Ali's Rocky Ride

by Molly Hurford

  My dad must have warned my brothers to be on their best behavior, because they’re both up from the basement and actually shaking hands, asking about everyone’s flights, and helping unload all the suitcases from the car.

  “What do you have in here, your entire comic book collection?” Steven asks Lindsay, who blushes. She probably does.

  Cyclists don’t travel light, and neither do teenage girls, apparently, because the SUV is completely stuffed. Each of them has a giant suitcase. And everyone has a backpack. I thought my room was going to be big enough, but as I eye the pile of bags, I’m realizing I’m going to be giving up a lot of space so that Jen and Lindsay have room for their stuff.

  I can hear the guys groaning as they hoist the luggage up into my loft, and I take a second to mourn the loss of my personal space for the next two weeks. But when I look up and see Lindsay and Jen still sporting huge smiles, I feel a little better and start grinning too.

  “I can’t believe you’re here!” I admit. It’s a little weird, seeing them in my space instead of in Phoebe’s living room or at the bike park.

  “I know,” says Lindsay. “I kind of thought Phoebe was messing with me until we were on the plane. I’ve never even been on a plane before!”

  “I have, for racing,” says Jen, always ready to share her knowledge (or show off a little). “This was an easy flight,” she adds.

  “Well, I’m glad you’re here,” I say, and I actually mean it. I grab Lindsay’s backpack from beside her feet and pull them toward the house. “Wait a second,” I say, turning back. “What about Penguin?” Penguin is Phoebe’s dachshund, and sort of our unofficial Shred Girls mascot. He’s named Penguin because Phoebe is as much a comic book nerd as Lindsay is, and since Penguin is all black with a white belly, it made sense to name him after a bad guy in Batman.

  “You didn’t notice?” Lindsay giggles, and points at Phoebe. Her backpack appears to be moving, and when I look closer, I see Penguin’s thin nose sticking out the side. “It’s a cool backpack, right? He’s so small, she can bring him on the plane with her and he stays under the seat!”

  Penguin appears to be making a bid for freedom, and Phoebe swings the backpack gently around, pulls him out, and sets him on the ground. He starts snuffling around before prancing over to us, clearly saying, “Be impressed by me!”

  We are, but only in that he’s hilarious. His thin nose pokes me right above my ankle, and he pops up onto his back legs to beg. “You’re adorable,” I tell him before scratching under his chin.

  Phoebe finally makes her way over to us, following in Penguin’s paw-steps. “How’s it going?” she asks me. “Practicing much?”

  “Of course,” I answer, and realize she hasn’t seen the backyard, which I’ve been dying to show off. “Come on,” I say, motioning to Jen and Lindsay as well. They follow me around the side of the house, and all stop short when they see the yard. It’s been bulldozed—literally—into a pump track: all the grass is gone in favor of a dirt oval the same size as the one at Joyride, complete with a series of whoops. Unlike at Joyride, though, there’s no platform. You have to ride the small beaten-in path and hit the first whoop fast in order to get moving.

  “This is amazing,” Phoebe says, almost whispering. Her eyes are huge, and I’m feeling really proud. The pump track was my idea. We have trails for mountain bikes behind our house in the woods, and lots of big jumps, but I listened when she said we all needed to spend time on the basics.

  “I’m actually jealous,” Jen admits, which is a hard thing for her to say—in fact, this might be the first time I’ve heard it from her.

  “It was all Ali’s idea,” says my dad, who’s managed to sneak up behind us. “She came up with the design, and she and the boys worked like crazy last week to get it finished before you all got here.” He seems proud, which I know he is. While my brothers might be a pain, Dad works doubly hard to be my cheerleader. I think it’s because he knows how outnumbered I am by the boys (and he can’t help being one!).

  “You girls all okay with burgers?” Steven calls from the porch. I’ve never seen him be this polite before. Dad really must have read him the riot act before the girls got here. Normally he’d be watching bike videos on the computer with his ridiculous massive headphones on or messing around on his phone—definitely not offering to cook.

