James Grippando - Leapholes

"Coolidge, you want to race?"

The driver revved his engine. Ryan just made a face and shook his head.

"Come on," the older boy said. "It's a fair race. A six-cylinder Mustang against you on your bike. You can whoop us. Just pretend the cops are chasing you."

The teenagers in the car roared with laughter. The light hadn't turned green yet, but Ryan couldn't take it anymore. He came down on the pedals with all his weight and sped through the red light. A truck screeched to a halt in the intersection, the driver lying on his horn. But Ryan didn't care. He had to get away from his house, from Mrs. Hernandez, from Teddy Armstrong and his father. From everybody.

Ryan was gaining speed, pedaling harder, flying down the street. His mind was racing even faster. It bugged him to no end when people said he was like his father, and no one said it more often than his own mother. To make things worse, she would always follow up by saying, "And you know Ryan, your father loves you very much." That, in turn, would lead to a conversation that Ryan could have repeated in his sleep, he'd had it so many times.

"If he loves me, then why does he lie to me?"

"Your father doesn't lie to you."

"Yes, he does. Every time I go to see him, he tells me that he's innocent."

"He's not lying."

"But he's in jail."

"Just because your father's in jail doesn't mean he did anything wrong. Sometimes innocent people end up in jail. It happens."

"But he told the judge he did it. And now he wants me to believe he was innocent? Why would he have confessed if he didn't do anything wrong?"

"I'm sure he had his reasons, Ryan. We can't stop believing in him."

Yeah, right, thought Ryan. The prisons had to be full of innocent people who had confessed to crimes simply because they had their reasons.

Stop lying to me, Dad!

A car flashed in front of him. Ryan swerved, but the car swerved with him. He hit the breaks, but he was going too fast. The rear tire slid out from under him. He released the break to stop the skid, but the momentum jerked him too far in the other direction. The front tire caught a hole or a bump or maybe it was the curb. Ryan didn't see it exactly.

All he saw was the rear end of a station wagon sliding straight toward him.

Suddenly, it was as if he were flying in slow motion. He could smell the burning rubber as the tires skidded across the pavement. He could hear the screech of metal against metal, his precious bicycle slamming into the car. He could feel the seat yanked out from under him, feel his hands leaving the handle grips. At that very moment, someone should have shouted, We have liftoff,\ because that was exactly how it felt. He was soaring in mid-air, and there was absolutely no way to stop.

Until his head hit the window.

It must have been a glancing blow, or maybe he was just lucky to have been wearing a helmet. He landed on the pavement and lay still for a moment, wondering if he were dead. But he wasn't dead, he was sure of it. He was in too much pain to be dead.

"Oh, my elbow," he said, groaning.

A man came running out of the car from the driver's side. He went straight to Ryan. Ryan looked up into his face.

"You all right, kid?"

Ryan tried to focus, but it was difficult. The man had a strange face. It was remarkably flat. Or maybe Ryan just wasn't seeing straight. "What just happened?"

The man picked him up.

"Hey, put me down!" said Ryan.

The man didn't listen. He carried Ryan to his car and opened the rear hatch to his station wagon. Ryan did a double take. It was the strangest looking car Ryan had ever seen. It looked normal on the outside, but inside was a stretcher and all kinds of gadgets and medical supplies. It was like an ambulance with no lights or sirens, no markings on the outside to identify it as an emergency vehicle.

The man laid Ryan on the floor. This was starting to give him the creeps. A strange man with a flat face. A car that opened up and looked like an ambulance. Where had that car come from, anyway? It seemed to have appeared from nowhere, which was appropriate enough. That was exactly where Ryan had been headed-nowhere.

"Let me out of here!" said Ryan.

The man raised his index finger, as if to quiet him, placing it just a few inches before Ryan's nose. Then he moved it back and forth, slowly, like a windshield wiper. Ryan's eyes followed his finger, side to side, left to right, and back again.

"You should feel better now," the man said.

Ryan blinked, trying to stay focused. He wasn't sure, but he thought he saw the man smiling. Yes, there was definitely a broad grin stretching across that ugly flat face. Ryan held onto that image for only a moment, just a flash in his mind. Then he could fight no longer.

His world turned black.

Ryan was flat on his back in a hospital bed, the white fluorescent ceiling lights assaulting his eyes. Squinting, he propped himself up on one elbow and peered across the room. People wearing white smocks and green hospital scrubs were moving in every direction. They were at least fifty feet away, and Ryan quickly realized that he was in a large, common area with lots of other beds just like his. He had a semi-private cubicle, and the only thing between him and the patients on either side of him was a beige plastic curtain that was suspended from the ceiling.

"Where am I?" Ryan said to a passing nurse.

She stopped in her tracks and came to his bedside. Quite large in stature, she reminded Ryan of the girls' field hockey coach at school, the kind of woman who could pick up Ryan with one arm and toss him out the window with the other. "Hey, Rip Van Winkle's awake," she said. What do you know?"

"Rip Van Winkle?" said Ryan.

The nurse pressed a button on the headboard, and the mechanical bed adjusted to bring Ryan into an upright, seated position. "You've been out cold since you got here. We were worried about you."

"I still don't know where I am," said Ryan.

"You're in the ER, honey. Emergency Room."

"How long have I been here?"

"Seventeen years."

"Yeah, right. What are you going to tell, me next, Mt. Rushmore is a natural phenomenon?"

"Oooh, you're a smart one, aren't you?" She checked her watch. "I'd say you've been here about two hours."

"What happened to me?"

"I was hoping you would tell us that."

Ryan felt a pain in his elbow, and the sight of the bandage sparked his memory. "I remember riding my bicycle. A white car came out of nowhere, knocked me down. I think I skidded across the windshield and then hit the pavement. A man picked me up and took me to his car. Strange looking guy. Then I blacked out."

"Hmm. That must have been the man who brought you here."

"Is he still here?"

"No. Looks like he pulled a little hit and run."

"Well, he didn't exactly run. He brought me to the hospital."

"Thank goodness for that. But he dropped you here and disappeared. Didn't leave his name. I guess he was afraid the police might arrest him for reckless driving. He didn't give us your name, either."

"Oh, my name's Ryan."

"Ryan what?"

"Ryan-" He started to answer, then stopped. A simple question like What is your name? wasn't so simple for a boy like Ryan. Not that he didn't know his surname. The problem was, everyone else seemed to know it, too, ever since his father's picture had been plastered all over the front page of the newspaper. "Oh, you're Ryan Coolidge," they would say. Then their faces would fill with disapproval, and Ryan would know exactly what was going through their minds: You're Ryan Coolidge, son of that jewel thief aren 't you? Ryan suddenly remembered why he had jumped on his bicycle in the first place, and why he had been pedaling so fast. He was tired of the stigma, the embarrassment. He was tired of being a Coolidge.