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Luxanna Crownguard was six years old today, and so far being six was exactly the same as being five.
There had been a breakfast with the correct number of candles. There had been a photograph on the good staircase, in the good dress, with her hands folded the way her mother showed her. There had been relatives she did not know saying hasn’t she grown over her head as though she were a plant. She had said thank you to all of them, precisely, because a Crownguard said thank you precisely, and then she had been allowed outside.
Because the one real present, the only one she had asked for, was propped against the garden wall with a ribbon on the handlebars.
A bicycle. A proper one, her own size, painted a bright candy pink, with a little white basket on the front and a bell that went ting when you thumbed it. She had thumbed it forty times already and did not intend to stop.
“To the end of Piltover Street and back, Luxanna.” Her mother spoke from the bench without looking up from the tall man she was discussing business with, even today. “No further. Where the Haldts can see you from their window.”
“Yes, Mother.”
Lux pushed off, wobbled, found it, and pedalled, and the wind got into her hair, and for about nine whole seconds it was the best feeling she had ever had in her life.
Then she reached the end of Piltover Street.
She stopped. She put one foot down on the kerb. Behind her lay the whole neat managed morning, the good dress, the relatives, the bench. In front of her the road simply carried on, and to a six year old that meant a whole world of infinite possibilities. The chance of fun and adventure unregulated by her parents.
She looked down the next street, a few blocks on, the eastern district would give way to the western side. Apparently even the tidy fences gave up altogether and lived life on the edge. Freedom, she had only ever read about it.
Snippets of conversation she had heard from family and neighbours gave her a tiny inkling to what lay ahead. Down there, the houses leaned closer together, paint peeling in friendly patches, apparently this was a travesty, and where gardens spilled there plants out across the pavements. Her mother fainted when someone told her weeds weren't plucked immediately. It was the sort of place where something loud and unexpected was always happening, much to her family’s disgust.
It sounded perfect.
Luxanna Crownguard had never once in her life gone further than she was told.
Today, she was feeling rebellious.
After a few blocks, Lux came to a screeching halt and thumbed the bell. Ting. Ting-ting. A small girl with blue hair was right in her path and no matter how many tings Lux made, the girl didn't move. Instead she was focused, folded over something on the kerb, two scruffy braids hanging almost into the gutter, tongue stuck out of the corner of her mouth in tremendous concentration. She wore dungarees that looked like they had been involved in a paint fight, and one shoe with no lace.
“Excuse me,” said Lux.
The girl did not jump. She looked up, squinting, as if Lux were a cloud that had got in the way of the sun.
“You’re in my spot.”
“I don’t think it’s anyone’s spot. It’s a pavement.”
“S’my spot. I spotted it.” The girl went back to her work. “An’ you’re blockin’ my light, bike girl.”
Realising the girl wasn’t going to move, Lux leaned her bicycle very carefully down on the grass verge instead, pink and gleaming. She crouched a polite distance away, curious what the other girl was doing that was so fascinating.
On the kerb sat a tin can, a stub of candle, and three small red paper cylinders with little twisted tails.
“What are those?”
“Speriments.”
“That isn’t a word.”
“Is now.” The girl held one of the red cylinders up to the light with one eye shut, the way Lux’s father held up a glass of wine. “S’a cherry bomb. But better. I made it better. Made it bigger. The shop ones are rubbish, they go pff, mine go—” she threw both grubby hands wide. “I dunno. Big.”
“I don’t think you’re supposed to have those,” said Lux, who was quite sure nobody their age was supposed to have those, maybe not even adults.
“I’m not s’posed to have loads of stuff.” She said it cheerfully, as though that were the whole point of everything. Then she turned and looked at Lux properly, taking in the good dress and the ribbon still tied to the handlebars and the general Crownguard-ness of her, and her nose wrinkled. “You talk weird. All big-word-y. You from up there?” She jerked her chin back towards the east side.
“Yes, I live in the eastern districts,” said Lux, thought for a second then added. “I’m homeschooled and I go to school. So I know a lot of words.”
