There’s a concrete path along the creek, covered in pebbles. It curves in and out—it’s fun to ride on, it’s like riding a wave. Just the noise of being outside is intense, I’m not used to it yet. It’s like the heat itself makes a noise, a kind of pulsing noise, as you go in and out of the shade. You have to keep going because it’s so hot that if you stop you sort of suffocate, but if you keep pedaling like crazy, the wind cools you down a little, and after five minutes I really have no idea where I am, but it feels great, even if I’m a little worried that Mom is going to be worried, so eventually I turn around and head back. The path is pretty good, but there are cracks in it where you can build up speed and jump, and tree roots growing under it, and sometimes you have to duck under the trees. The leaves are scratchy; the branches or twigs have some kind of green moss growing in all the cracks. There are also a lot of bugs flying around, and by the time I get back to Mom, who doesn’t look worried at all but is just sitting on a rock, I’m in a real sweat, and there’s salt in my eyes, and dust in my sweat, and my palms are dirty from trying to dry them against my shirt.

“You look happy,” she says as I pull up next to her. Then she says, “You don’t have to make that face. I didn’t mean to spoil it.”

Right now that’s all I really want to do—just ride my bike around the neighborhood. The streets around Granma’s house are wide and almost empty; most of the houses have driveways, so there aren’t even that many cars parked along the curb. And there are trees along all the sidewalks that spread their branches across the road, so there’s plenty of shade.

The asphalt is pretty rough and covered in twigs and pecans, so you can hear your wheels cracking them as you go. On my bike it takes me, like, no time at all to get to the swimming pool, so I can lock it up against the chain-link fence, jump in, just literally kind of stand by the pool for three minutes afterward in the sun, until I’m dry again, and hop back on the bike and head home. Or wherever.

It was my dad who taught me how to ride in New York. My dad is, like, a serious fitness freak and used to go for twenty-mile rides on the weekends, all over New York, along the river, or wherever, which pissed my mom off because she was like, “All week long all you do is go to work, and then the first chance you get, you just head out on your bike. It’s like you can’t even bear to be around us for more than two or three hours at a time.” But he did teach me how to ride in Central Park, first on the Great Lawn, which is this green field in the middle (you can see the Metropolitan Museum on one side, a big wall of glass), and later alongside the reservoir, when I got a little better and stopped falling down.