This is Shyness by Leanne Hall

Author:Leanne Hall
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: JUV000000, JUV037000, JUV039020
ISBN: 9781921799341
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2010-08-16T16:00:00+00:00

sixteen

We work fast, without thought. I swap my checked shirt for a black t-shirt, and find a pair of jeans, a black turtleneck and a navy beanie for Wildgirl. I pull my old bike out of the garage. It’s dusty and spotted with rust but it seems sound enough. While Wildgirl pumps up the tyres, oils the chain and rips off the reflectors, I put some things from the garage into my backpack: a coil of rope, a plastic sheet, octopus straps, pliers, gaffer tape, a shifter. I grab Dad’s old fishing knife and wrap it in a rag.

I feel like I’m watching myself do these things. If I don’t think then I won’t lose it, at anyone or anything. Wildgirl was supposed to take one look at Blake’s scars sixteen and reverse at a hundred miles an hour, but she didn’t even flinch.

From the kitchen I grab a packet of fun-size chocolate bars that I was given months ago for helping a friend paint his new squat. I’ve lost my taste for sweet things. I put the chocolate into a plastic bag then shake in a jar of Italian herbs to mask the smell.

Blake stays behind in the house—if things go badly with the Elf I don’t want her on the streets—and Wildgirl takes her bike. We have to put the seat up a bit but other than that it suits her fine. Blake is already asleep on the couch when we leave, her arms folded over her head.

We ride around the driveway a few times to check the bikes and then pull out into the empty street. I haven’t ridden in years. I can’t remember exactly when Paul and Thom and I stopped, but it was around fifteen, when all of a sudden being seen on your bike became desperately uncool. I breathe easier now that Wildgirl isn’t rattling around inside my house, touching things and asking questions, but I’m not a hundred per cent happy that we’re going ahead with this. We haven’t thought it through well enough.

‘I feel like I’m twelve again,’ Wildgirl calls out. Her handbag swings off one handlebar. She flaps her arms like a bird, riding around a roundabout until I’m dizzy. I tried to talk her into leaving her handbag behind, but she looked at me like I’d asked her to cut one of her arms off. She went through it and took out a water bottle, dog-eared book, mp3 player and sunglasses as a compromise. No amount of arguing would convince her to abandon the ukulele though, especially once she realised she could fit it inside her bag.

‘Keep your voice down,’ I say. It’s like she’s trying to draw attention to herself.

We should still be sitting in the chill-out room at Little Death with our faces nearly touching, the only two people in the world. Instead we’re playing bike bandits on the backstreets. Of course I want the lighter back but things aren’t as black and white as Wildgirl would have them.

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