  The girls all nod, and I pull Lindsay and Jen toward the house. “Come on, guys. I’ll show you our room,” I say. Behind me, I hear Dad tell Phoebe that her guest room is right off the kitchen, but I’m too excited to wait for them to come in.

  Luckily, when Dad redesigned the loft, he added a small bathroom at the back. The shower is barely tall enough for me to stand in, in the middle of the room where the roof is at its highest, but it’s still a bathroom that’s all mine—well, and now Jen’s and Lindsay’s. I’ve seen Jen’s makeup kit when we’ve had sleepovers before, and I’m a little worried about where all her bathroom accessories are going to go, but Dad even thought of that and got us a set of clear plastic drawers that he put next to the shower, with a drawer for each of us.

  Jen and Lindsay scramble up into the loft behind me. “So, this is it,” I say, and they look around.

  “This is awesome,” Jen says enthusiastically, peering into the bathroom, and then at all the closet nooks. “Can I put my stuff here?” she asks as she’s already dropping her stuff into one of the nooks. Then she flops onto the bed with the (of course) purple bedspread.

  Lindsay shoves her bag onto the other free bed, covered with a red blanket. “This one looks just like the Flash!” she enthuses. I knew those yellow sheets were a good call!

  My bed, in the corner, is clearly already in use since I didn’t make it this morning and my bike clothes—the clean ones—are strewn all over the top.

  When I unpacked at my mom’s very empty-seeming, minimalist apartment, it wasn’t anything like this. Within minutes, it’s like a bomb went off in the room, but a bomb full of clothes. Even Lindsay has way more stuff than I do….Though as I look closer, I see that the bottom half of her suitcase is full of books.

  Typical, I think, and it makes me smile to know that she hasn’t changed at all, despite her confidence-boosting performance at the Joyride jumping competition. Maybe sharing a room won’t be so bad—and that thought makes me let out a happy sigh, even as I start to clear some bookshelf space for her.

  CHAPTER 2

  While the girls unpack, I can’t help but think back to our first competition together, when Lindsay really saved the day. Maybe it’s because she’s already hanging up her huge collection of superhero shirts and piling comic books on the bedside table….

  You’re probably wondering what the fuss was all about, so to summarize: Sam, this jerky guy from the bike park, decided he didn’t want to earn the trophy for a bike competition the good, old-fashioned way, so he tried to steal it instead.

  Lindsay has always wanted to be a superhero, and she got her chance when she solved the mystery of the missing bike frame and spotted Sam trying to make a getaway with it. She chased him down on the morning of the competition, followed him onto the ramp to the foam pit, did a sweet trick completely by accident, landed in the foam, and found the frame. Sam got banned for life from the bike park, and she ended up getting third in the competition. I did pretty well too—actually, I got second—but it wasn’t quite as impressive as her amazing rescue. Or, at least, that’s what Leo keeps telling me.

  Which is totally typical. Leo has been a royal pain in my butt since before I could tell him I thought that. He’s eighteen. He still lives at home, since we’re near a lot of the best trails and he can torment me on his recovery days. At least Steven left for college last year and gave me a break. He’s back for the summer, though, and honestly? It feels like he never left.

  And now both of them are being even more obnoxious than usual. They seemed impresse
d with my riding skills at Joyride, but the second I got back, it was all criticism all the time. Leo is constantly pointing out how I could improve my riding, and telling me exactly what I’m doing wrong (everything, apparently). Steven is a little nicer about it but still isn’t exactly offering a whole lot of praise….Since he came home, he’s been ignoring Leo and me more than usual and acting kind of weird, but that’s a mystery for another day.

  Lindsay and Jen getting out here to train and compete will hopefully help change how my brothers see me. I’m not just their younger sister; I’m on a team of my own now. I hope my fellow Shred Girls like our big log cabin—I know I do—and I hope they can handle dealing with my idiot brothers. The girls are pretty tough. At least, Jen is. Lindsay is working on it.

