I Hate to Stand Alone

by Casey Winter

  “Obviously not,” I snapped.

  Now, days later, I place my Kindle aside and make to stand up. I’ve been sitting down for too long, waiting for the rain to stop so I can go outside and skate. Even if Cleo called me last night and told me to take all the time I need, I still love skating. My manager is very understanding, though, and that helps with this mid-twenties crisis I’m having.

  I love skating … But I dislike the nomad lifestyle. Where’s the happy medium?

  I’m not even halfway up before Mom clucks like an enraged hen. “No, no,” she cries. “Please sit down, changuito. Please pick up your Kindle.”

  For a second, I wonder why she cares so much. But then it all clicks into place. Smiling wickedly, I say, “Madre, you wouldn’t, like, just paint me this whole time without my permission, would you? You know that’s really weird, right?”

  Teresa Ortiz is, and always will be, the queen of sassy expressions. She narrows her bright blue eyes and tuts. “Firstly, child, you straighten up your tone when you’re talking to me … your superior.” She giggles, bantering. “Secondly, this is my house, girl, and I’ll paint whatever and whoever I want. Now, please? I’m so close. Por favor.”

  With a melodramatic eye-roll, I drop onto the couch and pick up my Kindle.

  “Happy now?” I tease.

  “Si,” she smiles. “And let me tell you something, sweetie pie, you can keep looking at that window all you want, but the weather man said it’s not going to stop all day long.”

  “Yeah, I’m starting to get that,” I mutter. “I could skate in the rain, I guess, but I don’t like to. It messes up your bearings, for a start. Those are the little pieces that let the wheels spin, FYI.”

  Mom nods in her not-really-listening way, humming a soft tune under her breath. The subtle cancerous rattling in her voice makes me so fricking sad.

  “I suppose I could go to Family Roller,” I mutter.

  I’ve purposefully avoided it since the opening and our standoff in The Jukebox. I was a tad tipsy. And more than a tad pissed.

  Thinking of Family Roller sort of upsets me. Like, when Evelyn ran it, it was so full: of people, of fun and of laughter. Of life. The Sunday night opening was kind of sad, but then, Evelyn worked around the clock to make Family Roller what it became. Luke Nelson, well, he did a great job of renovating the place in such a short time. I can’t take that away from him. But he doesn’t have the passion for it that Evelyn did. But then, not many people do. My sport is ultra-niche.

  The neon lights made the place look atmospheric. The skates were decent-quality. The bar was brand-new and sleek. Everything was shiny and clean. But the energy of the place, it was different. There wasn’t that … oh, I don’t know, that zest it used to have.

  “Where’s your head, changuito?”

  “I’m just thinking that I might head down to Family Roller when you’re done. I want to practice and that’s the only place I can do it, unless I wanna do it in the rain.”

  I’m justifying, I realize. But not to Mom. To myself.

  Mom’s face tightens for a second, as though she’s in pain. “Luke Nelson fancied up the whole place, didn’t he?”

  “Yes,” I mutter.

  “The Nelsons.” She tuts. “I don’t think getting mixed up with them is a good idea, Hannah.”

  I laugh awkwardly. “I’m not getting mixed up with them, Mom. Jeez. I just want to skate.”

  She looks at me for a moment, then nods. “Good,” she says. “Because we both remember how upset you were last time, with that other Nelson boy.” She won’t say his name, I know. She never has, not since it happened. “I won’t see my daughter like that again. I mean it. I’m not Mother Teresa, sweetness, even if we do share a name.”

  “Okay, Mom,” I exclaim. “I get it.”

  “Good,” she repeats meaningfully. “Now stop hopping all over the place, you little monkey. Can’t you see a lady’s trying to paint here?”

  —

  Once Mom’s painting is done, I head out to Family Roller. Alejandra has come round to hang out and do some knitting, so I’m not leaving Mom on her own. Though Mom does get annoyed if I say stuff like that to her.

  “What am I, a little baby?” she’ll sass, one step away from snapping her fingers and going mm-hmm, girlfriend. And actually she once did snap her fingers and go mm-hmm, girlfriend. But she looked so silly we both couldn’t stop laughing for a full minute.

