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Paige meets Mav on a rainy Tuesday in May.
She’s biking around the empty parking deck at what used to be the Eastfield Mall. The mall is right at the edge of town, as far as Paige is allowed to go without telling her parents, even though the town line with Fielding to the west is actually closer to the house and she’s not allowed to go there, where there’s actually a movie theater and a new smoothie bar, and where she could have friends, maybe, instead of being the weird former-homeschooler whose backyard borders the old canal.
Despite her classmates’ whispers and the ghost stories her older brother Micah tells, Paige doesn’t believe that the old canal is haunted. She doesn’t believe that this parking deck is haunted either, or the echoey cavern of the abandoned mall. It’s not that Paige doesn’t believe in ghosts or magic. If the clinking of the old chains on the canal lock outside her bedroom window or the shadows at the bottom of the ramp she’s coasting down were the work of spirits, it would be the most interesting thing to ever happen to Paige.
Nothing exciting ever happens to Paige.
Nothing exciting ever happens in Eastfield. Nothing but the factory shutting down and the houses getting more worn with every winter and the look on Mom’s face getting more and more pinched as she applied for the cleaning job that sent Paige and Micah from the kitchen table to Eastfield High and started the nightly arguments with Dad.
Nothing exciting happens in Eastfield and nothing interesting happens in Eastfield. No one is interested in Paige in Eastfield either. Not the teachers who look right through her or the girls who laugh when she walks past their cafeteria tables or the boys who push her into lockers before taking the laughing girls under the bleachers after school. Even creepy Pete at the corner store doesn’t even bother to shout come ons at Paige like he does to the other girls in the neighborhood when they’re walking to the bus stop.
No one is ever interested in Paige. Until, on that rainy Tuesday, everything changes.
The only warning sign Paige has before everything changes is a slight shimmer on a pillar. The day is hot, the old concrete plays tricks on your eyes, but she’s never seen anything like the shimmer before, and she stands on the pedals to get closer, racing towards the shimmer and almost crashing into the girl biking through the wall in front of her.
Through the wall.
On first glance, Mav’s bike barely looks like a bike at all. The wheels are glowing and the body of the bike shines like liquid silver. Mav herself is wearing dark as midnight silks that seem to swirl around her body as she turns the bike to circle Paige. If Paige squints, she can see holes in the silks, and a deep looking cut on Mav’s forehead, but everything else about her is like nothing Paige has ever seen.
Then, as Paige watches, the bike and the clothes and Mav herself seems to shift. The bike is still nicer than Paige’s own bent hand-me-down, but it reforms from twisting metallic curls to simple red bars and black spoked wheels. Mav’s silks warp and spin until she’s wearing jean shorts, a lilac t-shirt, and a dark jacket that looks like it could have come off the rack at Mom’s favorite vintage store.
And, Paige sees for the first time, Mav has a second bike’s handlebars in her grip, the other bike balancing effortlessly as Mav comes to a stop and drops her feet to the concrete, grinning wide and a bit mischievous as she pushes the second bike towards Paige.
Paige looks down at the bike, and her eyes must be playing tricks on her because the wheels seem to glow. Her hand reaches for her bag and her cell phone, on instinct, because she should text Mom, she knows she should. But before she’s made the decision to do it, her hand meets the cool handlebars of the bike and she’s climbing onto the seat, a thousand times cushier than the seat that Micah ripped the padding out of last year.
Mav turns over her shoulder to grin at Paige again, then rides straight at another pillar, which has that same weird shimmer. Her grin beckons, and Paige doesn’t even look back at the scraped old green bike on the ground for a second before she follows Mav into the wall.
The world bursts into color and light and excitement.
***
Mav doesn’t talk a whole lot more after she shows Paige how to ride through the time windows, time windows, than she did in the Eastview Mall deck.
But her eyes twinkle when Paige rides up beside her on a road that looks eerily familiar yet unrecognizable, and she tells Paige her name and that they’ve ridden through a time window, and yes, Mav is from the future.
She won’t say where the bikes came from, and Paige doesn’t ask again after she sees the haunted look her question brings to Mav’s eyes.
Mav is from the future and Mav doesn’t explain very much and Paige is enchanted by her smile.
The little town they ride into, down the long twisting road, looks like Eastview through a funhouse mirror, and Paige realizes with a start that almost tips her off her bike, it likely is Eastview, through a time window.
The houses are smaller, but the paint on them isn’t peeling. The factory’s smokestacks are missing from the horizon. But when they ride around a bend, the corner store is there, its dingy bricks covered with shiny new white paint.
The corner store is there, and a man who looks an awful lot like Creepy Pete if he was fifty pounds heavier and had a lot more hair is in a truck outside. They stop for a snack that Mav downs like she hasn’t eaten in weeks until the man yells at them and backs over Mav’s bike tire.
Paige expects Mav’s face to fall and the smile to disappear, but instead, as confusing as anything else that’s happened since Mav rode through the wall, Mav just smiles and taps the tire. The tire glows a little and fills with air again. Mav doesn’t climb on the bike though, as she grabs the bag that the man dropped in his hurry to be an asshole. Instead, she pushes her bike against Paige’s, and with a click, they merge to become one.
Mav’s arms are tight around Paige’s waist as they ride, together, to an empty house on the outskirts of town. Mav’s laugh is clear as a shiny new bell in Paige’s ear as they slide off the bike and slip through an open window. Mav’s eyes look like stars when she holds out the bag she took from the man at the store and opens it up.
Mav’s eyes look like the stars that fill Paige’s entire field of vision as they both peek into the bag.
Paige isn’t entirely sure if she’s lost in Mav’s eyes or the bag’s contents or the blinding light of the sun itself as time rushes to meet her, the stars bending to touch the earth and everything that Paige is consumed in light and heat and overwhelming, exhilarating sensation.
***
Paige wakes up alone.
She doesn’t even remember falling asleep, but when she sits up, stretching her arms wide, she’s in an unfamiliar room, tangled in a nest of worn blankets. When she squints, she remembers Mav pulling out of the linen closet in an empty house, remembers lying in them, remembers Mav’s arms wrapping around Paige’s body, holding her tight. When Paige’s eyes flick around the room, Mav is nowhere to be seen, but the now empty bag sits in the corner, as if it’s proof.
As if Paige needed proof that her entire world cracked down the center last night.
When Paige pushes to her feet, tugging her sleeves down and pushing her hair out of her face, she notices a cool breeze blowing over her. The window is open, just a bit, and Paige crosses to it in two steps.
Mav is outside, on the ground, her hand on her bike and its wheels glowing. She grins up at Paige, beckoning Paige with the stars in her eyes.
Paige runs for the stairs, then the splintered window in the back room, crawling outside and landing on her feet as Mav pedals directly into the shimmering trunk of a tree.
Paige grins and grabs her own bike, following Mav into the tree and into forever.