Going in Circles (13 page)

They're talking to one another, too, yelling around their mouth guards. I watch one woman put her hand back, fingers wiggling. The girl behind her takes her hand, and then flings herself forward, rushing past the others. Someone yells in celebration. Another curses. I can't tell which girl is saying what because they're all so loud.

Bam!

A girl slams into the railing, right in front of my face. If the rail wasn't here, she would have flown right into me.

Bam!
Another girl slams directly into her, into her back. The hit is so hard it makes my teeth hurt. My hands fly to my face and I hold myself like I'm in the audience at a horror movie. Before I can ask either of them if they're okay, they're gone, halfway around the track, rushing to join the others.

In the center, over where it's flat, the rest of the women are watching, shouting.

“Hit her, Killer! Hit her!”

“She's on your inside, Muffin! Don't let her get past you!”

“Call it off! Call it! Call it off!”

A whistle ends the action. The women skid to a halt, sliding to the center. Some bend forward, exhausted, hands on their knees, gasping for breath. Two women help each other up from where they've tumbled into a heap on the ground. One pats the other on the helmet.

“Woop woop!” I hear behind me. “You made it!” I turn around.

It takes a second to realize that the tough-looking bruiser in the black helmet and massive knee pads is Francesca. She's taller in her skates, and wearing not much more than tights, a T-shirt, and some booty shorts. I don't know what to say or think. I just start giggling.

“Yeah, yeah, laugh it up.” She rolls a semicircle around me. “You're impressed, I know it.”

“What is this?”

Francesca's eyes scan the track in front of us. “This,” she says proudly, hands on her hips, “is roller derby.”

F
rancesca stands next to me as we watch the girls get into formation again. This time she explains what is happening.

“Roller derby is kind of like football,” she says, her eyes never leaving the track. “Except a girl is the ball.”

The group in front, that mob of girls, is called the pack. There are eight of them, four girls from each team, who are called Blockers. The two girls who are at the other line are called Jammers. They're the ones who score points.

When the whistle blows, the pack takes off. A few seconds later, the whistle blows again, signaling the Jammers to start skating.

The Jammers have to race each other through the pack. Once one girl has made it to the front, she's called the Lead Jammer.

“And then it's over?” I ask. “Like a race?”

“No, then she has to skate all the way around the track and go through the pack again. She scores one point for every opposing Blocker she passes.”

But the other Jammer is still skating, and she's trying to take Lead Jammer position. The Blockers want to get their
Jammer ahead, while keeping the opposing team's Jammer behind. Usually by knocking her on her ass.

My brain can't compute what I'm watching. It still looks like madness on the track. The game seems to be over just as quickly as it started. A wheeled stampede.

“So when the whistle blows again, then it's over?”

“Yeah. That's called a jam, one round. Sixty seconds.”

“What happens if the other Jammer gets all the way around?”

“Then she starts scoring, too. That's why the Lead Jammer should call it off before the other one makes a point.”

I watch another jam. This time I notice the Blockers begin bumping into each other once the whistle is blown, knocking into each other's arms and thighs. One girl skids out, landing on her knee pads. But she jumps back to her skates so quickly it's like she's got rubber in her kneecaps.

A Jammer takes the lead. The girls watching from the center of the track are cheering, shouting at her to skate faster, skate harder, as she rounds the track alone. Within seconds she's breaking through the pack, angling herself between other girls, sliding through. A teammate reaches back, grabs her by the hand, and yanks her forward, shooting her past two other skaters.

“That's called a whip,” Francesca tells me, pointing.

Once the Jammer gets through the pack, she pounds her hips with both fists. The whistle is blown.

“What happened?” I ask.

Francesca pats her pelvis. “That's how you call off the jam.”