  Now, I pull up outside Family Roller, dismayed to see how few cars are in the parking lot. It’s the summer break, it’s raining, and Little Fall isn’t exactly a bustling metropolitan. As an indoor place of leisure – safe from the rain – it should be jam-packed.

  I try not to think of the hundreds of times I made this same walk up to the main desk as I enter. Because then I might let my mind wander to Noah, and our childhood romance. I’ll remember the time when, as thirteen or fourteen year olds, we huddled under the eaves together when it was raining, waiting for Mom to pick me up. Stroking my hair out of my face, he’d said, “We’ll get married, won’t we, Hannah? I know people say that’s stupid for kids our age to talk about, but screw them. We can do it. I know we will. We can be the exception.”

  I’d been overflowing with teenage emotion, almost incapacitated by it. That’s what it’s like, you know, to be a girl shy of twenty. Everything is either a Big Bang beginning or end-of-the-world bad. There’s no middle ground. And, on that particular day, I definitely thought I’d met the love of my life.

  I was so wrong.

  Top points to me for not losing myself in the past, right? I almost crash into the desk, I’m so lost in the clouds. The teenager in the swivel chair gawps at me.

  “Miss?” she says, moving gum around her mouth.

  I must be getting old, because the first thing that pops into my head is … Spit that gum out and have some manners, young lady. Twenty six? More like sixty six.

  “Yes?” I say, intuiting that she was just talking to me, but I was daydreaming too hard to realize.

  “I said do you need to hire skates?”

  “Oh, no. I have my own.”

  “Oh.” The girl visibly brightens. She has dyed pink hair and those big tribal earrings, the sort that stretch her ear lobes so I can see right through them. “You’re Hannah Coleman-Ortiz.”

  I smile. Inline skating is so uncommon, and freestyle slalom even more esoteric, that nobody ever recognizes me outside of conventions. “In the flesh,” I say. “Do you … skate?”

  “No, no,” she says. “I’m Alexis Vaughn. I’m just working here as a summer job, but really I’m going to be a filmmaker. Everyone who comes in here has asked about you, by the way. Well, everyone who’s from Little Fall, anyway. Word gets around in a town like this. I’ve been showing people videos. I hope that’s okay.”

  “Of course,” I tell her, inwardly beaming.

  Chew all the gum you want, girlfriend. I think I might love you. Okay, maybe I’m letting this praise go to my head. Fricking sue me.

  “How has business been?” I ask.

  Alexis frowns. “Not good. Between you and me …” She looks around and then leans in conspiratorially. “Mr. Nelson, Luke, he’s a bit … um, distant, I guess you could say. Not much of a PR man. He spends most of his time working out in this makeshift gym he has out back. Or in his office. I walked in one time and he was on the phone, but he didn’t say a word while I was in there. People’ve been saying it’s Army stuff. Secret agent stuff.”

  “He was a SEAL, not in the Army.”

  This comes from a young woman I don’t recognize. She’s pretty, with a bob of blonde hair and very noticeable eyes, since they’re different colored. One is blue and the other green-brown. She’s very short.

  “Do you recognize me, Hannah? It’s Bella. Bella Hanlon.”

  “Oh, Bella.” I giggle, going over to her. I wrap my arms around her and we hug briefly. “You were just a teenager the last time I saw you. I don’t recognize you without the black eye
liner and the goth jeans.”

  She giggles. “Yeah, now that was a phase.”

  “What do you mean, a SEAL?” Alexis persists.

  “It’s a branch of the Navy,” Bella says. “It’s, like, a really high-up thing. I heard Dad talking about it. Apparently only two percent of the candidates make it through the training.”

  “Oh, wow,” Alexis mutters.

  “But he’s not doing Army or SEAL stuff up there,” Bella goes on. “He’s helping his dad with his hardware store, organizing deliveries and stuff like that. His dad isn’t very well-organized when it comes to the business side of stuff. I heard Dad talking about that, too.”

  “Does your dad have spies in Nelson’s Nails?” I tease.

  Bella groans, rolling her eyes. “Don’t tell me you’ve heard about the Hardware Wars, too, Hannah.”

