The Adventures of a Girl Called Bicycle

by Christina Uss

  “It feels like I’m dragging a dead hippopotamus up this mountain!” Bicycle huffed. The fact that she was feeling upset made her feel even more upset. “What is happening? I’ve ridden this bike for years and years and years. I thought I was prepared for this. It looks so easy in the bike-racing films.” She knew she was whining, but she couldn’t seem to stop. “My maps are flat, why aren’t the roads flat? Why can’t the roads just go around the hills and stay flat? This is not fair!”

  “Well, there’s fair and there’s fair,” mused Griffin. “In my opinion, this day is as fair and fine as can be. I don’t know what your maps say, but a person doesn’t need a map to tell ’em it’s beautiful out here, or to know that we’re lucky. We get to go along as free as we please, the wind in our spokes, the sun on our backs—”

  “You get to go along as free as you please, because my legs are carrying you along! And my legs are tired of these hills!” Bicycle shouted. With her outburst, she swerved and crashed into a sign framed by tree branches at the side of the road. She fell off the bike and lay in the grass for a moment, dazed.

  A white-haired woman wearing a sweatshirt proclaiming I NEVER MET A COOKIE I DIDN’T LIKE peered down at her with great concern. “Are you okay? You took a nasty tumble there!” She held out a paper cup of something. “Here, drink this—it might help.”

  Bicycle took the cup with mumbled thanks, and sipped. After the first taste, she drained the cup dry. Cold lemonade was a welcome change from the plastic-tasting water in her water bottles. “Thank you very much,” she said. “I’m sorry I hit your sign.” The sign that Bicycle had hit read: HOME OF THE COOKIE LADY. “Are you the Cookie Lady?”

  “I sure am, and don’t worry about the sign. You certainly aren’t the first bicyclist to fall over in my front yard. It’s a tough way to spend the day, climbing hills on bikes.” The Cookie Lady held out her hand. “Why don’t you come sit on the porch and have a cookie or two until you get your breath back?”

  Bicycle could think of no more wonderful words in the world at that moment. She let the woman help her to her feet and followed her a few steps to a small porch with big screened-in windows and colorful wallpaper. Set up on a table were packages of Oreos, Nilla Wafers, Chips Ahoy, Fig Newtons, Nutter Butters, sandwich cookies, soft cookies, chocolate-dipped cookies, and some weird little crispy twists covered in powdered sugar. Bicycle crammed three Oreos in her mouth and then turned red. She thought she’d been bad-mannered, but the woman laughed and handed her another Oreo.

  “You help yourself there, child. You riding with a school group?”

  Bicycle ate the cookie in two bites and shook her head. “I’m homeschooled.” Sister Wanda had often used the same explanation to satisfy curious question-askers in D.C. as to why Bicycle was out and about on a school day.

  “Ah. Where are your folks?” asked the Cookie Lady.

  “Somewhere back there,” Bicycle said, waving her hand to indicate the world outside the porch. She didn’t like to lie, and as far as she knew, this was pretty much the truth.

  The Cookie Lady nodded and eased herself into a nearby rocking chair with a couple of oatmeal-raisin bars. Bicycle helped herself to a handful of Nutter Butters and some Chips Ahoy. The two of them munched in silence.

  When Bicycle could speak through the crumbs, she said, “Thank you. Really. I didn’t know how much I wanted a cookie until I saw them all.” She burped a small chocolatey burp, covered her mouth, and said, “Excuse me.” She’d been yelling at Griffin when she crashed, so this woman must have seen her shouting at her own bicycle. She felt like she should try to explain. “I’ve been having a rough day. It’s been harder riding than I thought it would be.”

  “I hear you, but you can take heart. It gets easier. And it’s worth the effort.” The Cookie Lady gestured toward the rear wall of the porch. “Hundreds of people have told me so. Some your age. Some decades older than you.”

  Bicycle looked more closely at the wall and saw that the inside of the porch was covered not with colorful wallpaper but rather with layer upon layer of picture postcards, some facing written-side out, some picture-side out. There were pictures of rock formations, of giant bridges, of snow-capped mountains and blue oceans. She read the nearest one: Dear Cookie Lady, We made it to Oregon today. It is so beautiful! Thank you again for the oatmeal cookies. I think of them often. Love, Abigail. The next postcard was written in Vietnamese. Another one said: California at last! Cookies rule!

