Going in Circles (17 page)

It's like we're constantly on the edge of a major decision. We're always about to irreparably change our lives. Funny how we planned on spending the rest of our lives together, but now we can't even make it through a dinner without wondering whether or not this should be the last time we ever speak.

“I'm sorry,” he says, as I watch him let something inside drop.

“I'm sorry, too,” I say. “It's none of my business. I shouldn't get mad at you. I didn't mean to—”

Matthew raises his hand, gently, easing me to stop. I do.

We both say no to dessert.

Y
ou should go to London. Or Mexico. Or the cold place you were talking about.”

“Iceland?”

“Yeah. I have no idea why you'd want to go there, but you should go there.”

“I can't just go somewhere. I have to work.”

Francesca is trying to pace my office, which means she's pretty much turning in circles on her heels. “If you were that blond lady with the book, you could go all over the place. You'd meditate, have sex, and then have Julia Roberts play you in a movie.”

I crumple another piece of wastepaper and toss it into the open desk drawer by my side. I'm storing up reserves for the next time I'm engaged in a paper-wad battle with Jonathan. I never know when the next missile will strike, and I'm determined to be ready with a stockpile he never saw coming.

“I'm not rich enough to go flitting around the world,” I tell Francesca, as if this is not obvious. “I can't have a fancy-lady breakdown. Also, didn't she go to Italy? Italy is closed!”

“Okay, fine,” she pouts. “Then let's go to Australia.”

“Sorry. After I left my lawyer husband, I spent my savings
repurchasing an entire life's worth of supplies. Therefore I rarely eat, I don't pray, and I'm done with love.”

Francesca drops back to the wall and flops down on the floor in front of me, tossing herself like a rag doll.
Bang, whap!
“You're officially no fun,” she says. “If I were you, I'd be in Paris right now.”

I point over her head at the closed door behind her. “When Jonathan comes back in here, you're going to get hit.”

“I don't care.”

The cuff of her pant leg has risen up on her shin, and I see a dark bruise peeking out from under her sock.

“Ow. Who did that?” I ask.

She pulls her pant leg down over her shin and rubs the fabric just over the contusion. “You did,” she says. “At practice yesterday when you wouldn't tell me what was wrong, and you just kept slamming into me.”

I surprised myself by going back to the warehouse yesterday, but when I woke up angry about Matthew, I needed a place to go where I not only wouldn't talk about him, but couldn't. I spent an hour exhausting myself learning to stay upright while skating the track before the trainer taught us how to throw hits and take hits. By the end of practice I'd learned something important; I can hit someone pretty hard if I want to.

“Well, sorry about the bruise,” I say to Francesca.

“Make it up to me by taking me on a trip around the world.” She pulls up her pants to rub the bruise, mashing it with her thumbs. It looks like torture.

“Yikes, don't do that,” I tell her. “You'll make it worse.”

“It's a hematoma. I have to break it up or I'll get a welt for six months.”

“Frannie,” I say, intentionally using the nickname she hates so I have her attention.

She looks up from the floor, where she's crouched in a ball. “Yeah, Charlie?”

“Did that count as Going Outside?”

“A date with your husband? No.”

The door opens, smacking Francesca in the back of the head.

“Ow! Jesus, Jonathan, can't you see I'm lying here?”

He casually steps over her head and walks to his desk, as if girls are always strewn about the floor of his office. “You don't do any actual work, do you?”

Francesca fakes a wail, crawling petulantly to Jonathan's ankles. “Don't be mad at me, Johnny. I'm sorry I'm taking up all your precious time with your girlfriend here.”

Jonathan gives me a quick glance. “Whatever. I see her every day,” he says.

“Admit it,” she says. “You're jealous.”

Jonathan sniffs, and pretends to wipe a tear. “It would be nice to be included, that's all.”

“Aw, Johnny.” Francesca pulls herself up and perches in his lap. “We're sorry. Aren't we sorry, Charlie?”