  At the moment, Jen is making a ton of noise as she unpacks her stuff into drawers, in giant handfuls of bright colors. Then she tosses a few things—mostly purple, her “signature color”—toward my bed.

  “What’s this?” I ask, picking up the first thing suspiciously. I’m right to be suspicious. It’s a purple corduroy miniskirt that would be ridiculously short on my long legs. The other thing is even worse: a fuzzy light-blue sweater with flecks of glitter that are shedding onto my bed and clean clothes.

  “Oh, that’s some stuff I had lying around the house. I thought you might like it,” Jen says offhandedly, but she looks somewhat sneaky as she says it.

  “Umm, thanks?” I say, even as I pile a bunch of my other clothes over the sparkly top. There is no chance that I will ever put that thing on.

  Lindsay hasn’t noticed this exchange at all, as she’s busy methodically unpacking and lining books up by her bed, and neatly folding her clothes into her two drawers (plastic, like in the bathroom).

  “This is neat,” Lindsay says, looking at the blown-up black-and-white photos of my brothers and me all riding—we each have our own frame, and my dad managed to make my photo look as impressive as theirs. “I didn’t know you could ride like that!”

  I’m a little embarrassed, because the photo does make it look like I’m completely in control. The secret? Right after my dad took that photo, I epically crashed into a pile of sand. But because of Lindsay’s slightly awed reaction, I don’t really want to admit that. Especially since I know that she’s had a major confidence boost lately.

  “You’ll be doing the same by the end of these couple of weeks,” I say instead, and she perks up.

  “Is this the helmet you usually wear?” asks Jen, who’s been poking through my closet while I’ve been talking to Lindsay.

  It’s my full-face helmet, the one that kind of looks like what someone would wear to ride a motorcycle. “Only when we’re going downhill,” I explain.

  “Do you do that a lot?” Lindsay asks, looking both fascinated and horrified.

  “Not me. My brothers do, though,” I explain. “But that’s where the big competition is, on that downhill there,” I tell them as I point at the picture of Leo flying through the air. “So that’s where we’ll be doing most of our training, and then racing in two weeks.”

  Now they both look a little horrified. “I knew it was going to be downhill, but I didn’t know it was going to be down-mountain,” Lindsay says. Jen nods rapidly.

  “It’ll be fun,” I say encouragingly. That doesn’t really change the looks on their faces, so I get out my laptop and pull up some videos of my brothers in different competitions, and then I pull up the most recent women’s Mountain Bike World Cup. That gets them both sitting up a little straighter, seeing these supercool women flying downhill, going as fast as the guys. “That’s Rachel Atherton,” I point out, showing them the woman who wins almost every downhill race that she enters.

  I want to be her when I grow up.

  “Wow,” they both say, entranced by the videos.

  We sit and flip through some of my favorites—I have them all bookmarked—occasionally shrieking or pointing out a particularly crazy obstacle that the racers are just flying over. We’re having so much fun that I lose track of time entirely, until Dad shouts up that dinner is ready. Maybe this won’t be so hard after all, I think as we all clamber down the ladder.

  At dinner, it’s the usual mayhem at the table: Steven and Leo try to pile their plates as fast as humanly possible, then empty the plates as fast as humanly possible. Lindsay and Jen are staring in horror, mouths hanging open. At least their mouths are hanging open empty; the boys have their mouths open and completely stuffed!

  I admit, it’s pretty gross.

  Once the girls settle into how disgusting boys can be, Jen starts peppering the guys with questions about racing while Lindsay sits quietly next to her. She’s a little shy around people she doesn’t know very well, and my brothers aren’t exactly the most soothing people. It’s sort of like being on one of those log flume rides at an amusement park—the volume of their voices keeps going up, up, up, and then BOOM, there’s shouting and suddenly you’re sprayed with water as Steven pounds his glass on the table to make a point.

