Vic had a whole framework of fantasies that involved riding the Tuff Burner across an imaginary bridge to faraway places and fantastic lands. She had ridden it to a terrorist hideout and rescued her mother’s missing bracelet and had taken it on a ride to a book-filled crypt where she’d met an elf who made her tea and warned her about a vampire. Vic moved a finger across the handlebars, collected a thick gray pad of dust on her fingertip. All this time it had been down here gathering dust because her parents hadn’t wanted her to have it. Vic had loved the bike, and it had given her a thousand
...more
