Going in Circles (14 page)

“You're the Super-Wheelie, right?” she asks. “Pastor's friend?” Her voice is low and sarcastic, like I amuse her no end simply by being here. I instantly feel a shaky combination of fear and humility. I want to apologize for entering what is clearly her lair.

“I'm with Pastor,” I tell her, adding, “but I don't know what a Super-Wheelie is.”

“It means you're new. Fresh Meat.” She rubs her hands together gleefully. “We love fresh meat.”

I can tell she's kidding, but she's not completely kidding, yet she's still kind of kidding while letting me know that she's about to be directly responsible for the kicking of my ass. My stomach feels like a swirling bathtub drain, emptying right down into my thighs, which have gone numb.

It takes a few seconds of pure determination, but I pull myself up and put out my hand.

“Charlotte.”

She takes my fingertips between her thumb and forefinger and wiggles them, amused that I thought a handshake was somehow possible while wearing wrist guards. “I'm Trashcan Punch. Call me Trash. You ready, Super-Wheelie?” she asks.

“Of course,” I lie.

“Good,” she says, and then turns to the rest of the group. Her voice turns into a guttural growl. “Okay, Wheelies! Get on the track! Everybody on the track!”

Wait, that's it? Now I'm just doing this? What is this that I'm doing? How do I skate? How do I stop? What am I going to do?

I stumble-step over toward the track, my heart racing. I didn't tell anyone that this is new for me. Did Francesca? Does anybody here know that I've never done this before? Should I tell them, just so they know not to hurt me?

I feel a pull on the back of my T-shirt. I turn around to see Francesca, her grinning mouth puffed up from her mouth guard.

“You're going to be fine,” she says, all muffled. She takes out her mouth guard before dropping her hand onto my shoulder. “Think of this as a skating lesson. But listen. Don't touch anyone, especially if you're falling. Don't grab onto anybody. Keep your mouth guard in your mouth all the time. But most importantly, if you fall, get right back up or roll to the flat part of the track and then get the fuck out of the way.”

The cursing must be a part of the mind-set that comes with the level of insanity required to play this game.

Trash is now wearing a headset microphone. “Ladies! You have thirty seconds to get on the track, or I'm making everybody do thirty minutes of squats! Don't test me!”

“Have fun,” Francesca says, and then totally abandons me.

I jam my mouth guard in between my teeth. I stand at the part of the track where it's flat the longest, before it curves around. Thirty or so women are skating along the track, some quickly, some at a more leisurely pace. A few seem to be going through drills, zigzagging up and down the slope of the track, racing each other. I watch one girl turn around in front of me and continue skating backward along the track just as quickly as she was skating forward, as if this is the most natural thing in the world.

Some of the girls are leaning forward as they skate, their hands clasped behind their backs. They look so serene, so peaceful. If I hadn't already seen what it looks like when an
actual game is being played, I would think I was about to engage in some easy-breezy couples skate.

I was terrible at Double Dutch. I never knew when to jump in between the two swinging ropes in order to get to the center. I'd stand there rocking back and forth on my feet for an eternity, until some other girl would coach me, screaming, “Now! Now! Now!” Even then the ropes would hit me straight in the neck half the time.

I've got that Double Dutch feeling as I'm watching these women barreling toward me while I'm supposed to jump up on that track.
When do I go?

“Get on the track!” shouts Trash. “This means you, Super-Wheelie! If you don't get up there, everybody else has to come down and do squats, and then everyone will hate you. Do you want everyone to hate you?”

I shake my head, feeling my helmet rattle. It feels like it's trying to jostle my brain into reality:
Get out of here while you still have all of your limbs!

Trash yells at me like Godzilla finding speech: “Go! Now! Now! Now!”

I jump in with my eyes slammed shut, just like I did playing Double Dutch.

I'm on the track, pushing my feet, skating in what feels like the world's most important race. I wobble around the curve, trying to find the right way to position my weight at this angle. Girls are shooting past me. From either side, they call out: “Inside!” “Outside!” I try very hard to stay right in the center, right where I won't be in anybody's way.