I cannot believe how hard these girls are skating, how fast they can go, and how brutal this sport it. In the next jam I see a girl slide pretty much on her face, narrowly missing getting her fingers run over. Another girl rams right into the wooden
barricade. She bounces off,
turns in a circle
, and keeps skating. At one point two girls slam into each other and both fall down. Another girl quickly approaches from behind. Right when I'm about to shield myself from witnessing the pileup, the skater
jumps over them
and keeps going. Nothing seems to faze them.

These women are all different shapes and sizes, and they move like they were born with roller skates attached to their feet. You'd think they were in tennis shoes, the way they can maneuver themselves around. If I put on a pair of Rollerblades I look like an astronaut stumbling through an unknown gravitational pull.

“Do they get paid for this?” I ask. “Like, is this a job?”

Francesca just laughs.

The skaters take a break and move to the center of the track to start stretching. They take off their helmets, and I'm taken aback by the long hair that flows from their heads. After all that brutality, that aggression, their femininity makes them seem like superheroes.

Francesca turns to me, beaming. “What do you think?”

My heart is racing, and trying to imagine Francesca doing this makes me a bit nauseated. But, if I have to be completely honest, it looks like a lot of fun. Part of me wishes I were brave enough to try something like that, to be the kind of woman who could just strap on some skates, climb onto the track, and take off. It must feel pretty great to be able to go that fast, to slam into someone and not worry about the consequences. To be an athlete. To be strong and confident and fit. I get winded from climbing the stairs to my apartment.

“I don't know what to think,” I tell her.

“It's the best thing I've ever done.”

“It looks incredibly dangerous.”

“Oh, it is. When I first started, I broke my collarbone.” She points at her left clavicle, her tiny fingers sticking out from underneath her wrist guard. “That sucked.”

“No, it sucks to lose your keys. You broke your
collarbone
.”

“It got better. But I lost two months of practice. It took forever to get back in shape.”

“How long have you been doing this?”

“About a year.” She looks up, thinks. “Yeah, I can't believe it, but it's almost been a year. Wow, that went fast. I hope to get drafted to an official Hot Wheels team this year.”

“And this is why you always look like someone just beat you up.”

“Um-hmm. Because someone did.” She points at a girl climbing off the track. “Usually, it's that one. She's a beast.” I notice the girl's T-shirt. On the front it says
HOT WHEELS DERBY DEVIL
. The back has her name:
KILLERIFIC
.

“And you don't get paid for this?” I ask again. “At
all
?”

Francesca shakes her head, smiling. “In fact, it costs a whole lot of money to do this.”

“Well, you're insane.”

“And you're next. Come play with me. Meet me here after work and I'll put you in some skates.”

I take a step back. “No way.” Even if there's a small part of me that's curious, I couldn't possibly show up and do this. I'd look ridiculous. They'd send me home, laughing and pointing. “I don't even know if I remember how to skate.”

“Don't worry. It's the rookie class. They call it Training Wheels.”

“No thanks.”

“You have to do it. It's the new rule.”

“What rule?” I ask. “Kill Yourself?”

“No.” I watch a bead of sweat roll from her forehead to her
chin as she breaks into a wide smile. “Do Something That Scares You.”

A swell of laughter comes from the skaters as they chat with each other over their sport bottles.

“I think I'm better off trying to quit the Internet,” I tell her.

“You'll never do that. But this you can do.”

“I don't have knee pads. Or a helmet. I've never needed a helmet. In fact, I kind of don't want to ever need a helmet in my life.”

She's grinning at me like the Cheshire Cat. “All you have to bring is a mouth guard. And I seem to recall you've got one of those. Don'tcha, Charlie?”

“Damn.”

A girl calls from the track. “Pastor, get the fuck over here!”

Francesca jumps. “That's me.”

“What'd she call you?”

But Francesca doesn't answer me. “Coming!” she shouts toward the track, as she hustles into her helmet and skates away. Over her shoulder she shouts back at me, “Tomorrow night! It's a rule!”

I'm gonna get killed.

