She’s in the fifth grade.

She wears braces.

She loves math.

And dance.

And if you want to learn how to ride a bicycle, 11-year-old A’laa Boufenouche is your girl.

Half-hearted pedal pushers need not apply.

“You have to have a will to do it,” the brown-eyed, ponytailed A’laa says calmly. “You have to have patience.”

She is folded into a camp chair under a pop-up canopy on an early spring day when the warm sunshine evens out the cool breeze.

Almost every Sunday afternoon, from 1–4 p.m. when the weather is nice, you’ll find A’laa and her family volunteering at the Greensboro Community Bike Shop in Barber Park.

Part walk-in repair garage, part picnic, part bicycle library — all free — the shop is run by volunteers with the Transit Alliance of the Piedmont, a nonprofit group that pushes the power of cycling to boost transportation, health and personal connection.

“People relate to you on a different level when you’re on a bike,” says Treva Whitmoyer, a retired nurse and alliance volunteer.

This month, the alliance plans to open a repair-only bike shop on West Market Street, alongside the Downtown Greenway. The Barber Park site will remain open through this month, longer if the city renews the lease for the bike library where A’laa gives free instruction to beginning cyclists. She works with people of all ages, but the young ones pick up skills the fastest, she says. They’re more open to instruction, less bogged down by ideas of what they can and can’t do, and less afraid of falling.

You wanna learn to ride? You gotta be ready to fall, according to A’laa (pronounced Ah-LAH).

Most important, you gotta be willing to get up and go again.

She knows this from experience.

Back when she was 3 and her family lived in Algeria in Northern Africa, she rode bikes with her mom, dad and older brother. She had a balance bike with no pedals. As long as her feet touched the ground, she was good to go.

Then her family entered an immigration lottery, a chance to come to the United States. Her mom, Fawzia Moussouni, who taught several languages and American civilization to high school and college students, applied on the last day possible.

“I said, ‘OK, I will take this chance,’” says Fawzia.

A few months later, her husband, Mohammed Boufenouche, called her. She was in class, testing students. He told her to leave class for a minute.

“We won!” he exulted.

A friend vouched for Greensboro as a good place to raise a family, so Mohammed, Fawzia and their kids settled here in 2019.

“I wanted a quiet place,” says Fawzia, who works as a teaching assistant in a middle school. “I love it here.”

A’laa got a new bicycle here, one with training wheels. Her brother, Omar, helped her to get the hang of it. Then Omar took off the training wheels, and they went to a sidewalk near their apartment. A’laa fell. A lot.

“I got mad because I couldn’t do it,” she says.

Her mom put Band-Aids on her scraped knees and elbows.

Her brother told her it would take time and practice.

“I went right back,” A’laa remembers. “If you don’t have patience, you’re probably going to be angry all the time.”

One day, A’laa found her balance. She was riding a bike. By herself.

“I was happy and excited and proud,” she says, beaming from her camp chair. “I felt really optimistic in that moment.”

She wants other people to know that feeling, so when 9-year-old Asher Warfield walks up with his grandmother, Mary Pettway, asking if someone can teach him how to ride a bike, she hops up, gets Asher a helmet and picks out a three-wheel bike for him.

They start on a stretch of asphalt beside the Simkins Indoor Sports Pavilion. The narrow lane leads to the bike shop, a small, brick building that used to house the controls of a sewage treatment plant before Barber Park took its place.

Asher stares at his feet as he pedals.

A’laa encourages him to look up and fix his eyes on where he wants to go.

He turns around, cruises past the shop.

“Grandma, look!” he says.

Other people trickle in. Cars weighed down with bike racks pull in to donate cycles, which the Transit Alliance reconditions and gives to people who need transportation.

Visitors dig into the chicken and rice dish that Fawzia has set on a table; she always brings food and snacks.

Two young women walk by.

“You wanna ride bikes?” says Sheldon “Shel” Herman, who calls himself the “chief bicyclist” of the Transit Alliance.

“Where?” one of the women asks.

“Here,” says Shel.

“How much?”

“Free.”

The women sign release forms, grab helmets and go.

A young man, an engineering student at N.C. A&T, brings his bike by for repair. One tire has a slow leak. Shel shows him how to replace a tube.

Others watch and learn from Shel and the other volunteer bike mechanics. Ten-year-old Nuwaib Farooqui’s father, Shadab, brings him to the bike shop to learn new skills, interact with people and get away from electronic screens.

“Any excuse to take him outside, I’m game for,” says Shadab, who develops apps for mobile phones and admits to a love-hate relationship with technology.

“I want him to know what’s real and what’s not,” he says.

That’s fine with Nuwaib, who just wants to know how to fix his bicycle when it breaks down.

“It’s the closest thing I have to a car until I’m 16,” he says.

It doesn’t take long for Nuwaib and A’laa to connect. They take off on the park loop. As they pedal away, I’m watching more than bicycle wheels turn. I’m watching time turn.

I remember the moment I caught my balance and my dad, who was running beside me, turned loose of the seat of the little red bike that I learned to ride on.

I remember swooping down a hill at Country Park on a Peugeot bike at breakneck speed about 40 years ago and feeling a wave of happiness and freedom.

I remember my first date with the guy who’s now my husband, a bike ride through southeast Guilford County.

I rode, for fun, for almost 60 years.

I stopped a few years ago, after a wreck left me counting my lucky stars and reckoning with the hard truth that I don’t bounce like I used to.

Recently, my husband and I gave our mountain bikes to the Transit Alliance. That’s how I found out about the bike shop and met A’laa.

Now, as I watch her and Nuwaib pedal away, eyes fixed on where they want to go, I feel no regret.

Instead, as A’laa would say, I feel really optimistic in this moment.  OH

Maria Johnson is a contributing editor of O.Henry. Email her at ohenrymaria@gmail.com.