With his breath held in, he hands her the joint. “Long day,” she says, declining, thinking about Janice and the women jumping on the trampoline: she doesn’t want to be drunk or high anymore, she only wants sleep. Smoke leaves his mouth, slowly, sinuously, and it smells sweet and grassy, like wet trees.
Joint between his lips, he reaches for her hand, his scar a fold of skin against her skin. He stares at her and she can’t tell what he’s thinking. She realizes she’s smiling, a surging of delight at the open-ended scope, at the impossibility of knowing. He lets her hand go, takes the joint from his lips, and exhales. Smoke floats behind his head, makes vague shapes, and disappears.
He smiles back at her, squinty-eyed. He stubs the joint carefully against the sidewalk, the end going from red to black, leaving a dark marking like an S against the cement. He tucks the remaining joint behind his ear like a pencil, sets his skateboard down, and flies away, wheels making their gravelly noise against the sidewalk, no goodbye, shirt flapping behind his hips.
The skateboard jumps a rise in the sidewalk, wheels suddenly silent, rising over the curb. His knees bend and he hunches so that he and his skateboard are impossible to tell apart. For a second, it looks like he’s soaring, his shirt fluttering behind him like a cape. She knows he knows she’s watching and this makes her smile again.
He lands gracefully, wheels clacking to the street, his arms lifting and falling, and he makes his skateboard move in a wavy line, his body leaning to the left and then the right. He shifts, aims his skateboard’s direction in a straight line. His bare foot pushes him forward, one-two-three-swoop-one-two-three-swoop.
He turns the corner, vanishes.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish to express my gratitude to Michael Carlisle, for his boundless enthusiasm and his commitment to an unknown literary writer; to Ethan Bassoff, the most incredible agent’s assistant to ever walk this earth; and to Anjali Singh, for her generous efforts to make these stories better, and for giving them a home.
I wish to thank my colleagues and professors at UC Riverside, in particular Joshua Hardina, Andrew Winer, Susan Straight, Michael Jayme, Chris Abani, and Dwight Yates. And a very special thanks to Dana Johnson, for being an acute reader, a great writer, and a true friend.
Thank you, as well, to David Partridge and Jim Galbraith, for serving a waitress, by acknowledging her as a writer: they gave me a space to work, in their offices and conference rooms, away from the countless interruptions of libraries and coffeehouses.
And my deepest gratitude and affection goes to my friends and to my family, who encouraged and supported and believed in my work through my years of waiting tables, through the raising of my sons, through the endless rejections, and through it all: Courtney Gregg, Holly Stauffer, Natasha Prime, Ry, Cole, Chris, and many many more. You carried me through.
About the Author
VICTORIA PATTERSON grew up in Newport Beach and received her MFA from UC Riverside. Her award-winning short fiction has appeared in the Santa Monica Review, the Florida Review, and Snake-Nation Review, among other publications. She lives with her family in South Pasadena, California.
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