“You’re famous,” I said.
“I’m infamous. There’s a difference.”
We cut through the last neighborhood and across the field, past the fence through the gate that was never locked. You could already see the crowd forming at the top, half the school, it seemed, an even bigger crowd than turned out for Evan’s run, everyone bundled in jackets, huddled in groups. I didn’t see Bench, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t in the crowd somewhere.
Looking at the tree-studded slope, I felt a heaviness. Part of it was just dread, recognizable from my first day of school or the moment in the bathroom leading up to this, but there was something else. A sense of significance. It felt like the kind of thing that you might even tell your children about when they asked you what it was like growing up. I’d never had a friend run the Gauntlet before.
A friend.
Rose Holland was about to risk everything for us. For Deedee and me. Suddenly, overlapping the dread and the weightiness, came stomach-worm-squirming guilt for not telling someone. The principal. My mother. Deedee’s parents. I’d convinced myself that Rose was right. This was how you handled things. You didn’t go to the adults. You sucked it up and made outlandish bets about who could make it down a hill on a bike without killing themselves.
She said this was the only way to settle it.
Maybe. Maybe, if she won, it would mean more than just saving us from a dunking. Maybe Cameron and his friends would learn something. The embarrassment. Just the thought of it, of all the kids he’d picked on—that they’d all picked on—laughing at whatever it was that Rose forced him to wear around school the next day.
Trouble with that was, I wasn’t sure she was going to win. Nobody had ever died running the Gauntlet, but the rest of the stories Deedee told about it were true. Some of the trees held the carved initials of the riders they had taken out, chiseled reminders of how dangerous it was. I was on the verge of telling her not to go through with it. We would find another way to deal with Cameron Cole.
But I didn’t have to.
Standing there, at the bottom of the hill between us and the summit, hands stuffed in the pockets of his brother’s hand-me-down leather jacket, Wolf squinted and frowned at us. He’d been waiting. Somehow or another he’d found out. He walked right up to me and grabbed the handlebars of the bike—my bike—and wheeled it around, heading back the other way without a word.
“Wolf. Wait,” Deedee called. “What are you doing? We need that.”
“No you don’t,” Wolf said over his shoulder.
I thought about all the kids up on top of the hill, wondered if they were watching us, and if so, what they were thinking. That Rose Holland had taken one long look at the Gauntlet and wussed out, probably. That she was chicken.
“Hold up,” Deedee pleaded, Rose and I following behind. “Don’t you know what’s happening?”
Wolf stopped and spun. “Don’t you know what’s happening?” he said, looking at all of us. “What were you even thinking?” He was mad again. Just like he’d been in English the day before. It seemed, by his stare, that his last question was leveled directly at Rose. It took her a moment to say anything. She draped an arm around Deedee’s shoulders.
“I’m his champion,” she said. “I’m defending his honor.” She said it half jokingly, but Wolf didn’t even crack a smile.
“I heard about what happened in the bathroom,” Wolf said, looking first at Deedee, then at Rose. “I know what this is about. But I’m telling you it’s not worth it.”
“And I say it is,” Rose countered, grabbing hold of the seat of the bike so Wolf couldn’t drag it any farther. “I’m sick of what those pricks do to Deedee and Frost and you and everyone else and I want to see Cameron Cole eat dirt, all right?”
Wolf let go of the handlebars and Rose let the bike fall to the ground. We stood in a circle around it, all four of us, but it was obvious this conversation was just between the two of them now.
“You can’t stop me,” Rose said.
“I could call your dad.”
She shook her head. “By the time he gets free from work and gets out here I’ll be down that stupid hill already. And it would take my mother half an hour just to get dressed and find her car keys. Face it, Wolf, in five minutes I’m going to ride down that hill. Now you can either stay and support me and be there when I screw up and crack my head open, or you can turn around and go home and pretend like this has nothing to do with you. But decide now, because I’m taking that bike and I’m riding down that stupid freaking hill.”
Wolf stood over the bike, trembling. He looked up at all the people waiting at the top. “It won’t solve anything,” he said. “You know that.”
