It was the summer between primary and secondary school. Or perhaps the one after that; it doesn't matter much. I was around 10-11 at the time and lived in a sleepy town surrounded by the countryside and stretched along a river, its banks dotted with weeping willows. It was one of those long and quiet summers we kids spent loitering together about the park, or playing in the communal gardens of the apartment blocks some of us lived in. We spent our allowances on trading cards and ice creams, and momentarily forgot that school and homeworks existed. Normal stuff.
In the past couple of years we had finally earned the freedom to roam the streets on our bikes - fully unsupervised that is, as long as we stayed within town limits. It was equal parts our parents trusting us a little more, and them being happy not to have us in their way all the time. We made the best of it by riding up and down the streets like gangs of howling Huns, and yet soon enough we were longing for more. Teenagers riding scooters would zap by every now and then, headed to nearby towns or just wandering. I remember they all had their helmets perched on the top of their heads, held in place by the straps. They were mandatory but you would be regarded as a loser if you wore one properly; it was also simply too hot. Whenever we heard the loud buzzing engines approaching we involuntarily interrupted whatever we were doing, hypnotised by the growing and the waning of the roar. We all had such an unquenchable thirst for their additional freedom, already weary of the invisible town walls that circumscribed us. The scooters and the buzz of their engines unconsciously reminded us we were still closer to grazing cattle than people. Inevitably, we worshipped them.
One day, one in our midst provided us with a symbolic way to bridge the gap between our meagre bikes and the superior scooters. Of course, this is just how I describe it to myself in my adult years: at the time we just thought it was the coolest idea we had ever heard. He had learned from a cousin of his of a trick that would make a bike sound like a scooter. You might know what I am talking about. You take a playing card (every house had several decks usually) and a pair of clothes pegs, then use the pegs to fix the card to the seat stay - that is, the fork at the back of the bike - propping it at an angle so that the card is in the way of the wheel's spokes. As the wheel turns, the spokes bend the card and then release it. If done properly, it will make an absolute rattle. Being little shits, the idea of adding an annoying clatter to our bike raids across town had us terribly excited. We immediately gathered together and collected the necessary material, then set up shop in someone's garden. We started practicing the trick, trying to get the angles right to maximise the noise, to make it more scooter-like. The pegs would sometime come off, or the card would turn to the wrong angle; we realised it wasn't as easy as it sounded. After a fair few trials in the garden, we thought we had finally gotten it right. Electrified, we rallied each other and mounted our bikes.
We headed down to the river to run along its length, as it was the longest stretch of straight road we knew of. We would ride all the way down to the edge of town, as if to taunt with our newly improved steeds the invisible troops manning the invisible walls. Unsurprisingly, the huge rattle we collectively made had us exhilarated. We pushed on the pedals as hard and as fast as we could, flanked by the weeping willows on one side and cursing car drivers on the other. Even in the heat of the summer the air feels cool on your face when you are riding that fast; it felt good. One by one however, our little contraptions started to fail - one started to make a different noise, a card fell off, another fell silent, and so on. We had not made it to the edge of town. Cursing (we had just started getting comfortable with all sorts of swearwords), we slowed down and looked behind us to assess the damage, but we kept going forward and eventually reached the edge of town at a crawl. There was empty space there, a town square that was used once weekly to host the local market; it was bound by the river-side road to the North, by an old gutted house to the West and some newer houses to the East. Word among us was that the abandoned house was haunted, of course (it's been restored and houses a Pharmacy nowadays; another chip in what was once my childhood). We gathered in the square, at a safe distance from the allegedly haunted house, and started working on the cards and pegs again, helping each other fix them and making sure that they wouldn't fail again this time.
Once we had made our improvements, we set out to ride the same road again in the opposite direction. Less confident in ourselves this time, we left the square one by one, looking behind us at the cards multiple times to check they were staying put. I was the last one to leave, just a little behind the rest. My card was making the right noise, so I stopped looking back and turned to look forward and gather speed. That's when a movement caught my eye, in the houses to the east of the square. In a open window on the first floor of the house on the corner, I saw a girl that must have been 20 or so that was getting changed. I was immediately transfixed. She was wearing only a black bra and had a tshirt in her hands, about to put it on. As my bike took me forward I kept staring at her, unable to avert my eyes. She herself was looking out of the window in my general direction, and she must have seen me or been aware of my presence; but she did not react to it. As soon as it happened it was over, my speeding bike having carried me beyond that house and that window. The rattle of the card faded in the background, displaced by the booming of my own heart in my ears. The air blowing in my face did not feel cool anymore, as all I felt instead was my entire skin burning and my extremities tingling. I glided down the road barely pedalling, the yells and screams of my friends a distant noise I was no longer concerned with. The brief image of the girl in her bra was replaying over and over in my head, as I tried to make sense of what had just happened. Obviously I had seen women in a state of undress before - at the beach, say. But I had never felt like that before in looking at them: a volatile and extremely confusing mix of guilt and glory at having witnessed a wonder that was not meant for my eyes. I think that was the moment I stopped being a kid and became an adolescent.