Then again, I also never thought I’d be hauling an incontinent Pomeranian in a bike trailer halfway across town to an apartment my dad lives in because he doesn’t live with us anymore. But here we are.
“Morning!” Ash says brightly as I approach. “How’s Chewy digging the trailer?”
“She cried at first and I felt terrible. But she calmed down.” I glance inside the netting. She’s panting and has a doggy smile. “You ready for a long ride?” I ask Ash.
“Abso-posi-toot-ley.” She puts the helmet on. “Lead the way, noble rescuer of cute leaky doggo!”
It doesn’t take long for my legs to burn and my butt to hurt from the bike seat. I Google Mapped a back way that keeps us off the busy roads, but hauling the trailer, even though there’s only an eight-pound Pom in it, is tiring. I keep slowing to pull down the hoodie around my waist so it’s over the bike seat to provide extra butt padding.
Six miles in, we stop for drinks at a gas station. We pull our bikes behind the dumpster and lock them together. It’s shady and cool back here, even though it stinks. We take our helmets off and head inside. “What’d you tell your mom you were doing this morning?” Ash asks.
“Nothing yet. She does church and then volunteers at a food bank, so she won’t be back till like two or three. How about you?”
“Minecraft Bed Wars tournament with Griff. She wasn’t thrilled, but she didn’t demand I come home, so.” Ash shrugs.
In the store, I’m debating between blue Gatorade and red and Ash is looking at the snacks when she glances at two people at the end of the aisle and goes tense. Her eyes dart to the plain black hoodie around my waist. “Can I borrow that a sec?”
I hand it to her, curious. It’s not cold in here.
She pulls it on and ties her hair back as a kid comes over. He looks about our age and says “Sup” to Ashley like he knows her.
“Hey,” she answers stiffly.
The kid seems like he wants to say something. He shifts his bag of chips from one hand to the other and looks at me like he’s trying to figure out what the deal is with me and Ash.
I’m tempted to step closer and take her hand. But something makes me stop. She seems taller all of a sudden, almost as tall as me, and she’s holding her shoulders rigid. She looks different with her hair tied back. Like . . . really different. Older, or something.
“Tyler’s a total scumbag,” the kid says. “Him and Jackson have been—”
“It’s fine,” Ash says quickly. Her voice is deeper, sharper. “I don’t need to know.”
The kid glances at the woman he came in with. “Well. We’re getting hammered at the meets this year. Our team scores suck without you.”
Ash opens the fridge case and takes an orange juice off the shelf with a shaking hand. I notice she’s not wearing nail polish anymore. She doesn’t look at the kid. She’s blushing so hard her neck is red.
“Okay, um,” the kid says. “I guess good luck at the new school or whatever.”
Ash nods, still without looking at him. She beelines for the cash register like a girl on a mission.
As soon as we’re out of the store, she yanks out the hair tie. She takes off the hoodie and gives it back to me without eye contact.
“So . . .” I don’t know what to say. It seems weird to not acknowledge whatever just happened. “Why’d you ask for my hoodie?”
She looks like she doesn’t know if she wants to kick the dumpster or burst into tears. “It was cold in there.” She kneels by the trailer. “Hey, pupper. Doing okay?”
I busy myself with unlocking our bikes, a million questions in my mind. I start to ask who the kid was, how she knows him, why she made herself look different. Sort of like a guy. What kind of team he was talking about. Why she didn’t want to talk to him.
But when I look at Ash again, she’s getting on Sir Reginald Bevis and avoiding my eyes. She might as well have hung a Closed sign around her neck.
I don’t want to upset her. So I don’t ask.
13
Dude Mode: Activate
Ash
Daniel’s unasked questions drift behind him on the warm fall breeze as we get back on the road. The longer he goes without saying anything, the more I want to tell him everything.
Well. Not everything. Just enough to explain, sort of, why seeing Nate freaked me out. I can’t tell Daniel how right it felt to be a boy out loud, just for those few seconds, even inside the awkwardness. How right it felt to be myself, and how that feeling banged up hard against how much I like Daniel and want him to think I’m a girl. And how that locked me all up and turned me into a socially awkward robot in front of Nate, who thinks of me as a weird dude who dresses like a chick sometimes and not a chick who’s a tomboy sometimes.
Maybe I could tell Daniel how I wound up at Oakmont. Without the details. I promised Griffey I’d at least think about telling Daniel the truth.
So as we ride, I start talking. I tell him about my appendix going kablooey, and that my parents’ fighting got way worse when that happened, and how they split up while I was in the hospital. I tell him about Griffey moving to Oakmont when his dad got a better job here. I tell Daniel I failed sixth grade, and that everyone made fun of me for it—which they did, even if their focus was my flip-flopping gender, a detail I definitely don’t tell Daniel—and I tell him how I only had one friend, Camille, and we weren’t super close but she was kind to me. I tell him the bullying got bad at the start of this school year. Which isn’t a
