by Dani Lewis

Back then, I could ride around on my bike for hours without feeling bile in the back of
my throat and inevitably throwing up. Imagining me, my brother, my twin sister, and our
neighbor peddling the loops that formed one big, mostly-paved figure -eight in our
neighborhood now just makes my head dizzy and my lungs burn.

That was in early middle school, before any childish heartbreak really happened and
mattered. No one put all their energy into messaging a boyfriend half-hearted reassurances on
the hour or convincing a parent to drive them into town to see their girlfriend on the weekend.
We just worried about peddling too quickly and accidentally popping our greasy bike chains off
the gears.

I stressed over taking enough ibuprofen to stop the aching induced by my braces as
they ripped a new path in my gums. My wildly crooked, overlapping teeth were already
adjusting, shifting downward, forward, and backward, but no orthodontist could tame my
energy. The dust yearned for someone to kick it into a cloud behind them, and I needed just
one more reason to avoid my basic biology homework.

The fear of a bike wobbling and sending me skidding across loose gravel at the bottom
of our hill had been temporarily dispelled. Instead, there was the fear that I would be the last
one to cross an invisible finish line in an unspoken race. Our quad wondered if we were the
only kids in the neighborhood and who else we could recruit for our next game of “Ghost in
the Graveyard” before the sun fell. We weren’t worried about cars coming around turns too
quickly or the dimming light forcing us to squint around in the night.

Now, that same children’s bike with the greasy chain and loose handlebars is simply
gone. Whether it was given to another child or finds itself rusting away, metallic pink paint
chipping and mixing into the dirt of some trash heap, I don’t know. I had traded it in for an
untouched mountain bike of the same color and heartbreak I never thought I’d be foolish
enough to face.

Instead of being oblivious, I stress about collisions with a fist, a wall, or the pavement
and how many paychecks it would take to replace a straight tooth my parents paid so much for
in the fifth grade. I come home to an empty house in an empty neighborhood and wonder if
I’ve simply gotten too old to spot any kids forgetting about schoolwork by slinking around
under the streetlights. I slam on my car’s brakes at any sign of movement alongside the road,
nauseous at the thought of ruining someone else’s life by not paying enough attention to mine.

Pink and black rubber bands held a wire in place across a child’s teeth, forcing them to
fall back in line with what would soon be the rest of life’s rigid expectations. I could be clueless
then and dread hearing my father shout from the front porch for me to come back inside to
shower, but now I wish I could go back to a time when parental concern tinged his voice at all.