Jonathan looks at me. I nod. Francesca reaches forward, grabs my wrist, and pulls me to her. Now we're both sitting on Jonathan's lap, each on a leg.

“Please forgive us, Johnny!” Francesca wails, clutching Jonathan.

“Get off me,” he says. “Both of you.”

“Not until you say everything's okay!”

“If HR sees this I am going to be sued!”

“Say everything's okay!”

As Jonathan and Francesca continue bickering, I try to make it seem like I'm an active participant, but all I notice is Jonathan's hand on my hip, how his fingers have curled around me. His fingertips are resting at the top of my thigh. I stand up and go back to my desk before either of them can see that I'm blushing.

It's not that Jonathan is touching me, it's that I'm being touched. My body wants to come back to the land of the living, but I know my head isn't ready. Where and with whom could I ever feel safe?

I
'm having a hard time with transitions.

Yes:
ha, ha, ha, that's quite the understatement, Charlotte.
But transitions mean something different in roller derby.

A transition is when you turn around and skate backward. You can't do it like you normally would skating for fun, coasting in an arc until you've circled around to face the other direction. That's dangerous, and maybe even impossible when you're skating at high speed on the banked track. If you even managed to do anything other than spin right onto your ass, you'd definitely slam into someone in the process, or have someone roll right into you.

To execute a transition, you have to lift your foot and turn around. That means you're skating forward, pick your foot up into the air, drop it behind you facing the other direction, and then have your other foot follow suit. Sounds simple, but it's terrifying.

I've been coming here for three weeks now. I've probably put in a good fifteen or twenty hours on this track. Still, I can only land a transition when I'm standing still. Trash told me to pretend my body is a door. You “open the door,” or lift one
leg and rotate your body toward the direction in which you want to go. For about a second you're skating sideways, like a flattened frog. Then you lift the other foot and “close the door,” bringing the other half of your body to join the rest of you. When it's over, you're still skating in the same direction but you're facing the other way. You're going forward, facing backward. A transition.

It sounds so easy, but my brain doesn't want this to happen to my body. Clearly it's thinking,
Why on earth would I want to turn around while I'm barreling forward?

The really good girls, the ones who know what they're doing, their transitions look like hip-hop moves.
Boom-Boom!
And they're suddenly backward, booties up in the air, wiggling their hips to pick up speed. They make it look so easy.

It's not.

God, it's not. I've fallen 6,315 times. Not that I'm counting. I feel it in my body. In my muscles, in my bones, there are little reminders that I'm not good at this. The aches and pains yell at me:
Please don't try this again! You are making a huge mistake! Falling hurts! You are thirty.

Last practice I was working on a hitting drill, partnered with a girl named Muffin Top. We were practicing hip blocks—using the better part of your ass to knock a girl aside, or even better, over. Getting knocked to the ground is tough enough, but getting up quickly over and over again is exhausting.

We'd been doing the drill for about five minutes, which in derby time means it felt like an hour and a half. Muffin Top was tired; I was wishing I could shut off my pain sensors.

That was when one of the coaches shouted from the infield, “Broken! I know you can hit harder than that! Get her!”

That's what they call me. Broken. It's short for Hard Broken. It started when I got frustrated at myself one practice and pulled too quickly on my shoelace, snapping it. “I can't skate with no lace!” I wailed to Francesca. “I'm heartbroken!”

As Bruisey-Q handed me an extra lace from her skate gear, she smiled. “I think you just found your derby name, Hard Broken.”

“Thanks, but that's not what I said.”

“Sounds good to me,” Francesca said, grinning wildly. They bumped wrist guards, and thus I was christened.

Sometimes they call me the cutesy Broke-Broke, and occasionally, Brokey. But for the most part, I'm known, somewhat affectionately, as Broken. I've come to appreciate it.

Back to last practice's drill. After I gathered up all the strength I had remaining in my body, crouched low, and pushed all of my might into Muffin Top's left side, something terrible happened.

