Lucy Doesn't Wear Pink (4 page)

He was way ahead of her by the time she got going. He was good on the sprints, but he’d get tired and she’d catch up again. As she pumped until her calves complained, she just hoped it would happen before he reached the hill.

It wasn’t really known as Little Sierra Blanca. It probably didn’t actually have a name. J.J. and Lucy called it that because it looked like a miniature of Sierra Blanca, the most powerful mountain of any of them. Ski Apache, the ski resort, was there, but Lucy just thought of it as a giant mound of the very best vanilla ice cream. She could always see faces in it. Of course, she could see faces in everything in New Mexico — the clouds, the moutainsides, the gnarly desert ironwood trees. But the only face that mattered right now was J.J.’s. It had so much pain in it, he was likely to do just about anything.

As she’d predicted, he was slowing down some, and his back tire wobbled over a clump of sagebrush. Lucy was almost on him, and they were both almost to Little Sierra Blanca when she heard the first snarl of an engine.

“Sweet!” J.J. said.

“It is SO not,” Lucy said.

She spun the bike out in front of him and stopped. He jammed on his brakes and hit her in the kickstand.

“Dude — you made me run into you.”

“I know. J.J., this is insane.

J.J.’s blue eyes slitted down. “Don’t call me crazy.”

“I didn’t say
you
were nuts, I said
this
is — whatever you’re thinking we’re gonna do.”

The engine whined closer, and Lucy knew it was climbing the hill on the other side.

“We’re just gonna make it fun for whoever’s driving,” J.J. said. “He’s probably bored too.”

The motor screamed, and another cloud of dust-smoke billowed above them.

“He doesn’t sound bored.” Lucy put her hand on J.J.’s handlebar. “Come on — I’ll lie down over there and let you jump over me with your bike.”

“Great idea,” J.J. said. But he didn’t move to where Lucy was pointing, away from the approaching growl of the ATV. “We’ll both get down at the bottom of the hill, and when he comes over the top, he’ll either have to go over the side or jump over us.”

Lucy shook her ponytail, hard.

“Either way, it’ll be cool. Come on,” J.J. said.

“What if he misses?”

“No way — he’ll totally see us.”

Lucy didn’t like the hard thing that came into J.J.’s eyes, like a lid slamming down on something. He was going to do this, no matter what. And Lucy wasn’t.

She could hear the ATV making its final snarling-growling-whining push to the top of Little Sierra. She jerked her wheel to the left and shoved off with her foot.

Even as she got her other foot to the pedal, she heard the ATV scream in the air behind her. Someone yelled in a voice that rose into the air with it. When J.J.’s cry joined it, Lucy turned around. She was just in time to see the thick wheels of the ATV land and bounce and head straight for her.

“Get down!” J.J. screamed.

Lucy let go of her bike and dropped to the ground. Her spokes flattened her arm, pushing it down hard. Pain shot all the way up to her neck. Tiny things hit her face and stung and bit and then were gone with the machine that roared past, just inches from the top of her head.

Dust rained on her, but Lucy didn’t care. All she could do was shake.

J.J. said above her, “You’re okay, right?”

“I don’t know.” Lucy tried to sit up, but her right arm was pinned under what used to be her bike wheel. Now, it looked like it belonged on the pile of junk in J.J.’s yard.

Her clothes didn’t look much better. Rips f lapped open in both her jacket and her sweatshirt as if they were eager to show off the gash in her arm.

“Dude, you’re bleeding,” J.J. said.

“Of course I’m bleeding, genius. The spokes cut me. Could you get the bike off?”

J.J. crouched beside her, hands shivering. He managed to use them to pull the twisted wheel from her arm.

“How bad is it?” Lucy asked.

“You got, like, a major cut.”

“No — my bike. How bad is it?”

J.J. got on his knees. “I can totally fix it. We probably got a hundred wheels at my house.”

Before Lucy could tell him he probably had that many in the front yard alone, engine noise ripped the air.

“He
better
come back,” J.J. said, scrambling to his feet.

