Blocked

by Seanan McGuire

  “Oh, we’re visiting a chicken farm,” I said faintly. But it was too late to get away: Elsie had already hauled me halfway to a door marked “Staff Only” and covered in spray paint squiggles. She opened the door with her free hand, and the noise from inside got even louder before she stepped inside, pulling me with her.

  The warehouse was dimly lit and virtually empty, with nothing to impede my field of vision. That was as nice as the scene in front of me was confusing. Someone had set up a flat wooden track in the middle of the room, surrounding it with padded mats, and about twenty women on roller skates were circling the track, their heads down and their elbows pumping like they were personally offended by the existence of friction. I stared.

  “Roller derby?” I asked, in a tone that couldn’t seem to make up its mind whether it was startled or offended. That was good: I couldn’t make up my mind either.

  “Roller derby,” said Elsie smugly. She waved to one of the people who wasn’t skating, a slim Asian woman in a black and white striped shirt with a whistle held tightly between her cherry red lips. The woman waved back. Elsie grinned before murmuring, “Ex-girlfriend. She doesn’t skate, but she coaches as ‘Cherry T. Case,’ and she’s one of the best in the business.”

  “And we’re visiting your ex-girlfriend on her home territory because…?”

  “Because we parted friends, and I think she holds the answer to all your problems.” Elsie resumed pulling me forward, until we were standing at the edge of the rink, separated from the passing skaters only by the padded buffers. “It’s a team sport.”

  “You’re insane.”

  “It teaches cooperation, tactics, and how not to scream when someone twice your size pile-drives you into the track.” Elsie was still beaming, her eyes glued to the circling bodies on the track.

  They were an awesome assortment of women, I had to give her that: skinny, fat, and everything in-between, visibly tattooed and apparently unadorned, short-haired, long-haired, dark skinned and light skinned and freckled and scarred. They looked like cheerleaders from the planet Mars. People who only see cheer from the outside never understand how diverse it is, how you need the bases and the flyers and the strong, dependable girls who can stand at the middle of the pyramid and keep the whole thing from tumbling down. Watching the women on the track was almost like having my squad back together, even if it was only for a few minutes.

  Elsie’s ex was trotting toward us, her whistle now bumping against her chest with every step she took. She nimbly side-stepped a skater’s trailing arm, coming to a stop a few feet away. “Elsie,” she said, sounding pleased enough to see my cousin, even if she hadn’t yet acknowledged me. “What brings you here? Slumming again? I already told you, I’m engaged.”

  “Yes, and I am really looking forward to coming to the wedding, irritating Jean with my presence, and hooking up with a bridesmaid,” said Elsie. “I wanted to introduce you to my cousin.” She paused, shooting me a panicked look. I swallowed a groan. Once again, Elsie had embarked upon a glorious plan without thinking it all the way through. Leaping without looking was a specialty of hers.

  “I’m Annie,” I said, extending my hand toward the woman in the striped jersey. “Annie Thompson.” The shortened form of my first name was common enough to be safe to use, especially after I’d been Melody for so long, and “Thompson” was both nicely generic and the last name of the female lead in A Nightmare On Elm Street, which meant that I would remember it if I had any need to keep using it. Which I didn’t anticipate from the day so far: roller derby was fun to watch, but it didn’t feel like the sort of thing I was going to wind up doing.

  “Nice to meet you, Annie,” said the woman, grasping my hand and shaking it firmly. She had surprisingly strong fingers. “I’m Dani, although most people here call me ‘Cherry.’ So you’re interested in roller derby, huh? You ever skate before?”

  This was starting to feel like a set-up. Fortunately, I had an answer prepared. “All the time when I was a kid. My parents felt it was good exercise and less dangerous than a skateboard.”

  “I don’t know if I’d agree with that last part, but they’re right about the exercise,” said Dani amiably. “Do you have your own skates? If not, I can recommend a few shops that will get you started. You will need your own protective gear, and we discourage sharing. That stuff can get pretty ripe, and nobody needs to stink like someone else’s sweat.”

