The first laugh came from the far end of the bar, from a man with an enormous beard and a voice that had been roughened by too many years of shouting over motorcycle engines.
The second came from the pool table.
By the time the laughter spread through the room, seventeen-year-old Cassie Hale had barely finished her sentence, and twenty-eight members of the Iron Wolves Motorcycle Club were looking at her as though she had asked to borrow the moon.
"I want to ride with you," she said again.
Someone set down a beer so hard the glass rattled. A man beside the jukebox whistled. From a back table came a suggestion that she had mistaken Rusty's Bar for the school bus terminal, and another voice wondered whether the Girl Scouts had started selling cookies in leather jackets. Cassie stood under the low yellow lights with her notebook hugged to her chest, her ponytail damp from the wind outside, her heart knocking against her ribs. She had rehearsed a dozen answers on the drive into town, but not one of them had included being laughed at by an entire room before she could explain why she was there.
She was five feet tall on a generous day, wore sneakers with one fraying lace, and had the sort of face that caused waitresses to ask whether she wanted a children's menu. Her oversized denim jacket came from a thrift shop in Millbrook. The notebook was a composition book with its black-and-white cover softened by months of handling, not a prop chosen to make her look intelligent. She had written her questions inside it in three different colors because she knew nervousness would make them difficult to read if she tried to find them in a hurry.
Rusty's smelled of stale coffee, old beer, engine oil carried in on boots, and a faint trace of rain from the gravel parking lot. The room had scarred wooden tables, a dartboard with a missing number, a wall of photographs under dusty glass, and one large Iron Wolves emblem above the bar. On the back wall, old photographs showed rows of motorcycles and men who had been young enough to believe they might stay that way forever. Cassie had studied those photographs online, but standing beneath them made her feel the difference between researching a place and entering it.
"Lost, sweetheart?" the bearded man asked. His name, she would learn, was Hank Wallace. He was seventy-six, had been riding motorcycles for more than half a century, and used his jokes to keep people at a distance until he knew whether he liked them. "We don't have a student discount on trouble."
"I'm not lost," Cassie said. She swallowed and forced herself to look at the people nearest her rather than at the floor. "I'm a senior at Lincoln High School. My final project is an oral history of American subcultures, and I chose motorcycle communities. I'd like permission to observe your rides, interview members who agree, and write about why this club matters to the people in it."
The laughter came again, though less loudly this time. Derek Vance, thirty-four, with black tattoos climbing from his wrists beneath the sleeves of his T-shirt, tipped his chair back on two legs. He looked at her with the easy confidence of a man who had grown up around people expected to move aside for him. His father had worn Iron Wolves colors for decades, and Derek had been coming into this room since he was old enough to climb onto a barstool.