ONE
A BELL RINGS.
Zelda slaps everything on her bedside table until the ringing stops, finds her glasses (which are fine, despite some light slapping), and rolls gently back onto her pillow.
Daylight slips in through the drapes.
She’d been dreaming she was drowning. Fun. It wasn’t the water that worried her, though—in her dream, in that brittle logic dreams have, the water was her home. It was when she discovered the water had a surface—and something more beyond—that the cold came in. A cold that had always been there but she’d never felt before.
There was someone above the surface of the water, wasn’t there? Holding out their hand. Already she can’t remember who it was. Their face was foggy. Maybe their face was fog.
It made Zelda anxious and foggy until she woke, but now that fog is lifting and Zelda smiles as relief warms her body. She doesn’t have to remember the thing that worried her. She doesn’t need to worry about the thing she can’t remember. Zelda blinks away the sleep that pricks at her eyes and stares awhile at her bedroom ceiling.
The morning light casts shadows in the plaster. There are pictures—like inkblots—in the shadows. She found them when she was young, and gave them names. Her constellations. Every morning, Zelda studies them like a sailor. She’s looking to see if she’s where she’s supposed to be.
Now she’s up and yawning. Her house is yellow, sunny. She brushes out her dark hair and ties it back, changes out of the shirt and shorts she sleeps in and into the shirt and shorts she runs in.
Dust motes linger in the light overhead as Zelda laces up her running shoes. She watches them a moment and breathes the day in.
She doesn’t know we’re here. She can’t tell that we’re thinking about her.
Then she’s out the door. She doesn’t turn to lock it because her running shorts don’t have a pocket for keys, and besides, in this town, why bother? Why. Then she’s down the steps to the gate with the creaky hinge, which she means to fix but never does because it sounds like a cartoon frog.
“MORning,” creaks the gate as it opens, a throaty singsong.
“Good morning, gate,” Zelda answers.
“GOODbye,” says the gate as it closes.
“See you,” Zelda tells it as she jogs away.
She worries sometimes she might be cute.
Here’s what Zelda’s town is like:
Zelda runs.
The air out here is tender and kind. The sun is a blush on her cheeks. There’s a sympathetic breeze like a hand on the small of her back as her limbs loosen.
This sidewalk was flat and straight once, but tree roots have pushed it out of plumb like a crooked smile—she has to mind her step as she waves at the paperboy, and says hi to Clara the mail carrier (“Hi, Zelda baby”), and nods professionally to the clown at the laundromat.
She climbs the library steps and slides back down on the handrail. She cuts through the skate park to admire the skaters, watches them all botch their tricks and get back up again. Then she turns into the town square to circle the courthouse a few times, and that’s when it hits her.
“Ohmygosh,” she huffs, grinding to a stop. “Oh no!”
There are a couple of guys playing Frisbee nearby, the kind who are all muscly arms and haircuts. “What?” one of them asks her, stepping close. “What is it?”
“My final,” says Zelda, and she glances up at the courthouse clock. “My geography final. It starts in five minutes!”
“Dude! That sucks!” calls the other Frisbee guy. “Well at least … ha! At least you’re already dressed for running!”
Zelda smiles wanly and raises a hand as she sprints off in a new direction.
“Good luck, Zelda!” say the Frisbee bros, in unison.
Zelda leaps over a little red fire hydrant and veers around the café. The flower cart woman calls, “Zelda, here!” and hands her a daisy as she passes. “Go get ’em, Zelda!” cheers the tattoo guy with his baby. There’s a funny tangle of leashes and legs as Zelda tries to get past that one old man with his three tiny dogs. It’s just the kind of lively moment you’d expect if Zelda’s life were a movie, and these the opening credits. A little snapshot of people and place.
“Whoop, sorry.”
“Yip-yip-yip!”
“Oh dear.”
“I think this belongs to you.”
And so on.
Finally, Zelda recovers and dashes past the boutique and bookstore and bakery. Runs under the jewelry store clock on the following block. “Four minutes,” she huffs. “Hey! Kid!”
There’s a girl with a bicycle, a beautiful blue bicycle with a banana seat and a backrest.
“Kid!” Zelda breathes. “Can I borrow your bike?”
The girl’s freckles are a constellation. Her gap-toothed smile is as crooked as an old sidewalk. “Sure, Zelda!” she answers, and hands over the handlebars. Just like that. Zelda mounts the bike at a run, leaping onto the seat and settling into a coast with one breathless sweep of her leg.
“Didn’t know I could do that,” she whispers absently.
“Atta girl!” shouts a meter maid.
Her feet touch the pedals. In that moment, her ears pop. Like something has changed in the air. A sudden shift in pressure. Or maybe not—no one else seems to notice it.
Three minutes.
Zelda pumps her legs and settles into a groove. She’s going to make her test in time. This bicycle has a bell—she rings it. Its tone is perfect and clear, like a drop of blue water, and as it fades she tries to quiz herself with geography words. Isthmus. Peninsula. Bismarck, North Dakota.
Then she takes a turn a little wide, and there’s an oncoming car, and her heart sinks. Time slows down.
