by Claire Adams
“What is one thing about you that most people don’t know,” the professor says.
Apparently I hadn’t filled my obligatory time.
“Uh,” I start again, beginning to become increasingly aware at just how foreign an entity these people think me to be. “Most people don’t know that I once caught my dad hiding money for one of his clients. I think the guy was a drug dealer or something—never came by the house or anything, but I used to go to my dad’s office after school when I was younger, and when I got off the bus and into his office that day, this crazy-looking guy with all these scars and just insane muscles was coming out of there and my dad was stuffing a duffle bag full of cash. I don’t know if the guy ever got his money back or not, but I know my dad lost the case. I’ve always kind of wondered if he blew the case just so he could keep the money, but the police don’t like to investigate—”
“And let’s move on,” the professor says, and I sit down, hardly able to contain my laughter.
Apparently, nobody here thought I was joking. Either that or nobody here thought the story was funny, but that can’t be it. I’m hilarious.
Class goes on and ends, and I remember something about a big project coming up, but once those magical words, “We’ll start next week…” came out of her mouth, I just naturally tuned out.
Out of class now, and I decide to forego my scheduled skate home to nap and go straight to the skate park near the college.
There are a few guys tooling around, but this park only really ever gets busy after everyone’s done with classes for the day. This is my favorite time to come here.
If I ever woke up early enough, I could probably get in some time with the park all to myself, but mornings are death and coldness and burning eyes and certainly not the kind of comfortable dream or well-furnished nightmare I could otherwise be experiencing at six AM.
I hate mornings almost as much as I hate the coffee most people drink to cope with their own hatred of mornings.
It’s a tortured existence.
My problem right now isn’t the street part of the coming competition, it’s the vert portion. Some jackoff got it into his stupid head that it would be great to have an all-around competition rather than three separate competitions. That way, the dickhead no doubt theorized, the best all-around skater would win.
It’s not that big a deal. It’s just something that I should have learned before now that I just never quite got around to.
I mean, I’m a street skater. What the hell do I know about vert? The parks around here don’t have vert ramps. How the hell am I supposed to practice for that?
Everyone says it’s not that different. Once you roll in, it’s just the same board on the same wood. They never say what you’re supposed to do if you can’t roll in.
There’s a concrete portion that equals out to be comparable to one side of a vert ramp, but I’ve always just done wall rides on it. It never occurred to me to climb to the top and practice dropping down. I guess I’ve just never really thought of this as a suitable substitution for a full vert ramp, but it’s close enough for what I need.
I cruise around the park a bit, pulling a few tricks here and there, but mostly just eyeing that tall concrete fall into a curve which is supposed to allow for a person to become vertical again without crashing. I’m going to see if it’s really that simple.
I come out at the quarter-pipe near the vert section and I climb the makeshift ladder all the way to the top.
It’s kind of nice up here. There’s a good view of the park. It helps that I’m not afraid of heights.
Now I’m looking down and everything’s changed. From where I’m standing, the bottom of the concrete where there’s supposed to be a nice, gentle curve to ease one from going straight down to straight across is a barely perceptible inverted bump. I drop in from here and I may as well be taking a swan dive straight onto the ground below.
“What up, shithead?” a voice I really don’t want to hear right now says as that stupid head comes up above the level of the concrete.
“I need to get used to dropping in,” I tell Rob. “Vert’s part of the Midwest Championship and it’s not like I have a halfpipe at my house.”
I should really have a halfpipe at my house. Why do I not have a halfpipe in my house?
“You’ve never dropped in before?” he asks, pulling himself to the top and standing next to me.
“I’ve dropped in,” I lie. “It’s just the one part of my game I haven’t really developed.”
“It’s easy, man,” he says, “watch.”
I watch, and he drops his skateboard to his side and moves it to the edge with his foot until only the tail is keeping the board from going over the edge. Rob holds the board in place at the tail with one foot and, with the other, he steps further up the board. The nose of the board drops as he shifts more of his body weight to the front foot and now he’s going straight down the incline, dipping down a little as the concrete curves beneath him and he rolls out without issue.
Okay, so I was watching and taking notes. I multitask.
It really seems simple enough, and lord knows I’ve seen people do it on video enough times. This is just one of those moments where I have to swallow my fear and just make my body go through the motions.
There are a lot of moments like this in skating.
They usually come right before an injury. Sometimes, though, these moments come right before you learn something big, and I need to be comfortable doing this. The foundation of my future, as my dad would call it, is going to be built or it’s going to crumble.
So, I ease the board forward with my back foot and I try to keep from shaking with the adrenaline that comes as the back trucks pass the concrete and the tail of the board comes down hard on the lip.
Okay, just lift my front foot, keeping most of my weight on the back for now, and set the front foot on the other half of the board. Now I just transfer my weight from back foot to front foot, I’m tilting forward and…
I open my eyes to see Rob standing above me, bent over with laughter.
