Tally’s old skates actually fit Mickey without a pair of socks in them, although there was a little extra room in the toe. “It’s the fit at the ankle that matters,” Tally said, tying the skates tight while Mickey and Gwen sat on a broken concrete ledge that everyone apparently used for this purpose. Gwen was ready first and she skated backward away from the ledge. Show-off.
“I worked at a rink when I was growing up in Boston and no one could lace a skate as tight as I could. I was also the only girl who ever drove the Zamboni.”
“What’s a Zamboni?”
“A machine that cleans the ice.”
“Is it hard to drive?”
“Not particularly.”
“Then why didn’t they let girls drive it?”
“Sexism,” Tally said. “Mickey—don’t you want to skate?”
“Oh, sure.”
“Then why don’t you?”
“Oh, I’m just—just warming up,” she said. Gwen had already launched herself across the ice. Gwen wasn’t athletic, but she had learned to skate somehow and she made her way into the middle of the pond without falling. And it was okay to fall, apparently. People were falling all over the place, not just little kids. Up toward the far end of the pond, near the bridge that led to Mickey’s house, boys were playing hockey.
Tally gave Mickey a hard look. “It’s okay if you’re not good at it. Falling is part of learning.”
And everyone should get a valentine from everyone.
But Mickey said only: “It’s just been a long time.”
Mickey knew that Tally would help her—but only if Mickey admitted she didn’t know how to skate. And then Tally might summon Gwen back, order her to teach Mickey, which would be worse somehow. She would rather sit here a thousand years than admit that there was something else Gwen could do that she couldn’t. Wasn’t it enough that Gwen made A’s and won the school poster contest and wrote poems that could get put up on the bulletin board even though they didn’t rhyme? She wasn’t supposed to be good at outdoor things, too.
“I had a treat just a little bit ago,” she said.
“So?”
“My mom says ice-skating is like swimming. You can get cramps.”
“Oh, Mickey—”
Fiercely: “My mom says.”
So Tally left Mickey sitting on the concrete ledge, saying only: “Don’t bang the blades against the concrete. It will dull them. Walk back when the sun goes down. It’s not safe to stay here after dark.”
It was cold, sitting still, especially if she couldn’t swing her legs. Mickey could change back into her shoes and boots, walk home. Tally Robison wasn’t the boss of her. But Tally would have called Mickey’s mother by now, told her about dinner, and her mom would be mad at Mickey for leaving the pond without a grown-up’s permission. At least, she would say she was mad about that. Mickey knew she would really be mad about having to make Mickey’s dinner when she thought she was off the hook.
Could it really be that hard, skating? Mickey managed to stand, only to have her ankles collapse until her feet felt like two L’s standing back to back. Stupid Tally, who had laced her skates, announcing all along how good she was at lacing skates. Mickey edged back to the concrete ledge, retied them. Better. But she still couldn’t figure out how to move in them. Gwen seemed to skate without picking her feet up at all. How did that work? Mickey tried to walk toward her, picking her feet up and down—and fell immediately.
“Damn it,” she said, and a nearby mom looked at her with horror. Mickey ignored her. She knew worse curses.
She retreated again, removed the skates. Why couldn’t she just wear her shoes and boots on the ice? Yes, she knew it would be slippery, but it wasn’t like she had never walked down an icy sidewalk. She removed the skates and put on her boots. It was amazing how loose and free her ankles felt after being inside the skates. She stood, walked onto the ice, and caught herself before she fell. Okay, this was going to be hard. But she soon found that if she rose on her tiptoes and ran, she could then slide for great distances. A few adults called after her, said things like, “You’re going to hurt yourself,” or “You really should have on skates,” but Mickey never had a problem ignoring adults. Besides, she wasn’t falling, not that much, no more than Gwen, with her fancy white skates. People began watching her, Mickey, the girl in boots. She even joined in a game of Crack the Whip, taking the last position and letting the skaters pull her along, then laughing hysterically when they released her, flying so far up the pond that she almost ended up in the hockey game, where the Halloran boys, who were sometimes called the Hooligan boys, yelled at her and shook their sticks. Who cared? It was like flying. She had invented a new sport, shoe-skating. It was so much fun that Gwen had to remind Mickey that they were to leave at dusk, that dinner was waiting.
