Page 11 of Mischief

I get up, shower, and drive to the shop to open, because that's what you do.

You keep your doors locked, and you open on time, and you don't let anyone see the chill crawling down your spine.

Yet, my whole life is riding straight into a mess he doesn’t want to tell me about.

CHAPTER TWO

Bodul

Somewhere past Nashville the air starts to change, and my body knows it before the map does.

The wet green heat I've spent years calling home thins out mile by mile, and by the time I cross into Kentucky the wind turns mean and cutting, and by Illinois the sky's gone the flat gray of a thing that's forgotten how to be blue.

I ride into the cold like a man riding backward through his own life.

Every hour north peels a layer off the version of me that Tindra knows, the one who fixes her grout, drinks cortados, and lies still under her while she sleeps, and puts the old one back on in its place.

Colder. Emptier.

A boy who learned to hold still on a staircase because holding still was the only thing that ever made it stop.

My hands go numb around the grips somewhere in Wisconsin, and I don't stop to warm them, because stopping means thinking, and thinking means turning the bike around.

Ishouldturn the bike around.

I don't.

The plan was one hard push, Tallahassee to Duluth in a day and a half, sleep for maybe four hours.

My body has other ideas.

Around four in the morning outside Eau Claire, the road starts to double on itself, the lane lines sliding sideways.

I catch myself drifting toward the shoulder with my eyes half shut, and I know the difference between tired and dangerous the way you know it after enough years on two wheels.

I pull into a motel with a sign missing half its letters and pay cash for a room that smells like other people's cigarettes.

I don't sleep so much as lose consciousness for four hours.

I dream about the staircase, because of course I do, and I wake with my heart going and my shirt stuck to my back.

Then I get back on the bike, and I finish the ride into the place that made me.

Duluth comes up out of the lake like a gray fist.

The hill, the water going on forever and cold enough to stop your heart in June.

The houses stacked up the slope with their backs against the wind.

I know these streets in my spine.

I know which corner store used to sell to kids, which alley you cut through to lose someone following you, and which house on which street has a staircase I'd burn to the ground if fire could reach that far back.

I park across from it and I don't get off the bike.

The house is smaller than it lives in my head. They always are.

Peeling paint the color of old teeth, a sagging porch, a window upstairs with a sheet tacked over it where a curtain should be.