“Behind you, sweetheart!”

“Watch your arms!”

My elbows are winged up near my ears, like I'm trying to figure out the chicken dance. As I drop my arms, I feel some
one grab me gently by my hips, and she eases me to the right. It is surreal to have someone controlling my direction from behind, like I'm a toy car.

“Inside,” she says, as she blows past me at a speed I cannot comprehend. Is she wearing special skates? And how can she be so fearless?

I look down at my skates and immediately start to pitch forward. My hands fly out in front of me. I'm terrified that when I go down everybody is going to fall on top of me and this is absolutely the last few seconds of my life because I can't control what is happening and I'm falling I'm falling I'm falling.

Wham.

I'm still alive, but I'm still on the track. And all I can hear are skates are coming closer. I open my eyes and see—

skates are coming at my face
.

This is where my brain disconnects from my body. In order to prepare for what will surely be intense pain and extreme physical trauma, I feel my mind detach from my nerves, float far away, and examine things like there's all the time in the world.

“Get up, get up, get up!” Someone shouts as she passes me, lifting a foot that barely clears my head.

And all I can think is:
Yes, I would love to. But see, skates are coming at my face. I am terrified.

“Get up or get off the track!”

Don't you understand, skater girls? Skates are coming at my face. My face, where my teeth are. Where my eyes live. I never really thought about how many very important things are on my face.

“Get up!”

My nose is on my face. I need my nose.

“Help me get this girl up.”

I feel myself getting lifted under the arms and spun around until I'm facing the right direction. I try to thank whoever it is, but I'm still confused, disoriented. I take a single step forward, and it's like I've forgotten that I'm on skates. My legs splay in two different directions and I fall to my ass, hard. It hurts so much that I fall onto my back, trying to catch my breath, my head resting on the track. I'm pissed off and disoriented. Have I even technically skated yet?

I hear skates coming at me again, and then . . . I hear nothing. But what I see is a girl jumping over my head, the bottoms of her skates a touchable distance from my face. I hear the slam of wood next to my ear, followed by the cheers of onlookers.

Now I can hear Trash on the overhead speakers. “Super-Wheelie, you must get up! Get up before you hurt somebody!”

Doesn't she get it? If I get up, I'm going to hurt
myself.
If I stay still people can just keep leaping over my body until it's time to stop doing this. I will spend the rest of my time here pretending to be an object in their reckless obstacle course. I would rather be a bump in the road than have to try to take another step.

“Get up, or get off the track and go home!”

Wait,
go home
? Like a quitter?

Trash can't know what she's just done, but she's said the secret words.
Go home.
What I've been struggling with all this time. If I can't make it, I have to go home. If I can't figure it out, go home. If I don't know what else to do, I might as well just go home. Go home and accept things the way they are, that nothing can change, that nothing is worth fighting for. If you can't hang here, then go home.

I'm not a quitter. Especially not when things are hard.

So I get up.

I get up and skate.

•   •   •

After what feels like a million attempts, I've almost been able to go an entire lap around the track without falling. But I am exhausted. My lungs are aching, my throat hurts. My lower back is clenched to the point where I might just snap right in half. I am panting around this hunk of plastic jammed between my teeth, and all I can think is
Oh, God, when are we going to stop skating? How long can this last?

Trash's voice booms over the loudspeakers. “For the next sixty seconds, I want you to skate as fast as you can and see how many skaters you can pass. Go on my whistle. Get ready.”

The whistle blows. It sounds like a thunderstorm is chasing me. For the next sixty seconds, I only have one goal: try not to get killed.

“Inside!”

“Outside!”

“Inside, baby girl!”

Aren't these supposed to be the new girls? These are the rookies in training? They are whizzing past me. I must look like a windup toy worn down, the slowest girl on the track. I am a spinning top, wobbly like a dreidel at the end of its rotation.