“Ugh.” The girl shuddered as if Lux had described a disease. “Two schools. That’s child crumelty.” She frowned. “Cruelty. Crum. Whatever.”
“It’s cruelty.”
“That’s what I said, bike girl.”
Lux blinked. “My name is Luxanna.”
The girl tried it. “Luh. Luxh— Luxanda. Luxa... Lux-sanna-fanna.” She gave up with the full-body disgust of someone who had been asked to do homework, which made no sense to Lux, she loved homework. “Nope. Too big. What’s the yellow bit, the hair bit?”
“...Blonde?”
“Blondie.” The girl nodded once, firmly, as if she was stating a well known fact. “Done. That’s your name now. No takebacks.”
“You can’t just decide my—”
“Did, though.” She was already turning back to her can. “Already happened. Can’t un-happen it.”
Lux opened her mouth to explain, carefully and with correct words, exactly why that wasn’t how names worked.
She closed it again.
Nobody had ever given her a silly name before. Nobody had ever given her anything she hadn’t been handed on a tray. Blondie was not a Crownguard name. It was not a name you folded your hands for. It was just hers, from a girl in one shoe who didn’t care about the up-there-houses one bit.
Lux decided, privately, that she liked it very much.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
The blue-haired girl went still for a tiny second. It was the first still second Lux had seen out of her.
“Jinx,” she said. Then, fast, braced, like she’d said it a hundred times and had it argued with a hundred times: “Not the other one. Jus’ Jinx. Tha’s it, tha’s all, don’t—”
“Okay,” said Lux.
Jinx looked at her sideways. “...Okay?”
“Okay. Jinx.” Lux said it like it was obvious, because to her it was. If a person told you their name, that was their name. You didn’t argue with a person about their own name. That would be terribly rude. “It’s nice to meet you, Jinx.”
“Huh.” Something happened to Jinx’s face that Lux didn’t have a word for yet, not even a big one. It was there and then it was gone, bolted over with a grin. “Why’s your bike got a bow on it?”
“It’s new. It’s my birthday present. I’m six today.”
“Oh. Happy Birthday. Y'know you’re alright, Blondie,” Jinx decided. “For an up-there.” She shoved the candle at her. “Here. Hold the fire. I gotta set the speriment.”
Lux knew, with every careful homeschooled-and-schooled bone in her body, that she should not have held the fire.
But Lux also never had a friend before that wasn't arranged by her parents. So she held the fire.
Jinx balanced the little red cylinder on the lip of the tin can with the delicate focus of a surgeon, tongue right out now, both eyes crossed. “Okay. Okay okay okay. When I say, you touch the fire on the tail bit, an’ then we run, an’ it goes—” she flung her arms up and nearly head-butted the candle. “Spentacular.”
“Spectacular.”
“That’s the one. On three. One—”
“Shouldn’t we move my bicycle? It’s quite close to the—”
“Three!”
It was not, Lux would reflect later, a very long countdown.
She touched the fire to the tail because a girl called Jinx told her to, which would turn out to be a running theme for the next twelve years of her life. The tail caught. It made a small, bright, furious, fizzing sound, and Jinx grabbed her by the wrist and hauled, and they got three whole steps before the world went…
BANG.
It was not a big bang, really. It was a six-year-old’s bang. A puff of grey smoke, a startled shower of grit, the tin can going up and over and landing in a flowerbed with an insulted clatter.
And the little red cylinder, which had rolled a short and fateful distance in its half-second of fizzing, went off directly underneath Luxanna Crownguard’s brand-new birthday bicycle.
The front wheel folded up like a flower closing for the night. The bell went ting, once, sadly, all on its own. The pink frame tipped over into the grass and lay still, one pedal spinning, trailing a thin curl of smoke up into the autumn morning.
Silence.
Jinx had gone white under the grime. Lux could see her doing the sort of sum that kids from this end of the city learned early. New girl. Nice bike. Broke the nice bike. Here comes the shouting.