“That was the greatest thing I’ve ever fucking seen, bro!” he says. “You didn’t even put your arms out to catch you. Just straight deadpan like you didn’t even see the ground rushing up toward—you’re not really hurt or anything, are you? I almost don’t even care because seriously, dude, that. Was. Awesome.”
I look at him and I look down at the sourceless drops of blood on my t-shirt and I ask him, “What do you mean? What did I do?”
Chapter Three
Smoke
Mia
I really hope he’s not here today. He’s always late, but it’s never easy to tell whether he’s actually going to show up or not.
Ian hasn’t really tried to talk to me all that much since class started, but today’s the day that Professor McAdams assigns us partners for the final class project. Whoever I get paired with, I’m going to be stuck with for the next three months or so, and I really don’t want to endure the hyper-ambivalence that I have toward him with any kind of increased frequency.
It might be simpler if I didn’t like anything about him, but after seeing him skate, that stupid portion of my brain that’s shaped like a skate deck has been trying to convince me that all of the reasons I thought he was an annoying moron at the competition were misperceptions.
The reality, and I’m sure of this, is that Ian is nothing more than a tattooed guy with no personal skills that just happens to be about the best skater I’ve ever seen in real life, but being in that kind of proximity with him—I don’t know. That stupid part of my brain has won the battle before, and it’s not usually a brilliant idea when it does.
Class starts, though, and Ian’s nowhere in sight. I’m not ready to pop the champagne cork just yet, but it’s a good sign.
“All right,” Dr. McAdams says, “today, as you’ll know if you’ve been paying attention, we are going to put you in teams of two for your final project. During class today, I wan
t you to talk with your new partner and come up with a few ideas you might want to do and hand them in on a paper that contains your names—I can’t believe I still have to say this to people. You’re adults, most of you, and you should know how to write your name at the top of a piece of paper for class. I’ll look over your ideas and select the best two. Of these, you must pick one and that will be your final project. If you do not have two viable options on your paper, you can either try again on your own time, bringing something we can actually use at the beginning of next class, or I can assign you something.”
Oh, just get to it, will you? The longer you talk, the greater the chances that Ian walks through that door and I’m stuck between my standards and a hard place, if you’ll forgive the pun.
“I’m not vindictive when it comes to assigning projects, either, so if you and your partner are genuinely having a difficult time, don’t hesitate to ask for ideas from me. That said,” Professor McAdams says, “why don’t we get you paired off and we’ll get going?”
He’s still not here, but I’m not uncrossing my fingers yet. I’m in the fourth column, third row and the professor’s taking her sweet time writing down everyone’s partner assignments. The good news is that she seemed to skip over the other empty seat on that side of the room. The bad news is that I can’t remember if that seat actually has a person that goes with it or not.
“Mia, you’ll be with Riley,” Professor McAdams says, and I turn around to face my new study partner—project partner, whatever.
Riley is about my age, dirty blonde hair and glasses. She doesn’t say a whole lot in class, but then again, I have been noticing that participation within the classrooms in our institutions of higher learning is waning prodigiously.
Whatever the case, she’s not Ian, so there’s nothing complicated, no competing feelings of attraction and disinterest, just simple partner work where I’m probably going to end up doing just about everything and Riley will scribble her name at the top of any paperwork as her contribution to whatever groundbreaking research we decide to conduct.
The professor finishes pairing everyone up and I finally breathe easy. Even when Ian comes into the room while Riley and I are putting our desks together, I’m feeling a lot better about everything.
“Hold on,” Professor McAdams says, “we just had someone come in, so we have an even number. What’s your name?”
This isn’t happening.
“Ian Zavala,” Ian says.
It doesn’t matter. I’m already paired up. We’re really very close to beginning talk about what we’re going to do for our project. We’re locked in.
“Okay, and where do you sit?” Professor McAdams asks.
Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me.
No, I’m sure it’s not going to matter where he sits. I don’t even think the professor ever bothered writing down assigned seating. The fact that he’s set up camp directly behind me long enough that people just assume that’s his seat doesn’t mean it’s his seat, and even if it did, it wouldn’t mean that I’d have to give up my partnership.
If I have to give up my partnership, everyone who was paired up after me is going to have to give up theirs and there’s no reason to make this whole process that much work. She’ll just pair him with whoever was going to be on their own before and that will be—
“Why don’t you and Mia team together, and Riley, you and Patricia can be a pair,” Professor McAdams asks.
Okay, so being that Patricia was the only person after Riley, I guess technically it makes just as much sense to pair Ian with me as it would to pair him with her, but I really wanted this to be my easy class.
Psychology fascinates me. It’s my wheelhouse. This should be a class where I breeze through and solidify my foundation in the more general concepts before I go into more field-specific classes starting next semester.
Now, as Ian smiles sheepishly as he makes his way past my desk to sit in his usual spot, the experiment has become me.