  “The whole town has,” Alexis beams. “It just surprises me that it’s Jock who’s driving it. Will was always the bully, wasn’t he?”

  “Was he?” I ask.

  “Uh-uh,” Alexis says, nodding. “I mean, he used to bully me, anyhow. In high school. Thank God he’s three years older so I didn’t have to put up with it after he graduated.”

  “Oh, jeez,” Bella sighs. “Men are such idiots, seriously. I promise Jock and Will are good men now, Alexis. Maybe Will is a little better than Jock, but they’re both basically decent. Anyway, I need to get going. It was nice seeing you, Hannah.”

  “And you.”

  After getting the neon stamp on the back of my hand, I ask Alexis, “So, what sort of films are you going to make?”

  “Huh?” she says.

  “You said you were going to be a filmmaker. What sort of films are you going to make?”

  “Oh.” She seems happy that I remembered. “Movies, one day, hopefully. But right now? Whatever the hell I can.”

  “You can do it,” I tell her. “Just don’t quit, ever.” I laugh, shaking my head at my own seriousness. “Not that I’m like a guru or anything. See ya.”

  I walk into the rink, skates in one hand and water bottle and slalom cones in the other. It always feels like coming home after a long holiday when I start skating again. It doesn’t even matter that I’ve only taken a one-day break to give my legs a rest. As I get into my skates, I feel like I’m slipping into my true skin. The skates don’t feel like tools. They feel like part of my feet.

  I warm up and then run through the cones. I spin into an acid slide, wheeling, which basically means I use one wheel to stop myself and another to balance on, the others off the floor. When I spin around to face my cones again, I see a young girl with a long braid down her back, gawping, with an even younger little boy at her side. I’m guessing he’s her little brother, if the way he clutches onto her arm is anything to go by.

  “How did you do that?” the girl snaps.

  “Do you want me to show you?”

  “I’ll fall,” she gasps.

  “Not that,” I say, skating over. It’s crazy to think that a few years ago—okay, maybe a little more than a few—I was the little girl and Evelyn was me in this scenario. “But I can show you some stuff. That is … if your parents don’t mind?”

  The girl huffs. “Mommy and Daddy are in the café.”

  I frown.

  She must sense what I’m thinking. Is it safe for them to be out here alone? Because she says, quite proudly, “I’m eight and Joe-Joe’s four, and they’re only right over there. No biggie.”

  The way she says this melts my heart. I glance at the café, seeing the parents watching us over the railing. Skating over, I ask, “Do you mind if I teach your children a trick or two?”

  The parents—a friendly-looking couple in their forties—beam at me. “You’re Hannah, right?” the woman says. “The skating star? I didn’t even know what freestyle skating was. But the girl at the desk showed me a video.”

  “Slalom,” I say, nodding. “It seems she’s been showing everybody that video. Not that I mind.”

  The woman has heart-framed glasses and wears a multicolored poncho. I can tell right away she’s a cool mom. I like her. “It’s wonderful,” she says. “Please, be our guest. I hope you don’t think we’re horribly awful for getting a cup of coffee instead of skating. Do you have children yet?”

  I shake my head.

  “When you do, you’ll know what summer break is like.” She grins.

  Laughing, I skate back to the kids. The girl with the braid is awkwardly walking around the cones, clenching her fists in concentration. It touches a deep part of my soul, I’ve gotta be honest.

  She almost slips, her skates going tsk.

  “Easy.” I giggle, skating forward. I kneel down next to her, bracing her with my hands. Then, looking over at Joe-Joe, I ask, “What about you, little man? You wanna try too?”

  “Just ’Gelica now,” he giggles, all shy.

  “My name’s Angelica,” the little girl says. “But he never can say it.”

  “Okay, Angelica, let me show you how to balance, yeah?”

  “Yeah,” she cries, grinning.

  For the next half hour, I show the kids some of the basics of balance and forward stride. Angelica is a slow starter, but ten minutes in, she’s able to go around the cones carefully. Then she does several circuits of the rink, giggling like mad. Eventually, Joe-Joe makes some small improvements, too, even doing an accidental spin that has his parents clapping proudly.

