Excerpt from Among the Ten Thousand Things by Julia Pierpont, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"If you push harder, you won't shake so much." That was what the other girls all said. They kept a few yards away, pigeon-toed, with hands on their hips or as visors over their foreheads. It was the Sunday morning after a sleepover. Their eyes worked at pinching out the sun.

"Just bike to here, Kay." Racky, on the only other bike, made figure eights around the rest of them, Chelsea and the Haber twins with their twin braids. It had become a group project at these New Rochelle playdates, teaching Kay to ride. She could never get past the wobbly, the fear of falling. That jelly feeling would hit after the first pump, and her foot would come down like a gag reflex, like the time she smacked the wooden stick out of Dr. Frankel's hand when he tried to depress her tongue with it, her foot would hit the pavement and drag her to a stop. Cycle, stop. Cycle, stop. Twenty minutes of this, most weekends, and finally the others would get bored, would propose trips to the multiplex, to TCBY, to the kitchen for facials with an issue of Allure and someone's mother's old avocado.

"I can't." It was a hot day and probably there was something good on TV, in the air-conditioning. Central air seemed the greatest of suburban luxuries. It was like living inside a Duane Reade. They had AC units at home, wheezy ones that dripped puddles under the windowsills.

"If Kay bikes to here," Racky said, "she can choose what movie we watch."

"I don't want to choose what movie."

The girls whispered, negotiating behind long strings of blonde that they tucked behind their ears as they came up with new terms.

"If Kay bikes to here," said one of the twins, "she can choose the movie and if we get pizza or Chinese."

"I don't care what we eat."

"Lo mein, Kay."

"I can't."

Racky rang the bell on her handlebar. "If she bikes to here," she said, counting off on her fingers, "she gets the movie, Chinese, and twenty bucks."

The Haber twins laughed. Kay understood that no one expected her to make it, that they were already telling the story on Monday in the cafeteria, the great lengths they had gone to teach Kay, how hopeless she was.

She pushed off the pavement with the girls still laughing and forced herself to pedal a second time, through the uneasiness. For once, she wasn't afraid to fall. If she fell, then at least this all would be over; they'd stop laughing, maybe even feel bad.

She rode right past them—past them!—went another eight or nine yards before sailing into a curb. But still, she had done it. Been bullied into it, but still.

She chose Harry Potter and beef lo mein. She never did get the twenty dollars from Racky, but then she never asked.



It was half past nine by the time Racky's mom's minivan pulled up in front of Kay's apartment building. "Your mother's going to have me arrested for kidnapping."

"She won't care." Sometimes Kay caught herself making her mother sound neglectful for no reason. She said thanks, for the ride or the weekend generally, to the whole of the car and worked the handle to slide herself out. She could feel the minivan waiting for her to reach the lobby before it lurched away.

Kay's favorite doorman was on. She never called him by his name, although she knew it, had heard other people address him this way. She was afraid that in her mouth it would come out wrong, that she'd been mishearing it all this time—what everyone else was saying sounded like Angel, but no one was named Angel.

"Okay, Kay," he said when she came shuffling through the lobby, backpack heavy with weekend things. She got to the elevator door just as it opened, and inside her button was pushed already. A magic trick Angel liked to perform. Kay stuck her head out to gape at him, as always, the suggestion of applause, and Angel laughed high and long, different from his laugh with the adults.

Excerpted from Among the Ten Thousand Things by Julia Pierpont. Copyright © 2015 by Julia Pierpont. Excerpted by permission of Random House. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.