  “Unless it’s for a fun reason,” interjected Elsie.

  “And once again, Elsie takes it to a sexual place in less than a minute and a half,” said Dani.

  Elsie shrugged. “It’s my superpower. I am the patron saint of inappropriate innuendo and giving people hickeys right before their mothers show up. I’m considering becoming a religious icon. You think I could get a following?”

  “I think the internet is your following,” said Dani, before returning her attention to me. This time she looked me slowly up and down, assessing me with the sort of casual thoroughness that I was only used to receiving from combat instructors and the bra fitters at Nordstrom’s. Finally, she said, “Cheerleader, right? I can’t imagine you were a flyer with a rack like yours, so you probably did base duty and tried really hard not to drop your teammates on their heads.”

  I blinked. “Uh, yeah,” I said. “How did you—?”

  “You’re in excellent shape, and you only get that sort of shoulder musculature from gymnastics or cheerleading. Or trapeze, I suppose, but there’s not a circus around here, and Elsie would have tried to scam free tickets when we were dating if she had relatives in a traveling show.”

  “Guilty,” said Elsie.

  Dani continued calmly, “You’re too tall to be a gymnast, you’re not standing like a modern dancer, and there’s a posture thing that all cheerleaders get—even the serious competitive ones—that you have. It’ll probably go away after we’ve been slapping you around the track for a year or so. I know you’re over eighteen or Elsie wouldn’t have brought you here, and Elsie knows that we’re down three skaters and getting ready to go into the practice season, or again, she wouldn’t have brought you here.”

  I crossed my arms defensively over my chest, trying not to look like I was struggling to figure out what she meant by “a posture thing.” I thought I was standing perfectly normally. “And you’re still talking to us because…?”

  “Because we need skaters, and you stand like a cheerleader, but the school year is over and Elsie brought you to me.” Dani smiled sweetly. “Also because I’d love to see someone hip-check one of her relatives into the floor. Call it revenge by proxy. Unless you don’t think you have what it takes to hit the track?”

  I scowled, dropping my arms. Elsie had dated this woman; Elsie knew how she planned her punches, which meant Elsie had probably known that Dani would take a sucker-shot at my pride. And that didn’t matter one little bit.

  “Where can I buy a pair of skates?” I asked.

  *

  An hour later I was standing just behind the painted starting line on the track, new skates strapped onto my feet, equally new protective gear covering my elbows and knees. The helmet was borrowed. No point in investing that heavily in something that I wasn’t going to be doing beyond today.

  And I wasn’t going to be doing it beyond today. This wasn’t for me. I liked flying, clapping, the smell of crushed grass, and the cheering of the crowd. This wasn’t that. But the fact that I had no intention of sticking with this ridiculous excuse for a sport didn’t change the part where the four women in front of me would gladly crush me into paste if I gave them half a chance, which made them the enemy, and more importantly, made me a target. I don’t like being a target. It makes me cranky.

  “You clear on what you’re supposed to do?” asked Dani.

  “Get through the pack,” I said.

  “Right. How are you going to do that?”

  “Small weapons fire.”

  Dani laughed. That was nice. I had only been half-kidding, but a laugh�
�s a laugh. “I like you, Thompson. Now let’s see if you still like me in a minute.” She blew her whistle. The four women blocking my access to the rest of the track didn’t so much adjust their positions as sink down into them, giving every impression of having sprouted roots and become one with the warehouse floor. They were wearing roller skates, and anything on roller skates should be moveable, but that wasn’t what they looked like. They looked like an impassable wall, and for a split second I wanted to throw up my hands, declare defeat, and go home to read comic books for the rest of the afternoon.