  You think I’m exaggerating, but right now he’s about to make his argument about why riding bikes on the West Coast is way harder than the East Coast.

  He picks up his water glass, and I instinctively block my plate with my napkin, since I’m sitting next to him, right in the splash zone.

  CLANG! The glass pounds on the table, and my napkin gets sloshed with water, but Steven doesn’t pause before glaring at Phoebe, pointing his fork, and saying, “And we haven’t even MENTIONED the rock gardens.”

  She darts her eyes around the table, begging one of us to help her. I’d normally step in, but even I know better than to challenge Steven about anything involving mountain biking. When it comes to bike stuff, Steven and Leo are brutal.

  “Anyway,” says Phoebe, trying to steer the conversation elsewhere, “I was thinking tomorrow we should check out the bike park, rent some gear, and do some loops on the easier downhill trails.”

  Lindsay immediately looks nervous, her eyes getting big and wide. “Downhill trails already?” she asks, like Phoebe suggested skydiving, not rolling down a hill.

  “Just the beginner ones,” Phoebe says soothingly. “They’re honestly easier than a lot of the flat trails in this area, so it’s a good spot to start.”

  Lindsay looks at me for confirmation of this fact—sometimes she doesn’t quite trust Phoebe’s claims about the easiness or difficulty of stuff. Fair enough, since I remember Phoebe saying to someone offhandedly that her last jump—the prize-winning one—at the Joyride competition “wasn’t anything too complicated.” Please. Phoebe went about ten feet in the air over the jump.

  I nod. “The beginner trails are fun,” I say. “And you barely have to pedal!”

  Jen looks dismayed at this. “But how is it a workout, then?” she asks. “I thought we were going to really start riding bikes more, not just doing tricks.”

  “Just trust me,” says Phoebe. “You’ll be exhausted by the end of the day.”

  And on that note, Jen looks satisfied and reaches for another roll.

  TRAINING LOG

  TODAY’S WORKOUT: Get comfortable on downhill bikes at the bike park at the mountain! Today isn’t the day to push your pace. We’re working on learning the basics and getting used to going downhill. It’s going to be fun! XO, Phoebe

  YOUR NOTES: Truth time. I’ve been working on being a professional cyclist since before I could walk—at least, that’s what my dad tells me. I suppose I should thank my brothers for that, since it’s mostly because of them that I ride bikes at all. But they’re so annoying most of the time that it’s hard to remember I should thank them for anything.

  The thing is, I haven’t really done any downhill riding or racing before, so even though we’re on my home turf, it’s still all new to me, and while I would never admit this if Dad asked me, I’m really nervous about the whole “flyi
ng down mountains” thing.

  Of all three of us, Lindsay is the most likely to love downhill because she wishes she could actually fly. She told us once that before she got to know Phoebe, she was trying to figure out how to harness some magical superpowers so she could save the world. It didn’t work, but she did figure out that biking makes her feel like she has magical abilities. She isn’t training to be a superhero anymore (I think), but she says she’s training to be a bike-riding superstar now. And if her epic showdown with Sam at last month’s competition is any sign, she’s gonna nail it.

  I doubt that the downhill race we’re doing is going to be as exciting as the story Lindsay just finished writing for herself. She solved a mystery, saved the day—or at least the competition—and she got the guy, Dave, who is ridiculously nice and a really great cyclist.

  She also told me that she realized she’s never had friends like Jen and me before. That was really sweet—and the same is true for me. So now the three of us started the Shred Girls. It’s sort of like the Justice League, Lindsay says, but with bikes and less dramatic villains, though Jen can get pretty high-drama sometimes.

  Since this is my story, I’ll be telling things a little differently…not the part where Lindsay chased down Sam and tackled him in the foam pit. That part happened exactly like she said. But what she didn’t say much about was how upset I was when he made fun of me every time we were at the bike park. He wasn’t the first bully I’ve met, and Lindsay standing up to him made me feel so much better, but while I tried to play it off like I didn’t care, he really hurt my feelings.