Motocross Me (5 page)

A short while later, a pretty girl in a skirt similar to mine sings the National Anthem, and the races begin. I ask Dad what I should be doing, via my walkie-talkie and he tells me to enjoy the races. I take a seat on the bleachers and try to gain interest in the sport that’s supposed to be in my blood. The first few motos are smaller bikes; kids younger than Teig who make ridiculously slow laps around the track. It isn’t as much fun to watch like the big bikes are. But I stay anyway since I have nothing to do until intermission.

The bleachers are packed, most of them worried mothers or younger sisters who are as bored as me. It doesn’t help that the day gets warmer as time creeps on, and my neck is soon sticky with sweat.

“Hi. You’re Mr. Fisher’s daughter, right?” A girl to my right flashes me an uncomfortable smile, as if she’s being held at gunpoint to talk to me.

 “Yeah, that’s me. I’m Hana.” I shake her hand. It’s sticky like mine.

“Your dad’s really excited you’re here,” she says, scooting closer to me. “He talks about you a lot. I’m Shelby, by the way.”

Maybe I’m confusing her with all the people I’ve met recently, but her heart-shaped face is so familiar…it’s like I’m experiencing déjà vu. She’s plain, with naturally tanned skin and no makeup. Her dirty-blonde hair falls loosely on her shoulders. I know this is my first time meeting her, but there is something in her eyes that I can’t quite place.

She flinches and turns back to the race. I realize that only creepy idiots stare at people for as long as I just stared at her. “I feel like I’ve met you before,” I say, trying to sound friendly and not like I have a staring problem. “But I know I haven’t.”

“You’ve met my brother, then.” She smiles, looking a lot less freaked out. “It happens a lot.”

“Who’s your brother?”

“Ash.”

So that’s where I’ve seen her eyes before. They are the welcoming eyes of a stranger this morning when he signed in, and then much colder when he registered a while later.

“You look so much alike,” I say, still wondering why he was worried about getting disqualified from racing.

She shrugs, keeping her eyes on the race. “He’s my twin.”

Chapter 5

Shelby and I stay on the bleachers and watch the next ten motos. The younger kids take forever to race four laps around the track. But the older, faster racers finish their six laps in just a few minutes. Shelby explains that Mixon is a two-minute track, meaning the fastest racers can complete one lap in two minutes. She knows everything about motocross. Despite Molly’s crash course in how to work at a motocross park, I don’t know a thing beyond working here.

I know it is unintentional, but she has this way of making me feel like an idiot when she says something about motocross and I give her a blank stare. Every single time it happens, her eyes widen and her jaw falls open and she says, “I can’t believe you don’t know this stuff!”

I listen and ask a lot of questions because every detail I can memorize about Ryan’s sport is sure to impress him later. She tells me about the black foam thing many riders wore under the bottom edge of their helmet and how it prevents their neck from breaking in a crash. She snaps her wrist in a pantomime of how the brace works. My stomach feels like I just witnessed a real neck breaking. Teig flashes through my mind – I hope he wears one.

A guy on a blue dirt bike flips off the side of a jump and lands on top of his bike. The crowd makes this excited yet worried, but mostly excited sound. He shakes himself, then waves a hand in the air before lifting up on his hands and knees.

“Is he okay?” I ask Shelby.

“Yeah he’s fine.” She nods, “It’s standard to wave if you’re okay. When they fall and just lay there then you know something is wrong.”

Sure enough, the guy stands up, pulls his bike out of the dirt and merges back into the race. Now that the excitement is over, Shelby goes back into her motocross monologue.

“You mean you don’t know about how Oak Creek had that huge pricing war with Mixon?” Shelby stares at me like I’m a jellyfish asking about the ocean. 

“Um, no?”
Tisk Tisk.
The daughter of Texas’ most popular motocross track has no idea about the supposed pricing war between Mixon and what the heck is an Oak Creek anyway?

“A few years back, it cost eight dollars to practice at every track,” Shelby says, wiping sweat from her brow. “Then Oak Creek raised their price to ten dollars, and so did Buffalo Springs. They talked your dad into raising it, too.”

“Oak Creek and Buffalo Springs are other tracks, then,” I guess. Shelby rolls her eyes and continues, “Yeah. And then they went to fifteen dollars last summer and Mr. Fisher refused to charge that much. He said no one should pay that much money to ride around on dirt for a few hours. The other tracks got really mad.”

