“Well, I definitely will.” Alice pulls her phone from her pocket. The strength and depth of female friendship only goes so far. “I’m calling my mom.”

“Alice, please,” pleads Maya. “It’s not like we’re crossing the Alps. We’re just riding to school. And I’ll make it up to you, I promise. Anything. My original ’77 Led Zep T-shirt. My firstborn. Anything. If you need someone to ride down the Mississippi with you on a raft, all you have to do is ask.”

Alice hits the number for Home on her phone. “All I want is a ride to school in a car.”

“What happened to the pioneer spirit that made this country great?” asks Maya.

“My ancestors never left Manhattan,” says Alice.

“Well, mine did!” cries Maya, and she sets off into the falling snow.

As a matter of fact, Maya’s ancestors, though they did leave Manhattan, didn’t go any further than Brooklyn. Which is a lot further than Maya is ever likely to get. The road is wet and slippery and filled with large vehicles that drive too fast and far too close, so Maya rides on the sidewalk, pedalling slowly and cautiously. Maybe she should have listened to Alice. She hasn’t gone more than a couple of blocks when she realizes how incorrect the phrase “just riding to school” is – making it sound as easy as strolling into the kitchen for a snack as opposed to, for example, crossing a significant mountain range on an old bicycle that is two inches too small for you. The bike is even more difficult to manoeuvre than she remembers. It wobbles and emits strange sounds that make her worry that something is about to fall off. Her legs ache after only a block or two. She is afraid to go too fast in case she skids. Maybe, besides listening to Alice, Maya should have listened to her mother, and waited for a day when it isn’t snowing for her first ride. Maybe she should have taken a spin around the block once or twice for practice. Perhaps she should have worn ski goggles so she could actually see where she’s going.

Maya would be happy to get off and walk, but of course she can’t. This is a popular road, used by a lot of people she knows. Cars pass, beeping their horns; familiar faces, laughing and shouting things she would be happy not to be able to hear. Someone throws an empty styrofoam cup at her as they hurtle by. Someone else shouts out, “Oy! Maya! Get a husky!” Ms Kimodo waves. For Maya, to be seen pushing her pink and blue bike through the snow would be even more humiliating.

She may have frostbite. Her lungs hurt. She’s lost all feeling in her toes. She’s lost all sense of time. But still Maya pedals on. It will be worth it when she sees the looks on the faces of her friends. It’ll be worth it to see the look on Sicilee’s face as she glides onto campus, gloating, calling out, “You see, I told you I’d fix the flat!” And with any luck she will pass Cody, slouching along with Clemens, and shout out, “Hi!” and toot her cow horn.

Maya pedals up Schuyler, the last road before the school, gasping but triumphant. Usually Schuyler is full of students who live nearby, but today there is not one single person trudging through the snow, hood up, head down. Maya doesn’t wonder why. Nor does she wonder why it’s been some time since the last car honked at her as it passed. She thinks it just shows you how soft everyone is. Mollycoddled. Spoiled. So afraid of a little weather that they beg their parents to drive them just a couple of blocks because of the snow.

When she reaches the top of the hill, she stops to catch her breath. She gazes down the other side. The dark shapes of cars move steadily if slowly along the road that runs along the bottom of Schuyler like bison through a winter storm. The sidewalk should also be teeming with students, but except for two figures huddled into their parkas just stepping off the curb, it too is empty. Maya pushes off.

Maya is fortunate in three things this morning, and unfortunate in one. Her first piece of luck is that the hill is not a steep one. The second is that the two figures huddled into their parkas are Clemens and Waneeda, who are late because they’ve been standing at the gas station half a mile away with their petitions for the last hour. The unfortunate thing is that, halfway down Schuyler, her brakes fail.

“Look out!” screams Maya, sounding her horn. “Get out of the way!” And she tries not to look as the pink and blue bike freewheels her straight into traffic.

The two figures turn, but only one of them steps out of the way. The other one runs towards her.

“Jump! Jump!” shouts Clemens, lunging for her and pulling her free from the bike, which – and this is Maya’s third piece of good fortune – clatters to a stop before it reaches the end of Schuyler and is ground under the wheels of someone’s car.

“Are you all right?” Clemens helps her up.

Maya nods.

“Are you crazy?” asks Clemens. “You could’ve been killed.”

“I know.” Maya smiles at Clemens with no hint of mockery for the very first time. “You probably saved my life.”

