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Bridgewater State University Virtual Commons - Bridgewater State University Honors Program Theses and Projects Undergraduate Honors Program 12-21-2020 Big Nothing: A Story About Bicycles and the Girls Who Ride Them in the Heart of West Texas Keziah Staska Bridgewater State University Follow this and additional works at: https://vc.bridgew.edu/honors_proj Part of the English Language and Literature Commons, and the Fiction Commons Recommended Citation Staska, Keziah. (2020). Big Nothing: A Story About Bicycles and the Girls Who Ride Them in the Heart of West Texas. In BSU Honors Program Theses and Projects. Item 449. Available at: https://vc.bridgew.edu/ honors_proj/449 Copyright © 2020 Keziah Staska This item is available as part of Virtual Commons, the open-access institutional repository of Bridgewater State University, Bridgewater, Massachusetts. Big Nothing: A Story About Bicycles and the Girls Who Ride Them in the Heart of West Texas Keziah Staska Submitted in Partial Completion of the Requirements for Departmental Honors in English Bridgewater State University December 21, 2020 Prof. Bruce D. Machart, Thesis Advisor Dr. Emily Field, Committee Member Dr. Lee Torda, Committee Member 1 Big Nothing: A Story of Bicycles and the Girls Who Ride Them in the Heart of West Texas The traffic parted and the smoke cleared to reveal a freight truck whose trailer had been stripped clean by the fire birthed by an overworked engine. Its metal frame arched toward the desert sky like the vulture-eaten ribs of a cattle’s corpse. This was the reward for over two hours veritably parked on a six-mile strip of highway in some far-off nowhere in Arizona. The dashboard thermometer read 110°F and the air conditioning had taken to blowing a constant stream of what felt like human breath. Paisley’s father had said a good handful of times that “there’d better be something real damn wild at the end to justify all this mess”. When the smoldering truck revealed itself, all he had to say in response was “okay, sure.” Their one-way road trip had started the day before when they left their home in San Bernardino for the final time. Paisley had been anxious about having to pack all her belongings for months, thinking it an insurmountable undertaking for a fourteen-year-old to put everything she had ever known into a mass of boxes. She was somehow even more anxious when she learned that said undertaking would only wind up taking an hour or two, and that everything she had ever known fit in two average sized boxes and an oversized duffle bag. Everything, of course, except for her prized 1989 Schwinn Le Tour, which had its own reserved and highly secure space on the roof rack of her father’s SUV. When she took inventory of her packaged belongings, scanning the house to make sure she hadn’t overlooked a single valuable thing, she was sad to learn that she didn’t really have much that she found value in. She felt that maybe she related less to the contents of the two boxes she had filled, and more to all the empty space of the countless boxes that would go unneeded. She placed a hand on her chest to feel the dull thudding 2 of her heartbeat to remind herself that life and energy flowed within her. Otherwise, she might feel like another empty box, without purpose. Paisley was afraid of moving away from the city she grew up in, but not for the same reasons many children her age would be. Paisley wasn’t especially known for having friends, and for her part she was content with that. She liked to spend her time alone, lost in her thoughts and fantasies. She would daydream until her feet felt like they were no longer touching the ground, and nothing made her sadder than having those moments of floating interrupted by the heavy reality that other people tried to keep her in. So, her social life wasn’t her primary concern when it came time to abandon her home. Instead, she was afraid to leave San Bernardino because she had memorized all the perfect bike routes within a thirty-mile radius. On one hand, the thought of pointing her front wheel toward the unknown with the intent of riding through it until it became the extremely well-known got her so excited that she would sometimes catch herself tightly gripping her fists around imaginary handlebars. On the other, the fear that their new home would have insufficient routes and roads compared to San Bernardino made her heart bounce awkwardly in her chest like a deflated tire crawling along the blacktop. Where she lived, she knew where to go when she was overwhelmed and she wanted to feel like the only things in the Universe were herself, the night sky, and God. She knew all the best circuits to race on when she needed to train her muscles until they felt they had melted underneath her skin. She knew hills that felt like death to climb even at the lowest gear but would reward her with speeds approaching 50mph when she finally bombed them. Her fear was that she might never know these places again. In San Bernardino and its surrounding areas, she was able to find ample races, sometimes even large events with racers that had corporate affiliations and, while she never got to race as an official athlete, they would 3 always let her run the course with the others. Her greatest source of pride came from catching the glimpses from coaches and team leaders, full of spite and fury as she blew past them. She had always hoped that someday, one of these races would net her the right kind of attention from an international level team and she could become a real athlete. She saw Texas, or at least the place they were moving, as the place that hope went to die. The closest things she found to a proper race during more than one anxiety-fueled late night internet search were small town community events that raised money for things like libraries or food banks, and while she was more than happy to kick up dust for something like that, it wasn’t exactly the kind of event that would land her a sponsorship. She found one pro level team, Road Gods Pro, but their offices in Dallas may as well have been in Austria as far as she was concerned. Paisley had two idols, both of whom she kept framed portraits of on her bedside table. The first was Prince, who was more or less forced upon her at birth by her mother who grew up in Minnesota and swore that “Raspberry Barret” was inspired by an outfit she wore at one of his concerts. She didn’t always love Prince as much as she felt she was expected to, but learned to when his music became a way for her to connect to her mom after her parents got divorced and she moved back to the Midwest. The other was Marianne Martin, the first winner of the Tour de France Feminin. These two portraits were placed securely at the top of a box labeled ‘Most Important’. Occasionally during the drive, Paisley would overcome her nerves by looking at the portrait of Martin and staying focused on her ambition. No matter where she was from, or where she wound up, Paisley would become the youngest winner of the Tour. And since the Feminin got replaced by the two day La Course, the women’s event would no longer cut it. If it was ever going to happen, it had to be soon, while she was still young enough to pull off prepubescent-boy and scam her way into the men’s competition. She knew, of course, that was a pipe dream, 4 something she would fantasize about while doodling in her notebook in math class. But it kept her moving, and Paisley was too short on motivation to let go of something like this. The gentle weight of her father’s hand nudging her shoulder woke Paisley up from what had been the most painful sleep of her life. “We just hit El Paso. Should be in Tuluca Rock come about three hours or so” he said. Paisley peeled her face off of the window, sticky with a layer of hours-old sweat, and unwound herself from the horrible, twisted position she had fallen into and pulled the lever to bring the back of her seat back up vertical. She felt like her spine was trying to secede from the rest of her body, and one of her feet stayed numb for several minutes. “Jesus, Dad. Have you stopped to sleep at all?” she asked. They had been driving since Vegas, where they had stayed with a family friend the night they left. “Your old man is an internal combustion engine, Pais. I don’t sleep ‘till I’m done.” J Dilla played faintly underneath the hum of the engine. Her dad was young enough that most people didn’t believe she was his daughter, and he stashed hundreds of hours-worth of old CDs in his SUV, claiming they kept his head sharp in situations like this one. “Anyway, figured you’d want to start getting to know your new home.” There were small fields of scattered light far off in the distance, but otherwise the landscape was completely engulfed by the darkness and even the road was mostly hidden but for the few feet the headlights would unveil at a given time.

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