“Maybe,” Rose said. “But it will mean something to me. And it will mean something to Deedee.” She looked over at Deedee, who nodded. “And maybe, if we’re lucky, it will send a message.”
“If we’re lucky,” Wolf said, “we won’t have to call for an ambulance.”
“That too.” Rose leaned in close to Wolf, so close that their chapped cheeks almost touched. “I need to do this. I know you understand.”
Wolf bent down and picked my bike up. For a moment I was certain he was going to keep walking away, but then he aimed it back toward the top of the hill. “I don’t even believe you.”
“Just so long as you believe in me.”
Had either of us said it, Deedee or me, it would have been gag-worthy, but coming from Rose it was different. We didn’t laugh or make fake vomit sounds. We just stood there for a moment, the four of us, looking at each other. “All right,” Wolf said.
Slowly, silently, we trudged up the less-steep side of Hirohito Hill, Wolf and Rose leading the way, Deedee and me walking behind, the crowd parting for us the same way they’d parted for Rose her first day at school. At the front of the pack of kids clustered at the top, Cameron stood next to his bike, staring at the slope, looking uneasy. Noah Kyle stood on one side. Jason Baker stood on the other. Jason and Wolf exchanged loaded glances, then Wolf quickly looked away. The crowd was library quiet, nothing but indistinct murmurs, all of them huddled in one large mass to break the wind that had picked up, threatening to topple the bikes where they stood. Rose walked over to Cameron, and for a moment I hoped she would just deck him and get it over with, just knock him to the cement-hard ground. Instead she extended her hand.
“We have a deal. Whoever makes it the farthest,” she said.
“Yeah, whatever,” Cameron said. He waved off her handshake and spit on the ground by her boots. Rose didn’t budge.
“Say it,” she pressed.
“Fine. We have a deal,” Cameron said. “I can’t wait to see if your fat head even fits in the toilet.” Cameron’s friends laughed, but you could tell they were nervous. Maybe just as nervous as I was. I doubted it though.
Rose walked back and stood between Wolf and me. “So what do you think? Good day for a ride?” She looked at the rustling leaves. The wind would be at her back so she’d go even faster. Lucky her.
I looked down Hirohito’s worst side. It had only been a week since I’d last stood there, but it looked different this time. The trees had started shedding in earnest, making for a few skeleton limbs that threatened to reach down and snatch an unwitting rider from her bike or snag the back of her ratty old army coat and yank her backward. It looked steeper too, almost straight down. I tried to carve out a path with my eyes, but there was no clear line of sight to the bottom of the hill. Everywhere you looked were branches and bark. I noticed a broken beer bottle that had been smashed against one tree, its dark brown glass glinting in the indifferent October sun. A red glove stuck out of the leaves about a quarter of the way down. I wondered who it once belonged to.
“Yeah . . . you really don’t have to go through with this,” I said as Rose threw one leg over my bike. The hill beckoned with rows of forty-foot teeth.
“You’re not worried about me, are you, Frosty?” Rose shot me a sneaky kind of smile. �
�You’re too cool to worry, I thought.”
“I’m not worried,” I said. “I just agree with Wolf. It’s not really going to prove anything.”
“Sure it is,” she said. “It’s going to prove that a moose can ride a bike. Besides, sometimes you just have to shut up and do something, you know?” She turned and looked at Deedee. “Wish me luck.” Deedee nodded. He looked like he was about to lose his Pringles in the grass by his feet.
Rose turned to Wolf and reached out with one hand. He took it and squeezed.
“All right,” she said. “Let’s show these kids what a ninja sorcerer princess from Chicago can do.”
Cameron pulled his bike in beside Rose’s, close enough that he could reach out and push her over if he wanted. The crowd closed in behind. I thought I saw crumpled dollar bills being passed around. Not unusual, but it made me wonder what the odds were. No doubt Rose was the underdog. This was the first time she’d ever even seen the hill.
“She’s never going to make it,” Deedee whispered beside me.
“She’s going to make it,” I said.
