From their porches and balconies, they watched her drag the dead Harley down the block toward her apartment complex, sweat sliding into her eyes, her palms burning as the locked tires screamed against the asphalt, and the laughter grew louder the farther she pulled, because there is something about other people’s desperation that makes cruel people feel safe.
Mrs. Talbot from unit 3C called down like she was announcing entertainment.
“Well, look at that,” she said, arms folded, voice sharp as broken glass. “There goes the neighborhood genius spending her rent money on trash.”
A group of teenagers, the kind who always smelled like cheap vape smoke and trouble, recorded her with their phones, snickering as if she was a meme unfolding in real time.
One of them shouted, “Hey! Wanna sell it for scrap when you realize you can’t eat a motorcycle?”
Elena didn’t respond.
She couldn’t afford to waste breath on people who didn’t know her story.
She kept pulling.
Her twelve-year-old son Caleb, tall for his age and already carrying the tired eyes of a boy who’d learned too early how fragile life could be, walked beside her with clenched fists, his anger growing not at the neighbors but at her.
“Mom,” he said quietly, voice cracking the way it did when he was trying hard not to cry. “Why are you doing this? Why do you always do things like this?”