The cold snap hung on for the rest of the week and Mickey went back to the pond every afternoon, refining her new sport. Gwen came, too, but she seemed to be mad at Mickey. She was just jealous, Mickey decided. Anyone could ice-skate, but only Mickey could shoe-skate. By the third or fourth day, she almost never fell at all. “She must have a lower center of gravity than other people,” she heard one mother say to another. “Or she’s just graceful, like a dancer,” the other said. “It’s almost as if her feet aren’t touching the ice at all.” That was how it felt to Mickey—as if her feet barely touched at all.
The pond was still frozen the next Thursday, when they had off for Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. Mickey had permission to spend the entire day at Gwen’s house, and she wanted to go straight back to the pond. The weather was beginning to warm, so the pond wouldn’t be frozen much longer. But Gwen dawdled, allowing the hours to slip by, and suddenly it was lunchtime and Tally was in one of her moods, which meant they had to sit down and have tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches, neither of them normal. The soup was spicy, the cheese smelled funny, and even the bread was weird. But, finally, Gwen and Mickey were at the pond. Gwen sat on the concrete ledge while Mickey practiced her “figures,” tracing numbers and letters, not that anyone could see them. But she could. On a weekday, in the early afternoon, the pond was almost empty; only the Halloran boys there, no grown-ups. Only the kids got off for King’s birthday.
Gwen continued to sit, refusing to put on her skates.
“I’m tired of doing this,” she said. “It’s boring.”
“Try doing it like I do,” Mickey said, knowing Gwen couldn’t, enjoying her chance to be superior. She put her arms out, rose up on tiptoe, took her tiny little steps, then lowered her heels so she was flat-footed. She could cross almost the entire breadth of the frozen pond. She looked back to see if Gwen was admiring her but saw that she had turned her back on the pond. In fact, she had her face pressed into her hands. Stupid Gwen. She was probably crying, baby that she was. If the Halloran boys noticed, they would tease her, then start in on Mickey. Plus, why was Gwen crying? She had her ice skates; she could come out if she wanted. She just hated for Mickey to be good at anything. And when Mickey was good at something—shoe-skating, getting Valentine’s Day cards, knowing the names of plants and bugs—Gwen said it didn’t count. Gwen was so unfair. Gwen was a bad friend. Mickey was going to go over there and tell her so. She rose up on her toes, got her usual running start, and—
She had not noticed how thin the ice was getting here, near the shore, above the dam. It seemed to wobble beneath her, sort of like hard Jell-O. Then, just like that, it broke beneath her and she plunged into the water.
• • •
She was drowning.
• • •
That was her conscious thought, her only thought: I am drowning.
• • •
She looked up: There was sky above her, or at least a patch of promising brightness. She had gone straight down, so the hole was still above her head. The danger, she knew, was that she would be sucked toward the dam
and under the ice and she would not be able to break through. She had to fight her way back to that brightness. Mickey could swim, she was a decent swimmer, but her clothes were so heavy now as they took on water, and when her toe found the mushy bottom and pushed off, she felt heavier than she had on the surface, quite the opposite of what she usually felt in the water, where she flipped and turned like an astronaut in zero gravity. She rose slowly, slowly, slowly, but her head finally broke the surface and she was able to heave her body out of the water back onto the ice, where she stayed low, afraid to move. Gwen was screaming, but doing nothing. The hockey-playing boys didn’t even seem to know what was going on. At any rate, they didn’t stop their game.
Mickey flattened herself on the ice as much as possible. Maybe if she moved upstream, toward the bridge, the ice wouldn’t be as weak. She probably should retreat toward the middle of the pond, where the ice would be thicker, less affected by the thaw. But the shore was so tantalizingly close. Mickey edged toward it on a diagonal line, hugging the ice. That should work. She crawled like an inchworm, humping her butt in and down in the air. Flattening, humping, flattening, humping. Oh, she hoped the Halloran boys didn’t look now. They would never let her live it down.
