The decision to testify did not come all at once. It came the way most big decisions come to a sixteen-year-old who has learned to be careful: slowly, in pieces, tested out loud in safe rooms before it was said in a room that mattered.
Dana explained it first, in the shelter office, with the folder open and her voice steady: what testifying meant, what the courtroom would look like, who would be there, what Brandt's lawyer would ask, and what Lucia could refuse to answer. She did not dress it up. She said it would be hard. She said Brandt would be in the room. She said the lawyer would try to make her doubt herself. She said Lucia could say no, and that no would be respected, and that nobody would think less of her for it.
Lucia went home to Nora's house that night and did not sleep. She sat at the kitchen table with a glass of milk going warm in front of her, and she thought about Rosa, and about the girls whose names were still initials in a ledger, and about the stops, and about the way Brandt's hand had felt on her elbow, and about the way Nora's hand had felt holding hers under the table. In the morning, she told Nora, "I want to do it. But I'm scared."
Nora said, "Being scared and doing it anyway is the definition of brave. I looked it up once. It's in the dictionary, right under your picture."
Lucia laughed, a short surprised sound, and then she said, "Will you be there?"
"Right beside you," Nora said. "Not in the back. Beside you. And Tank's people will be outside, at a respectful distance, the way they were at the cafΓ©. Not crowding. Just there."
Lucia nodded, and then she said something Nora had not expected: "I want to name the ride."
Nora blinked. "The ride?"
"The ride they're talking about," Lucia said. "Tank said the club wants to do a ride for the shelter fund. I want to name it. If I'm going to testify, if I'm going to be a person in this story and not just a girl in a ledger, then I want to name something."
Nora thought about that, about a girl claiming the right to name a thing, and she said, "Then you'll name it. What do you want to call it?"
Lucia was quiet for a long time, looking out the kitchen window at the desert, and then she said, "The Thousand Engines Ride. Because that's what it sounded like, that morning. A thousand engines. And every one of them was there for me, even though they didn't know my name yet."
Nora wrote it down on a recipe card, in her own hand, and stuck it on the refrigerator with a magnet shaped like a chili pepper. "The Thousand Engines Ride," she said. "Named by Lucia Vega. That's official now. Nobody can unname it."
Lucia smiled, and Nora saw, in that smile, the first outline of a person who was not just surviving a story but authoring one. She would testify. She would sit in a room with a flag in it and tell strangers the truth, and Brandt's lawyer would try to make her doubt herself, and she would doubt herself, and she would tell it anyway. That was the plan. And the ride would have her name on it β not her full name, not yet, but her choice, which was the same thing, in the ways that mattered.
That night, Lucia slept without dreaming about the stops for the first time since the shelter. She dreamed about pie crust, and about a road full of headlights, and about a girl standing at a counter with a coffee pot, watching the hands. When she woke up, she told Nora about the dream, and Nora said, "Good dreams are like good crust. You have to make them yourself, and then they hold."
Dana came the next day to practice with Lucia, in the shelter office, with the chairs arranged the way they would be in the courtroom, and she asked Lucia the questions Brandt's lawyer would ask, in a voice that was firm but not unkind, and Lucia answered them, and stumbled, and answered them again, and by the third round her voice was steadier, and Dana said, "That's how it works. You say it until it belongs to you, and then nobody can take it from you in a room."
Nora watched from the doorway, and she thought about how strange it was to practice telling the truth, as if truth were a speech, and then she realized that for a girl who had been answered for for months, telling the truth out loud was a skill, like pie crust, that had to be learned with the hands. Lucia was learning it. Her hands, which had trembled around a water glass that first morning, were steady on the table now, and when Dana asked her the hardest question β "Are you sure?" β Lucia said, "I'm sure," without looking away, and Nora felt something in her chest loosen, the way a knot loosens when you finally pull the right end.
That evening, Tank stopped by the cafΓ©, and Nora told him about the ride's name, and Tank took off his cap, the way a man takes off his cap in church, and said, "The Thousand Engines Ride. Named by Lucia Vega. I'll put that on the flyers myself, in my own hand, so nobody forgets whose it is." Lucia, hearing that, blushed and looked down, and then she looked up and said, "Thank you, Tank." Tank said, "No, miss. Thank you. You gave us something to ride for that isn't just chrome and noise."