Teeny maintained the height that defined her, but puberty and years of dance had carved her shape into something impressive and hard-earned. Even the way she rode her bike looked powerful, her back arched as she lifted herself from her seat, braids cascading down her back, blowing with the wind, whipping around her face but never obscuring her view. She didn’t bother to pedal. She rode the momentum down the last part of the hill, lifting her hands off the bars because she could. She dismounted from her bike without breaking speed, a flawless leap that looked as impossible as it was. The bike’s wheels rolled until the ledge around the wood chips stopped them.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

Bigs propped her bike back up and placed his beside it.

“I’ll explain once everyone’s here,” I told them.

The twins climbed the ladder beside the swing, sitting side by side on the edge of the rattling plastic bridge.

Aidy arrived moments later. Harrison trailed behind her. Swap out his usual athletic wear for dressy casual, toss ten inches of height and a good sixty pounds of muscle onto him and it was the same well-worn sight we all knew. Harrison Shin, for as long as he’d lived in Cadence, had always been a clip behind my sister. As the two of them pedaled closer, I realized Harrison was riding my bike: a lemon-yellow Schwinn with a bumblebee sticker on the left handlebar.

Our bikes used to be our flags in the sand wherever we went, declaring that area our territory for the day. We were a pile of bikes in someone’s driveway, outside someone’s store, in the always-empty parking lot of Cadence Park.

But for years, mine and Aidy’s had sat behind dozens of boxes in our garage, buried to keep us from the Cadence we once roamed without restriction. For the same reason as the Campbells, Aidy and I were forever banned from using them, as if being able to pedal all over our town was the reason Marley stole her father’s gun and died.

The strange thing was, our parents didn’t get rid of our old Schwinns. It would be too much to give away something they’d spent a good deal of money on, even if they could get some money back by selling them. The bikes sat among other unusable things we didn’t need but would never part with, giving my parents a twisted sense of pride in their punishment.

Aidy had broken a years-long rule to retrieve them.

Before Marley’s death, it never would’ve occurred to our parents to take away the Schwinns. We could use them to run to the store and pick up bread and eggs for them, or to get far away from the house when they wanted space. Taking them away afterward was the only resonating punishment they’d ever given us.