She was only three feet from shore when the ice gave way again. The second fall was worse, in part because she belly-flopped in, so her face and body took the shock, but also because she knew now how hard it would be to get out. She heard Gwen screaming, screaming, screaming and then it was quiet, the way it always was in movies when things happened underwater. Her feet found the bottom again. She was over her head, only barely. She should be able to push to the surface, but the water was stronger than she was and it was taking her now, moving her, bullying her, forcing her up against the dam, away from the light.
She heard her own voice: I’m going to die.
No, you’re not, a voice in another part of her head insisted. Push.
I can’t. I tried. I’ll just hit the ice.
Then break it.
What?
Push. With your hand. It’ll give way. But you gotta hit it hard.
This was not her voice. How was a voice in her head not her voice?
Show me, Mickey pleaded. But was she asking herself or someone else?
Can’t. But you can do it.
She raised her arms above her head. How could this lazy stream of water have so much strength below the surface? She pushed off, tapped the ice, but nothing happened.
Harder.
I can’t. I can’t.
Yes, you can. You have to. It’s the only way out. You can’t swim back now. You gotta break the ice.
I can’t.
You wanna live, you better. I can tell you this much—you don’t want to stay here.
• • •
Mickey looked straight ahead and saw a pair of green eyes almost glowing in the murky water. They could be—what? The eyes of a catfish or whatever else might live here in the long-polluted stream. But she knew these were not a catfish’s eyes and they scared her so much that she found the strength to push toward the surface again, the voice calling after her, insistently in her ear, almost as if someone were riding piggyback.
Make fists. Hit that ice like it’s somebody you want to hurt. You ever want to hurt anyone?
Yes. Yes, I’ve wanted to hurt people.
Me, too, the voice said. Me, too.
And with that, Mickey cracked the ice above her head, broke the surface, then let the water pin her into the corner formed by the dam and the concrete ledge. There, clinging to the rough side, she caught her breath and let Gwen help her out. She probably could have gotten out on her own, but it felt good to see Gwen’s arms reaching for her.
“Don’t tell my mom,” Gwen said.
“Of course.” Again, this was one of the things that Gwen’s parents would get upset about, while Mickey’s mother wouldn’t mind, given that she was alive.
“We’ll go in the house through the basement, wash your clothes and put them through the dryer. You can sit down there in a towel until they’re ready.”
“Sure,” Mickey said. “Gwen, when I was under the ice—”
“You had a tetanus last year, right?”
“Yeah, and I didn’t get cut, I just swallowed a lot of water. I’ll be okay. Gwen—that story, about that girl. The one who ran into the water. Did it really happen?”
“I told you it did. My father told me about it. You’re lucky you’re not her.”
“Why was she running like that? Across the ice?”
“Just playing some stupid game with her brother. Tag or something. I don’t know. She tried to run across the ice and she fell in. You really shouldn’t wear shoes on the ice.”
Not shoes, Mickey thought. It wasn’t about the shoes. Something else happened to that girl. Atheena. How did she know her name. She just did. There was a girl, named Atheena, who had tried to run across the pond and fallen in. Why had Atheena been running?
But Atheena, who had ridden Mickey’s back up and out of that filthy water, she hadn’t waited around to tell her all she wanted to know. There wasn’t time to tell the white girl about how Atheena’s brother had brought a boy to the house, a boy he was specifically forbidden to bring around. Marvin. Ugly, thuggish Marvin. Bobby wasn’t supposed to bring anybody to the house when Mama wasn’t there, and Marvin wasn’t welcome even when Mama was there. Atheena didn’t want to be in the house with them, so she went outside and sat on the back steps, hands thrust into her pockets because she had forgotten her gloves. It was only one in the afternoon. Mama wouldn’t be home until five o’clock.