“I didn’t, it rolled, I didn’t mean the bike, I swear, it just, it rolled, I never—” The words were coming out of her small and fast and frightened, nothing like the cheerful racket of a minute ago. Her hand was still locked round Lux’s wrist, and it had gone tight, and she had half-turned to bolt.
Lux looked at the ruin of her birthday present.
Then she did something she had not done, not once, not at any of the correct breakfasts or the good-staircase photographs or the long stiff dinners of her entire careful life.
She laughed.
It came up from somewhere underneath the folded hands and the yes-Mothers, somewhere she had not known existed, and it was not a polite laugh at all. It was an enormous, delighted, slightly unhinged shriek, both hands over her mouth and her eyes streaming, because her bicycle had exploded, it had gone up in actual smoke, and the little bell had gone ting all by itself, and it was, with no competition whatsoever, the most exciting thing that had ever happened to her.
Jinx stared as though Lux had grown a second head.
“...You’re not cryin’.”
“The bell,” Lux wheezed. “The bell went ting—”
“It did! It went all sad! Ting!” And then Jinx was laughing too, the fright cracking off her like old paint, and the two of them sat down hard on the kerb beside the smoking wreck of a candy-pink bicycle and howled until they could not breathe.
“That,” Lux gasped, when she could, “was spectacular.”
“Spentacular,” Jinx agreed, with feeling.
“Come on.” Jinx jumped to her feet, hauling Lux up by the same wrist she had very nearly dragged her away by. “I got more. Back at mine. Gotta get another one, that one’s used up.” She said it the way other children said let’s get another biscuit, and Lux, who had never in her life simply gone to another child’s house without three adults arranging it in advance, went.
Mine turned out to be a leaning house at the end of the next street, with a garage door rolled up and a yard behind it, and a hand-painted sign over a side door that Lux could not quite read. From inside the garage came a steady, meaty rhythm. Thump. Thump-thump.
A very large man stood in the middle of it in worn leather, the old boxing kind, cracked soft at the elbows, the sort that had clearly seen more years than Lux had been alive. The back of it bore a faded mark she did not know the meaning of, something about a hound. He was holding up two flat padded mitts, and a bigger girl, pink-haired and scabbed-kneed and perhaps eight, was hitting them. Left. Left. Right. Good. The girl hit hard.
The man saw them come in and lowered the pads. The girl, mid-swing, blew a strand of pink hair out of her face and dropped back against the garage wall to watch, arms folding across her chest, sizing Lux up top to bottom with the frank suspicion of an older sibling.
“Five minutes, Vi,” the man said, and then, to Jinx, in the weary voice of a man who had asked this question a great many times, “What’ve you done now?”
“Nothin’,” said Jinx, far too quickly. “It wasn’t, we never, she was already, the bike was—”
“She helped me,” said Lux.
It came out of her mouth before she had the slightest idea it was coming. She had never told a lie in her life. Crownguards did not tell lies, her father said, because a Crownguard’s word was worth something. And yet here it was, arriving smooth and clear, in her best mature company voice, the one she used for the relatives.
“I was riding my new bicycle too fast and I crashed it, and it’s quite broken, and Jinx was helping me.” She folded her hands. “She’s been very kind.”
The man looked at Lux. He looked at Jinx, who had arranged her face into an expression of tremendous innocence that fooled absolutely no one. He looked back at Lux, at the good dress and the folded hands, and something at the corner of his mouth moved that was almost, not quite, a smile.
“That so,” he said. He did not believe one word of it. He was, Lux understood with a small thrill, going to let it stand anyway.
That was when she saw the camera. It sat on a shelf by the side door among the tins and the rags, square and chunky, the kind that spat the photograph straight out of its own mouth.
“Excuse me.” Lux had been raised to ask properly, and so she did, chin up, very polite. “Would you take a photograph of us, please? Of me and Jinx. It’s my birthday, and I would like to show my family that I made a new friend.”
The whole garage went quiet.
