“I babysit my brother. If I can find someone to keep him, I’ll come. Where is it?” He told her. It was on an old track, a long bus ride from where she lived, but she was intrigued by him now. She realized she still didn’t know his name.
“Bring your brother with you. How old is he?”
“He’s twelve. He’d probably tell my mother, but he’d love to see the race too.”
“Well, bring him if you want.”
“Do you have brothers and sisters?”
He shook his head. “Nope. My parents got divorced when I was two. They fight whenever they see each other. I live with my mom. My father works on boats, all over the place. I don’t see him much.” She nodded. They each had their own heartbreaks to deal with. “What’s your name?” he asked her then.
“Maggie Kelly.”
“Paul Gilmore,” he said, and they smiled at each other.
“I’ll try to make it to your race,” she promised, not sure if she could do it, and then ran to meet her brother before it got any later.
She was lucky. As soon as she met Tommy at the bus stop, he told her that he’d been invited to a friend’s house the next day to hang out, stay for a barbecue, and then spend the night. He had made friends more easily than she had. But he was only twelve, and boys were less complicated than girls her age. Most of the girls had boyfriends, or they moved in a pack. She didn’t have a pack mentality, didn’t want to show off, and she didn’t know how to play the games that attracted boys her age. Paul liked that about her. She seemed like a nice person, and she was easy to talk to. She was pretty too, in a totally natural way. She had shining dark hair, green eyes, and didn’t wear makeup. She was tall and thin and had a good body. He had the feeling that she didn’t know she was beautiful.
After she dropped Tommy off at his friend’s the next day, she took the bus to where the track was. It was a bitter cold day. She had to walk the last few blocks and her face and hands were frozen when she arrived. There was a small crowd of mostly men sitting in bleachers, watching the track. She got there just in time to see Paul race. He came in third out of a dozen boys and men older than he was. They were riding mostly rebuilt motorcycles. The bike slid after he crossed the finish line, and he had a nasty gash on one arm and had grazed the side of his face. He was bleeding when she got to him, and she helped him clean the arm. He didn’t seem to care that he was hurt. He was glowing with the excitement of having come in third. All the others in the race pounded him on the back and one of them handed him a beer. He didn’t even feel the graze on his face in the emotion of the moment. He offered her a ride on the back of his motorbike to where he lived, which he said wasn’t far away.
When they got there, she was shocked to see the seedy part of town he lived in, and the ramshackle house where he left his friend’s motorbike in the garage. Then they walked back to his house, which was barely more than a cottage. It smelled of sour cooking and looked gray and dingy when they walked inside. He watched her face for her reaction, but she didn’t seem to care. She was more interested in him than where he lived. She was the only girl he’d ever brought there.
“How does your face feel?” she asked him.
“Great!” He looked a mess and had dirt all over his jacket and had torn a sleeve when he cut his arm. “It’s the best time I’ve had yet.”
“Are you serious about racing motorcycles when you finish school?” He nodded enthusiastically and had a light in his eyes that reminded her of how her father looked when he talked about flying planes.
“I am. I want to be the best at something when I’m older. Some kind of racing. I love motorcycles.” She could see that he did. He poured her a soda from the nearly empty fridge, and they sat down on a sagging, beat-up couch and talked for a while, and then she said she had to go. She had a long ride home, and she wanted to be there when her mother came in from work. She didn’t like to have to tell her where she’d been. “Do you want to go to the movies tomorrow?” he asked her, and she nodded with a slow, shy smile.
“Yes, I’d love to.”
He walked her to the bus stop, and she thought about him all the way home, and that night. She didn’t say anything to her mother. She met Paul at a movie complex downtown the next day. She was surprised to see that he was driving the motorcycle, and she rode on it with him after the movie, then let him take her to within a few blocks of her house. Her mother would have killed her if she had seen it. Motorcycles or anything high risk were strictly forbidden. Emma was afraid that she or Tommy would turn out to be like their father. She didn’t even want Tommy to play sports, and all he wanted to do was play football when he got to high school in two years. He had the build for it, and his father’s strength and agility.
Maggie liked being on the back of Paul’s bike. It was exciting. She told him her mother would have a fit if she knew.
“She wants us to be safe, and not do anything dangerous. Ever since my dad died, she’s been crazy on the subject.”
“She’s not going to like me then, is she?”
“Just don’t bring the bike if you ever come to visit.”
She didn’t tell her mother about him until after Christmas, and then she mentioned him casually and said he was just a friend from school. She invited him to dinner and he came in jeans and an old leather jacket and sneakers. He was a good-looking boy, with his blond hair and blue eyes, and very polite, but Emma watched him with suspicion. There was a kind of self-confidence about him that was all too familiar to her, and that she never wanted to see again, certainly not around her children. He had a maturity which frightened her, and a self-assurance that came from the hard life he’d had. The apartment where Maggie lived was much nicer than the shabby cottage where he lived with windows that didn’t close properly and the wind whistling through it.
“I’m going to have money someday,” he told Maggie one day as they walked around the lake.
She smiled at what he said. “How are you going to do that? Rob a bank?”
“I don’t know. But I know I will. And I’ll buy my mom a decent house,” he said, his eyes full of dreams, and the way he said it touched her.
“I don’t know what I want to do when I grow up,” she said. “My mom says all that matters is having a stable life and being safe. She says it all the time.” Maggie was sick of hearing it.
“I don’t care about that,” Paul said. “I want to do something exciting. Climb mountains, race motorcycles, parachuting.” His eyes were ablaze, as though he could see himself doing it.
“Roller coasters scare me. I’d rather die than jump out of a plane or go skydiving,” Maggie said, making a face.