  “All of these people made it to the West Coast on their bicycles?” Bicycle asked.

  “Well, not all of them had the same goal,” said the Cookie Lady. “Some wanted to ride across Virginia, and lots come from the west headed east. Some rode here from South America and planned to head up toward Alaska! But most of them did what they set out to do.” She poured another cup of lemonade for Bicycle. “Where are you headed?”

  “To San Francisco,” Bicycle said.

  “Well, there’s a bit of advice I’ve given before, and I’ll give it to you: if you think you might give up before you get there, get off your bike, eat a dozen cookies, and think hard about it. Will you promise me that?”

  Bicycle took the lemonade and washed down her last bite. Now that she was full of chocolate and peanut butter and whatever Oreos are made of, she was feeling better. Energetic, even. She thought she could face climbing the hill again. “Yes, I promise. I won’t give up hope without a dozen-cookie consideration first.” She gave back the cup and stood up.

  “Well, okay then,” said the Cookie Lady. She looked satisfied, as if Bicycle was now guaranteed to make it to anywhere she set her mind to. “And send me a postcard from San Francisco. Address it to the Cookie Lady, Afton Mountain, Virginia, and it’ll find its way here!” She got up from the rocking chair and opened the screen door.

  “I will,” Bicycle said. “I’ll sign it ‘A Girl You Rescued with Cookies and Lemonade.’ ” She waved as she went out. “Thanks again!” She knew it was her third thank-you, but she had to say it one more time.

  Back on Clunk, Bicycle pedaled far enough beyond the Cookie Lady’s house so that she didn’t think the Cookie Lady could see her before whispering to Griffin, “Hey—you still there? Griffin?”

  There was no answer.

  “Griffin, listen. I’m sorry. I know I shouldn’t have yelled. I’m not very good at being around people, you see. I’ve never had anyone to talk to before, at least not all day long.”

  Still no answer, but she felt like the handlebars were listening. “I haven’t been out in the world much, you know. I thought I had this trip figured out. But everything is just so…big. Crazy-hilly and big! There’s a whole lot of difference between seeing a map of the Blue Ridge Mountains and riding a bicycle up and down the Blue Ridge Mountains.” She tentatively patted the handlebars. “I’ll try hard not to yell anymore—I mean it.”

  “You sure you mean it?” Griffin said. “You crashed me right into a signpost, you know. I was only trying to make you feel better.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  Griffin held out for another few seconds of silence, then caved in. “Aw, it’s okay. Wanna hear another song?” Griffin howled out a chorus of “Camptown Races” while Bicycle puffed up the mountain road.

  That night, huddled in her rain-poncho tent with her flashlight illuminating the cool darkness, she jotted some notes in her tiny notebook. She thought it might help her muttering mind to calm down if she recorded which day it was and how far she’d come. She smiled when she added up her daily mileage and confirmed she had chipped away almost two hundred miles from her journey, but she hurriedly stopped writing after calculating the number of miles she still had to go. She shoved the notebook back in her backpack and pulled out Wheel Wisdom instead. The book contained a collection of quotes and advice from successful racing cyclists, a lot of them from Zbig. She flipped through the pages until a quote with his name caught her eye:

  Most people who love to bike also love to eat. In fact
, many bike racers I know took up the sport so they could eat whatever they wanted whenever they wanted but still stay thin. Sometimes these racers will be in the middle of a race, but they cannot resist stopping at a roadside restaurant for a meal and a bottle of wine. Each man eats like they have two or three stomachs. Roast beef! Pasta! Chocolate cake! It is a sight to behold. Sometimes, I myself cannot resist, and I will stop and eat with them. Yet we stay thin and trim and speedy, no matter how many roast beefs we eat. I think this is because calories have a hard time catching up with you when you are zooming down the road on a bike.

  Bicycle patted her own stomach. Though the cookies had been digested miles ago, the memory of them still filled her with hopefulness. She wrote another postcard to the monastery and sketched a plate of Oreos topped by the words COOKIES RULE! in capital letters. She was sure Brother Otto would understand what she meant.