Still, Zelda has enough time to feel every bump in the road, hear the scream of tires, see the startled face of the driver that’s about to hit her. It’s that woman who’s always selling Girl Scout cookies outside the Sav-Mor. Zelda sees her mouth a word she probably doesn’t use in front of the Girl Scouts. Then someone somewhere shouts, “Loooook ouuuut!” and Zelda brakes, the car brakes, their brakes catch and they grind like glaciers toward each other in dilated time, patient but inevitable.
Actually, not so inevitable—they both stop, hardly more than a meter apart. A bird sings, whit-whee. The woman behind the wheel finishes the word she’d been saying, the crisp T of it fogging a little spot on her windshield. Then: time speeds up again as a third person—some boy—lurches across the road between them, trips over a curb, does a header over a railing, and disappears behind some bushes.
It seems like a good moment for someone to say, Ta-da! Nobody does.
Zelda’s chest thumps, and her head goes light. She’s standing in the middle of the street. The car stands in the middle of the street, facing her.
The driver’s-side window opens, and the woman sticks her head out. “Sorry, Zelda!” she shouts.
“No!” says Zelda. “Don’t apologize! It was me—I’m sorry!” She can’t remember the woman’s name.
“You okay?”
“Yeah, you?”
The driver’s okay. Zelda jerks her head at the flowery hedge on the side of the road. “Who was that guy?” she asks.
“I think he was trying to save you!” shouts the Girl Scout woman.
Zelda squints at the bushes. “He missed.”
She wheels her bike toward those bushes and waves to the driver as she leaves. She doesn’t have time for this. She has, in fact, two minutes.
“Hello?” she calls to the guy. “Was that you who shouted, ‘Look out’?”
“It was just a suggestion,” says a voice on the other side of the flowers.
“Are you hurt? I have to go.”
“You go on ahead, then,” says the flower boy. “Having a lie-down.”
“All tuckered out from the big rescue attempt,” says Zelda, trying to get a look at him. The branches are too thick to see.
“Rescue? Nah. I was just rushing to get a good spot in the hedge before it filled up.”
“Hmm.” Zelda bumps the bike up onto the curb and leans across the fence, cranes her neck over the hedge into someone’s front yard. A little garden and a crab-apple tree. “Okay,” she says. “Thank you for—”
That’s when she sees him.
She looks away quickly. As if she’d happened upon something scandalous. But it’s nothing of the sort. Just a boy. A cute boy, her age, his long body draped over the wet grass.
She’s afraid to look at him again, but she also really, really wants to look at him again. How can it be both at once? She wants to cover her face and peek out at him through her fingers. Jeez, she thinks, get a hold of yourself.
It probably seemed weird to him, anyway—her looking away like that.
So she quiets herself, collects her features, and leans once again into the yard.
“Sorry,” she tells him, “I—”
But there’s no one there.
Zelda straightens. She looks all around. There’s no one there.
He’s gone.
“Well,” says Zelda. “Fine. That’s fine.”
She checks again. To be sure.
“I have a geography test anyway,” she tells herself. “In one minute. So.” She gets back on the blue bike and rings the bell.
The school bell’s peal is just fading when, in the classroom, she takes her seat. “Sorry I’m late,” she says.
You didn’t see her get to the school or watch her come in—just a cut to the classroom, like they do sometimes in stories. The light outside was honey, but here it’s like the inside of a refrigerator. Zelda’s sitting at her desk, panting, the only student in running clothes. She tries to silently scooch her chair forward but makes sort of a trumpety elephant noise instead.
“Almost got in an accident,” she explains. “And there was this boy.”
It occurs to her that she didn’t know him. The boy in the hedge. This morning—this morning alone—she knew Clara, and the clown at the laundromat, and all kinds of people on the street. She recognized the Frisbee bros and that guy with the dogs and the little girl who lent her the bike. She’d seen that bike before. She’d seen that girl. Though it comes to Zelda that she has no idea what her name is, or where she lives, or how to get the bike back to her.
“Also, I think I stole a bike,” she says.
It’s a small town; she knows everyone. Their faces, if not their names. But the boy in the bushes—his was a face she had never seen before. Like an impossible shape. And yet the memory of just a moment with him feels more real to her now than every other student in this class.
Those other students are quietly test-taking. There’s a skritching all around her of lead against paper. The room smells like pencils.
How can Zelda be expected to take a test now? There was a boy—she should get excused. When the teacher asks why, Zelda will say, Boy, and get a hall pass with the word BOY on it. Go and solve the mystery of him. Maybe if she gets done early …
Zelda looks down. There’s a piece of paper—her test. In the cold, flickery light, she looks at her test, but it’s just a blur.
Everything else in her line of sight is fine. But the exam in her hand … she squints—did she lose her glasses?—and taps at her face, but there they are.
“Something’s gone wrong,” she whispers. “Something in my brain.” Her head feels heavy and empty at the same time. And hot. Heavy and hot, while the desktop is so cool. She rests her head to feel that coolness on her cheek. Fresh, like green grass.
“Everything feels different.”
She won’t fall asleep. She isn’t the type of student who falls asleep in class, she thinks, as she waits for the bell to ring.
Copyright © 2023 by Adam Rex
