Read Online Under the Dusty Moon by Suzanne Sutherland - Free Book Online

said, polishing off the bottle of Coke.
    â€œGo,” I said. “I need to go home. There are some things I need to …” I grabbed my sandals and shoved them back on my feet. “I’ll see you … are you? You’re …?” I couldn’t pick a sentence. All the nakedness had short-circuited my brain.
    â€œHuh?” Shaun said. “You’re leaving?”
    â€œYou’re, uh, staying?” I asked. I smelled like sewage, worse than sewage. What smells worse than sewage?
    â€œYeah,” he said, shrugging, “guess I will.”
    â€œOkay, cool,” I said. “I’ve just — I’ve got to go.”
    And I ran away as fast as the sand would let me.
    I ran like a dumb little kid.

    I unlocked PYT and wouldn’t let myself cry. I wouldn’t. Though I could feel hot tears of embarrassment stinging the backs of my eyes, I held them in.
    I pedalled back to the ferry, nearly letting the tears go with gratitude when I saw a boat waiting for me. I took my place on the deck, faced out where no one could see me, and I let the hot tears spill down my face. People around me nudged each other — asked, “Do you smell that?” but I just kept on silently sobbing.
    Once we were back on the mainland, I couldn’t get away from the ferry docks fast enough. I cut up Bay Street to Queen, and rode even faster than I had on the way over, trying to outrace my shame as sweat trickled down my forehead, stinging my eyes. I felt painfully sober.
    I finally stopped at a red light at Spadina Avenue — my breath was ragged, and I was nearly out of air — but the second I saw the other side change from green, I stomped back down on my pedal, flinging my body into the intersection.
    I couldn’t stop riding.
    I didn’t ever want to stop.
    It was unbelievable. Unbelievably humiliating.
    Cars skidded around me and blared their horns as I flew through the lights — it was an advance green, I realized, and cars were trying to turn left around me, but it was too late to stop, I had to keep going. My chest was tight with panic as I realized the mistake I’d made, but I finally relaxed enough to breathe as PYT and I cleared the intersection. I closed my eyes in relief — just for a split second, an instant, I swear.
    And that’s when I got doored.

Five
    A t least seventeen different people told me how lucky I was that I’d been wearing my helmet when it happened. It wasn’t a ton of consolation, though, while I lay there on the sidewalk feeling like my arm had been snapped in half, that my idiot brain hadn’t been goo-ified along with it. Someone had the sense to pull PYT off the road, but she’d been totally mangled in the collision and seeing her lying on the sidewalk with all the wrong angles sticking out hurt almost as bad as my arm did.
    What kind of loser rides through a red light at a major intersection without a single freaking scratch, only to get doored on the very next block?
    The woman who doored me — the woman who flung open her driver-side door without looking for any particularly distraught-looking cyclists on the road, sending me flying off of my bike and onto the asphalt — was in hysterical tears when the cops showed up. Someone walking by must have called 911 after it happened, because the police cars got there quick. When they arrived, though, they spent nearly as much time consoling the woman who’d almost killed me as they did making sure I was okay. But I was way too out of it with pain and humiliation to protest.
    She tried to apologize to me — the hysterically crying, carelessly dooring woman — but every time she looked at me she just lost it, and I couldn’t make out any of her squeaky, terrified words even if I’d wanted to.
    The ambulance arrived on the scene pretty quickly, too, but I almost died for real when I saw a cute paramedic with dark, floppy hair and cool retro