Jess crouched at the rear tire of her dirt bike. She untwisted the cap of the air valve and took a bobby pin to the tiny nozzle to release just a little air. She liked the hiss it made like a little snake. She looked around to make sure no one was sneaking up on her. She had Uly to watch too. Always Uly.
“You done?” Uly asked, impatient like always, too.
Jess squeezed the rear tire to check its pressure. It squished just a little bit. That would be enough to make her wheelie easier. “Yes.”
Uly kick-started his own dirt bike. Sputtering exhaust blasted the air with gas. His muffler coughed and sprayed little drips. He revved and bounced on his seat – at seventeen years old, he was light and could fly.
He scribbled the line as the crowd surged forward, jostling him to get closer to the trains. His editor would be pleased if blood were spilled today. Not only was he a Democrat who referred to Lincoln as “the baboon,” but like editors of every political persuasion he gloried in mayhem and was overjoyed when rebel guns fired on Sumter. “Peace don’t sell papers,” he said, spitting.
Older riders in the 12 o’Clock Boyz started zipping by them. Jess stood and hopped on her own bike, a larger, more powerful ride than Uly’s, and she kicked the starter a few times before it roared to life.
“C’mon, Jess!” Uly said. “I want to ride with them.”
“Hold on.” Jess looked back to make sure no cops were following the group. Dozens of riders flew by. Some of them kicked back and pulled wheelies, not quite as vertical as twelve o’clock, but still they hung there in the air and rocked back and forth like riding a wild stallion. People came out on their porches to see—old ladies in bathrobes and slippers, guys in long wife beaters, church people in church clothes, and what seemed like hundreds of kids, all of them awestruck at the parade of wind-ripping bikes.
Cars stopped to let them speed by.
Jess twisted her throttle. Her bike whined underneath her—a power she wanted to unleash on this otherwise boring Sunday. She nodded at her cousin. Uly nodded back.
Following behind, they rode with the pack through Druid Hill, opening up their throttles inside the long, tall trenches of row houses so the sound compounded into a cacophony of bratty growls. Uly swerved through bags of thrown out fast food and cursed the people who littered out their car windows. “Keep the city clean, you retards!”
Jess laughed.

She tugged her throttle and jerked back with her front tire in the air, hovering there as she throttled a little each time her bike threatened to fall forward. Jess stayed balanced on her back tire for a few seconds before leveling out and following the group.

Uly counted sixty, maybe even seventy riders. Most of them in the 12 o’Clock Boyz. He didn’t feel like part of the group yet. He’d only been riding about a year, but Jess felt less part of them for being a girl, though she could wheelie just as well as most of the guys.
They rounded the mall and the adjacent shops. The park was up ahead.
Guys on ATVs rolled over the median to join them. A few scooters followed too.
Uly and Jess both watched for cops. With the “no pursue” law, the cops couldn’t follow them anyway, but they’d heard about police waiting on street corners with Tasers. Something like that scared the crap out of them. Getting zapped off your bike. Bones broken and bleeding.
When he came to himself, they told him that he had repeatedly called for someone named Reynolds. Who was Reynolds, they asked. He couldn’t tell them.
Uly watched his cousin pop wheelies as they followed the group around the park’s reservoir. They crossed over the highway closer to the college where moving trucks would double park as students loaded loveseats and lamps. He liked that time of the year. It wasn’t unusual for seniors to throw away perfectly good stereo speakers and microwaves, piling great and slightly-used home goods on curbs because maybe where they were going would be much better and they were getting new stuff there. Uly didn’t care.
But it baffled him that people had the money to just throw good things away. Pawn stuff, at least. Or give it to someone in need.
At a red light, the leading riders decided to cluster and run it. Cars with the right of way were forced to stop. Some of them honked. Others just gawked at the spectacle.
“Slow up!” Jess yelled to him. “Slow up!”
They didn’t like running lights even if it meant having to catch up. Uly stopped, his feet on the asphalt. Jess stopped behind him too.
A van double-parked just a couple yards in front of them. They saw a girl on a bicycle pedal up to the driver’s side, kinda mad it seemed. She was short with tattoos and light hair—the type of girl Uly always saw around the art school off North Avenue, not so far from their house.
“You staring at that white girl?” Jess smacked her cousin’s back.
“What’s she doing?”
Seconds later, a tall man in a ski mask leapt out of the back of the van and grabbed the girl. Her bike toppled over. The man scooped her up onto one shoulder and shoved her in the back of the van. She didn’t seem to resist.
“What the fuck, yo?” said Uly.
“Bet it’s that kidnap app thing. People be crazy with that,” Jess replied, looking back at the intersection to make sure no cops were around. She revved her throttle. Uly revved too.
“Kidnap what? What the hell do you mean?”
“Cell phone app. People ask to get kidnapped. For fun.” Jess shrugged. “I dunno. People are crazy.”
Uly knew he was making that look of astonishment which always made him appear way younger than he wanted to seem. He forced a serious face. “Like, what if it isn’t though?”
The masked man rolled the girl’s bike into the van. Uly could see the girl, facedown, her wrists and ankles bound.
“Look, he’s taking care of her bike,” Jess pointed out.
“What if he’s stealing that too?” Uly asked.
“C’mon, we’re gonna lose the group.” Jess revved louder. Uly couldn’t help but open his throttle too. The power was infectious. The van’s brake lights flashed on. It started to drive away.
“I’m following it,” Uly said.
“What?”
“I’m going to see where they’re going. What if it’s not for fun?” Uly yelled over his cousin’s engine.
