Esperanza and me saw a car following a girl while riding back from jiujitsu practice. We were on our bikes and took Central all the way back down to the neighborhood. It was a Honda, dark green like a rental, like something nobody picks out for themselves but got because they thought it looked normal. The girl was just a few years younger than us, probably, small and thin like an uncooked pretzel in purple pants and T-shirt. She was on her phone, looked nervous, and I could feel the pace in Esperanza’s pedaling slow down. So I slowed down too.
Central is usually a busy street, but not that time of day, late October near sunset on a weekday. Everybody who should be home was home already. We passed the cemetery that butts up against the elementary school. One car passed, then no cars. Invisible birds gossiped about each other from the trees. The bike ride plus actual jiujitsu practice was three hours of physical activity. Esperanza wanted to stop for Now and Laters, but I wanted a burrito. The car and the girl drifted farther away and then the girl turned onto Caldwell. The car followed. Now and Laters are the worst candy and will yank a filling out or a whole tooth depending on the mouth we’re talking about. Esperanza pronounced them more like annihilators the way everybody else did.
Noemi had been taking turns kicking our asses for weeks. We were not good, practically speaking. I was strong enough to hold my ground, make myself heavy and hard to turn, but against Noemi’s skill it meant nothing. Noemi was like a crocodile. She’d tuck her arms close to her body and smile like some mad ancient mini-dinosaur just waiting for us to try something that would fail. Then she snapped, and in seconds Esperanza would be colliding with the floor or I’d have a shoulder joint about to dislodge. It hurt so bad but was beautiful.
Esperanza had bigger wheels than I, a whole bigger bike, actually. Mine was made for kids or grown-ass men who thought they were kids and liked to fling themselves upside down just to feel something. The bigger wheels made her faster, so it was strange to be in the lead for once as we rode.
That day Noemi had jammed her finger on something unrelated to BJJ at all and couldn’t participate. She just coached me and Esperanza on how to escape from front-facing chokes. I had to practice grabbing Esperanza by the throat over and over. Esperanza kept telling me to make it tighter, tighter, tighter. When I thought it was way too much and was about to let go she said okay, good. It wasn’t cold yet. October was like that. The trees were giving up their color, but it wasn’t like TV with the piles of leaves that dogs jumped in and the cut of an icy breeze. The air here could get humid and balmy even if the stores wanted to sell us pumpkin-colored sweaters and brown leather boots. We rode home in our T-shirts, the short sleeves rolled up under our pits.
To this day I feel like perverts drive Hondas. The little girl had been out of sight for too long, and the car too. I wasn’t afraid like Esperanza yet; it didn’t occur to me that I should’ve been until I saw her lean forward on her bike and begin to pedal past me. Sometimes it’s the witnessing of a horror story that makes us forget we’re in one. She pedaled for the life of the little girl and our own. I pedaled just to keep up. Back then I had no imagination for the worst of us, those who take and take and stretch the tender parts of life to the point of breaking.
I saw a play once as a kid about a detective bear that solved mysteries. I used to think about crime that way for a long time, like a child in a theater safely surrounded by adults who keep the danger far away on a stage. Criminals weren’t actual people anymore; they were impostors playing a part, monsters inside of a human husk to hide their true selves, their buckled skin, hot dumpster breath, stained cotton balls for eyes, and vinegar sweat. It doesn’t take long to realize that it isn’t like that at all.
We pedaled and pedaled for only seconds before we stopped. We stopped because the little girl was running toward us now. She’d come back from around the corner to the silent main street, where there was nothing but our heartbeats and the complaints of birds in the air. I was ready to die, not for the little girl but for Esperanza, because Esperanza chewed her dangerous candy, walked into bruises day after day, and demanded that I try to squeeze the life from her just to test her worth. I knew as strong as we were, as fast as we were, we were still very young and in relation to whoever was in that Honda probably very small and not at all like Noemi, made hard as a needle by the world. So I readied myself for death.
We stopped and held our ground while the girl made it to us and paused in between our bikes, looking over her shoulder as the car slowly approached. I wanted the car to careen into the curb and then a corpse stumble out of the passenger side and a greasy alien with a mouth like a lamprey eel and arms long as my whole body to burst from the windshield. But villains never look the way they should. Threats are often surprising and unannounced, so it takes a lot of people to protect one another, especially little girls. The car sped off and even though all of our eyes watched it go, we never saw the driver. Just like that we were alone, the three of us. The day faded fast right before the gold streetlights lit up the sidewalk. We had the dusk to ourselves and moved exhausted again through time as if the shapes of the night could be anything we wanted.