  “I hope the little rascals didn’t interrupt your practice too much, Hannah,” the father says later. He’s balding and smiling and wears a sweater with a superhero I don’t recognize on it. “That was really incredible, that video the girl showed us at the desk. Just—wow.”

  “Thank you,” I say sincerely. As they’re walking away, I call out on a whim, “And don’t forget to tell your friends about Family Roller in Little Fall.”

  When I return to my slalom comes—through the otherwise empty rink—Luke’s standing there, leaning against the wall. In a plaid shirt and faded jeans, with big chunky black boots, he looks every inch the country boy. I’m pretty sure he was smiling as I turned around. But, as soon as he sees me looking, the smile becomes a smirk.

  I decide I’m not going to speak first. I have no interest in bridging this rift between us. He’s nobody to me, a stranger from my past, a vague figure in the upstairs window when I was skating with Noah and Evelyn. I tried to pay my respects about his losses, and he treated me like a jerk.

  Screw him.

  I just start skating.

  He watches me do a couple of runs through the cones. I find myself showing off a little, doing my most high-level stuff. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t appreciate the gleam in his bright green eyes. His smirk twitches, as though he’s really impressed but not letting it show.

  Finally, annoyed that he’s just watching me and not saying anything, I spin on him.

  “Getting a good look?” I hiss, breaking my no-talking rule.

  He grunts, “Good enough.”

  “What are you doing? Just staring like a freak. Did you want something?” I raise my hand, showing the neon stamp. “I’ve paid my admission price, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  He pushes away from the wall. “I was just coming to … never mind. Enjoy your skate.”

  Suddenly, I realize why he was here. But of course his douchebag tendencies took over before he got the chance to complete his mission. He’s asshole through and through. He just can’t help it. I skate around, blocking his way to the stairs that lead to the raised area: the bar, the café, the rental desk and, I’m guessing, his office.

  “You were just coming to thank me for helping with those kids,” I say. The way he flinches tells me I’m right. “But then, when you got over here, you remembered you’re a jerk. Don’t worry, frogman. I’ll never forget how much of a jerk you are.”

  He grins savagely. “Good,” he growls, making to push past me.

  But this time, I have the advantage. I’m much nimbler o
n my skates than he is in his boots. I back-skate, blocking him.

  “And, by the way, it might be worth actually posting some flyers and marketing this place a little bit. Those kids were completely on their own out here. What sort of impression does that give? Or are you too good for that, huh? Too busy thinking of all the ways you can come across as a complete asshole to actually try?”

  “Try?” he growls. “Look at this place, twinkle toes. Show me another man in Little Fall who could’ve got this place renovated so damn quick.”

  “Oh, you did the work yourself, did you?”

  “Some of it,” he snaps. “Some of it I paid for—and not with the money Noah left …” He trails off. “Just get out of my way, Hannah.”

  Noah left him money? Why? For Family Roller?

  I find myself smiling. My cheeks are flushed. I don’t know what it is about Luke, but every time I talk to him, I find myself getting carried away. I can see the intense gleam in his eyes, too, like we’re both being taken over by something neither of us can control.

  “What’s wrong? You can’t get by me? I thought you were supposed to be this big badass.”

  “I work for the most elite security firm on the east coast,” he brags. “I could get by you in no time at all. I just don’t like the idea of knocking you on your ass. As annoying as you are, my mother taught me to never hit a lady.”

  I thrill. “You couldn’t knock me on my ass for a million bucks,” I sass. “Not in my skates. Never. And I bet you can’t get past me, either.”

  He rolls his eyes, but he’s smiling. We both are. Even if there are a million reasons for us not to be.

  “Just move,” he says, darting to the left.

  But with a nimble glide, I block him.

  He smiles ruefully. “You’re fast, I’ll give you that …”

  He feigns right, left, right … and then ducks to the left again. I glide just as easily. Now he’s shaking his head in disbelief. I’m giggling. He’s laughing. What the hell has gotten into us? Warning sirens blare in my head: Stop flirting with Luke fricking Nelson. But I don’t. I keep darting in his way until, at a loss, he grabs my shoulders firmly and lifts me off my feet … well, skates.