  Bicycle came up with a new idea for her little spiral notebook. Instead of keeping track of how far she had to go, she started writing down the names of people she met and road signs that made her laugh, like WARNING: CATS SLEEPING and BED AND BREAKFAST AND EXOTIC ANIMALS. She wrote down some of the songs that Griffin taught her. She tried to wrangle at least one jumbled word out of every town she camped in, like finding SAILOR in “Charlottesville” and NOOK in “Roanoke” and SUMAC in “Damascus.”

  On her seventh day, she began keeping track of how many other cyclists she saw and whether they waved to her, called out greetings, or seemed lost in their own little worlds. She saw kids in school clothes with neon backpacks, moms with babies in handlebar-mounted bike seats, folks in ratty clothes on old bikes like Clunk, and men and women wearing fancy jerseys that fit like gloves. Mostly they shared silent waves and smiles. She felt like a member of a secret society with whom she didn’t have to share one word. Clunk’s two wheels served as her membership card.

  She also kept track of everything she ate and everything she wished she could eat. By her tenth day, she saw her food supplies weren’t holding out like she’d hoped, and she was grateful for the generosity of strangers. When she stopped to fill her water bottles in the mornings at farm stands and country stores, farmers or folks who were shopping sometimes handed her snacks and fruit and waved away any offer of payment. Occasionally someone would give her overstuffed backpack an odd look and ask if she was headed to school. Bicycle knew that with her regular clothes and old bicycle, she looked a lot like any average kid out for a neighborhood ride, so she always sidestepped any discussion of where she was headed by telling them what she’d told the Cookie Lady—that she was homeschooled and that her family was “back there,” flapping a hand behind her. Then she’d thank them profusely for whatever munchies they’d given her.

  * * *

  —

  Starting out on her eleventh day on the road, Bicycle climbed aboard Clunk without a single twinge of pain. Steady riding had toughened her up in places she didn’t even know could be toughened. She still wished road builders would try harder to navigate around hills instead of constructing steep roads straight up and down them, but her muscles no longer complained quite so much about it.

  Pedaling along and marveling at her pain-free body, Bicycle saw a large blue-and-white sign ahead in the distance. Feeling perky, she thought she’d sprint for it. She stood up on the pedals and raced down the road, Griffin yelling as her own private cheering section. “And, at the line, the winner is…Bicycle by a nose!” he bellowed.

  She braked to a stop at the signpost and gave a happy whistle. “Griffin, we are really on our way.”

  “More than usual?”

  “Read that sign.”

  She waited while Griffin slowly read out loud. “ ‘Welcome to Kentucky. The Bluegrass State.’ ” He whistled, too. “Well, so long, Virginia, and helloooooo, Kentucky!”

  “Eight more states to go,” Bicycle said. Crossing the state line gave her a shiver of delight. She stopped at a gas station to buy a postcard of galloping horses. She had faithfully mailed a postcard to the monastery every other day through Virginia, and she really wanted to share the news of her completing one whole state by bicycle with Sister Wanda and the monks.

  Kentucky State Line

  Dear Sister Wanda and Mostly Silent Monks,

  I’ve made it to the Bluegrass State! I wonder if they have red and white grass here along with the blue? That would make for some patriotic lawns.

  Nice people are everywhere. Folks honk their car horns and yell, “You go, girl!” out their windows. One lady flagged me down from her church bake sale to give me two whole fruitcakes. Don’t worry—I said thank you, and I always brush my teeth before bed.

  Bicycle

  Riding in Kentucky offered Bicycle a new challenge: sharing the road with coal trucks. When she heard the rumble behind her that meant an extra-large vehicle was coming, she’d steer Clunk toward the very edge of the pavement and clench the handlebars tightly. Griffin would repeat, “Wow, that’s big,” over and over until the truck had passed them. He’d stopped hollering in surprise every time they saw a car, but after meeting a handful of coal trucks he announced that while cars were impressive, he preferred the peaceful whir of a bike wheel to the roar of an engine.

  Bicycle kept a tally of coal trucks in her notebook, then scratched it out and kept track of wildflower colors instead. They had met up with the month of May in the Bluegrass State, and while her search for blue grass proved to be a disappointment, the pink honeysuckle, white magnolia, and purple violets made up for it.