How will Mia handle being paired with a guy she’s simultaneously turned on and off by? What kind of stress and psychological strain will this new situation put on our young heroine?
Tune in next week.
“So, what are we doing?” Ian asks.
“We’re supposed to come up with ideas for some sort of experiment to do as our final project,” I tell him.
“You were at that competition a while ago—” he starts.
“You know what?” I ask him. “You and I are going to be working together for a while, and we don’t know each other, although I think it’s safe to say that we do both remember meeting one another when you were staring at my breasts right before you went out and skated in front of a few hundred people.”
“Yeah, that was a pretty good day,” Ian says.
“Glad to hear it,” I tell him, “but as we’re working together, you will either look me in the eyes, in the direction that I’m pointing, or not at me at all, do you understand me?”
He laughs. “Sure thing,” he says. “What’s your name?”
“Mia,” I tell him. “You’re Ian.”
“Remember my name from the big screen, huh?” he asks.
“You just said it to the professor about forty-seven seconds ago,” I tell him.
“That was really specific,” he says. “You kind of strike me as the uptight type, only the uptight type doesn’t usually hang out at skating competitions. The only people that really hang out at skating competitions are skaters, wannabe skaters, and skate groupies. Are you a wannabe skater?” he asks.
“Could we possibly focus a little bit here?” I ask. “I know we have some time before the project is going to be due, but if we don’t plan this thing out, we’re going to find ourselves with a week left and nowhere near enough time to do anything that we might want to do, so could we just…?”
“Sure,” he says. “What did you have in mind?”
“I don’t know,” I tell him. “I think one of the first things we’re going to want to consider is going to be the method of collecting data. As this is a psychology class, not a chemistry class, we’re going to be working with people, so collecting data is going to have to have some aspect of getting information from people about a particular topic. Is there anything you can think of?”
“We could always try to reboot what they did at Stanford,” he says. “You know, when they put all those students into a warehouse or something, made half of them guards, the other half prisoners, and watched as half the people started humiliating and abusing the others: We could do that.”
“I know what you’re talking about,” I tell him, “but first off, that’s not quite what happened. Second, someone already did it. Why would we want to repeat an experiment when we can try something new?”
“Don’t scientific experiments have to be repeated before results can be considered valid?” he asks, tapping the end of a pen against his full, bottom lip.
Really, I’m just impressed that he has a vocabulary large enough to form the question.
“Yeah, but we’re not a research lab,” I sigh. “We don’t have those kinds of resources. This is for a class in which we are students. I don’t even know how we would put something like that—”
“Yeah,” he says, leaning forward, “I didn’t really mean that seriously. I was just hoping for a quick chuckle at the schadenfreude of it all.”
“Where did you learn to talk like that?” I ask.
“What do you mean?” he returns.
“Schadenfreude,” I say. “How do you even know what that means?”
“What?” he asks. “I watched PBS when I was a kid, too. Don’t think just because I have all these tattoos that I’m some kind of idiot—oh hey, Gooch,” he says to someone on the other side of me. “Heard you got crabs from the old lady at that party last week; bummer.”
I’m trying to find out how this guy became so intelligent and now he’s talking past me to someone about their rumored venereal disease. If it weren’t i
mpossible, I’d honestly think he was toying with my indecision about him.
This is one of those nice moments when I get a free stare, though. He’s talking to someone behind me, but we’re also in a conversation, so I get to just stay here and take in the contradictions.
Still, after a couple of weeks in class, I haven’t seen him without a beanie on his head, but a few inches of medium brown hair poke out from under the bottom of the hat. The tattoos stop well before his neck, and he seems to have remarkably clean teeth for someone who comes off like such a lazy slob.
“…probably best to wrap your guy up next time, don’t you think?” Ian asks and I shudder.
Being a skate aficionado, I’ve grown used to the kind of crass talk that goes on in a skate park and, although it’s not the way I choose to speak myself, I like to think I’ve even become very tolerant of those who choose differently. Still, the uncomfortably loud talk about VD in the middle of a college classroom is enough to make me want to hide my face.
“So,” Ian says, turning back toward me, and I could swear I see his eyes dilate before he reaches his second word, “what kind of sampling method do you think would be best?”
“I’m open to ideas,” I tell him. “Questionnaires can be useful because they can provide anonymity, which you’d think would make people more likely to tell the truth, but that’s not necessarily the case. Sometimes, immature people lie on questionnaires because they think they’re funny or witty or—are you listening?”
Ian looks down at me, his eyes having drifted to what I can only assume was the ceiling. “I’m sorry,” he says, “what?”
“Where did I lose you?” I ask, really trying to be patient.
“I think we should do phone sampling,” Ian says. “It’s probably more likely to put people into awkward situations while they’re supposed to be answering your questions, but it would be hilarious to toy with them when you know you’ve got someone who’s trying to be discreet.”