The Bay at Midnight

could run through the cloud of insecticide with a friend, unable to see one another until you emerged on the other side. We were naive to the perils of DDT back then. If Lucy had not been with me, I would have welcomed the thrill of finding myself smack in the path of the truck, but I knew she would not.

“Hey, Luce!” I called behind me. “The mosquito truck is coming. Let’s pretend we’re in the sky inside a cloud.”

I had barely finished my sentence when the truck drove past us. The driver either didn’t see us or didn’t care that we were there, and we were instantly engulfed in the chemical fog.

“Help!” Lucy called. “Ack! Help!”

“It’s okay,” I shouted back to her. I didn’t want to stop. It was too exciting. I couldn’t see the road ahead of me. It was like riding my bike with my eyes closed, which I did occasionally when I knew I was someplace safe.

“Julie!” Lucy’s voice had grown fainter, and I figured she must have stopped and gotten off her bike.

I turned my bike around and rode back the way we had come, but even though the fog was lifting, I couldn’t see her on the road.

“Lucy?” I called.

“I’m over here,” she said. “I went over the handlebars.”

Then I spotted her in the woods, half sitting, half lying down. I jumped off my own bike, tossing it to the ground, and ran through the fog to reach her.

“Lucy!” I dropped to my knees next to her. “Are you hurt?”

She was flailing at the fog with her hands, her eyes squeezed shut, and I looked at her legs and arms, afraid I might see bones jutting through the skin. Except for a nasty scrape along the length of her forearm, she looked okay.

“Open your eyes,” I said. “C’mon. The fog’s almost gone.”

She opened her eyes, but she was crying, trying to catch her breath, and I figured she’d been holding it to avoid breathing in the spray. Now she was forced to drink in the odorous air in big gulps. Looking down at her wounded arm, she let out another scream. It was ugly, a two-inch-wide band scraped raw along her forearm, dots of blood breaking through here and there.

“It’s okay,” I said, but she held her arm to her as if it were a fragile thing and let out a wail.

I knew I was not going to be able to persuade her to get back on her bike. The fog was thinning, and I tried to find a landmark to tell me how far we were from the house. There were woods on both sides of the road but I could see the opening to the blueberry lot a distance ahead of us.

“Get up, and we’ll walk our bikes home,” I said. “We’re not that far.”

She peered down the street, then shook her head. “I don’t want to touch my dumb bike,” she said.

Where was her bike? I looked around, finally spotting it several yards away from where she’d landed. She must have flown over those handlebars, and I felt sorry for her. She was lucky a scraped arm was all she’d suffered.

“Okay,” I said, “then we’ll leave the bikes here and walk home.”

Sniffling, she got slowly to her feet.

“You’re an old lady in a girl’s body,” I told her, helping her up. “Grandma has more energy than you.”

“Shut up,” she said.

We heard the sound of another vehicle on the road and Lucy gave me a look of alarm before running a few feet into the woods.

I turned around to see a red car heading toward us. “It’s only a car,” I said. Then I realized what car it was: Ned’s red Corvette convertible! “Hey!” I called to Lucy. “It’s Ned!”

Lucy came out of the woods and stood by my side, still cradling her arm. I waved as Ned stopped the car in front of me. Bruno Walker was in the passenger seat, and the radio poured “Cryin’ in the Rain” into the air all around us.

Bruno grinned at me. “Hey, good-lookin’,” he said, and I wasn’t certain if he was being serious or just teasing me, so I kept a half smile on my face which I figured would work either way.

“What’s going on, Jules?” Ned asked. I liked that he used Isabel’s nickname for me.

“Lucy crashed into the woods on her bike,” I said.

Ned turned off the engine and he and Bruno got out of the car. They were both tan and gorgeous, slender Ned with his softlooking blond hair and Bruno with his sexy black ducktail and muscular build. I didn’t think there were two better-looking, non-movie-star guys in the universe and I wished I was with one of my Westfield girlfriends instead of with my little sister.

“Are you okay, Lucy?” Ned asked.

Still sniffling a bit, she stuck her arm out for him to look at. He held it gently in his hands, studying the injury, and for a moment, I wished it had been me who had fallen off her bike.

“It’s not broken, is it?” he asked her, carefully moving her arm this way and that.

Lucy shook her head. “Just bleeding,” she said.

“Not much blood,” Ned stated the obvious. “Your mom just needs to clean it up and put a bandage on it.”

I stood right next to Ned, feigning my own interest in Lucy’s arm but really just reveling in the cigarette-and- Coppertone smell of him.