  * * *

  —

  In the middle of one afternoon, the first Saturday in May, she and Griffin found themselves on an odd stretch of road. The asphalt had dozens of sneakers strewn from one side to the other. Bicycle noticed as she biked through them that no two sneakers were alike. They’d made it more than halfway through Kentucky and hadn’t seen anything like it before. She asked Griffin what he thought it meant, and he said, “Search me.”

  Bicycle came around a corner and saw a mailbox up ahead with a dog’s face painted on it. An S-shaped dirt driveway led to a couple of barns and a ramshackle farmhouse with a wraparound porch. She decided she’d ask if she could fill up her water bottles there. So far, farmers hadn’t said no when she stopped to ask for a drink of water and usually sent her on her way with a pint of raspberries or radishes. “Look at that cute puppy mailbox! I’ll stop here for a drink and see if those people know about the sneaker thing,” she said to Griffin.

  Getting closer to the mailbox, she spotted a faded sign nailed to the trunk of a dead tree. She slowed down and squinted to read it. VISITORS NOT WELCOME. The next tree had another sign: WE SAID VISITORS NOT WELCOME. “Okay, I get the message,” Bicycle said under her breath. “Not stopping here for any reason.” She passed the mailbox and saw a hulking man and a shapeless woman sitting on the porch. They rocked listlessly side by side in two rocking chairs. Still pedaling, Bicycle lifted a hand and waved at them, but they didn’t wave back. She was about to say something to Griffin when she heard a sound that turned her insides to cold jelly. It was a growl. No, it was three growls. Low, menacing, and coming from very close by.

  She caught a glimpse of three furry shapes hurtling across the farmyard toward her. They were moving fast, and her instincts told her that she’d better move fast, too, if she wanted to keep moving at all. She stood up on her pedals and started pumping as hard as she could. “Griffin, we have to get out of here!” she yelled, tearing down the road away from the dogs.

  “Wait a minute!” Griffin yelled back, but Bicycle was too busy pedaling to listen.

  Bicycle raced down the road, dodging mismatched sneakers as she went, but the dogs were gaining on her. They were barking in excited, high-pitched yips. To Bicycle, they sounded overjoyed to have found a tasty little cyclist to eat for lunch. She dug deep into her body for more energy and pedaled faster. At the next fork in the road, she zigged off the main street and zagged onto a network of dirt roads. The dogs were close
enough now that she could hear their toenails digging into the dirt. She could almost feel their hot doggy breath on her heels and felt a sudden certainty that these beasts were the reason behind the single sneakers. Either the three dogs had pulled the shoes off cyclists who were trying to get away, or (gulp) the single sneakers were all that remained of unlucky cyclists who had wandered into their territory.

  Griffin kept up his yelling. “Wait, Bicycle, stop for a minute! Trust me! Hold on!”

  “No way, Griffin! I like my feet still attached to my legs!” Although her lungs were hot and hurting with every inhalation, she continued to pedal full-tilt. She kept zigging and zagging until she swooped around a corner and lost control of Clunk, tumbling off the bike into the road.

  The dogs pounded around the corner behind her. When their furry faces came in sight, Griffin called out in a commanding voice that seemed to resonate through the whole frame: “Sit!”

  The dogs, two big black-and-tan mutts and a grayish sheepdogish thing, looked shocked. They came to a stop and sat so fast, their back paws hit their front paws. Griffin bellowed, “Stay!”

  The dogs stayed still.

  “Good dogs! Shake!”

  The dogs looked at one another as if to say, “Shake with a bicycle?” But they each lifted a paw in the air and offered it toward Clunk’s frame.

  “Roll over!” was Griffin’s next command.

  The dogs rolled back and forth on their backs in the dirt.

  “Dance!”

  The dogs got up on their hind legs and started wobbling to and fro.

  Bicycle would have laughed, but she was still trying to catch her breath from the chase.

  “Good boys,” Griffin praised them. Their long pink tongues lolled. “Go home!”

  The dogs looked at one another again, shook the dirt from their coats, and turned tail to lope back the way they’d come.