Leapholes

Chapter 2

Ryan hopped on his bicycle and didn't stop pedaling until his thighs were on fire.

They weren't really flaming, but it was a good burn, the same tingling sensation he got when leaving the competition in the dust at the BMX races. Ryan had the coolest bike at Central Middle School, the fastest thing on two wheels that didn't come with a motor. It was silver with dark red striping. He'd paid extra for the striping, but it was worth every penny. It was his money. He'd earned it mowing lawns. Kids used to see him speeding by and say, "Cool bike, Ryan!" Parents would look at their little ones and say, "See, children, hard work does pay off. Look at Ryan Coolidge." But now that his father was in jail, people had a different take on it.

They figured the bike was stolen.

"Move along, boy," said Mrs. Hernandez.

Ryan was sitting on the curb, still breathing hard from the ride. His sandy-brown hair was in a tussle from the wind. He was wearing his favorite basketball jersey beneath his sweatshirt, and he could feel it sticking to his back with perspiration. He looked up to see old Mrs. Hernandez standing on her front porch.

"I said, move along!" she shouted, scowling.

Ryan got back on his bike and continued down the street. It seemed that someone always had an eye on him. No one trusted him. They told him to move on, get lost, beat it. They assumed he was up to no good, that he was a bad kid. It was all because of that old saying, "The apple doesn't fall far from the tree," which meant that a son (the apple) is usually a lot like his father (the tree). Ryan wanted to hop off his bike and say, "Hey, I'm not like that. I know you think the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, but the truth is, this tree was planted on a very steep hill, and when this apple hit the ground it rolled, and rolled, and kept on rolling clear into the. next county. And it didn't stop rolling until you could make a pretty good argument that my father and I were no longer members of the same species, let alone related as father and son, or tree and apple, or whatever else you wanted to call us."

But he knew he'd be wasting his breath. The apple didn't fall far from the tree, and the tree was in jail. People just figured that the apple wasn't far behind. Both of them, rotten to the core.

Ryan stopped at the traffic light. A red convertible pulled up beside him. It was a perfect day to ride around town with the top down, sunny and mild, the kind of weather people craved in south Florida. Ryan was admiring the old Mustang when he suddenly recognized the high school kid in the back seat. He tried to ignore him, but the kid spotted him.

"Hey, Coolidge!" he shouted.

Ryan refused to look.

"Are you deaf, kid?"

Ryan wished he would just go away. Teddy Armstrong wasn't the coolest kid in high school, but he sure thought he was. His father was a hotshot lawyer, a hard-nosed State Attorney who had been re-elected to his post three times. Some said he might run for Congress someday. Ryan hoped he would run, and he hoped to be old enough to vote against him when the time came. Mr. Armstrong was the man who had prosecuted the criminal charges against Ryan's father.

"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.