12:00 6 June

The roller rink was in a big building that shared space with its upstairs neighbor the local little league.

I knew this from personal experience, which had not gone well.

One moment I was checking out a ladybug hanging out on a dandelion in the outfield. The next moment I was waking up with baseball stitches imprinted on my head and possibly a concussion.

I liked sports, they just didn’t always like me.

But today will be different! I resolved. Roller-skating was super fun, according to the movies and the vague memory I had of doing it as a seven-year-old. I was going to enjoy it, or die trying.

Maybe scratch that last bit.

Purely because we thought it was funny to mess with Andrew, Melody and I decided to dress as alike as we could – both of us in tan cargo shorts and converse, I wore a black Runaways t-shirt I’d picked up, and Mel had an Avril Lavigne shirt. We even made sure our hair parted the same. Mom gave us a Look when we came down the stairs.

“Do I want to know?”

“Andrew couldn’t tell us apart the first time he saw us together,” I said.

“We thought it would be funny to lean into it,” Mel added.

Mom smiled and shook her head. “Far be it from me to stop you. That would probably be hypocritical anyway,” she admitted as we headed out to the car.

“Huh? Why?”

“Well, when Cheryl was in high school, I still looked close enough to her age that people mixed us up sometimes,” she explained while Mel and I tussled over who got the front seat. “If we did our makeup right we could even fool Mom and Dad.”

“Should you be giving us ideas?” I asked.

“And do Gram and Grandpa know about this?”

Mom just laughed, and then made us both get in the back. She drove us to the rink, and once we’d parked she came inside with us so she could meet Andrew’s parental unit/s.

We walked into the main room and saw a number of kids milling around near the function room off to the side; Andrew was talking to Max as we walked up to him.

The whole place had fairly low ceilings, or seemed that way because of how the ceiling was constructed and the contrast between the dark color of the ceiling, the grey carpet of the outside area, and the pale linoleum rink floor. The lights were fairly low in the main room, which let the multicolored lights of the disco-ball-thing be more noticeable as they spun around the rink.

“Hey!!” Andrew started happily as he saw us; then he trailed off and looked at us flatly. “You’re doing this to screw with me, aren’t you.”

“Yep!” “Is it that obvious?”

He ran a hand down his face. “Well, thanks for coming.”

“‘Course! Where do you want the presents?”

He directed us into the room; there were white plastic tables put together in the middle for whenever we did cake and such, and to the side of the room was another table with presents on it. We added ours to the pile and then returned to the group, where Andrew introduced us around. I did not retain any of the string of ten or so names, much as I might have wanted to.

“Hey, guys,” Max said, and we quickly traded high-fives.

“So, what’s the plan?” Mel asked.

“Cake and presents last,” Andrew said. “May as well go up and get your skates.”

“You know, I’m not sure I’ve ever been to a birthday party at a roller rink?” Mel mused.

“I’ve been to a couple but I’d never actually had one here, so I figured it was about time. And this is about the last year it’ll still be cool,” he repeated.

“Definitely better than bowling,” Kelly said, rocking up next to us. I raised an eyebrow.

“What’s wrong with bowling?”

“You like bowling? What are you, forty?”

“Well, I don’t hate it.” Though to be fair, other than wii sports bowling it had been a very long time.

Mom came up to us before we could start for the counter.

“Alright kiddos, I’ll be back to get you around four, okay?”

“Okay, bye mom!” “Thanks!”

I hugged her, and then waved her off so I could goof off in peace.

“That was your mom?” Andrew asked. He had an expression on his face I couldn’t identify, not that I was great at identifying expressions.

“Yeah, why?”

He shook his head. “Nothing, just… you must not look like your dad at all.”

He turned around to gather all his other friends up before I could respond. I’d always thought I looked like my mom, but, was it really that much? It wasn’t like I had anything against my dad – he was certainly the best dad I’d ever had – but after so many times being told I looked like him, the best description I could think of for the feeling Andrew’s comment gave me was relief. Not that I had any idea why.

