Black and Blue
by V.E. on November 17th, 2009
Black and blue nail polish. That’s what I went down to the store for this afternoon. I took my brother’s bike, a blue and green thing with mountain-ready tires and like 24 gears. The seat is almost too high for me, but I was able to manage. (When I’m actually pedaling, it’s fine; it’s when I’m trying to get on or off that it becomes a tiny problem.) The CVS near me is less than a mile away, and I didn’t bother with a helmet. There’s a left turn about halfway–and that’s where things got messy.
I was riding along just fine, the wind in my hair and all that, when I started to slow down for the turn. There were two cars there, waiting for me so they could turn, and I was distracted. I didn’t slow down fast enough, but I did keep turning. Suddenly, my bike was on the ground and I was flipping in the air and then skidding face first on the asphalt.
I managed an “uuugh” as I landed on my arms and face on the pavement. I kind of bounced and then the ground took off a lot of skin while I skidded to a stop. The bike was a few feet in front of me, the front wheel turned completely around and the seat crooked. My glasses weren’t broken, exactly, but they were bent almost beyond repair.
I stood up slowly as one of the cars’ drivers rolled down her window and asked, “Hey! Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. Thanks,” I said, dusting myself off and reaching for my iPod earbud headphones. One had been pulled from my ear when I landed. I pulled the other one from my ear, Bill Kaulitz and Tokio Hotel’s music forgotten for the moment.
“You sure?” she prodded.
I took a mental tally. “Yeah, I’m all right. Thanks, though.” The woman drove away just as another came walking up toward me from the direction I’d been heading.
“You all right, kid?” she asked.
“Yeah. I just fell off my bike,” I said sheepishly.
“On this turn, here?”
“Yeah. Took it too fast.” I grabbed my bike and hauled it up.
“I’ve seen that happen before,” she said.
“Got scraped up pretty good, but what can you do, y’know?” I could feel the blood oozing from both elbows and my left knee, even though I was wearing jeans. My chin and my forehead above my right eyebrow stung, but I tried not to let it look like it hurt.
She nodded and looked me over from head to shoe before apparently deciding that, since I was up and walking around and dismissing the fall, I must be fine. “You need something, I’m over there,” she said anyway, pointing to a house across the way.
“Okay, thanks.” She kept walking and I threw my leg over the bike, determined to ‘get back on the horse’ as soon as possible.
I made it the rest of the way without incident. It was actually kind of liberating. I didn’t think anything else would happen to me. That’s a total lie, of course, but that’s what it felt like. I felt more alive, even though everything ached and I could feel the blood dripping from my elbows. They’d taken the brunt of the fall and were pretty bad off. But it felt good, in a weird way. Not really like I wanted to do it again, but like I wouldn’t have minded if it had happened again anyway.
I had my earbuds in again, listening to the German melodies of Tokio Hotel, as I parked my bike and walked into the store.
I headed for the nail polish section before I realized that a woman and her small child had avoided coming down my aisle. I looked up and down the aisle and saw no one else. I went to the next one and another mother and her kid moved out of the way for me, steering her child away from me.
I was being avoided. I nearly laughed out loud. I was officially the people my my parents warned me about. Now, other parents were avoiding me. I looked down at myself. I was wearing a Nine Inch Nails/Jane’s Addiction NIN|JA tour shirt, ripped jeans, and grey Converse. I looked like a punk who’d just gotten into a fight.
It happened at least one other time before I found the polish I wanted, which turned out to be “Black Magic” and “Bolting Blue” shades, and headed for the counter. I briefly thought about stealing the polish, but squashed the desire forcefully under my foot as I pulled out my credit card to pay.
The cashier waited until I put the two small bottles onto the counter before she picked them up each in turn and rang them through the register. When she refused to take my card until I put it on the counter, too, I realized she was also avoiding me, just like those mothers had been.
“You should see the other guy,” I joked. The cashier laughed, and the ice was broken. I wasn’t a scary punk girl anymore, at least to her. The middle-aged woman behind me, though, changed cashiers upon hearing my comment, as if my being too close to her son would make him violent. I laughed.
Heading back home was less exciting, but my wounds were still stinging when I finally got in the door. I laid on the floor for a while, trying to figure out how I was going to be able to sleep tonight without re-scraping my injuries.
It was a little bit later I discovered that my cell phone was similarly scratched. It looked like it was windblown, and the wind had been scratched into the front. Neat, matching war wounds, right?
Am I weird to think the whole thing was way cool instead of being angry or thankful for my life or something? I’ll be black and blue tomorrow, for sure.
