by Pamela Ribon
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?
23.
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.
“Fall what?” I’m back on my feet again, skating with her, but my ankles are wobbly and my back is screaming in pain. I want to get down but don’t want to just as much.
“Fall small,” she says, pulling her elbows to her sides, crouching. “Don’t flail yourself everywhere when you fall. That makes it harder for you to control yourself, and you end up taking up more space on the ground, so someone’s more likely to trip over you, or run over your finger or something. People can get hurt in these pileups. We’ve had broken ribs, bruised kidneys. One girl got a skate to her nose. That was a lot of blood.”
I can’t believe she can say all of this to me while we’re skating, while she’s wearing a mouth guard. When I talk I sound like Eliza Doolittle, her mouth filled with marbles.
I try another transition, but I fall and end up facing the oncoming skaters. One sees me, panics, and instantly drops to the ground. This causes the girl behind her to fall. I pull in my limbs and stand up.
Bang-Up is waiting for me on the high side of the track. She rolls back over and continues, as if I hadn’t just given her a perfect example of what she was asking me not to do.
“Fall small. You curl up and either spring back onto your feet or roll into the infield as quickly as possible. Just don’t be a splat on the track. You’re no good to anyone.”
In roller derby, even falling has rules.
“Okay, try another transition.”
I try, but nothing’s happening. “I can’t lift my feet,” I say. It’s true. They feel weighted and numb, like the laces have cut my feet from below the ankle. I’m covered in sweat. It has dripped into one eye, and I’m squinting like a pirate.
Bang-Up screams at me: “Now!”
Terrified, I lift my foot, turn at the hip, and drop it. My other foot drags behind me, and I begin to spin out, falling forward, my hands outstretched in front of me like a toddler going down.
I fall, but I jump right back up, my legs somehow finding their balance.
My secret? This time when I fell, I imagined that girl with the busted nose. I fell, thought Skate to the face!, and then jumped right back up. I want to tell all of the other skaters my secret. Just imagine your face destroyed; your legs will do whatever it takes to keep that from happening.
“I fell small!” I cheer, even though the mouth guard makes it so I really said, “I fawll schmell!”
“Good,” Bang-Up says. “That’s right, you get right back up. That’s good. Keep practicing. Open the door, close the door.”
I fall. I get up. I fall. I get up. I fall. I fall before I even get up. Fear keeps me motivated. I drop to the ground and instantly think Get up, get up, get up.
And while it’s good that I’m getting right back up, there’s another part of me that realizes that I’m a girl who has fallen about six times in a row without taking a single step in between.
Bang-Up watches this whole spectacle. I can see her searching for the right words of encouragement, as a trainer, as a skater, and as a human being who doesn’t want to mock the feeble. She finally settles on: “Who’s a winner?”
I laugh so hard I end up drooling around my mouth guard.
She skates away to help the girl who’s got this look on her face that says she’s realized she’s made the worst decision in her life by entering this track. Her hands are constantly fluttering up by her shoulders, elbows out, her legs stiff straight like she’s got stilts under her hips. Looking at her makes me nervous, and I wish there was some way she could wear an extra helmet.
But through her I can see how far I’ve come in these past few weeks. I feel stronger when I’m here, and the best part about it is the rest of my life goes away. When I’m on the track it’s just me and whatever seemingly impossible physical activity I’m trying to master, over and over again. There’s no room for anything but the work. My real life is forgotten, inconsequential. I don’t even have the mental space to let the voice of John Goodman narrate a few laps. It’s me, my skates, and this thing that it turns out I’m not completely horrible at. I do wish my lea
rning curve wasn’t so sluggish. But I’m happily no longer the greenest girl of the Training Wheels.
“Look out, Broke-Broke!” I hear next to me. I recognize Trash’s voice. “Coming through!” I can hear her skates, and they’re very close. I move. It’s only then I see that I turned around. I did it. I made a transition.
I give a shocked huff around my mouth guard, so proud of myself. I look to see if Bang-Up caught it. She did, and gives me a thumbs-up.
“I’m a winner!” I shout. I start to skate off, but another skater falls spectacularly un-small-ly in front of me, and I topple right onto her.
The victories here—while hard-earned—are unfortunately quite brief.
24.
Charlotte!”
I sit up quickly, wiping my mouth. “No, I’m up, I’m up.”
Francesca’s brought me a triple-shot latte. “You have a deadline,” she says. “Finish that copy.”
“I know. I know. Damn.” I just need some more sleep to let my muscles and tendons and quite possibly my blood heal. Every time I move I can feel the last few practices up my spine, down my legs, pulsing through my brain. I need a vacation from my flesh. Just for about a week or two, until I no longer look like I just escaped a gang fight.
“This is all your fault,” Jonathan says, wagging his finger in Francesca’s face. “You are both too old to be playing these lesbian sports.”
“You should see how good your girlfriend Charlie is out there.”
I’m shaking my head before I even find the words to say, “I’m just trying not to embarrass you, at this point.”
She hops up onto the one clear area on my desk, still knocking over a stack of unread memos in the process. I don’t know where she finds all this energy. She’s like an overactive bird, always twitching and moving, bobbing through space like she’s got to keep life bouncing in the air around her. She inches the paper cup of coffee closer to my wrist, then points at it. “You’re getting so much better so quickly. I can’t wait for the Rookie Rumble. We are going to kick ass.”