I turned my perplexed expression toward Mel, and she shrugged.

“I mean, he’s not wrong. We both mostly look like our moms.”

“Huh.”

I was distracted by Bailey announcing her presence with a hug.

“Hi guys!”

She gave Mel a hug too while we all said hi, and then we finally went up to the counter to get skates. Which involved talking to someone and was thus annoying and uncomfortable but at least it was over quickly. We claimed a bench where we could start putting them on.

Max flicked one of the wheels on his skate with a whirrr, and watched it spin. “This isn’t gonna go very well for you, is it?” he said thoughtfully. I shook my head.

“I don’t think I should really expect it to, no.”

“You can, uh, hang onto my arm or something, dude. If you want,” Bailey offered.

“Thanks Bay, that’d be great, I’d love to get out of this without any new bruises.”

I tied my skates on – just standard four-wheel roller skates, I was not confident enough to try inline ones – and immediately wobbled, grabbing Bailey for support. Mel snickered.

“So I’m guessing you don’t wanna try for roller derby with me,” Kelly observed. I was pretty sure she was joking, but I could definitely picture her doing it.

“If I could get to the point where all of my injuries were caused by someone else, maybe,” I said as I managed to stand up. “In my defense, I haven’t done this since I was like, seven.”

Mel finished putting her skates on, stood up, and immediately fell over.

###

13:00 6 June

Somewhere I’d once heard the phrase ‘like Bambi on ice’. For the first half hour or so, that had very much been accurate. Mel was just as out of practice as I was, and eventually I got the feeling Bailey wanted to actually skate instead of just prying my hands off the bar on the rink wall so I convinced her to leave us with each other. Once we finally had the hang of it again we started speeding up, until we were racing around the rim of the rink. I was leading a few yards when someone, presumably not having seen us, came toward us from the opposite direction and I swerved further away from the edge.

Ah, they’ve waxed the rink recently, I noticed, roughly at the moment my second foot left the ground.

Y’know what, I said to myself or the ceiling or the Universe at large, I’m not even gonna bother hurting anymore. From now on, I was gonna treat these sorts of accidents like I was Buster Keaton, and life was a silent film.

I used all that flexibility I’d been working on, plus my skill at flips learned from the trampoline, to pull my knees to my shoulders and lunge quickly forward and hop to my feet. Which would absolutely have been impressive, had I not forgotten I was wearing skates.

“You just love this, don’t you,” I asked the ceiling once I had my breath back. It didn’t answer. At least the dancing lights were from the disco ball, rather than inside my head, so other than a bit of an ache in my tailbone and shoulders I was probably fine.

“Hahaholy shit dude, are you okay?” Mel said. She tried to stop next to me and kneel down, and immediately fell over instead.

“Oh, totally fine,” I told her. “Aren’t the lights lovely this time of year?”

“Gorgeous,” Mel said, in a tone that told me it had been a toss-up between that an ‘ow’. “I think they waxed the rink or something.”

“Oh, I noticed.”

Max appeared in my range of vision at that point, skating to a stop above us.

“You skate like Ranma,” he said.

“Thanks for that.”

The number of times this sort of thing had happened lately seemed disproportionate, but really only because it stood out as an odd string of coincidences. After Bailey and Max helped us up, we went back to skating and things went just fine.

“Yes! I managed the splits! Somebody please help me up. Ow. Ow. Ow ow ow.”

Well, mostly fine.

About halfway through the party, Mel and I ducked into the bathroom to quickly swap shirts in the disabled stall; and, for the first or maybe second time, something caught my attention and suggested a point. I brought it up as I slipped on the Avril Lavigne tee.

“Mel, if we end up getting a gig – should I wear a bra?”

She blinked and then raised an eyebrow.

“Do you… want to wear a bra?”

How’s a guy supposed to respond to a question like that?

“Not… particularly? I just thought it might look weird if I didn’t.”