“Who cares!?”
Uly’s bike jerked forward. He gave her an irritated glare. It was the face he gave Jess when there was no room for discussion. He tried to peel out, but didn’t quite punch the gas enough. Then he was off.
Jess rolled her eyes and looked back at the oncoming traffic.
Then she followed.
The van turned at the symphony hall and wound around the art school campus to reach the northbound highway. Uly kept his distance, trying not to make too much noise with his dirt bike. Jess kept close. “I ain’t using all my gas following a van across town,” Jess said.
“I ain’t using all my gas following a van across town,” Jess said.
“You don’t have to come.” Uly let the van get some distance between them before he took off.
What Uly really loved about riding wasn’t the attention or power he felt from the bike, though he would admit he liked those things. It was the fact that he got to leave his neighborhood—a small patch of the city that he rarely had the opportunity to free himself from. On those Sundays they’d ride as far east as they could, past Harford Road into hoods that felt inhospitable even to him. He would stop to stare at old buildings and odd statues, taking out his notepad to jot a few lines of poetry, then pocket his pen before speeding and shifting to get back to his cousin.
“Stop scribblin’ and ride,” she’d yell.
Now they were severely out of their element.
The van exited the highway and headed west towards the racetrack—the place where Uly’s and Jess’s fathers used to go bet on horses.
On the open road, Jess couldn’t help herself. She leaned into the left lane and ripped past the van, screaming up a long and curving hill until Uly couldn’t see where she went. He hung back. The van drove at normal speed.
He wondered what kind of person would want to get kidnapped—what kinda freaky things went on – who was this girl and this man and did they know each other and—?
Jess was waiting for him at the top of the hill.
They both turned right as the van entered a verdant neighborhood Uly had never seen. Their loud bikes cut the serene stillness of the streets. Lush green lawns crowned mammoth, detached houses with wrap-around porches and decks. Young dads mowed lawns with new mowers. Kids on bicycles stared at Jess’s grizzly dirt bike. She shot them a defiant glare.
Uly felt like an invader wreaking havoc on this peaceful place.
The van turned a few corners. Uly leaned into the turns and rolled just above an idle. When the van stopped, Uly stopped. Jess was just behind him.
“Why’d he stop?” Jess asked. She was tapping out a little cigar for herself and for Uly. She handed him the individually wrapped tube—a small way of celebrating that they didn’t have to ride all the way into the county to see what these fools were up to. Jess always had things like this for him.
Uly put the plastic piece of the thin cigar between his lips and waited for Jess’s lighter. They watched the man get out of the van. This time he had no ski mask. He opened the back of the van and hoisted the girl out on one shoulder, shut the van and walked up to a house with a wrought iron stairwell anchored to the side of it.
“Guess he’s bringing her up there,” Uly said, puffing the sweet tobacco.
“Freaky white people.”
“What’s the thing called?”
“Kidnapping. He’s kidnapping her.”
“The app, stupid,” Uly said.
“Just called kidnApp. You gotta be eighteen to use it.”
They watched the man open a door at the top of the stairs and disappear inside. “You know anyone who’s done it?”
“Sure.”
“Who?”
“I’m not tellin’ you,” Jess said, just joking. “People.”
“Yeah,” Uly said, kicking his bike to a stuttering whine. Jess did the same.
“Race you home—” Jess said, but as she did she saw the shape of a white Crown Victoria moving through the tree-draped side-street. She looked behind her, knowing that if there was one, there might be more. “Five-oh.”
“Oh shit,” Uly said, revving and watching the white cruiser speed up around the block. He waited for that inevitable squeal of police siren.
“Follow me,” Jess said.
Uly always knew it would be a challenge following his older cousin. It always was in anything other than writing or reading or rapping. That’s where he was always king. “Go, Jessica!”
Another cruiser surfaced like a great white shark to their right. How had they not seen it?
Jess ripped open her throttle and sped across the main street’s median, popping over it to the tree-lined road running parallel to the main road they’d taken in. Uly followed. He wanted her to just take the right to bring them back to familiar territory—at least then they’d know where they were—but Jess stormed over the wide center median again to herd the cops away from them. Grass and mud spat into the air as she wrote gibberish graffiti into the lawn.
“C’mon! Uly! HAHA!” she screamed, cigar smoke streamed from her mouth. “Woo!”
Uly stood on his pegs as his dirt bike bucked over curbs and knotted roots. “We’re going to jail. We’re going to jail.” Sirens wailing, the two cruisers turned to catch up. One of them scrapped along the high sidewalk and jittered on its chassis.
“This way!”
“They aren’t supposed to follow us!” Uly yelled.
“They won’t after this!”
Jess slowed a little and pivoted with her leg down to spin completely around. Pointed down a narrow path, she peeled out and led them down three, four, five blocks of overgrown alley. Bamboo reached out for their arms and legs. A reed sliced a paper thin cut along Uly’s knuckle. He looked back to see if the cops had somehow magically squeezed behind them. He prayed they weren’t going to be at the end of the alley when they got there.
Once she saw black asphalt again, Jess took it and hurried south—or what she thought was south—to a small downtown area they’d never seen before.
Jess stopped. Uly caught up. She coughed and chuckled with her cigar nearly finished, “I think they’re gone.”
“We need to get back to the city,” Uly said, trying not to sound nervous.
“I’ve got to get some gas,” Jess said. “Follow me?”
“Yeah. In the city,” Uly said.
Jess somehow knew the way.