It was my mom who sold me out.

What had happened was the condo board held a meeting about how there were too many bikes cluttering the basement and everyone needed to claim a space by writing their unit number on the wall. My mom, charitable Protestant she is, immediately yelped out, “Oh, we’ll tell our daughter to put her number up right away!”

It was a 1982 Peugeot, a true red, almost a womanly red. That’s what I thought when I met someone’s mother in the parking lot in Saint-Jérôme after a hasty conversation on Marketplace. After some bartering (“$215?” “No.” “Ok.”), my then-boyfriend rented a Communauto, and we drove north. They watched me ride the bike around in circles, much to my embarrassment, because at 21 I had just learned how to ride a bike and was only accustomed to the cushy, low-riding luxury of a Bixi. The Peugeot had its original 10 speeds that I had to reach forward and awkwardly change, the gears lurching for a moment as the handles veered to the left. When I pedalled faster, there was a round light on the front that illuminated the way. It turned out to be useless, unless you were drunk at night, in which case it was very useful.

I texted my mom if she would e-Transfer the money into my TD student account. Her and my dad hadn’t moved to Montreal yet, and I felt the shooting freedom that only an Arts major without a fully developed frontal lobe can feel. “I’ll only ride it on bike trails! I can go to the market by the canal and put a baguette in the basket!” I had been raised to be a liar, so I guess she should’ve known better.

Example: When I was 10, my mom would take me to the taco shop in the strip mall and let me order a shrimp burrito. We would eat there and bring another shrimp burrito home to my dad, so he wouldn’t know she had twice paid an extra $4 for a child to eat shellfish.

Example: When I was 14, I got a B+ as my final grade in algebra, and I wrote to my teacher, begging her to bump me up to an A- because I was just so deeply depressed that semester and had really tried my absolute best. Those things were half-truths. My mom edited the four-paragraph email for me. (She didn’t bump me up. We told my dad that she had.)

Example: When I was 16, I was sitting on a Starbucks patio with my brother and dad in my home town of San Diego. We had just done some back-to-school shopping next door at Target, and my dad had pushed the cart over with us. I was drinking my child’s size chocolate milk with whipped cream (I’m not sure if you can order that anymore, but it was a great deal when you could), and there was this Old White Couple a few tables over who kept looking at us with that squinty, old people stare. My dad came back out with a tall latte and the New York Times, which he was going to read for free and then return. A grim Target employee wandered over to us and asked if he could take the cart back. He lifted out our shopping bags to empty it, and for some reason, a bunch of receipts came flying out, swirling around in the air before settling mischievously on the pigeon shit-covered ground.

I, being a 16-year-old “liberal,” immediately bent down to pick them up. At the exact same time, the Old White Man of the couple hobbled over with a decidedly vindictive limp. My dad, who knew what was going on, mouthed to me from the corner of his mouth, “Leave it there.” And the Old White Man opened his Old White Mouth and said to my dad, “Is that your trash?” And my dad, with laughter in his eyes and a straight face, said, “No.” The OWM grunted, “It sure looks like it! It came out of your cart!” At which my dad shrugged and said, “Nope. Not mine.” And this OWM mustered up from some hell within himself the strength to practically yell, “Well, maybe that’s how they do it where you’re from!” And my dad asked, “Where am I from?” And the OWM, motioning to his Old White Woman (OWW) that it was time to go, barked out, like Clint in a movie before he learns how to stop being racist, “I don’t know, but certainly not here!” And my dad shouted at his back, which was now trudging towards the parking lot to his beige sedan, “And where are you from, sir?? Where are you from?!” Because that OWM sure as hell did not look Kumeyaay.

The whole thing was really funny because the OWM was technically right. My Toisanese dad was not American-made. He was Canadian. Afterward, he said to us that the couple had been staring because they were trying to figure us out, and when he had come out with his latte and paper, they had put two and two together. Then he said that this was okay, that they were going to drop dead any day now and their whole generation would soon follow. I went home feeling like a soothed little suburban mixed baby.

It was at about that point in time that he began really hammering in the idea of not buying a bike when I would leave for uni because I would get hit by a car and die. I also couldn’t get “tipsy,” because then I’d eat peanuts and go into anaphylactic shock, or I’d have unprotected sex with a stranger and catch an STD, or worse, get pregnant. Instilling these ideas in me and at the same time teaching me to lie was an interesting parenting tactic that had so far resulted in mixed results.

The day my mom sold me out, I came home from work and he was sitting in his Chair.

“Sit down,” he commanded. I knew it was a command because he pronounced it like “Siddown,” with a strong emphasis on the “down.”

“First question.” He pointed his index finger at me. “When did you buy this bike?” He laughed ironically. “Oh, WAIT, did you even buy it? Or did I buy it?”

“No, I bought it with my money from my job… like four years ago?” I croaked out. What a strange expression, “croaked out.” We like to use it when our voice raspily betrays guilt, but mostly it calls to mind frogs, and I couldn’t think of any animal more guiltless than a frog, sitting there all squishy and damp in the rain, waiting to be run over. I fixed my eyes on a scratch on the cherrywood coffee table. Had I left that scar when I was young?

“Okay, next question. How much did your ex-boyfriend have to do with this bike?” This was good; I had someone to blame it on.

“Well, I mean, yeah, he kind of influenced it.” I paused. How much of the weight of this could I avoid? “He was, like, into bikes, I guess. He found it for me on Facebook.” He was actually very into bikes, like underground urban racing and downhill racing and whatever other pointless races you can pedal in.

“That’s what I thought!” he said triumphantly. I spied the neighbor’s cat on the window ledge across the courtyard. Wasn’t it afraid of falling? My eyes began to glaze over.

He gave me the Chinese lecture on disobedience, on events from his past, on the haunted corner of Duluth and Parc where people kept dying, on wasting his money on frivolity, on the temporality of love and boyfriends, on the stupidity of the word “fun.” Nothing really worth writing down. A good 30 minutes later, my eyes came back into focus, and I followed him to the basement to unlock the bike. I told him I didn’t have time to go with him to clean it up, which was a lie, so he pushed it alone some kilometers away to wipe off all the muck and pump it full of air, my beautiful red bike that he had bought me. It was a sunny day, so he leaned it on its kickstand in the courtyard and I came down to take pictures of it to post on Marketplace. It sold in two days. I kept the money.

It is silly how hard I held onto that lie, fearing the day he would find me at an intersection, one leg on the street and one leg on the pedal, and rip it away from me. But of course he never asked, “Why did you lie to me?,” which would have been beside the point. He knows why we lie. It is the slyest form of survival in a world that unceasingly churns out reckless ex-boyfriends, hard-ass math teachers, bowls of pub peanuts, drivers who don’t check their blindspots, OWM, and that rush of autumn wind that makes you scream with happiness as you roll all the way down the hill, the round light positively beaming. They are all out to hunt you dead.