False Start (Love and Skate)

by Felix, Lila

  “Hey Cy. I was just watching your grandmother’s videos.”

  “I miss her. She was the best.”

  I smiled at him, “She was. What’s up with you?” My son coming home gave me an out. I switched off the computer and focused my attention on him.

  “I have a problem.”

  “What’s going on? Sit down.”

  He sat in Nellie’s chair and fidgeted with his jeans.

  “Dad…I…”

  He tended to stutter when he was flustered. He got picked on a lot between his stuttering and his Dyslexia.

  “I met this girl. She’s beautiful and she’s sweet. And she’s totally smart and she’s a teacher.”

  I smiled, “Well, ask her out.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “She’ll think I’m stupid. She’s an English teacher in high school.”

  “So what? Cyrus you have a learning disability.”

  “I know but there’s another thing.”

  I waited for the other thing. He buried his head in the heels of his hands and looked down as he spoke the next four words. After he spoke them I lost it, busted out laughing at my son’s expense. But I couldn’t help it. Life was a circle. It all came around. Karma was a real wench.

  “Say it again, Cyrus. It’s just too much.”

  He squinted his eyes and sterned his face, “I’m glad this amuses you.”

  “It does. Just say it again, just one more time.”

  He stood up to his full height, the same height as me, and walked to the office window and looked out. I stopped laughing, putting myself back in the shoes I hadn’t worn in years. I reveled in the reminiscence of feelings I’d once had about the same issue with Nellie.

  “She’s a derby girl.”

  Lila’s POV

  I sit on Nellie’s couch in their home, Chase and Sylvia’s old home, having a cup of coffee with my friend.

  “Is it gonna be weird,” Nellie asked.

  “What?”

  “Writing Cyrus. I mean, you created him as a baby and now you’re gonna write him older and falling in love with some chick.”

  “It was your idea.”

  She scoffed, “It was not. It was Scout’s.”

  I laughed, “Scout has been on my ass to write a book about her since Nixon’s book.”

  “So you write Cyrus and then Scout.”

  “But what about the rest of the kids?”

  “Write them too, a whole spin-off series.”

  I waved my hands in the air, like a dancing hippie, making fun of her positivity, “Oh yeah, we’ll just write another damned series. I oughta kick you in your fluugen muugen.”

  She broke out in a laugh that I hadn’t heard in a long time, “Oh my God, you sound like Betty White on the Golden Girls.”

  “I’m serious. What would I even call it? Love and Skate, the rug rats go on a date?”

  “Dude, that rhymes. No, you’ll think of something. I believe in you, Lila.” She dragged out ‘believe in you’ like a Southern reverend in the middle of an Easter service.

  “Be careful, Smurfette. I could axe you at any time.”

  “No you wouldn’t. I know what you went through when Sylvia died. I know it wasn’t easy. She was our mom, but you made her. I know that was like burying a child.”

  “It was.”

  No one knew the pain I went through with Sylvia. But the first time I wrote her into the story, I knew she wouldn’t be with them all the way through. I knew she was going to leave the family a long time before anyone wanted her to, but such is life. There is death and birth and love and hope. But she’d done her job well. She prepared the family to live without her. She was the kind of mother everyone wishes they had.

  “Do you think I did it,” I asked her tentatively.

  She knew what I spoke of. You see, dear reader, Nellie spoke to me before Love and Skate, and it was about a lot more than roller derby. Nellie called to me, “Lila, do you see my blue hair, piercings and tattoos?” I looked her up and down. Of course I did, I made her that way in my own imagination.

  “They are me, but they don’t define me. And that’s what you need to do. You need to convince them, if only one person. Convince them that no matter how people look on the outside, you don’t know them until you see their insides.” I rolled my eyes, “Not a tall order at all.”

  “I think you did. But the kids’ stories need to be told.”

  “Okay,” I agreed, downtrodden.

  “Okay. I’m here if you need me.”

  “I’ll always need you around, Nellie.”

  Stay tuned, the spin off series, it will be coming soon!

  Acknowledgements:

  To God, for giving me a brain to make up imaginary people, the fingers to type it out, and the guts to expose it to the world.

  As always, to my husband and kids, none of this would be possible without your support and love.

  To the Indie Hellcats: The rock stars of the author world, for giving a girl a place to belong.

