her voice rose as she wrestled with the unfamiliar combinations of sounds.

  The Fortune interrupted her. You may attract unwanted attention if you use your top volume level. I suggest you reduce by at least 10 decibels.

  “Sorry, you’re right. I just don’t have a lot of time, and I have to get this perfect. I should have started working on this earlier.” She focused hard and tried to roll the language around her mouth more quietly, forming the sounds of the letter Ł and the letter Ń and the letter Ą. She flipped through the dictionary and wrote down every word she needed for the sentences she wanted to get down pat. After repeating the Polish for “I biked across the country to meet you! Do you think there’s a chance we might be friends?” six dozen times, she started to yawn so hard she couldn’t mouth the words any longer. She fell into a hazy midday nap mumbling in Polish.

  The Fortune rang an alarm once the heat of the day had passed, and Bicycle awoke with the dictionary open on her chest. She packed everything up, still practicing her new sentences under her breath, and continued riding along the cattle track, determined to put in as many miles as possible before dark. A couple of hours farther along, the track joined a paved road. Bicycle squinted ahead and saw the strip of asphalt meandering through more unchanging desert.

  Turn here.

  “Are you sure we’re headed the right way?” she asked the Fortune. “Your navigation can’t let us down. We’d really be in trouble, because we’re way off my maps now.”

  This alternate route will lead us to San Francisco. I will not let you down. Until it is time to sleep again, when I will let you down, since sleeping while sitting on a bike seat is impossible.

  Bicycle smiled. Whatever else happened, she was glad she had made the choice to keep the Fortune by
her side. Well, underneath her. “Imagine if I could bike in my sleep, though? It’d be awesome. We’d be in San Francisco with time to spare.” She made the turn and continued practicing her Polish sentences in time to the rhythm of her revolving pedals.

  * * *

  —

  They went on like this for more than a week. Then, after the Fortune deflated the camouflage tent one morning, Bicycle wondered how different things would look when they left Nevada and crossed into California. She expected it to be a land lush with lemon and avocado trees, filled with movie stars in red convertible cars and sweeping views of the ocean. But as far as she could see, dirt and lifeless gray shrubs lined the way ahead. In a history book, she’d read that some pioneers who couldn’t afford covered wagons had loaded up their wheelbarrows with everything they possessed and walked from Missouri to the Great Basin Desert in Nevada to settle the Wild West. She’d wondered then why the pioneers hadn’t kept going all the way to the ocean, but now she thought she understood. After you travel for a few thousand miles and see a lot of hot and brown and hopeless, maybe you give up wishing for oceans and lemon trees. The only thing you want to do is lie down and stop pushing your wheelbarrow.

  She halted her Polish practice for the day when her mouth got too dry. She was nearly ready to lie down and stop pushing herself when she saw the Sierra Nevada range ahead. Despite the desert heat all around them, the serious, plum-shaded mountains were crowned by a white frosting of snow. The frosting seemed to whisper promises of deep lakes, rushing rivers, and green, ferny forests. Bicycle inhaled with her mouth open, imagining she could taste a faint breath of coolness.

  Up ahead, she saw a state line sign. Her last one. The sign was nothing special, a run-of-the-mill green-and-white highway sign, but Bicycle solemnly read it out loud to the Fortune as they pedaled past. “Welcome to California.”