Lucy cradled her arm against the front of her jacket. “Why? So he can run over me again?”

“Hey!” J.J. waved his arms above his head and jumped, puffing dirt into Lucy’s face.

“Would you knock it off?” But Lucy could barely hear herself as the ATV roared toward them. She curled up and rolled away, but it stopped, and the motor noise dropped to a mumble, unlike Lucy’s heart, which slammed against the walls of her chest.

“What was up with that?” the driver said. His “that” disappeared up into that range where only dogs can hear, the way J.J.’s often did, and Lucy uncurled herself to look at him. He had to be their age, but his face was so plastered with dirt she couldn’t tell who he was.

“What are you asking me for?” J.J.’s words seemed to want to slide back down his throat. He crossed his arms and hid his hands in his armpits. His “You’re the one who almost ran over somebody” came out only half sure.

Lucy stifled a groan. J.J. was backing down. That could only mean this guy was —

“I was trying to keep from hitting
you
,” the kid said.

His “you” came out as “jew.” Yep. It was Gabe Navarra, the biggest kid in sixth grade, Hispanic through and through, like most people in Los Suenos. He used “hate” as a people-verb when it came to J.J. — or anybody else who didn’t speak English as a second language. Until now, he had never so much as spit in Lucy’s direction. Now he narrowed his eyes at her in a way that would have made Mudge run for cover.

“If I killed you, it woulda been your fault,” he said to her.

“So what?” Lucy said.

Gabe blinked. The whites of his eyes were bright against his ruddy skin.

“If I was dead,” she said, “why would I care whose fault it was?”

He blinked again. The he hissed between his teeth and turned to J.J., who was starting to grin.

“What are you laughin’ at?” Gabe said.

“Nothin’,” J.J. said. The grin evaporated.

“You were laughin’ at me.” Gabe came off the seat of the ATV, and J.J. pulled his hands from his armpits, stiff, but at the ready.

“Hello!” Lucy said. “I could be bleeding to death here.”

Gabe tilted his chin up. “You wouldn’t be sitting there talking if you were bleeding to death. Right?”

Lucy kept her arm hugged to her jacket and managed to stand up. Her face burned. The tear in her jacket was turning red. And if she didn’t get J.J. out of there, he was going to look worse than she did.

She glanced at her watch. 3:10. Barely enough time to get home and destroy the evidence before Aunt Karen pulled up.

“I want to go home,” she said. “I might need stitches.”

“It was your fault,” Gabe said again, and spun his wheels to make an exit.

“Do you really need stitches?” J.J. said when he was gone.

“No, brain child,” Lucy said. “I was just trying to get rid of him.”

J.J. pulled his dark eyebrows nearly down to his nose. “I coulda done that.”

“Before or after he tore you into little pieces? Come on, I gotta get home.”

“Take my bike,” J.J. said. “I’ll fix yours before your dad even knows about it.”

Lucy didn’t go there in her mind. Dad would somehow sense with the eyes he seemed to have inside his brain that she’d gotten into trouble.

But he wasn’t the one she was worried about. She looked at her watch again. She still had time to bury her jacket and sweatshirt in the bottom of the dirty clothes basket, put a couple of bandages on her arm — okay, maybe five — and get into a long-sleeved shirt before Aunt Karen —

But that plan slid down her brain pipe when Lucy rounded the corner from Second Street. The silver Toyota Celica with the Texas license plate was already parked in front of the house. Lucy peeled off her jacket and dropped it behind the century plant. Maybe if she slipped in the back door —

“Lucy Elizabeth Rooney,” said a voice-like-a-supervisor. “What have you done to yourself now?”

3

The meow that rose from behind the century plant didn’t sound as disgusted as Aunt Karen’s voice, even though Mudge emerged with Lucy’s jacket draped across him and only his disgruntled head sticking out.

“Thank you, Mudge,” Lucy whispered to him as she snatched him up, jacket and all. “There’s a can of tuna for you later if you’ll hang with me now.”