She wasn’t going to make it. It was a matter of physics. Too much speed. Too many trees. She was a rookie. It wasn’t even her bike. Of course I didn’t think Cameron would make it either. So then it would simply come down to who crashed first.
Noah Kyle stepped up between the two of them and raised both of his arms into the air, holding them there for several seconds, just to build suspense, then brought them down like twin ax blades.
Both bikes tilted forward, each taking only one push before the Gauntlet swallowed them whole.
There wasn’t a crowd when my father made his run. The one that would take him all the way to Florida. Nobody came to wish him good luck. He’d already said good-bye to the people at the magazine he wrote for, and most of the neighbors were so clearly on my mother’s side that there was no real point in saying good-bye.
In fact, my mother tried to argue for the two of us not being around when he left either, saying it would be too hard, that it would complicate matters. If it were up to her, Dad would have snuck away in the middle of the night, maybe standing in the doorway of my bedroom while I slept, watching the rise and fall of my chest like a tide sweeping in and out, maybe whispering something to me, a line from a poem (Frost, of course), or just an I love you, hoping to say it just loud enough to wake me but not. Then he would vanish.
But my mother didn’t get her way, and I got to be there when he left, packing up the last of his portion of the loot. My father insisted he didn’t need much. It all fit in the back of the SUV. Mostly books and clothes. The laptop computer and the smaller television. His baseball mitt that he used when he taught me how to catch. The box that I painted him for Father’s Day when I was five. His collection of ball caps. The SUV was stuffed to the tinted windows, spilling over into the passenger seat, but it didn’t matter. He wasn’t taking any passengers.
There were no tears either. There had been enough of those. There had been a dozen conversations and explanations—none of which I remember because I didn’t believe any of them. Probably he said something about two people realizing they simply weren’t right for each other. Undoubtedly he said something about loving me no matter what. More than twenty times I was told that it was absolutely not my fault that he was leaving. Which meant it was all their fault. Which meant I could just be mad at them instead.
And I was. Angry enough that I told myself I wasn’t going to hug him or say good-bye or even open my mouth. I was going to clench my teeth and jut my chin and narrow my eyes and just stare so that he would know it. That was my plan, anyway. The plan of a ten-year-old who knows he can’t get what he wants.
Dad said good-bye to my mother, actually giving her a kiss on the cheek. She told him to drive safe and to text her when he got down there. Then he sat down next to me on the porch.
“It’s twenty-five hours by car, but only three by plane,” he said. “And it’s just a couple months until summer break and then your mother will let you fly down. There’s a place where you can actually swim with stingrays. Touch them and everything.”
Teeth clenched. Chin jutted. Eyes narrowed.
Dad ruffled my hair, then took the Tigers cap off his head—the one that he’d had since college—and put it on mine. It was way too big and covered the tips of my ears. I didn’t move. I didn’t take it off. I was a statue.
But when he wrapped his arms around me, something inside collapsed, crumbled like a tower made of wet sand. My hands shot around him and clenched fistfuls of his shirt, hot face buried in his chest, pressing close and tight so I could barely breathe, wanting to burrow as far in as I could go. And we sat there like that on the porch for what seemed like an hour. Long enough for my mother to go back inside. Long enough for me to remember how it felt to have him breathing next to me.
He waited for me to let go. I had to be the one. But as soon as I loosened my grip just a little, he pulled away. Then he stood up and looked one last time at the house we’d lived in for most of my life. He told me good-bye and I love you and we’ll talk soon, all the things you’re supposed to say. And I went back to clenching my teeth as the truck drove off, absolutely positive that, at that very moment, I was the most miserable kid in the universe.
I sat and watched him go, even long after there was nothing more to look at. Then I went inside, slamming the door behind me, loud enough, I hoped, for everyone in the world to hear.