  A Price never declares defeat. I sank down into my own crouch and launched myself forward, gathering as much speed as I possibly could before lunging up onto the toes of my skates and beginning to force my way into their midst. The four women did their best to stop me, blocking with hips, backs, butts—anything but heads or hands. They were scrupulous about avoiding illegal touches, maybe because this was half-demo, half-audition, and there was nothing actually at stake. If I succeeded, maybe I’d stick around and skate with them. If I failed, they got to impress me with their awesome skating skills, and nobody had to feel like they’d lost.

  Elsie whooped from the small crowd that had gathered next to the track, watching us. All four team captains for the local league were there, studying my progress with rapacious eyes. The Block Busters and the Slasher Chicks were the two teams that actually needed replacement skaters: whoever joined with them would be alternates at first, never guaranteed to touch track, which was one more reason for me not to take roller derby seriously. I wasn’t looking for a new sport that would keep me warming a bench while other people had all the fun. I could warm the bench just as easily from the comfort and safety of my own bedroom, and I wouldn’t have to put on roller skates to do it.

  The first two women were behind me now, their shoulders slamming together on the empty air where I had been only a moment before. I shoved forward like I was going to keep bullying my way forward, and then dropped into a crouch, using the momentary surprise of my last two challengers to open a low passage out of the mob. The track stretched out in front of me, empty and inviting, and I took off as fast as I could, arms tight against my sides, legs pumping hard. The other women pursued.

  I could warm the bench just as easily from home. But by the time I finished my second spin around the track, I knew that I didn’t want to: Elsie had won.

  I was going out for roller derby.

  *

  The whole audition process took about an hour and a half. I had the feeling it would have been shorter during actual open tryouts, when they would have had more than one rookie to focus all their attention, disdain, and amusement on, but since I was a latecomer, I was getting the deluxe treatment. I was also a welcome distraction from practice, which explained why members of all four teams had joined in, gleefully, for the various forms of torture that were supposed to prove I was capable of playing a gladiatorial blood sport while on roller skates.

  The latest trial was simple: I was on the starting line again, next to a girl who looked like a stiff wind would carry her away. Her hair was the flaxen color of shampoo commercials and CW teen stars, and her elbows looked sharp enough to be classified as bladed weapons. She flashed me a shy smile around her mouth guard before hunkering down into a crouch, ready for the whistle to blow.

  “No one expects you to skate faster than Fern,” said Dani, who was still acting as ringleader to this little torture show. “Fern is a freak of nature. We just want to see how long you can keep up with her.”

  “Which you can’t,” said another woman—Carlotta, I thought her name was—as she watched impassively from a few feet away. She was one of the only derby girls who seemed annoyed by the way I was disrupting their practice schedule. Elsie apparently had a lot of credit to burn with these people, even though my cousin didn’t seem to really understand much of what we were doing. She was a casual derby enthusiast: she couldn’t tell a jammer from a blocker, she didn’t understand the scoring system, and she was more interested in collecting team shirts than actually rooting for anyone in specific, but all these women seemed to like her, possibly because it’s hard not to like Elsie. Elsie was born one of the world’s likeable people, and I…was not.

  We all have our crosses to bear.

  “Don’t worry,” said Fern, in a voice so soft and wind-blown that at first I thought she was whispering, until I realized she was just one of those people who naturally sound like a cartoon princess. “I’m not going to be trying to hit you.”

  “Thanks, I think,” I said, and sunk into my own crouch. And then the whistle blew, and there was no more time for conversation, or contemplation, or anything but watching Fern accelerate away from me at a speed that shouldn’t have been possible under our current laws of physics. I pushed myself away from the starting line, pumping my arms as I tried to build up speed at something resembling her pace. Catching up to her seemed like a fool’s dream, and so I just focused on going as fast as I could without losing control of my skates and spinning out. I’d managed to get through the audition process without embarrassing myself thus far. I didn’t want to start now.

  The air behind Fern felt faintly ionized, and smelled fresher than the air in the rest of the warehouse. I swallowed a laugh. Wasting air would just have slowed me down, and suddenly I had a real reason to want to devote my nights and weekends to roller derby: Fern wasn’t human. And if Fern wasn’t human, who was to say that the rest of these women were?

