David Wisehart - Blood Alley

Trevor couldn’t see what the big deal was. But why would he? He already had a family.

I don’t.

Not a real family, anyway. Claire wanted to know what Trevor’s family was like. Maybe they would accept her as one of their own.

She had persuaded Trevor to let her go with him to the funeral service by appealing to his sense of adventure. School finals were over. They’d both finished yesterday. Next week was graduation. His uncle’s death had cast a cloud over Trevor’s spirits, but together they could turn his sad obligation into a fun road trip, and once the funeral was over they could spend the rest of the Memorial Day weekend hiking in the mountains.

Things hadn’t started out well this morning, with the Hummer breaking down thirty miles outside of Palmdale. No one could get a cell phone signal. A road sign had promised a gas station up ahead, and Trevor had insisted on going forward— always the optimist —though his mood now had a harder edge. This morning he had teased Claire because she didn’t know how to drive.

A side stitch stabbed her.

Claire stopped walking and let the others push for a while. She bent over and took a few deep breaths. The pain subsided. She felt out of shape, out of her element, and out of her mind.

She wiped sweat from her forehead. Standing in the middle of the road, Claire regained her bearings. She could see for miles in all directions. Here the Mojave desert was vast and desolate and oddly beautiful. Joshua trees and sagebrush filled the open plain, surrounded by rolling foothills and white-capped mountains. The highway was a straight shot through the desert, but she could see where it started to twist and curve as it negotiated the distant hills.

Despite the holiday weekend, here were no other cars on the road. She found that disconcerting.

Claire watched the others push the Hummer. They were all sweaty and tired. Trevor leaned hard into the open doorframe on the driver’s side, keeping one hand on the steering wheel. He was the strongest of them, and did most of the work.

His car, his responsibility, she thought.

If Trevor had taken the Hummer into the shop for a check-up before the trip—like she told him to—they wouldn’t be in this mess.

Damnit, Trevor—

They were supposed to be in Cedarview tonight, in time for the funeral service tomorrow morning. The plan was to check in at the lodge by four o’clock, take a quick sunset hike along the mountain crest, and have a nice steak dinner at the restaurant on the summit.

We’re not going to make it.

They had no choice now but to press on.

Ethan pushed half-heartedly. He didn’t seem to care. All he cared about was his music, whatever he was listening to on his iPod. Ethan was a good guitarist, but a bad traveler. He’d been grumpy even before the breakdown. He was only here because he was dating Trevor’s younger sister, Dakota.

Dakota walked beside Ethan, pushing with one hand while playing Angry Birds on her Android with the other. She seemed bored by the road trip, and reluctant to chip in when things went bad.

Only Trevor pushed on the Hummer with any real force. The others had basically given up.

So have I , Claire admitted to herself.

Trevor glanced back. “Come on, Claire! Help out, will you?”

She caught up with the others, put her hands on the back corner of the Hummer, and gave it her best.

They rolled the car slowly past a road sign. It was an official warning from the California Highway Patrol’s Safety Task Force: “Stay Alert, Stay Alive!”

Claire noticed something else. Chained to the bottom of the signpost was a bicycle painted all white.

“Weird,” Dakota said.

Claire had read about these on the Internet. “Ghost bike.”

Hanging from the handlebars of the white bicycle was a handwritten sign in large block letters. It faced out toward the road for passing motorists to read: A CYCLIST WAS STRUCK HERE. Flowers decorated the memorial. Stuck in the rear spokes was the faded photo of a red-headed teenage boy in a bicycle helmet.

Dakota said, “He must have died right here.”

Claire nodded. “This is where it starts.”

“Where what starts?”

“Blood Alley.”

The roadside memorial puzzled Claire.

What’s the point?

The ghost bicycle would rust, the pictures would fade, the flowers would die and blow away to nothing. Passing strangers in cars and trucks would look, shrug, and continue on.

But one thing was clear—the bicyclist killed on this highway had a family that loved him. No doubt his mother or father had built the memorial. Here, days or weeks ago, his girlfriend stood weeping. Here a priest or a rabbi left a prayer on the wind. Here his classmates bowed their heads in silence. That moment had passed, those footprints were gone, but the memories would forever haunt this place.

That, of course, was the point. No death should go unmarked, no life unmourned.

Who will mourn for me? Claire wondered.

She did not know her real parents. She had only a few clues about who they might have been. She didn’t even know if they were alive or dead, but it comforted Claire to imagine her parents sleeping in their graves, with pretty little tombstones side by side in the smooth, green grass. The quiet image carried a kind of justice, absolving them of the crime of abandoning their daughter.

That sense of abandonment still lived inside her.

Claire had always felt alone in the world, an outsider. She liked to think of this as her unique strength, this ability to survive in an uncaring world, without the love and protection most kids took for granted.

Her foster families had all been fakes. Flim-fams, she called them, making a joke of her private little horror. Life, after all, had played a joke on her: abandoned, fostered, abandoned again.

Rinse, repeat.

It toughened her on the outside, made her cold and cruel when she didn’t mean to be, but on the inside she felt everything, and treasured her wounds. The world had rejected Claire at birth, so she rejected it. Her families were never her real family. Her friends were never her real friends. She didn’t trust the girls who tried to befriend her—and trusted boys even less.

When Claire was younger, boys didn’t matter. But now that she had a cover-girl face and boobs you could see across a football field, boys were a problem. Though she welcomed the confirmation that her mother had been beautiful, Claire’s physical allurements threatened to tear down the wall she’d so carefully built around her.

Boys stared at her. They even asked her out. But she never wanted to go to the party, or the movie, or bowling, or burgers, or drives, or any of it. She just wanted to be left alone. And they wouldn’t let her. It didn’t matter how much she shook her head and walked away. The boys would follow her. It didn’t matter how simply she dressed, or how plainly she did her hair. Some of those boys just didn’t give up, and she felt powerless to stop them. She didn’t mind the teasing so much. It was the hunger in their eyes that frightened her.

To protect herself, she pursued Trevor.

He had scarcely paid her any attention. As captain of the varsity swim team and the cutest boy on campus, Trevor had all the girls he could handle. But once she and Trevor got to talking and spending time together, he liked her well enough to ask her to go with him to see the meteor shower. They’d driven out to the desert, just the two of them, with beers and a blanket, and watched falling stars all night.

Well, not all night.

Trevor had kissed her, and she kissed him back. He unbuttoned her shirt, and she helped him with the rest. He covered her with his naked warmth, and when he entered her she welcomed him, and told him she liked it. And it wasn’t exactly a lie. She liked it more and more each time, and soon they were a public couple. The boys stopped staring at her—and the girls started. Claire didn’t mind that so much, those jealous glances. No one could threaten her now. That was the thing she liked most about Trevor. He kept the other boys away. She was Trevor’s girl, and no one messed with Trevor’s girl.