Jinx’s head turned very slowly toward her. “...Friend?”
“Yes,” said Lux, as if it were obvious, because to her, already, it was.
The man reached up and took the camera off the shelf without a word. Jinx flung an arm round Lux’s neck and hauled her in close, grinning so wide it threatened to fall off the sides of her face, and Lux stood very straight the way she did in all the good-staircase photographs, except that this time she was smiling, properly, for once in a way nobody had told her to.
The camera flashed. It whirred. It poked out a small grey square, and the three of them bent over it while the grey slowly gave up a picture of two six-year-old girls, one golden and tidy and one blue and wild, pressed cheek to cheek and beaming.
Lux held it as though it were made of glass. She did not know, could not have known, that it would still be on her bedroom wall twelve years from now, curling slightly at one corner, the first photograph she had ever chosen to keep.
“Right.” Jinx snatched a fresh red cylinder off a workbench, business concluded. “C’mon, Blondie. Your turn.”
It was Jinx’s idea that Lux should get to set one off properly, to make things fair.
“S’only right,” she said, very serious about it, lining the cylinder up on a flat stone out in the yard with enormous ceremony. “I blew up your bike. So now you get a free go. That’s the rules.”
“Whose rules?”
“Mine. I got loads. They’re all like that.” She stepped back and gestured at the cylinder like a magician presenting a trick. “Go on. Your birthday. Make it count.”
Lux crouched. She held the candle the way Jinx had held it, one eye shut the way Jinx’s whole family seemed to squint at the world, and she lined the little flame up with the twisted tail, and her careful homeschooled heart was going absolutely wild in her chest.
“When it fizzes,” Jinx whispered, right by her ear, a co-conspirator for the first time in Lux’s small managed life, “we run.”
“We run,” Lux agreed.
She touched the fire to the tail.
What she had failed to account for, what a more experienced demolitions six-year-old might have accounted for, was that this cylinder, too, would roll. It fizzed. It spat. It skittered off the flat stone with a mind entirely its own, bounced once off a paint tin, and came to rest underneath a bigger, battered, far-too-old bicycle propped against the garage wall, exactly where its owner had left it to come and see what all the banging was about.
“Oh no,” said Jinx, in the delighted voice of someone for whom oh no had always been the start of the fun and never the end of it. “That’s Vi’s.”
BANG.
Vi’s bicycle did not fold up like a flower. Vi’s bicycle leapt, briefly, a clear three inches into the air, shed its chain in one glorious loop, and came down a ruined heap of spokes and fury.
From the garage wall, the pink-haired girl came off it so fast she knocked over the paint tin.
“JINX!” Vi’s roar could probably be heard back on Piltover Street. “THAT’S MY BIKE, YOU LITTLE—”
“RUN,” Jinx shrieked, joyfully. “Run, Blondie, run, run, run—”
And Lux ran.
She grabbed Jinx’s hand, or Jinx grabbed hers, it was impossible to say and would remain impossible to say for the rest of their lives, and the two of them tore off down the road shrieking with laughter while an eight-year-old thundered after them promising violence, and the autumn leaves kicked up around their feet, and Lux Crownguard, who was not permitted past the end of Piltover Street, who folded her hands, who said thank you precisely, had never, ever, ever been so happy.
12 Years Later
The alarm clock on the nightstand read 1:30AM.
Lux was still awake, cross-legged on top of the covers, chewing the end of a highlighter and scribbling chemistry notes she would need by next week, because midterms rudely did not care that it was the middle of the night. Her handwriting had gone loose and tired three pages ago.
Above where she sat on the bed was her wall of priceless memories, all arranged with great care and love, years of history. Ticket stubs. A faded pink ribbon. A dozen photographs overlapping at the corners, blue hair in nearly every one.
And dead centre, curling just slightly where the corner had let go of its tack a long time ago, a small grey square twelve years old. Two little girls, one golden, one wild, pressed cheek to cheek and beaming over a bicycle you could not see was broken.
The day she lost a bike and found her world.