“Did they lower their price?”

“Nope,” she says, crossing her arms like she’s in charge. “Buffalo Springs went out of business recently. Oak Creek is still open. Mixon gets more business than anyone, which is great because we live so close, only about fifteen minutes away.”

“So you live in Mixon?” Sometimes I don’t believe that Mixon contains civilized life besides my dad’s family. But since it does, I think I just made a new friend.

“Yep,” she smiles as if thinking the same thing. “I’m sure we’ll be seeing a lot of each other. Most of these guys drive for an hour or more to get here. I’m just down the street.”

Two girls who could pass as real-life Barbie dolls sit on the bench below us. One of them is the girl who sang the anthem, and the other looks like a carbon copy in the same skirt and a similar top. Their hair is stick-straight and perfect. Despite the heat, their makeup is flawless – something my crappy cosmetology skills could never pull off. I envy and hate them at the same time.

The anthem girl asks Shelby when her brother is racing. She answers in one word, “Sixteen.” The girl thanks her in that fake high-pitched voice that hot girls tend to have. I almost throw up.

“I’m guessing you don’t like her?” I whisper.

“Heck no,” she snaps, making an exaggerated gagging sound. It’s a classic case of plain girl versus hot girl rivalry. I’d been the plain girl my whole life, but today I had hoped to cross over into the hot girl realm.

The girls sit on the bench with their legs crossed, watching the races. I check over myself, sitting with my feet on the bench below me, elbows on my knees, sweaty hair pushed behind my ears. If it wasn’t for this skirt, I’d look like a man. Ugh.

“I don’t know how they do it,” I say, trying to loosen the tension from Shelby’s hatred. “Maybe they are just born hot and they can’t help it. I’ll never be able to compete with girls like that.”

“Oh I don’t hate her because she’s gorgeous,” she whispers. “I hate her because she’s a backstabber.” Fire fills her eyes.

The gossip fiend in me begs for more. “Details. Now.”

“They’ve been coming to the races for as long as I can remember. And they always ignored me.” She leans closer to me but keeps her eyes fixed on the race. “Then one day last year, Alyson, the one who sings, suddenly started being nice to me.” She glances back at them, “Do you think they can hear me?”

“No, I can barely hear you over these loud bikes. Go on.”

She hesitates, speaking even quieter, “So anyway, they included me in their stupid group, and it turned out that they just wanted to get to my brother.”

“What do you mean?”

“They liked him, not me, and when he rejected them both, they dropped me from their radar.” She presses her lips together and forces an apathetic eye roll that
so
does not convince me. I doubt she even convinces herself.

“I don’t know why you’re upset about that. It’s not a big deal.” I’m disappointed that her story wasn’t more scandalous.

“Maybe not to you, but it’s happened with a few other girls, too. Everyone wants my brother,” she says, dropping her chin in her hands. “You can’t trust the spectator girls.”

“Spectator girls?”

Shelby holds up a finger to shush me while she listens to the announcement about the next moto. “The girls who race are trustworthy, but the ones who just watch the races typically aren’t,” she says, stealing a quick glance at Alyson. “Except for me,” she amends, flashing a smile. “You can trust me.”

I nod, wondering if college life would be like TV reality shows, where everyone has a knife waiting to stab you in the back. Felicia is the oldest friend I’d ever had, not counting shallow friendships I gathered at each school I went to as a kid. She’s never betrayed me, but then again, I’ve never had a brother.

Many checkered flags later, moto number sixteen lines up at the starting gate. The bleachers have no empty seats. According to everyone, the Pro class is the best race to watch. Shelby focuses on Ash with her fingernails between her teeth. She says she hopes he gets the holeshot, whatever that means.

All the racers are dressed head-to-toe in protective garb, so it’s impossible to distinguish between the helmeted heads revving their bike engines and waiting for the gate to drop. Luckily, I remember Ryan’s bike number, the infamous number ninety-six, so I find his red bike in the crowd. The gate drops and he soars past the competition, quickly grabbing the lead.

“Ugh,” Shelby groans, slamming her fists onto her knees. I don’t want to disappoint her by cheering for Ryan, so I keep quiet. When the checkered flag flies across the finish line, Ryan is first, but her brother is a close second.