  To the rink rats: so much more than a street team, THE most kick ass group of readers on the planet.

  To Mandy, Amy and Candace, for putting up with my antics on a daily basis.

  The Playlist for False Start and all my other works can be found on Spotify.

  Lila’s Other works:

  Emerge, Perchance, Hoax, AnguiSH, Seeking Havok, the Love and Skate series and her new dystopian (release date January 3) Forced Autonomy.

  Stalker Links:

  www.lilafelix.com

  www.authorlilafelix.blogspot.com

  E-mail: authorlilafelix@gmail.com

  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lila.felix.96

  Forced Autonomy (A Novella Series, Release Date: January 3)

  Prologue

  It started as the other falls of the great societies did—a rumble of rhetoric in the ranks, the progression of propaganda in the populace, the ascension of anger among aspiring assassins.

  Petitions were signed by citizens who truly thought a signature could change the world. Picket signs were waved in public displays of outcry. Encyclopedia thick bills were slammed on the desks of politically blinded Senators and Congressman never to see the light of day or the tick of a vote. Families and the elderly, nearly ninety percent of them, were underfed or starving—the government was no longer able to provide supplemental help nor control the prices of food. Cars were abandoned in the streets, making lines waiting by the curbs, lonely, never would their masters return. Men in suits threw themselves from buildings every day. Women resorted to ghastly measures just to buy a piddling of a meal for their children. The mentally unstable ran amuck, no longer confined to their medical facilities.

  The President elected in the year 2024 walked off of the stage after a less than exuberant win and straight down, down, down into the cesspool which had become the state of our nation. The United States of America, under the various administrations, had managed to dig itself a hole to the tune of two hundred and seventy three trillion dollars, give or take a trillion. Prisoners were let go, regardless of their guilt, the non-violent first, and eventually the not so violent. Public and private mental facilities could no longer operate and those patients without families were simply dropped off at a homeless shelter—regardless of their threat to those around them and themselves.

  Immigrants once filtering into the harbors and points of entry like sugar through a sieve were now sojourning back to their homelands, finding that the land of opportunity was more like the land of poverty and despondency. Inflation rates of electricity and fuel led to deaths by the hundreds in the winter from freezing and just as many at the peak of summer from heat stroke. Hospitals were packed with the sick and the just plain desperate, often resorting to self-inflicted injuries just to get a meal and a place to shower. Social welfare and charity organizations flopped belly up, completely overwhelmed and unable to serve the masses. Churches were packed to the brim with followers who had once
fallen away and those new believers looking for even a fraction of a miracle. Revivals were held everywhere, hoping the rising voices of a God fearing nation, or what once was a God fearing nation, would infiltrate heavenly ears and mercy would be reigned down upon them again.

  But grace never found its way to our crumbling country, nor to its people. And when that young president, hired more for his tenacity and overall gumption than actual know how, threw his hands in the air with a white flag attached—that’s when the United Nations promised us better.

  They promised our women and children would not suffer. They promised our way of life would return to us, as much as possible. They promised the United States would be restored to its former glory.

  They were filthy, filthy liars.

  Hope remained as long as the President of the United States sat at the White House, still on his dilapidated throne, still rubbing his temples and struggling to find an answer.

  But none would ever come. Families of the president were ‘secured’ in underground vaults for protection, and Senators and Congressman were relieved of their duties, left to file in with the rest of the abhorrent population. ‘Thrown to the wolves’, that’s what one Senator called it on a radio interview.

  Americans, proud and true as we were, held out hope that something would change, that the United Nations would revive us again.

  Our first clue should’ve been the whispers about the procedures being done on the prisoners and the elderly. But like an infomercial for the latest and greatest gadget, we refused to believe it was true. They wouldn’t do something so heinous. They wouldn’t. Inch by inch they were turning our citizens into their mindless slaves, claiming it was for our own good. And as complacent as we’d become, we believed them.

  Then one day, on a balmy Sunday in July—July 4th to be exact, the President of the United States and the First Lady, plus the Vice President and his wife were lined up like common criminals and assassinated by the General of the Army of Nations in front of his family—and on live, nationally broadcasted TV. The mass, mandated forced lobotomies started thereafter. Those who protested or refused quickly met their end.

  That’s when we knew for sure—we were hopeless.