The boys came banging out the back door. There was a small, sad tree in the yard, naked and cold. Marvin broke a branch from it. Mama would be mad. She loved that tree, a dogwood, bloomed pink every spring. “Let’s play a game,” Marvin said. “Like hockey. And your sister will be the puck.”
Atheena turned to go back in the house, but Bobby blocked the way. There was nothing to do but run past Marvin and through the back gate, then into the woods beyond Hillside Road. The boys were slower, in part because Bobby had to grab his own branch, and carrying the sticks slowed them down, but she could hear them behind her.
She ran down the hill, almost blind in her panic, while they shouted at her, saying terrible things about what they would do. She was smaller than they were and able to duck the branches that snapped and whipped around them, but what good was being faster when she ended up trapped between the pond and the boys? She could run along the shore, but she wasn’t so fast that she could get back to the road before they caught up with her. She would have to go across the ice. That was the only way. There were houses on the other side, and houses meant people. They couldn’t do whatever they meant to do to her if people were around. It seemed safer to walk along the dam line, where Atheena would have something to grab if she slipped. She inched her way across, her brother and Marvin standing on the shore, shouting horrible things at her but scared to follow. She was almost to the other side when the ice seemed to hesitate beneath her, just like the girl in her class who never knew the answer to anything. “And what is the name of Dr. King’s most famous speech, Quintana?” Ummmmmmmm. “We are working on our seven times today. What is seven times seven, Quintana?” Ummmmmmmm. And then Mrs. Burke’s pointer would slap across her desk. “Pay attention, Quintana, or I am going to have to send a note to your mother.”
• • •
So the ice said Ummmmmmmmmm and then cracked beneath Atheena’s feet, the sound as sharp as Mrs. Burke’s pointer slapping across a desk. Atheena plunged into water colder than anything she had ever known. An igloo could not be this cold. The cold seemed to make the water thick, too, even where it was not ice. And although the surface was only six inches from her head, it might as well have been a hundred miles. She didn’t know how to swim, didn’t have the first idea what to do. Her l
egs, so fleet on the ground, pedaled as if on an imaginary bike; her arms waved as if she were trying to signal a school bus that was pulling away from the curb, leaving her behind. The water pushed her, lazy but determined. No matter how she battled it, the water came back, nudging and pushing, telling her where to go until she could go no farther. The dam’s rickety boards caught on her clothes and hair, held her there.
And there she stayed, the little girl who ran into the pond. Because she was silly, because she didn’t know better, because she couldn’t swim. She could hear it all, the stories told over and over again. Did you hear about the girl who just ran into the pond? That was Robert’s story, not hers. She heard her brother’s lying words, heard her mother’s tears. She watched the light change above her, signaling the change of seasons, calculated when the dogwood bloomed—and when its flowers dropped. One year, two years. She saw the light grow dim when the ice closed over her again, saw children’s feet, agonizingly close, moving above her. Winter, spring, summer, fall. Her mother’s tears were not as loud or frequent; people spoke of her less. Three years, four years. The story stopped being told.
Did the girl know, the one who had fallen, that Atheena had grabbed onto her back and ridden her to the surface, then just kept rising? Had she felt Atheena’s fingers digging into her coat and hair, her breath in her ear? They had broken the surface together, but where the other girl reached for her friend, Atheena kept rising. The last thing she saw, as she looked down at the pond that had held her so long, was that soggy white girl clinging to her friend—chest heaving, hair streaming water. Did that girl even know how lucky she was to be alive? Probably not. But she would say she did and that was all that mattered. Would she remember Atheena? Probably forever. There would be a new story now, about a different girl, a new warning. There would always be cautions and stories, stories told just to scare other children. Atheena understood that now. The girl who played with matches. The boy who didn’t look both ways. The girls who talked to strangers. The boys who walked home in the storm. Atheena had been held in place not by the water or the splintery boards, but by her own story. Now that there was another story to replace hers, Atheena was free. Atheena was gone.
Games Creatures Play Page 38