Back in time, my smile widens. "Great minds," he says, gesturing toward the dirt bike parked in the tall grass. "Got my own ride now."
Her eyes widen then. "Holy shit, Legion! When and how?" She knew how poor we were. She knew.
"Saved up," he tells her. "Three jobs this past year. Bought it from a guy over in Glendive. Not new, but it runs good."
They stand there grinnin’ at each other, both burstin’ with the same idea.
"Makoshika," they say together. The nearby state park filled with secret trails, and a gift shop where I bought her a handmadeleather bracelet that summer, and secret canyons with sandy ground that feels good under your toes.
We went all over that fucking place that summer. To this day, there isn't a chance in hell I'd get lost in Makoshika. You could drop me off anywhere and I'd find my way out.
We hiked every trail, we saw every canyon, we even found a little spring. In the dead of fuckin' summer, we found water in the badlands. The gift shop people even called us by name because I bought Savannah an orange soda every mornin’ when we arrived.
Thinking back now, it was a good way to spend my fifteenth year. I was poor, my family was fucked and about to get fucked harder, and I knew this was all bad for my future.
But she didn't care. Before Savannah Ashby was my woman, she was my best friend.
I wouldn't trade it for anythin’.
"You on your horse, me on my bike," fifteen-year-old me says, bringing me out of the other memory.
"Or both on the horse," she counters.
"Or both on the bike," he says, voice dropping a little.
The way she looked at me that day—eyes bright, cheeks flushed—it was all there. Already there. The love.
That's one thing I never doubted—Savannah Ashby loves me.
"This is our summer," I tell her.
It comes from my mouth.
Right in the here and now.
And it was our summer.
But that summer was something else too.
It was the beginning of my demons.
Because my first contact with Badlands MC happened that fall, and once I knew what a MC really was, it was the only reasonable future I had.
The memory shifts, the silo dissolving around me. Suddenly I'm crouched in the brush at Makoshika, late September chill creeping through my worn jacket. My breath forms small clouds in the morning air as I clutch the secondhand shotgun.
I wasn't legal to carry that shotgun—the second thing I bought with my own money after the dirt bike. But who needs rules when your stepdad's a drunk and your mom's practically incapacitated with postpartum depression?
I left before dawn that day, determined to get us a turkey for dinner. We were dead broke. Deacon, the piece-of-shit asshole who called himself my stepfather, found my money stash under the trailer two weeks earlier and took it.
All of it.
There was nothing in our fridge but a sack of potatoes about to go bad, some butter, and some milk.
My mama opened the fridge that morning looking for solace after being up a whole night with fussy, colicky, newborn Destiny and said something like… if we only had a turkey, I'd make us a nice dinner.
Now, my mama had not made me a fuckin' dinner in years at this point. It was frozen mac and cheese or frozen burritos. Never nothin’ homemade. She had been depressed after Destiny was born because Deacon took less notice of her, not more.
I pictured that dinner in my head and decided I was gonna go bag a turkey and hold her to it.