The three of them walk the rest of the way together, Maya pushing the bike. As they turn into the school, Cody passes them in his father’s car. He turns in his seat and waves.

Chapter Thirty-Three

Waneeda and her mother have an argument that neither loses or wins

Waneeda’s mother wants to know what’s wrong with the chicken.

This is a moment Waneeda’s been dreading. She scoops up a forkful of peas. But it was as inevitable as it was dreaded. There was no way she could keep this a secret. Not without moving in with someone else. “Nothing’s wrong with it.”

Mrs Huddlesfield glowers at the untouched leg on one side of Waneeda’s plate. Mrs Huddlesfield looks as if she’s about to spit bullets. “Then why aren’t you eating it?”

Waneeda shrugs, but doesn’t raise her head to catch her mother’s accusing, gimlet eye. “Because I don’t feel like it.”

“Don’t feel like it?” Mrs Huddlesfield’s voice rises indignantly. “What do you mean, you don’t feel like it? You love chicken.”

Maybe more than Mrs Huddlesfield thinks.

“What’s the big deal?” Waneeda reaches for the bowl of salad, risking an innocent glance in her mother’s direction. “I’m eating everything else.”

“What’s the big deal?” parrots her mother. “What’s the big deal? Is that the thanks I get for working all day and racing back here to make a nice home-cooked meal for you? What’s the big deal? You think this food just walks out of the refrigerator and puts itself on the table?” Her fork, a piece of white meat pinned to it, hovers in the air. “You think everybody gets a nice home-cooked meal like you do?”

Waneeda spears a slice of tomato. “Everyone who owns a microwave and a can opener does,” she mumbles.

The fork clatters against Mrs Huddlesfield’s plate. “You can cook your own meals from now on if you think you’re so funny.”

“I wasn’t trying to be funny.” The chicken leg pushed to the far side of Waneeda’s plate has tiny veins buried in the flesh. “I just don’t feel like eating the chicken, that’s all.”

“What is this? Another one of your diets?” Mrs Huddlesfield doesn’t ask this in the kindly, affectionate way of a mother who is worried about her child’s health. She asks it as a mother who knows that no diet Waneeda has ever been on has lasted more than a few days and who automatically expects her child to fail.

“Kind of.” Waneeda has recently watched a documentary with Clemens on, among other things, factory farming (in fact, the same documentary that so efficiently emptied the auditorium last year), and now knows that, if it is true that “you are what you eat”, she is a tortured, drugged and septic pool of misery. “I’ve kind of decided to stop eating meat for a while.”

“You what?” Mrs Huddlesfield laughs the way you might if you discovered a two-headed possum in your bed – in amazement, horror and disbelief. “And why in the name of all that is right and holy would you want to do a thing like that?” Waneeda’s mother looks over at Waneeda’s father, whose attention (up until now) has been fully absorbed by what’s happening on the television screen. “Oscar!” she bellows. “Oscar! Did you hear that? Now she isn’t eating meat!”

“What?” Waneeda’s father tears his eyes from the real police-chase taking place only a few feet away in the living room. “Who isn’t eating meat?”

“She isn’t.” Mrs Huddlesfield points to the only other person at the table to clarify this statement and end any possible confusion. “Your daughter is refusing to eat meat!”

“Really?” Mr Huddlesfield snaps a chicken wing in two. “What are you going to eat if you don’t eat meat?”

“Well, you know…” says Waneeda. “I guess I’ll just have to make do with the millions of other things there are to eat besides meat.” She takes a deep breath. “I’m going to be a vegetarian.”

From the look on her father’s face, you’d think Waneeda had just announced her intention to become a mercenary.

“I’ve never heard such nonsense.” Waneeda’s father is so appalled that he has actually forgotten about the hysterical chase on the Californian highway. “Don’t you know that if we didn’t eat them there’d be no cows or pigs or sheep? We’re doing them a favour. Without us they’d die.”

“And with us they die,” counters his daughter. “Which puts them in a no-win situation.”

“Don’t be a wise guy.” Mrs Huddlesfield has retrieved her fork and is pointing it at her daughter. “You know what your father means. That’s what animals are for. For us to eat.”

“Really?” Even the leaf of lettuce on the end of Waneeda’s fork looks sceptical. “Then how come, in nature, the chicken Dad’s breaking into pieces will talk to her chicks when they’re still in their eggs? And they’ll talk back? How do you explain that? You think she’s telling them they only have seven weeks to live and then they’re supper?”