Page 39 of Over & Out (Redbeard Cove #3)

Chris

“ A re you sure this is okay?” Shay asks, her voice so quiet I barely make out the words.

I met this girl an hour ago, and it’s the hundredth time in those sixty minutes I’ve wondered if she’s always spoken like this, or if someone ground the confidence out of her. That’s a familiar thought that makes my skin heat with anger. It also feels like the correct answer. I pray I’m mistaken.

“Totally okay,” I say. “He’s Mr. Helpful. He loves doing stuff like this.”

I’ve never asked for Hopper’s help with anything like this before. But I’d eat my helmet if he shows up with any resentment at all. The Hopper I know is compassionate to the bone.

“I still can’t believe it’s really you,” Shay says, ducking her head shyly, her slightly greasy hair obscuring most of her face.

It’s beyond strange to me that in this scenario, she thinks I’m famous. But after the way she freaked when I came out to help her? I know it’s genuine.

I didn’t mean to meet her. I didn’t mean to come back to the dirt track at all, but once again, my feet just pointed this way.

And once again, rounding the corner past those brambles until the winding dirt path revealed itself to me was like a press of hands on my shoulders.

Instantly my blood pressure lowered. My heart lifted.

And I felt like I could breathe. If I’m being honest with myself, it’s the same way I feel around Hopper.

That feeling of being home. Though in Hopper’s case, that feeling sits under a whole well of other feelings.

And tingles and butterflies and…other things.

Today, when I realized where I was going, I promised myself I wouldn’t hide in the shadows if I saw her.

I didn’t think I’d see her again at all.

In fact, some part of me kind of thought she might have been a figment of my imagination.

But lo and behold, I rounded the corner, and once again, there she was.

A girl by herself, with the best bike in the world, on the track on a quiet Tuesday morning.

Betty was working today. At least, at first. I watched as the girl took her around the sharpest loop on the track, mud splattering as she drove through a puddle.

Her body was stiff. Shoulders hunched, fully seated.

It could have been the weather—the misty drizzle impairs visibility, and the mud makes things slippery. But I think it was the bike.

“Drop those shoulders,” I whispered. “Loosen up. You’ll be more agile. ”

She was keeping it slow, avoiding jumps. Clearly she was new at this.

But she had promise. In that stiffness, I could also see her determination. The grit she’d need if she wanted to be someone in this place. Hell, even being here—especially on a day like today, and with a temperamental crone like Betty—took guts.

When she rounded the corner again, I knew I was in view.

I waved so I didn’t look like a creep and then pretended I was interested in a rosemary bush growing in the field next to the track.

It wasn’t my best moment, but I hadn’t thought very far ahead.

There’s a patch of grass here, and it’s a little higher than the track, so if nonriders come to spectate, this is normally where they sit.

Sitting would have made me look more casual, but it had been raining all day, and I was wet enough.

I know she saw me. There was a slight wobble. But she recovered. A moment later, she disappeared around a bend.

That’s when I heard the loud bang.

I didn’t think. I sprinted through the mud. Just around the corner, the girl was on the ground, the bike on its side, wheel spinning.

On top of her.

I ripped the bike off her, barely noticing the twinge in my shoulder from the old injury. I dropped Betty into the mud. Sorry, girl.

“Are you hurt?” I asked, kneeling down. “Did it land on you? Did you twist anything?”

But the girl bolted up to sitting the moment the bike was off her.

“I don’t know,” she said, her voice muffled.

“Move your legs,” I told her.

She duly obeyed. They worked.

“I think I’m okay,” she said after shaking out her arms too.

Relief flooded through me.

Betty was still running, so I reached over and turned her off. “She backfires sometimes,” I said. “It happens when you let off the throttle too fast.”

The girl looked in my direction for the first time. Then she slowly flipped up her visor. Her eyes were wide behind it.

She looks at me with the exact expression people wear around Hopper. Like she was starstruck. I almost look around to see if he was here.

“You’re Chris Maplewood!” the girl said, her tone almost reverent.

I laughed in pure surprise. This used to happen to me at races. I’d only raced at amateur meets, but when I had, little girls would sometimes come up to me and tell me I was awesome. Or ask for my autograph. It was cute. Inspiring, that I could inspire them.

I’d forgotten all about that, even though I’d raced last summer. Before the accident.

“I am,” I said.

She blinked. Then she looks over at Betty. “This is your bike.”

I shook my head. “It’s your bike.”

“But—”

“I don’t ride anymore,” I said .

She swallowed, her throat bobbing. “I—” she trailed off, like she’d lost her nerve.

I bit my cheek, knowing I shouldn’t ask. But curiosity got the better of me. “How did you come to get her?”

“Her?”

“Betty.” I smiled.

Her cheeks blotched with pink, like she’d made a huge faux pas. “I didn’t know she had a name.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “I didn’t really share it with anyone.”

She swallowed again.

“What’s your name?” I asked her.

Her cheeks went even pinker.

“Actually, it’s okay,” I said, realizing that I was an adult and she wasn’t. She’d probably been taught about stranger danger, which was a good thing. I’d just help her get Betty started and leave her alone.

“Shailene,” she said quickly. “But you can call me Shay.”

I smiled. “Hi, Shay.”

“The bike—Betty—” she said. “I…she’s not really mine.”