  Urban cryptids have a lot of trouble finding communities where they can feel comfortable and accepted, even in a place as devotedly off-the-wall as Portland. “Weird” turns out to come with a surprising number of rules and regulations, many of which seemed geared at keeping the non-human members of the populace safely out of sight and out of mind. Roller derby threw most of those rules aside in favor of proper safety gear and the willingness to eat track every so often. I had been looking for a community of cryptids that needed me.

  I might have just found it.

  Fern’s single-lap lead turned quickly into a four-lap lead, but I kept pushing on, learning the little quirks of the track, the places where it was possible to cut a few feet off my total by jumping from one section to another, the places where the wood was just worn enough to be a hazard if I hit it at the wrong angle. I got faster. The people watching us were nodding thoughtfully, and some of them actually looked halfway impressed.

  The whistle blew again. Fern slowed down, dropping to something like a human pace as she glided onward to the starting line. I rolled to a stop beside her, and gave serious thought to stretching out on the track for a nice nap. No one was skating on it at the moment, and if they decided to change that, they could just make me part of the obstacle course. Circle the track, try not to trip anyone, jump over the semi-conscious newbie sleeping at the starting line.

  “Not bad,” said Dani. “How are you feeling?”

  “Blerg,” I said.

  “Well, you’re not puking all over everything—and if you start to feel like that’s going to change, take out your mouth guard first—so that’s good.” Dani lifted her clipboard. “So far I think we like you. Leave me your number and we’ll get back to you next week.”

  I stared at her, panting and still fighting not to lay down on the track, and said, intelligently, “Huh?”

  “You’re tired and you smell like a dead moose; I don’t want you making any decisions in this condition,” said Dani. “Besides which, our team captains need to discuss your performance and decide whether they want to take a chance on you. We need skaters, but that doesn’t mean we’re desperate.”

  I kept staring at her for a moment longer, trying to make sense of what she was saying. Anger flared behind my eyes. They didn’t want me? I had gone to the trouble of trying out, I had volunteered to participate—which was not a thing I did lightly—and they didn’t want me? Well, screw them. I didn’t want them either. I didn’t…

  Fern flashed me a quick, shy sm
ile, there and gone so fast that I might have imagined it. I sighed. Cryptid community. Family duty.

  “Let me give you my cell,” I said.

  *

  They didn’t have showers at the warehouse, which seemed like an almost criminal omission after all the sweating we’d been doing. I stripped out of the shorts and tank top I’d been wearing for my audition, forced my sticky body back into my street clothes, and slouched to the curb where Elsie was waiting. She was leaning comfortably against the side of her car, looking like she was auditioning to be the latest roller derby pin-up girl, and the smirk on her smug, lovely face was almost enough to move me to violence.

  “Well?” she said. “Do I know where to find the perfect team sports for you, or do I know where to find the perfect team sports for you? The praise can begin now.”

  “They’re never going to find your body.” I shouldered past her, hip-checking her out of the way as I fumbled with the handle of the passenger side door. “I’ll tell your parents you gave me your car right after you bought a bus ticket to Los Angeles. They’ll believe me. They always believe me.”

  “And then Sarah will come over to read comics with my brother, and she’ll read the guilt plastered across your mind, and the jig will be up,” replied Elsie, unruffled by either my threats or my shoving. She pushed away from the car, strolling lazily around it to the driver’s side door. “What’s the big deal? You said you needed an activity. I found you an activity. An awesome activity full of hot chicks and violence.”

  “I’m not as interested in hot chicks as you are,” I said, sliding into the car. “The violence I like, but…I’m not even sure they’re going to take me. We may have just been wasting our time and getting my hopes up.”

  Too late, I realized what I had just said. Elsie slid into her seat, giving me one of her rare serious looks, and asked, “Getting your hopes up?”

  “I don’t suppose there’s any chance you’d be willing to forget that you heard that.”