She snuggled him against her, careful to keep most of his coat-clad bulk over her arm, and whirled to face Aunt Karen. Her aunt had rounded the corner by then and stood by the fence, black-sweatered arms folded, hazel eyes squinting. Lucy hated it when she did that. She reminded herself to add it to the list of reasons Aunt Karen should move to Australia.

“Hi,” Lucy said.

“Don’t ‘hi’ me. What happened to your face?”

Lucy held back a groan. As bad as it was stinging, it must look like someone had thrown a handful of rocks at her. Actually, someone kind of had.

“I fell,” Lucy said. “It’s not as bad as it looks.”

“You’re not the one looking at it.” Aunt Karen shook her head, sending one chin-length panel of dark hair against her cheek and another across her forehead. She jerked it out of her eyes. “What did you fall on, a box of tacks?”

“Luce? You okay?”

Lucy did groan then. Dad stood in the front doorway, looking frustrated because he couldn’t see what was going on. Everything would have been fine if Aunt Karen had been late like she usually was. And if she didn’t stick her stumpy little nose into other people’s business.

“What’s going on?” Dad said.

“She hurt herself.” Aunt Karen sounded as if she were announcing that Lucy had just robbed a bank. “I don’t know if she’s going to need stitches or not.”

“Stitches?”

Dad’s voice sharpened to a point. Lucy gritted her teeth.

“I’m fine, Dad,” she said between them.

“She is not ‘fine’.” Aunt Karen came to Lucy and hooked her arm around her back, already pushing her toward the front door. “Her face looks like somebody shot her twelve times with a B.B. gun — ”

“It does not!”

“Have you looked in a mirror?”

“Lucy, what happened?” Dad said.

Lucy wrenched herself away from Aunt Karen and took the front walk in two long steps to get to Dad.

“I just fell off my bike, okay?” she said. “I’m fine — it doesn’t even hurt.”

She tried to edge around her father, but he stopped her with his arm and pulled her to stand in front of him. Before he could get his hands to her face, Aunt Karen charged up to them, voice still in supervisor mode.

“First of all, she doesn’t even have a coat on,” she said, “so I suggest we go inside before we add pneumonia to the mix.”

Aunt Karen turned Dad around with one hand and pushed Lucy inside with the other. Lucy kept going, straight through the entryway toward the hall, until Dad said, “Lucy” — in that way that stopped time, forward motion, and Lucy’s heart.

She froze.

“What happened to your jacket? I know you put it on before you left.”

“How would you know?” Aunt Karen said. She clicked the door shut behind her. “I bet you don’t know half the stuff she gets away with.”

At the same instant that Lucy added yet another item to the move-to-Australia list, she remembered something else.

“My jacket is right here,” she said. She crossed the entryway toward her aunt. “I’m carrying it — see?” she said, and she thrust it, Mudge and all, straight into Aunt Karen’s arms.

A gray-striped head popped from the denim folds and pointed its toothy side at Aunt Karen’s face. Mudge let out a yowl that sounded exactly like, “I hate you!” and Lucy vowed to make that
two
cans of tuna.

Aunt Karen matched him with a yowl of her own. Flinging her arms out in at least two directions, she stepped back, collided with the table by the door, and set a basket sailing. Candy fanned across the floor, which sent Mudge into a frenzy. He turned in frantic circles, sliding on plastic-wrapped canes and finally leaping between Aunt Karen’s legs. She didn’t stop screaming or f lapping Lucy’s jacket until Mudge was behind the totem pole in the corner. Lucy made a dash through the hallway and dove into the bathroom.

But she didn’t quite get the door closed before Aunt Karen was leaning on it.

“No, you don’t,” she said. “Let me in, Lucy.”

Only because Dad echoed with, “Let her look at you, Luce,” did Lucy back away from the door and allow Aunt Karen to fall into the bathroom. She tripped over the basket of towels and stumbled against the sink — and Lucy plastered a hand against her mouth to keep from laughing out loud. When she drew it back, it was speckled in blood that sobered her up like a splash of cold water.