I pressed my lips together, dying to know more. Had she stolen it? Did the guy who’d bought it from me ditch it here? He hadn’t really listened when I told him how to deal with all of Betty’s quirks.

“My…the dad at the house I live at, he bought it from some rich guy a couple months ago.”

My stomach lurched. The dad at the house I live at. That could have meant any number of things. Either way, it was deeply familiar phrasing to me, and not the kind that felt good.

“So you’re borrowing it?” I asked softly.

Shay nodded. She shoved her hands into her jacket pockets. It was an old ski jacket, torn, with the stuffing sticking out under one armpit. Didn’t mean anything. I had jackets like that.

But then she said, in barely a whisper, “He’ll kill me if he finds out,” my heart cracked in two.

“But he probably won’t. He found out it was yours and called it a piece of shit Barbie bike,” she blurted out.

“Said it was no wonder it was so cheap. He stuck it out behind the barn with the broken ones. He’s gone all day during the week, and I knew it was yours.

I remember it from when…” She looked almost like she was going to cry for a moment, but quickly tucked the emotion away.

“I used to go to your races.” She looked down at Betty and reached forward to try to pick her up.

“Here,” I said, lifting it up with her.

We got it to standing.

“Shay,” I said gently, “I know exactly how you’re feeling. I think. I just…” I hesitate. “No bike is worth getting in trouble for.”

In trouble was a catchall. I could see we both understood that.

“Is there a way you can ask him if you can borrow it?”

“I tried. He just laughed at me. Never really answered. I thought maybe it would be okay.”

My heart clenched at her childish na?veté. She couldn’t be more than fifteen. I wanted so badly to know her story. More than that, I wanted to magically take her away from this life she’d been living. Bring her home with me.

I had to shove that away. I can’t go abducting kids. But maybe I could help her.

“Shay,” I said. “Are you supposed to be in school right now?” I don’t know when the winter holidays start. What if I’m helping her play hooky? The trouble she could be in could be so much worse.

But at that, Shay’s lips pulled tight. Suddenly, it was like night and day. “I gotta go,” she said, taking Betty from me. She wheeled the bike out of the mud with a grunt.

I had to hold my hands tight in front of me to stop from begging her to wait. To let me help somehow. But what could I do?

“I’m not going to tell anyone,” I said. “I promise.”

She ignored me, yanking on her helmet.

I backed away, off the side of the track, to the grassy edge. There was nothing I could do. I couldn’t even tell her I’d be back here. Shay swung her leg over Betty.

Or could I?

“I’ll be back tomorrow,” I said. “I can give you pointers, if you want.”

Shay looked up at me, and for a brief moment, I wondered if I’d reached her. If she’d decide I was trustworthy. But she just kicked the starter. At least, she tried to, and missed. She did it again. And again.

Betty was down.

“Can I try?”

“No!”

This went on another few minutes, until, finally, she got off the bike. “Fine,” she said, just a mumble from the helmet.

I went over to try to start Betty. I used all my old tricks. I ignored the pain in my shoulder—and the sharp pain in my chest at the feeling of Betty’s familiar shape under me.

But it was no use. I suspected I knew what was wrong, but it would take more tools than we had here, which was zero, to fix it.

That’s when I felt the buzz in my pocket.

Hopper.

The thirty minutes between my text to Hopper and his arrival were only a little awkward. And only at first. I asked Shay a few questions, but she was fully tight-lipped.

When I told her I was sending for help, she’d freaked out. Grabbed Betty from me and started trying to walk. Unless she lived right around the corner, though, it wasn’t going to be easy to get her home.

“How much time before your…he comes home?” I asked her.

She’d faltered then, looking slightly panicky.

“I promise, you can trust me,” I say. I told her I used to be like her.

Sneaking out with a bike I wasn’t supposed to be riding.

In my case, it was the guy at the bike shop in Swan River who let me borrow one of the older ones from the shop.

The home I’d been staying at was strict, but not awful. I figured out how to get the time away.

She seemed to be rapt, so I continued. “I was in foster care,” I explained. “After my dad died.” I described my best foster home. And my worst. I left out all the bland ones in between. I talked so much I was surprised Hopper wasn’t there already.

I don’t know if I fully won her over. But by the end, I got a smile out of her. Some joke about the caseworkers and parents getting my name wrong, no matter how many times I corrected them. And it felt good to talk about that time. Even if it was a sanitized version.

There’s a long pause now. Long and quiet enough that I can hear the rumble of a truck in the distance. Hopper. I hope.

Shay looks over at me. “How did you learn how to ride?”

I smile. “Someone taught me.”

“You took lessons?”

“Nope. Just someone who rode. Who thought I showed promise.” I skim over the fact that this was my real dad. Because I want her to believe she can trust someone to teach her too.

Someone like me.

The thought makes me nervous but sends a thrill through me too. Empowering a girl to ride a dirt bike? I can think of no better way to spend a day. Or a hundred days.

With the truck definitely louder now, though, I tell her about Hopper, trying and failing not to lay it on too thick. I talk about how good he is. How kind. How even though he’s kind of grumpy sometimes, he isn’t when it counts. And he’s pretty much erased all the bad men I know.

Just before the engine cuts out in the parking lot, Shay looks at me like she did the first time. “I still can’t believe it’s really you.”