2014-2015

Two Pedals

Featured in 2015 Spring Issue of Rambunctious

By Julia Skeval, ’16

A bike has two pedals and humans have two eyes and I used to wear five rings every day, spread across my ten fingers and five times ten is fifty and there are as of now, at 9:36 on a Thursday in the tenth month of the two thousand and fourteenth year, fifty states in America. America has seven letters and so does forever and so does goodbye and when I was seven I said I wanted to die when I was eighty three for no reason at all and I got an eighty three on a really important test my freshman year and thirteen days later it didn’t matter anymore because I wasn’t a freshman anymore. And a piano has 88 keys and there are four major oceans and maybe those two things are connected and maybe they’re not. I have six visible scars and eleven is my favorite number and I will be seventeen when I graduate high school and in my favorite playlist, I have seventeen songs but maybe in twenty five days I’ll get tired of them all and twenty five is one quarter of one hundred and a hundred years ago, women could not vote and today, the average woman makes a quarter less than the average man. By two thousand twenty, I will have been in school for roughly eighteen years and eighteen years ago my dad owned a ’94 Mustang and my parents met the year before in ’93 and I came in third in my fourth grade spelling bee. I’ve had one detention, broken one bone, have one younger brother, have one older brother, have one life to live and do not tell me that life isn’t complex when 88 keys plus six scars equals a ’94 Mustang minus ’93 when my parents met equals one and one life plus fifty states plus thirteen days until I wasn’t a freshman anymore plus seventeen years of age plus four oceans equals 85 and 85 minus 83 when I die is two and humans have two eyes and bikes have two pedals.