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Would anything? I hated myself for having allowed myself to believe I was at the center of Diane’s world. When I was, in fact, a kid she knew.
    But it really was a wonderful bike Jason had lent me. I stood on the pedals, daring gravity to do its worst. The tires gritted on the dusty pavement but the chains and derailleurs were silky, silent except for the delicate whir of the bearings. Wind sluiced past me as I picked up speed. I flew past primly painted houses with expensive cars parked in their driveways, bereft but free. Near the bottom I began to squeeze the hand brakes, bleeding momentum without really slowing down. I didn’t want to stop. I wanted never to stop. It was a good ride.
    But the pavement leveled, and at last I braked and keeled and came to rest with my left shoe on the asphalt. I looked back.
    Jason was still at the top of Bantam Hill Road with my own clunky bike under him, so far away now that he looked like a lone horseman in an old western. I waved. It was his turn.
    Jason must have taken that hill, upslope and down, a thousand times. But he had never taken it on a rusty thrift-shop bike.
    He fit the bicycle better than I did. His legs were longer than mine and the frame didn’t dwarf him. But we had never traded bikes before, and now I thought of all the bugs and idiosyncrasies that bike possessed, and how intimately I knew it, how I had learned not to turn hard right because the frame was a little out of true, how you had to fight the wobble, how the gearbox was a joke. Jason didn’t know any of that. The hill could be tricky. I wanted to tell him to take it slow, but even if I had shouted he wouldn’t have heard me; I had zoomed too far ahead. He lifted his feet like a big gawky infant. The bike was heavy. It took a few seconds to gather speed, but I knew how hard it would be to stop. It was all mass, no grace. My hands gripped imaginary brakes.
    I don’t think Jason knew he had a problem until he was three quarters of the way down. That was when the bicycle’s rust-choked chain snapped and flailed his ankle. He was close enough now that I could see him flinch and cry out. The bike wobbled but, miraculously, he managed to keep it upright.
    A piece of the chain tangled in the rear wheel, where it whipped against the struts, making a sound like a broken jackhammer. Two houses up, a woman who had been weeding her garden covered her ears and turned to watch.
    What was amazing was how long Jason managed to keep control of that bike. Jase was no athlete, but he was at home in his big, lanky body. He stuck his feet out for balance—the pedals were useless—and kept the front wheel forward while the back wheel locked and skidded. He held on. What astonished me was the way his body didn’t stiffen but seemed to relax, as if he were engaged in some difficult but engaging act of problem-solving, as if he believed with absolute confidence that the combination of his mind, his body, and the machine he was riding could be counted on to carry him to safety.
    It was the machine that failed first. That dangerously flapping fragment of greasy chain wedged itself between the tire and the frame. The wheel, already weakened, bent impossibly out of true and then folded, scattering torn rubber and liberated ball bearings. Jason came free of the bike and tumbled through the air like a mannequin dropped from a high window. His feet hit the pavement first, then his knees, his elbows, his head. He came to a stop as the fractured bike rotated past him. It landed in the gutter at the side of the road, the front tire still spinning and clattering. I dropped his bike and ran to him.
    He rolled over and looked up, momentarily bewildered. His pants and shirt were torn. His forehead and the tip of his nose had been brutally skinned and were bleeding freely. His ankle was lacerated. His eyes watered from the pain. “Tyler,” he said. “Oh, uh, uh… sorry about your bike, man.”
    Not to make too much of this incident, but