Authors: Elisa Ludwig
Pretty Crooked
Pretty
CROOKED
ELISA LUDWIG
TO JESSE—the Marion to my Robin Hood,
the Clyde to my Bonnie, and the thief of
my heart.
CONTENTS
GO GO GO
go go go!
The chant was in my head, because I didn’t have enough breath in my lungs to make sound. I was too busy pushing my bike up a killer beast of an incline, churning my legs against the pedals like my life depended on it. Which it did. Ordinarily, I might relish the burn in my chest, the rubbery feelings in my thighs, the butt-whupping high of a challenging ride. But this situation was anything but ordinary. In the thick dark of the desert night, I was fighting against gravity and space, and my body was losing.
For the millionth time, I was reminded that my vintage cruiser wasn’t built for this desert terrain. Someday, when I got my driver’s license, I’d speed through these back roads no problem, just like Aidan in his dad’s Porsche. That is, if I actually made it out of here.
Still, I kept moving, breathing hard, and leaning forward to urge my old bike on. The wind whipped against my hoodie, taunting me with its ease. Coyotes called to each other in the distance, their high-pitched whimpering like balloons losing air. Or was that the sound of fate catching up to me?
I am so completely dead
, I thought.
As I approached the top of the hill, the view opened up to a thick carpet of shrubs on either side of the asphalt, the silhouettes of craggy mountains in the distance, and the inky evening sky hovering over it all. Here and there were the lights of houses tucked into the darkness, but beyond that, there was little sign of life. The emptiness I’d loved so much about the Arizona desert now seemed less like a promise and more like a threat.
Doubt was creeping in. How long could I keep this up? Even if I managed to escape, where was I going and what would I do when I got there?
I thought of Tre, how he’d made me promise to be careful.
Believe me when I say that what you’re doing is just not worth it, Willa
, he’d said.
You’d get kicked out of Prep. I’m sure your parents would never forgive you
.
All of the possible consequences flashed in front of my eyes. The disappointment on my mom’s face. The disgust on Mr. Page’s as he told me I was expelled from school. Cherise shaking her head. Tre telling me he’d told me so. And there was Aidan, with his knowing smile—though for some strange reason, I felt like he,
out of everyone, would understand why I’d done what I’d done.
But none of this could really happen to me, could it? I’d been so lucky so far. I just needed a tiny bit more luck to tide me over.
Please, God
, I thought.
Please just let me get away—just this once—and I promise I will never screw up ever, ever again. Just do me this one solid, God
.
But even as I thought it, I knew that I didn’t have much pull with the Almighty. My mom was a pseudo-Buddhist and when she’d taken me to churches, it was to look at the architecture. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe, but my relationship with God, casual as it was, probably didn’t count for much when it came time to beg for favors. Not even now.
I was so deep in thought I hadn’t noticed that I’d hit the peak of the hill; the road had plateaued and I was on flat ground. It should have been cake. Something was wrong, though. My legs knew it before my brain did, because they were keeping pace yet I wasn’t gaining ground. It felt like I was
slowing down
, riding through quicksand.
Maybe it was fear or lack of oxygen, but in that moment my brain was slowing down, too, looping backward. I could no longer think about what came next. I could only think about how I had gotten to this point. How I ended up alone and trembling in the desert. How I’d come so close to losing everything.
TO THE LOCALS, it was probably a weird sight: a short blond girl in a miniskirt and laced-up boots, riding through the desert on a bright orange 1970 Schwinn Suburban on an early September morning. Maybe that’s why cowboys in SUVs and tractor-trailers shot past me, honking and shouting things.
Okay, I was new here. How was I supposed to know there was no bike lane?
The Schwinn was my most prized possession—I’d bought it at a garage sale and tricked it out with chrome fenders, a crushed-velvet seat, and a headlight for night riding. It was also my only way to get to school. So there was nothing to do but embrace my own personal freakiness and smile with pride as I pedaled.
Eat my dust, cars
.
The thing was, I wouldn’t have wanted to travel in any other way. The view from my saddle was outrageous.
Close to the ground, going twenty miles an hour, I could see everything—the cacti like giants’ hands, the succulents studded with clusters of orange and yellow and pink blossoms, the funny furry blobs of tumbleweed. The air smelled like sweet incense. Giant hawks swooped overhead. And on the horizon, always, were the ghostly shapes of mountains, layers of blue and amber like colored sand in a jar. I was fifteen years old and I’d lived in lots of places over the years—twelve by my count—but none as gorgeous as this.
