The Patron Saint of Dead Bikers

I don't know if this works as well as I would like it to. I may revisit it sometime.

I met Savanah for the first time at a party. It was the eighteenth of December nineteen-ninety-two, I was fourteen, a freshman in highschool and the youngest one there by far. The lights were gold and red and green and the punch was strongly spiked, and I had just lost my virginity to a senior named Chris.
It was her laughter that I first noticed, harsh and loud and utterly without care or reservation. And it was directed at me, my flushed face and tousled hair, and the two cups clenched in my hands. I turned towards her and we locked eyes, she had such striking eyes, deep reservoirs of pain overflowing with life.
“How was it?” she called to me, from the corner where she was ensconced and largely concealed, with two or three friends, people I recognized, who hung around the theater but weren't quite a part of my circle of friends.
“I don't... It was great.” I smiled stupidly and swayed over to them.
“God you're young,” she said, “I mean, we've all heard him talk about you, but that face of yours... You haven't seen much, have you.” and for a moment she looked old, in a denim vest that had once been a jacket, a wife beater, and a pair of jeans. Her hair had been dyed several times recently, each fading and blurring with the ones before it, and her nose and lips were pierced, her ears gaged, but not yet so widely that I could see through them.
“That's not what people usually say when they meet me.” I said, feeling at an utter disadvantage.
“And what is it they normally say?”
“'My you're tall' or maybe, 'do you play basketball' or, if they're my moms aging lesbian friends, 'aren't you cute!'”
“To which you would respond?” I got the impression that she was playing with me, but not in an unfriendly way.
“Umm, usually, 'No shit', 'only when I can't avoid it,' and, 'thank you...' respectively.” The pained expression I made along with the last response caused her to chuckle.
“You smoke?”
“Ah, no.”
“Good call, want to try?” She had, I noticed, very expressive eyebrows and had great fun arching them dramatically for emphasis.
“What the hell.” I followed her out onto the back stoop of the house and we sat on the crumbling concrete steps, me leaning against the wrought iron of the rail as we talked, and I coughed, and she laughed, and we finished three cigarettes.
“Jordan?” the high, inquisitive voice came from inside and I half stood, bracing myself to remain balanced, peering through the window of the door. Chris was inside, searching for me.
“I'm sorry,” I said to Savanah, “it was good talking to you.”
“'Course,” she said, “go fuck the boy again before he gets all weepy.”
I threw her a mock salute before walking back into the heat and light and wrapping one frigid arm around the waist of the elfin boy who would be my first real boyfriend. He would also be the first to break my heart, through no fault of his own, but rather due to the judgment and perceived disapproval of his parents.
Of course, I didn't know any of that at the time, just that I wanted to stay in his bed forever, one hand resting on his narrow chest, watching his face in profile, admiring the shadows cast by a wane moon. Even that was not to be, my mom didn't give a shit how I spent my nights, she'd bought the handle of vodka we'd used to spike the punch after all, but she always wanted me home by morning, and so around four in the morning I tore myself from his side and announced my intention to walk home.
“It's four a.m.”
“So?”
“It's the middle of a Minneapolis winter!”
“I don't get cold.”
“You're an idiot.” He said at last, shaking his head.
“I know,” I grinned back, “you love me for it.”
“God knows why.” But he smiled and I left with the taste of him warm on my lips.
I always took the bike path for a stretch going home, getting off where it run past the parking lot of a strip mall, tramping through snow that rose to my mid-thigh, overwhelming the low boots that I wore. For all that I cared.
It was in the parking lot that I noticed I was no longer along, and self consciously I realized that I was singing, the Cabaret soundtrack, one of Sally's songs, I know longer remember which one, but given their reaction it was probably “Mein Herr.”
I just remember hearing, “Hey! Faggot! Hey!” Several voices from the shadows of a drab and characterless apartment building with a coffee shop and a tobacco shop on the bottom floor. I extended one finger in proud salute, knowing my size, and that it wasn't likely they would try anything. The beating of my heart and the rush of blood in my ears drowned out any audible response, but all at once I saw shadows detach from the building and become the shapes of three men, details shrouded by night.
I began to run, slipping on patches of ice, keeping my footing, but loosing valuable time, and steadily they gained on me. “Assholes!” A fourth voice, female, but deep and resonant came from behind me.
My would be attackers turned, and there she was, astride a road bike, dressed for spring save for the fingerless leather gloves onto which was sewed a quantity of lead shot. Something about her caused them to slow, turn and, with many a sotto voce epithet, walk away.
“You okay?” She asked, coming nearer.
“Yeah, thanks to you.”
“No problem, hurry home eh?”
“Yeah, I, I plan on it.” My teeth chattered, as much from the sudden adrenalin crash as the cold. As she walked back to where she had dropped her bike I called after her, asking her name.
When I asked around that Monday I found that no one knew her, no one had her number or her address. I got an awful lot of “Savanah, who?” Type responses, and a couple, “The girl at the party? I don't know, I thought she was Chris's friend.” but even he seemed not to know her, or at least, not to want to talk about her.
I have seen signs of her, now and again, ever since. There was a mural for a long time, spray-painted across a condemned building off of Minnehaha, near Franklin avenue signed “Savanah Lives” and I heard her name once or twice, at parties or in conjunction with theater functions. Supposedly she went to an alternative school in Dinkytown, dropped out and went out west, had a girlfriend that danced at Dreamgirls on Hennepin and beat up anyone that approached her as she was getting off, and a dozen other stories all equally contradictory.
The final word came from an older man, maybe fifty, who bore the marks of a life hard lived, at three in the morning in the only cafe still open. I asked him about the point-stick scrawled around his arm, “Ride on, daughter mine.” it read.
Years ago, he said, in the early eighties, his daughter had been struck by a drunk driver while biking home from the same cafe we were sitting in. He said that her name was Savanah, and that she had the most striking eyes...
So I blow kisses whenever I pass a ghost bike now, my offering to the patron saint of dead bikers.