Lucy

I pedal fast. Down Rose Drive where houses swim in pools of orange streetlight. Where people sit on verandahs, hoping to catch a breeze. Let me make it in time. Please let me make it in time.

Just arrived at the studio. Your graffiti guys Shadow and Poet are here, Al texted, and I took off across the night. Took off under a sky bleeding out and turning black. Left Dad sitting outside his shed yelling, ‘I thought you weren’t meeting Jazz till later. Where’s the fire, Lucy Dervish?’

In me. Under my skin.

Let me make it in time. Let me meet Shadow. Let me meet Poet, too, but mainly Shadow. The guy who paints in the dark. Paints birds trapped on brick walls and people lost in ghost forests. Paints guys with grass growing from their hearts and girls with buzzing lawn mowers. A guy who paints things like that is a guy I could fall for. Really fall for.

I’m so close to meeting him and I want it so bad. Mum says when wanting collides with getting, that’s the moment of truth. I want to collide. I want to run right into Shadow and let the force spill our thoughts so we can pick each other up and pass each other back like piles of shiny stones.

At the top of Singer Street I see the city, neon blue and rising. There’s lightning deep in the sky, working its way through the heat to the surface. There’s laughter somewhere far away. There’s one of Shadow’s pieces, a painting on a crumbling wall of a heart cracked by earthquake with the words: Beyond the Richter scale written underneath. It’s not a heart like you see on a Valentine’s Day card. It’s the heart how it really is: fine veins and atriums and arteries. A fist-sized forest in our chest.

I take my hands off the brake and let go. The trees and the fences mess together and the concrete could be the sky and the sky could be the concrete and the factories spread out before me like a light-scattered dream.

I turn a corner and fly down Al’s street. Towards his studio, towards him sitting on the steps, little moths above him, playing in the light. Towards a shadow in the distance. A shadow of Shadow. There’s collision up ahead.

I spin the last stretch and slide to a stop. ‘I’m here. I made it. Do I look okay? How do I look?’

Al drains his coffee and puts the cup on the step beside him. ‘Like a girl who missed them by about five minutes.’