I
haven't been on roller skates since I was ten years old. This time, instead of a side ponytail and cute little terrycloth shorts, I'm wearing two sports bras, an old T-shirt, and shorts that come to my knees. I wanted to look tough, like a girl who wasn't as scared as I am to be inside this warehouse, but I think I look like I'm ready to paint the garage.

Francesca skates over to where I'm sitting on a bench. Her giant black helmet makes her look like a carpenter ant. “You look great,” she says. “Does everything fit okay?”

I feel like I'm wearing an exoskeleton. “The elbow pads aren't too annoying, but the wrist guards you gave me smell like they were pulled off a corpse.”

“You're so hard-core. I love it. Ready?”

“I don't think I can get up.”

She holds out a hand and helps me get to an incredibly tenuous standing position.

“Thanks, Francesca.”

“No, I'm not Francesca,” she says, shaking a finger at me. “Not here. Nobody knows who Francesca is.”

“What?”

She rolls her eyes. “We have derby names.” She points out
the other girls putting on their gear. “She's Bang-Up. She's Spank DaMonkey. That one's Sandra Day O'Killer.”

“Wow.”

“Shut up,” Francesca says as she bumps into me with her shoulder. My skates roll out from under me and I immediately fall to the floor, smacking the concrete. A sharp pain shoots up my forearm.

“Yikes,” Francesca says, helping me up. “Are you okay? That had to have hurt.”

“It did.”

As she helps me back to my feet, she instructs, “Try not to use your hands to break your fall. Fall toward your knee pads or your hips, where you have extra padding.”

“You mean fall on my fat ass, not my skinny hands.”

“Something like that.”

“Why didn't you laugh when I fell? That's not like you.”

“Well, I don't want you to quit yet.”

There's the sound of wheels on the track picking up behind me as I watch the remaining few girls strap into gear. They look like action movie heroines prepping to battle fierce alien enemies.

I shake my head. “Derby names, huh?”

“Mock it now, but you've only got three months to come up with your own. And you'd better like it, because your real identity? It's gone.”

I have to admit there's something intriguing about the concept of losing my real identity, about becoming someone else entirely. I could disappear under this helmet and just beat the crap out of people, become some kind of bruiser, a brawler. A take-no-shit, hot-shot lady. But it's absurd to think of myself that way. I'm sure I'll go home crying the second one of these women so much as gives me a glare.

“So, who are you, then?” I ask. “What's your derby name?”

She spins on her heels, revealing the back of her baby blue T-shirt. In hot-pink letters it reads,
BLOWIN' PAST'ER
. I have to say it out loud before I get the double entendre.

“Lord,” I say.

She winks. “Exactly.”

A voice booms through the warehouse. “Okay, Training Wheels, get on the track! Now! Now! Let's go, let's go!”

Francesca looks genuinely frightened as she says, “I'm sorry. I didn't know Trashy was teaching today.”

“Trashy?”

“Trashcan Punch. She's kind of brutal.”

“Brutal how?”

“Come on.” Francesca skates away, hustling to the stairs that lead to the track. I grab my water bottle and follow, surprised at how quickly I've remembered how to skate. I thank ten-year-old me for all those endless loops around my neighborhood.

Climbing onto the track, I accidentally drop my water bottle. Before I can catch it, it goes rolling down the slope, straight to the center where it's flat.

I try to stand up, but immediately my feet slip out from under me and I fall. I don't know how to stand at an angle, and these rental skates they've got me in are missing toe stops. I try to stand, holding on to the railing, but I slip again. There's a line of women waiting to get on the track right where I'm standing in front of the steps, so I pull up onto my knees and slowly crawl over to my water bottle, real smoothlike.

The bottle is resting at the skate of a very tall woman. I guess it's possible that she's not all that tall. It could just be the effect of roller skates and a helmet on anybody who is
standing directly above your head. But this muscular redhead is glaring at me with one eyebrow cocked and a grin smeared across her face like she's a giant who's just discovered the lost little villager soon to become her afternoon snack.