I could barely watch her, pulling down the brim of my cap to half cover my eyes. The crowd erupted the moment they took off, both bikes instantly diverging, choosing different paths. You could see Rose struggling to maintain her balance, the front wheel wobbling over the uneven terrain, my old bike listing one way and then the other. And she hadn’t even gotten to the middle of the hill yet, where the trees clumped even closer together. Most of the kids were hooting and hollering, incomprehensible grunts and shouts, but a few were calling out Cameron’s name. Deedee had his hands in front of his eyes, splayed open like he was watching a horror movie. Wolf just had his fists clenched, but he was watching all the way.
A third of the way down, Rose brushed against the trunk of one tree, catching the right handlebar and wrenching her wheel around, sending her off course, or at least onto a new one. I felt sure she was going to wipe out right there, but she somehow recovered, adjusting to the new trajectory, instantly rebuilding her speed. Cameron was ahead of her. He seemed to have found a fairly well-worn path—maybe he had planned the route ahead of time—and it made all the difference. If Rose bit it now, she’d lose for sure. I tried not to think about what the boys’ toilets smelled like, the ring of brown and yellow crust along the rims. Tried not to imagine the cold water on my lips, up my nose, in my hair.
The crowd around me started calling Cameron’s name louder. I don’t know that they were friends of his, particularly. Friends’ friends. Or maybe it was just that he was in the lead. In middle school, all other things being equal, you side with the kid who has the best chance of winning. In front of me Deedee had given up on his finger slats and buried his face completely in his hands. “I can’t watch,” he murmured.
I couldn’t not.
Beside me, Wolf was unshakable, pumping his fists, his cheeks pink from the wind. “C’mon, Rose! You can do it!” he shouted at the top of his lungs. Some of the kids standing next to us gave him looks. I didn’t say anything. She probably couldn’t even hear her name above the din of the other kids. Maybe she couldn’t hear anything over the wind in her ears. I put my hands on top of my father’s cap, holding it in place. Every muscle in my body tightened. “She’s going to make it,” Wolf said to no one in particular.
They were two-thirds of the way down the hill, both of them weaving, ducking beneath branches that threatened to clothesline them. Rose hit a bump and actually went airborne for an instant and I held my breath, hanging on to it, even after she landed. It was difficult to make out either bike through the colonnade of tre
es.
“Holy crap,” Deedee whispered beside me, and I knew he was watching again. “I don’t believe this.”
I nodded. I’d never actually seen anyone make it this far before. Heard stories, but never actually seen it. They were almost to the bottom now. Both of them. This wasn’t just a bet. It was an actual race. For the first time in Branton history two people could conquer the Gauntlet at the same time.
Then I saw the back of Cameron’s black-and-red jacket suddenly rise into the air, for just a second, before it disappeared, swallowed by the green. The Gauntlet struck quickly, biting once, and dragging him into the dirt.
He was down.
Less than a second later, Wolf pointed.
“There she is!”
My blue Huffy shot through the wall of trees at the bottom of the hill at breakneck speed, its rider a mostly green splotch from this far away, jacket flapping behind her like a cape. The bike skidded sideways, sliding to a stop. The rider hopped off and thrust both fists into the air.
The crowd instantly shut up. Every mouth dropping open in disbelief.
Rose Holland—the Moose, the Dozer, the girl who took the empty seat at the table and made phoenixes shaped like fish and once told me that my mom was cool and that she liked my room—Rose Holland had conquered the Gauntlet.
I couldn’t hear anything over the sound of my own cheering.
THE MESSAGE
IT TOOK THE REST OF US THREE TIMES AS LONG TO MAKE IT DOWN the hill. As we skidded and slid, grabbing hold of each other’s jackets to keep our balance, Deedee wrapping both arms around me at one point, we passed a cluster of kids already huddled around Cameron, Noah and Jason among them.
I stopped to appreciate the damage. It wasn’t the worst I’d seen, though he was clearly in pain—grimacing through skid marks of dirt on his face, a crown of leaves in his hair. Rose had given him a bloody nose just like she’d threatened, she’d just let a tree branch do it for her. A few gawkers took pictures with their phones. If I’d owned a phone I probably would have taken one too. Jason yelled at everyone to go away as he tried to help Cameron to stand. Most of the kids were passing right by him, though, heading down to the bottom. To Rose.
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