Paradise Valley, Arizona.
Leave it to my mom, the painter, to find it. She’d been moving us around whenever inspiration struck. Every so often, she would announce that we needed a new start. There was a certain look in her eye—you know, like how some people get all glassy when they get a fever?—and as soon as that set in, she’d be online, looking for the next place for us. It was only a matter of hours before she started weeding out old lip glosses and stacking clothes on her bed.
This time was different, though. An amazing stroke of luck, really. We’d been living in Castle Pines, Colorado, for almost a year. One day, a few months back, I came home from school to find my mom on the front step of our bungalow. She handed me a smoothie and told me the good news: A few of her paintings had sold at an auction for big money. Big, big money. A windfall, really.
We’d giggled together as she wrote down the number on a piece of paper. So many digits. I couldn’t believe it. This was the break we’d been waiting for all these years. We could afford a much nicer place now, she’d said, and she knew just where we could go when our lease was up in August. She went online to an Arizona real-estate site and showed me a listing for the house on Morning Glory Road.
“Morning Glory,” she’d said, tilting her head, so that her silver earrings jingled slightly. “It just sounds fresh, you know?”
I would be starting sophomore year in yet another school. But it was going to be a private school this time, she insisted. She had it all worked out.
So here I was, riding to that private school. I guess that’s what it’s like for people who win the lottery. One minute you’re eating ramen bricks and the next you’re meeting with an interior decorator. We’d been in town for a few days and I was still slapping myself to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating. This fancy place? Us? Here?
For realz?
It just felt like a very pretty mistake, like any minute my mom might be like,
“Psych!”
Now, scoping out the incredible landscape, I was more than willing to be mistaken.
Lawns and trees started filling up the brown patches as the road led through the center of town, which was not really much of a town at all, I could see now—just a thickening of houses. These were sprawling Spanish-style
buildings, their stucco walls in bleached-out whites, peachy pinks, and lemon-curd yellows, each spread out fetchingly over the land, and every single one of them with a pool.
Suh-weet
.
A red Jeep slowed down next to me so that it was neck and neck with my bike.
“Hey, sexy,” a balding guy yelled out the window.
“It
is
a sexy bike, isn’t it?” I called back. “You should see my head tube!”
Then I flipped him a gesture I learned on a crime show. Hopefully not a gang sign.
As if on cue, I saw the school entrance from the street, a small white square on a post:
VALLEY PREPARATORY SCHOOL, FOUNDED 1952
.
As I pedaled up the driveway, the school buildings, all modern concrete and glass, loomed ahead, flanked by rock formations glowing golden in the sun—a scene as picture-perfect as the website promised. Neatly lettered signs pointed toward the Upper School campus, the Lower School campus, the Fieldhouse, the Weston A. Block Art Center and Galleries, and the arboretum, a thirty-acre expanse of natural plantings with a man-made pond. It wasn’t so much a school, it seemed, as a luxury educational complex.
I gawked, taking it all in. I mean, I’d seen those photos on the site, but it was something else to be here in person. Inspiring, actually.
In front of the Upper School entrance was a line of
fancy cars: BMWs, Jaguars, Range Rovers. Behind me, at the Lower School entrance, parents were escorting kids in little blazers with plaid skirts or striped ties up the front steps.
This was the place, no doubt about it. More money than the US mint.
And I was going to be a student here. I could barely believe it.
I rode closer, my heart rattling like I was going to bust an artery. Then, a flash of white…
Shiny white. The side of a VW cutting me off.
I fell backward, but not before grabbing hold of my horn and honking it, a long blast like a ship going down. Then I
was
down, down on the ground.
“Oh my God,” the girl driving the car called out, after she’d screeched to a halt. “Did I just hit you?”
“Not technically, no.” Still on the pavement, I felt my extremities for fractures or fabric tears.
She turned off the car and hopped out. She was black, with a pouf of curly hair streaked with highlights, and she was wearing a denim blazer over gray skinnies. “Are you okay?”
“Just a little shaken up, but I’m fine,” I said, coming out of my crouch to stand up. Legs supporting torso: check.