“Once again folks, Raging Ryan for the win, and Ash ‘The Flash’ Carter in second place,” the announcer says. It sounds like Marty. “And in third place is Eric Morgan. Those are our cash winners in the two-fifty Pro class! Up next, the eighty Super-Mini, women’s class and then we’ll have a twenty-minute intermission.”

“I better go console him,” Shelby says before I have the chance to ask if everyone has nicknames like “Raging” and “Flash.” We make our way down the bleachers.

“My parents grill every Sunday race,” she says, stepping around a toddler in a dirt bike shirt. “You should come to our pit during intermission and eat lunch with us. I know they’ll want to meet you.”

Mmm, food. “That sounds great.”

I keep an eye out for Ryan while walking to the tower and I even take the long way through the pits hoping to see him. He isn’t at his truck but his bike is there, so he must be basking in his victory somewhere else.

After meandering through the pits a second time, I give up and actually do walk to the tower. And because I have the worst luck ever, there he is standing at the bottom of it talking to other racers and drinking an energy drink while two girls smile at his every word.

I call on all the confidence buried inside me and walk right through his group of friends, “accidentally” brushing my shoulder across his chest. I turn back to him, as if it was an afterthought. “Nice race.” All of their eyes are on me but the only pair I care about are the blue ones staring straight into mine, one eyebrow cocked in surprise.

Inside the tower, I rest on the futon and play cards with Teig to pass the time until intermission. He’s in an exceptionally good mood, despite losing Go Fish four times in a row. This kid must always be on, just like his mother. I like that.

The roar of engines die out, signaling intermission. Members of the staff water the track with huge water hoses and go over it with a tractor that ruffles the dirt and removes the ruts formed from this morning’s racing. Through scientific ways beyond my understanding, the track doesn’t get muddy when they douse it with water. Maybe the sweltering summer sun has something to do with it.

My new family goes back home to eat lunch, but I excuse myself saying I have a lunch invite from a new friend.

“This new friend isn’t a cute boy, is it?” Molly asks as we walk from the tower to the parking lot.

“I wish,” I say, rolling my eyes and meaning it more than she could ever know.

Shelby hadn’t told me where they were parked but I vaguely remember her driving a beat up red car. I search for it amid the trucks and motor homes that dominate the pits. Before I find her car, I find the dreadlocks. Ash sits on a step stool doing something to the wheel of his dirt bike. Shelby’s car is behind his truck.

“Do you know where Shelby is?” I ask the back of his head. He turns around. His eyes get wide when he sees me, and it isn’t a good sort of wide. Is my black eye still that bad?

“Yeah, she went to find you,” he says, hands still on the tire, his body now facing me. “You can sit down if you want.” He motions to some canvas chairs customized with
Carter 336
on the back. Two of them are occupied with his parents. I take a seat and introduce myself to Mr. and Mrs. Carter. They tell me to call them Rick and Barb.

Barb is older than my mom and considerably more mature. She has pale skin and brown graying hair. Rick is olive-skinned, like Ash, and has the same eyes and smile that Ash and Shelby share.

They tell me about their younger son named Shawn, but I don’t get to meet him. Barb says Shawn is friends with every kid here, including Teig, which is why he never came back to their pit unless it was time to race. Ash calls him a social butterfly.

The entire family is like Shelby: polite and happy. They are the picture-perfect example of the all-American family. Maybe this is what Dad meant when he talked about the motocross family.

When Shelby finally appears, she swears she searched all over the park for me. “Except for the one place that’s the most obvious,” Ash says, tossing a wrench in his tool box.

Shelby’s dad makes the best brisket I’ve ever tasted, and her mom somehow manages to have an endless supply of sweet tea in the ice chest. I like this job more every day.

All thoughts of Ryan disappear until Shelby and I get on the topic of sexy celebrities. We debate if muscular is sexier than tall and lean. Shelby likes this short squatty guy from some MTV reality show because he’s really muscular. I argue that Ryan Reynolds is tall and muscular, thus the perfect embodiment of male perfection. The name Ryan makes me think of my Ryan. And that’s all it takes to make me bored with the Carter family. Slouching back in my chair, I daydream about him for the rest of intermission.