I can't focus on anything other than the pain. The muscles in my legs are yelling at me, calling me names. My stomach muscles are somehow all that's keeping me from doing a face plant. My feet have gone numb.

A whistle blows. Trash screams for us to come down off the
track. I've never been so happy to be yelled at in all my life. I thank the stars above that it's over. I made it. I did it. I am a warrior. A weary, weak, pathetic warrior.

I stumble to the infield in search of my water bottle, which I find and then suck like a hungry baby. As I look around I notice I'm possibly the only girl here who doesn't have a tattoo. The other women are fantastically multicolored, with dragons and symbols wrapped around their strong biceps, stars blazoned across the backs of their necks. I can see hints of tattoos peeking from underneath their fishnet stockings, streaks of color along their backs, their ankles, each girl marked uniquely but boldly. Where they don't have tattoos, they have piercings. Hoops and pins adorn their noses and eyebrows, chins and necks. They've had needles jammed into all kinds of body parts. I look down at my pasty body and think I might not be as equipped as these other girls to deal with this level of pain.

The girl next to me is on her knees, stretching out her lower back. Her shirt has ridden up to expose a tattoo of the handle of a gun, as if her butt is the holster. Watching her stretch makes my body ache, because I recognize her pain in my own pain, the feeling that I've destroyed all of the muscles that attach my ass to my body.

“How long was that?” I ask, noticing there aren't any clocks in the warehouse. “What, like an hour or something?”

She rolls her face toward me, sweat pouring down her cheeks. She laughs. “Dude, that was the ten-minute warm-up.”

“What?”

“Hey, you've only got an hour and fifty minutes to go!”

“Are you serious?”

She eases herself to her knees, her hands on either side of her butt gun. “I am,” she says. “Don't worry; it's not all on skates. Half an hour of it will be squats and crunches. Then some drills. And then, if you're lucky, maybe we will play some roller derby.”

I groan, rolling forward to stretch out my back. It's awkward sitting in all this gear. I feel like the Michelin Man.

She stands up and raises her arms over her head, stretching her sides. I see streaks of pink hair curling down from the edges of her powder blue helmet. She's like an anime character, all taut muscle and neon coloring. “Good job getting up,” she says. “My first month here, I was a total Bambi.”

I shake my head, confused.

“Bambi. Like this.” She breaks into a jittery scramble, hands flailing, eyes wide. “A baby deer on wheels.”

I drop my head to my knees. For a moment I've forgotten about the gear, so I end up slamming my forehead into the hard plastic of my knee pads.

“Ow.”

“Stick with it. You'll be surprised how fast you pick up everything.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I'm serious. What's your name?”

I don't know if I'm supposed to give my real name, but I don't have any other one. I'm not going to have these people call me “Char,” and the only other nickname I've ever had is when my dad calls me “Bunny.” So I tell her my real name.

“I'm Bruisey-Q,” she says, patting my helmet. “Welcome to the Wheelhouse.”

I spot Francesca on the other side of the track, laughing and joking with some of the other skaters. Her face is flushed, and her bangs are plastered across her forehead, heavy with sweat. She looks destroyed, but she also looks happier than I've ever seen her.

T
he next morning I wake up in agony. Every muscle I have feels swollen inside my skin. It's like I could grab my hamstrings and rip them from my femurs.

I hurt everywhere.

Today's plan: find the strength to kill Francesca.

I gramma-walk over to my cell phone and punch up her number.

“Morning, Charlie,” she says, all sunshine and rainbows.

“You fucking bitch.”

“Aspirin,” she laughs. “And take a bath.”

My wrist is purple, and there's a bruise streaking across my right thigh like I escaped a monster in my sleep. There's a blister on the inside of my left foot, right at the bunion. It's not just swollen—it's filled with blood. My shoulders ache, and there's a scrape across the inside of my right elbow.

“I'm so broken,” I say. “Someone ripped out my arms and then shoved them back in again, but they didn't do it right.”