“Hm.” She thought for a moment, or possibly just stared at the ceiling. “Yeah, that sorta makes sense. Most of the girls our age would be…”

Someone else came into the bathroom, and Mel shrugged. “We’ll talk about it later.”

###

15:09 1 June

I’d been skating with Bailey again for a while when a loud, sharp whistle cut through the music, and we looked over to see Andrew’s mom with two fingers in her mouth. She whistled again to make sure she had everyone’s attention.

“Alright, kids, time for presents and cake!”

We headed that way, peeling off our skates once we were out of the rink, and met up with Kelly and Mel. I could tell Kelly had been putting in more effort than I had by how sweaty her forehead had gotten. We all sat down around the big table in the function room, and then Kelly flopped down over Mel’s and my laps.

“Ew, getoff, you’re all sweaty!” I protested, while Mel just tried to shove.

“Excuse you, I’m not sweaty, I’m glowing,” she said faux-snobbily. Then Mel and I succeeded, and she hit the floor with a yelp.

“Bitch, that hurt!” she said, though I could tell she wasn’t really mad and meant ‘bitch’ in about the same way she said ‘dude’.

She scrambled back up into her chair next to Mel as Andrew’s dad stacked up presents in front of his spot at the head of the table.

He started digging in, eventually ending with the ones from Mel and I; we’d bought him two teen sports mysteries by John Feinstein, Last Shot and Vanishing Act. He read the dust jacket blurb on the first one and looked excited.

“Thanks, Jack!” He said, looking at Mel.

“You’re welcome!” I said brightly. Andrew looked at me, confused, and then back at Mel, frowning.

“Man!” he protested. The girls and Max and I laughed. “They do this all the time!” Andrew explained to the rest of his friends. “You swapped shirts, didn’t you?”

We nodded. “Yep!”

He opened Mel’s next, and looked very intently at her. “Thank you, Melody.”

“You’re welcome!” I said at the same time she did. She laughed and smacked me on the shoulder, and Andrew put his face in his hands.

“I hate you guys,” he groaned. “Let’s do cake.”

We all sang happy birthday – I used my band voice, because it was fun – and his mom brought out the cake. It was a chocolate ice cream cake, apparently at Andrew’s request, which proved I had excellent taste in friends. And in cake.

After cake, it was back out to the rink for a little longer as people started to trickle out, and then Mom showed up and we went home.

“Have fun?”

“It was great!” Mel said happily. “Thanks for letting me steal your friends, Jack.”

“Steal? They’re living people! And you kidnapped them fair and square.”

Mel giggled, and I saw Mom smiling at us in the rearview mirror. It reflected my own feelings; lately, I was having the time of my life. Whatever gave me the opportunity to redo it, or enjoy it more by seeing how life could have been, or whatever the situation was, I was so incredibly grateful.

###

12:20 7 June

Sunday, I mostly just hurt. Aren’t teenagers supposed to be less… breakable, than adults?

Mel and Bailey and I ended up just vegging out and watching cartoons, and making plans to go to the swimming pool on Tuesday.

###

11:23 8 June

Mel had just run upstairs to the bathroom, and I was pausing Road to El Dorado, when I heard someone come up to the front door. I looked out the window; it was the UPS truck. The guy left a package on the front step and went back to the truck.

Huh. I wonder who ordered something?

I hopped off the couch and opened the door, then picked up the package, reading the label as I closed the door with my foot.

It was addressed to me.

Oh shit, that’s right!

I ran the box upstairs and cracked it open with my swiss army knife. There were a bunch of little pill bottles, with two different types of pills; I read the instructions on how to take them real quick, dumped out a dose of each, then tossed the papers in my trash can once I was done with them and the bottles in my underwear drawer. I went downstairs, broke down the box and threw it in the trash bin in the garage, and then downed a glass of milk.

I looked at the pills in my hand – one round white one, and two of the pink tablets. They were shaking for some reason – wait, no.

Why is my body vibrating?

Weird.

Well, down the hatch!