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.
Griffin waited a minute or two, and then said to Bicycle in his normal voice, “I think they’re gone for good.”
Bicycle came over to the bike, pulled it upright, and hugged the handlebars. “Griffin, you saved the day! That was incredible! How did you do that?”
The handlebars got a little warm, as though Griffin were blushing. “Shucks, I trained pups ever since I can remember. I know dogs, and I know that even the worst ones need a firm voice to tell ’em what to do. No dog was ever born mean. They only know how to act by the way their owners tell them to act.”
“Oh,” Bicycle said in a small voice. She thought about this while she put Clunk’s kickstand down, then asked in an even smaller voice, “Why would anyone teach them to attack people on bicycles? What kind of dog owners would do that?”
“I can’t imagine, Bicycle. People sure can be awful sometimes. It’s not nice to think about, but it’s true.”
Bicycle sat down on the ground, suddenly shaken. “I…miss…my…monastery,” she announced, tears welling up in her eyes. “What if…” She wiped her nose on her sleeve. “What if the next farm has something worse than dogs? What if they have attack wolverines, or pet grizzly bears, or robot sharks, and they send them out to chew up girls on bikes?”
“Bicycle,” Griffin said, “if you think too much about how awful some people might be, you will never get anywhere. None of us would. Every person would stay home every day and hide under the bed. But there’s this: that’s the first time anything has tried to bite you in hundreds of miles. Think about the kind folks you’ve been meeting instead. Think about the ways you’ve been lucky, and you just forget about those rotten dog people. They ain’t worth another thought, I’ll tell you that, and they sure ain’t worth you giving up your trip, no sir, no way!”
Bicycle wiped her face on her other sleeve. “We did cross the thousand-mile mark sometime today,” she said in an unsteady voice. She’d done the math last night in her notebook.
“That’s a thousand miles of good luck and hard work wrapped up together with cookies on top! Quick, what else can you think of that’s lucky?” Griffin said.
“There was the all-you-can-eat church breakfast buffet where they wouldn’t take any of my money,” Bicycle said. “And the lady there who said I looked like an angel on wheels.”
“Don’t forget the deer and her fawn grazing grass right next to us when we woke up that time,” Griffin added.
“And how it seems to rain only on warm days,” Bicycle added.
“See? Measure that up against a few wayward dogs, and lucky comes out on top.”
Bicycle sat and counted her blessings until she was feeling more herself again. She looked around. “Where are we?” she asked, pulling her map out of its plastic bag.
Griffin responded, “I wasn’t paying a whole lot of attention when we were running for your life, but I think the road we were on is to the right somewhere. Take the next right, and let’s see where we end up. How lost can we get?”