Wild Awake

and catch his eye.
    “Intoxicants not your thing?”
    “I choose my poisons.”
    “Does that mean we’re robo-tripping later?”
    He smiles.
    “Wait and see.”
    I’m starting to realize that talking to Skunk is like digging for clams on the beach. You see bubbles in the sand and start digging, but he’s digging too, and nine times out of ten that sucker’s faster than you. I cock my head.
    “You straight-edge or something?”
    Skunk hesitates, and for a second I wonder if I’m digging too hard. He squeezes his brake levers.
    “Not exactly.”
    “You’re very evasive, you know.”
    Skunk’s about to say something when a tall, skinny guy on a red BMX shouts, “Listen up!” and everyone shuffles into a bicycle huddle to decide on a route for the night. Somehow Skunk and I get shuffled apart. When I spot him again from across the circle, he’s lighting a cigarette. He sucks on it nervously and lets out a long, smoky exhale. There’s one of his poisons, anyway .
    Red BMX lays out some route options. I vote for northward. So does Skunk. Stanley Park at night sounds like fun. I’ve only ever been there during the day, whenever Auntie Moana and Uncle Ed come to visit. The bike path is always so clogged with little kids on training wheels and their beaming parents that there’s no point in even trying to ride around them.
    Red BMX pushes off and starts pedaling down Commercial Drive. For a moment all you can hear are gears cranking and tires bumping down over the curb. I can see Skunk up ahead of me, not too far behind Red BMX and his girlfriend, Purple Mongoose. For someone who loves fixing bikes, Skunk’s doesn’t look like much. The taping on the handles is scruffy, and orange foam peeks out from the cracks in the saddle. You’d think someone Skunk’s size would look funny on a spindly road bike, but Skunk and his bicycle fit together perfectly. When he pedals, I can see the flash of muscles in his calves.
    We turn down East 7th Avenue, cutting through a warehouse district I’ve never been to before—blocks and blocks of buildings like monoliths or ancient tombs, so quiet that speaking feels forbidden even though it isn’t; even though it can’t be. I bike on the left side of the street, ready to swoop back over the line if a car comes, but none do. How silly to have a line there at all , I think, delighted, pedaling faster and faster. The city at night is a playground, and we are a pack of kids riding its swings upside down.
    As the warehouses give way to residential streets, I cut through the fleet of cyclists to the front of the pack. Red BMX and Purple Mongoose and I keep pace with one another, our bikes humming beneath us like generators. I’ve lost track of Skunk again, but it hardly matters. At this speed, there’s no way we could talk, no way to do anything but watch the houses and trees and bus stops flash past like frames in a stop-motion movie. The Granville Street Bridge is a roller-coaster. We fly over it in a blur of metal and blinking lights and veer left as a single body.
    Guys in tight jeans wave and whoop for us as we thunder down the hill toward English Bay. Music pounds inside the nightclubs on Davie Street, and the smell of beer and salt water makes even the air seem drunk. On the water, I can see Sukey’s ships, dark cities of their own. They are objects I will never touch, places I will never stand, sleeping giants that would not be disturbed even if all the shimmering lights and pretty buildings on land crumbled and fell down. Maybe we all need ships to hold our dreams, to be bigger and steadier than we ever could be, and to guard the mystery when we cannot, to keep it safe even when we have lost everything.
    I keep my eyes on them as long as I can, falling behind the others as we cruise along the sea wall to the dark, forested path that borders Stanley Park. I startle when Skunk rides up beside me. I’d fallen so deep in thought I’d practically forgotten he was here.
    “How’s the bike feel?”
    “Oh. You know. Like a total death trap.”
    I smile at him so he knows I’m kidding.
    “I ant to ear oo ay um time,” shouts Skunk, scraps of his words torn away by the wind. I angle my bike closer to him.
    “WHAT?”
    “I want to hear you play sometime.”
    I nod to show I’ve understood him.
    “Make you a deal,” I shout.
    “Another one?”
    “Uh-huh.”
    “I want to hear you too.”
    He opens his mouth to protest, but I curl over my handlebars and scream,