That was the job I hated because my boss was a massive dick. Hotel maintenance wasn’t hard. I didn’t mind the work. I was good with my hands. Anything mechanical and building things was my jam. It was what I enjoyed and what I was good at. But I would quit the job if I didn’t need the money.
“I’m so high, man.” I couldn’t say that with a straight face.
I wasn’t hooked on drugs or anything like that, but I partook once in a while in social situations. By social situations, I mean whenever Joel and I worked together at Gino’s Pizzeria and Pasta House. After finishing a shift, we usually hung out at the back of the restaurant and shared a good time.
“High as a kite,” Joel sang in his best rocker voice. He sang terribly, but it was inevitable that he’d start singing at least once while we hung out.
Joel was the funniest drug dealer on the face of the planet. He was the chef at the restaurant. Yeah, I put his job title in quotes. I’d say calling him a chef was a very loose description of his cooking skills. He called himself the pizza bitch.
If Joel was the pizza bitch, then I was the delivery bitch. I liked the job well enough, but it wasn’t my dream job. It helped pay my bills. I had a lot of them. The hole I dug myself into was a tough one to get out of, but I was chipping away at it, payment by payment.
When I could speak again, I said, “Seriously, I can’t get home.”
“I rode my bike.” Joel sucked in a breath, then patted my shoulders. His blue eyes widened. “Hey. I know. You can take my bike home.”
“It’s five miles.” I could ride a bike for five miles. It was much faster than walking, but I couldn’t and wouldn’t drive.
“You want me to call Miles to come get you?”
“Hell, no.” I’d rather freeze to death than spend one second with my ex. Miles was Joel’s shitty, know-it-all older brother, someone who had a lot to say about how I led my life. We had broken up after only a couple of months. Miles was just a little too vanilla, and he had said some mean things. We just didn’t mesh. But Joel and I had been friends before I started dating his brother, and we’d stayed friends. “I don’t need a lecture.”
I had two best friends. One was my neighbor across the street. He was so old that he had served in the army during World War II. That was frickin’ old, right? The other was Joel.
“It might be better than riding in the cold all that way.” Joel bit his lip, a sparkle in his eyes. He got that look when he wanted to say something I might not want to hear. “Riding a bike can be just as dangerous as driving a car.”
I couldn’t help but roll my eyes. “No way, man. I’ll be fine.”
Hanging out behind Gino’s wasn’t the best idea. We could have gotten fired. That no one had caught us was a minor miracle. Gino always checked up on the restaurant. I swear he had cameras inside, strategically planted where we couldn’t see them. Gino was the killer of joy, and he seemed to have eyes everywhere except for in the back of the restaurant.
I giggled when I stood because I felt a little dizzy. I wasn’t sure why it made me laugh, but it was mostly out of fear. Paranoia had set in, and I started to believe Joel. Riding a bike all the way home in the cold was a terrible idea.
The giggles were pot-induced, right? “What strain was that?”
Joel wiggled his eyebrows. “Ghost Train. It’s like super-high THC. Like twenty percent or some shit, man.”
Yep, it was the marijuana. I couldn’t handle the heavy stuff.
I just shook my head and tried to ignore the voice in my head telling me that taking Joel’s bike home was a bad idea.
I did stupid shit. Like, really stupid shit. All. The. Time. I didn’t mean to. It just sort of happened. It was as if I’d manifested trouble so much that it chased me. I tried to run from it, but it was always faster. A quarter of the problem was the great ideas I got when I was high. Joel rarely agreed with me, but I was a hell of a lot of fun. Ask anyone.
“I’ll bring your bike back tomorrow.”
“You could stay with me. My couch is pretty comfy.” Joel lived with Miles. In no way did I want to see him. The wound of our breakup wasn’t fresh, but Miles reminded me of a judgy cat. It was all in the way he looked at me.
“No, thanks.” Before Joel could talk me out of it, I grabbed the bike and walked it to the sidewalk.
The bike wobbled when I got on it. I hadn’t ridden since I was a kid. I surprised myself when the wobbling stopped, and I rode as steadily as I had when I was ten.
The air was much colder as I moved. It ripped past me as I rode down the sidewalk. It was late enough that no one was out, so I had a clear path without using the shoulder.
The cold air was refreshing in some ways. It sobered me, clearing my head.
Maybe Miles had a point about my being a little reckless. Even Joel, who had little room to judge, thought so. I hated agreeing with Miles. It gave him permission to live rent-free in my head.
I intended to ride a bike five miles right after I’d smoked something called Ghost Train. So maybe the playing-it-safe train had already left the station.
I was about a mile into the ride, on the edge of town, when the sidewalk ended. I couldn’t have been riding very long. Ten minutes tops. The streetlights had ended about a quarter of a mile back. Darkness had taken over, and I couldn’t see the sidewalk in front of me anymore. That might have had a lot to do with the fact that the Earth was rotating really fast, too. A tree, which was about a foot from the sidewalk, must have a root system that lifted the corner of the sidewalk a few inches. Nature had a way of taking over. Maybe I was still a little high because I didn’t have a sense of how fast I was going, either.
