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, Griffin, 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 call 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.
“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.