Instead of falling over, Muffin lost her balance. She stood straight up, arms flailing backward, and to stop herself from falling over, she somehow spun herself around. She actually did a transition, I guess accidentally, and was suddenly facing me with this look of confusion and fear on her face. Unsure of what to do next, she shot her arm straight out and grabbed me with one hand.

On my right breast.

Confused about the fact that she was holding my boob in her hand, she looked down at her hand, lost her skates completely, and went toppling to the infield.

But when she fell, she did not let go. I went flying with her, breast-first, skates over helmet, into the infield. A mess of girl parts rolling and slamming to the concrete.

I stayed there for a little while, holding myself, yelping.

“I'm so sorry,” Muffin immediately said. She didn't know what to do, so she patted my arm ineffectively.

“It's okay,” I moaned.

“Are you okay?”

“No.” I rolled onto my side and went fetal, an arm protectively curled around my chest, hoping I wouldn't lose a nipple.

“I was falling and I panicked. I didn't mean to grab you
there.
”

I eased myself up, still rubbing my chest. “You gave me an actual titty twister.”

Muffin sat on her knees, scooting over to me. Then she arched back, sticking her chest out. Her pink T-shirt rode up until I could see her belly button, which was encircled with star tattoos. “Do it back,” she said. “Twist my tit.”

I laughed. “No, thank you.”

“You have to do something. I feel terrible. Punch me in the face.”

“What? No, Muffin, I am not going to punch you in the face.”

Suddenly from behind us, we heard Trash's deep, deadpan order. “Broken, either punch that girl in the face or get your asses back on the track.”

That was a few days ago. Right now I'm staring straight ahead, skating at a pretty good speed, dreading that I have to turn around. This upcoming transition fills me with such anxiety that I no longer know what I'm supposed to do, even though I know exactly what I'm supposed to do.

Technically.

I open the door; I close the door. But it's not that easy when I think about lifting my foot. Lifting my foot means I lose my balance, which means I'm supposed to be off balance.
Then I'll fall, which means it is going to hurt. It will hurt because I will have broken my wrist. Simple cause-and-effect at work.

Bang-Up, the trainer with the giant green eyes and the leopard-print helmet, is trying her best to be patient with me, skating easily alongside my jerky body. “This time, you can do it,” she says. “How are you feeling?”

“Don't ask,” I grumble.

I am reminded of the time I visited my grandfather in the hospital and went with him on a walk through the halls. He'd just had a bad bout of pneumonia, but he was determined as he shuffled along, pushing his IV, struggling to catch his breath every few minutes. I'd walk and stop, walk and stop, but he wouldn't let me ask how he was doing.

“I only want to know about the fifth grade,” he'd say between gasps. “Just fifth grade.”

So I talked about fractions and kickball and the mean girls in my class who all had better denim miniskirts than I did as Grampa kept his eyes focused and his feet moving forward. When we'd finished our walk and gotten him back into bed, he'd patted my hand, called me a good girl, and given me his Jell-O.

I remember my mom telling me she was proud of me that day. “It's not easy to sit by and do exactly what's asked of you, when you want to do everything,” she'd said. That was the first time I ever saw my mother cry. My dad took me out of the hospital room right after, and I still can't stand the taste of Jell-O. It tastes like my mom is hurt.

“Don't look at your feet,” Bang-Up's saying to me now. “You know where your feet are.”

I might know that my feet are at the ends of my exhausted legs, but I don't know what they're going to do next. Will
they stay under me, or will they shoot out in alternate directions, causing me to slam down onto my coccyx? Even Bang-Up can't accurately predict where my limbs are going to be in the next five seconds. Nobody can.

“Look where you are,” she says, “and then, don't think about it. Just turn around.”

My mind tries to make me do what she says, but my feet make me fall. A girl trips on my legs and flies over me, landing on her face. She gets right back up and skates off, but not before she gives me the stink eye.

“Sorry!” I shout.

“Don't say ‘sorry,'” Bang-Up says. “The girls here are all new, too. They need to practice not tripping over you.” I like that somehow my falling is helping them be better skaters.
You're welcome, everybody.
“But fall small,” Bang-Up adds.