Skating Away

You rode the outwind of centrifugal force until you felt you’d spin right out of your own body.

Draw one of your cats, her father said

“You can’t do that,” Vanessa told her husband. “Our house will collapse.” Trillian’s father, John, was blasting away beneath their ancient wooden home. The earth was soft and chalky.

“I’ll dig the rest out by hand,” he told Vanessa. Trillian helped her father shovel out the dirt until a huge pile formed in the yard. “I’ll build a garden too,” he said.

“Please, Daddy, please,” Trillian had murmured to her father, pulling out the Daddy word she almost never used. Trillian wanted a concrete basement, a place to skate during Seattle’s long, damp winters. As tall and lanky as Vanessa had been at her age, Trillian showed neither her feelings nor a foreshadowing of Vanessa’s famous beauty.

With Trillian’s help, John poured concrete, smoothing it by hand until it was like glass. Once it dried, Trillian skated round and round, skates like wings on her feet. As she circled the basement, she swung her arms to increase velocity, freeing herself from the taunts that weighed her down at school.

John’s father, the Danish immigrant, had been a concrete man who expected his son to follow in his footsteps and eventually take over his successful business. John rebelled and worked summer fire crews to earn money for art school instead.

Vanessa turned her perfect face to her daughter after Trillian hitchhiked home from school. No way was she going to endure the bus. None of the girls sat with her. The boys made fun of her breasts. “How was your day?” Vanessa asked over her second, third, or tenth gulp of vodka.

For a time, Trillian sat with a boy from special ed. She read him stories. At first, he sat as far from her as he could, staring out the window. “He can’t even talk, you know,” the bus driver said. Trillian kept reading.

Then one day, she didn’t read. He tugged at one of her books. “That one,” he said. Later, Trillian brought art pads and showed him her drawings. Soon, he took one of her pens and drew scary pictures of monsters. “Night is bad,” he said, leaning against her. That day, she rode to the end of the bus line so that she and the boy were the only passengers left.

A man stood waiting beside the road.

As the man climbed the stairs to the bus and walked down the aisle, the boy wet his pants. The man hefted him like a sack of concrete from Trillian’s side.

The next day, the school went on lockdown, and officers made everyone stay in their rooms. Trillian learned that the boy told his teacher what the man did, and then the man showed up with a gun, threatening to blow everyone away.

“The day was good,” Trillian told her mother. She watched the cigarette, barely touched, that her mother snuffed beneath her heel. Her mind seized the image, holding and playing with it. Maybe she’d draw it, the smoke enfolding her hair like a crown. When Trillian drew someone, she imagined walking in their skin, their shame.

She hurried to her room and sat on the floor. She felt safest in her cave with her pencils and pads. Then, for hours, she drew until her notebook was full, but still she was never satisfied. The “smart one,” the “talented one.” The labels were a burden, left her heavy and faint, made her want to smoke cigarettes and drink all the tiny bottles her father collected on his business flights. Artist, for John, had ended up meaning art director for an advertising agency. For Trillian, it meant something else.

After her parents went to bed, she crouched outside their room, hoping for a translation of their murmuring. “Trillian has more talent than I ever had,” John told Vanessa late at night.

“Daddy, don’t deride yourself,” Vanessa said, her constant refrain.

But when her father complimented her on the drawings, Trillian tugged at her lank blonde hair and twisted it around her finger. “Do one of your cats,” John said.

“I’m way beyond that,” Trillian said. She picked up her skates and walked to the porch. “I’m going to skate around the block,” she shouted to Vanessa, who made a show of emerging onto the small porch.

“Don’t go past this one block,” Vanessa said.

“Sure Mom,” Trillian said, but Vanessa had already gone inside. Trillian had her mind on a cigarette, barely smoked, she’d noticed earlier. Her mind was like that. She would see the butt and later, after dark, return to collect it.

“That’s an ugly coat,” Brenda turned from the mirror in the girls’ restroom to face Trillian. Brenda, not the cheerleader type that most popular girls were, was somehow the most compelling person in the school. Trillian watched Brenda apply makeup until her eyes were heavy. She’d seen Brenda out on Highway 99 wearing a low white top with lacing across the front, shorts, and high heels. “You know,” Brenda said thoughtfully, “You could really be cute if you tried. Like if you washed your hair.”

“Get used to it. I like this coat,” Trillian said. “It’s my mother’s. I’m growing dreads. I think I’ll dye them orange. What do you think?” When Brenda ignored her, Trillian said, “I see you up on the highway. You could get killed, you know.”

“Grow up,” Brenda said. “Do you ride in limousines like I do?”

“I’ll go with you,” Trillian said.

After school, Trillian walked Brenda to the corner where the arterial met the highway. Brenda stood motionless, leaning slightly against a pole. A passing driver stared, and Trillian wondered if he knew she and Brenda were just fourteen, whether he would circle back later to pick Brenda up, and how many times in an evening this might happen.

“Mom, can I go to the skating rink Friday?” she asked that evening after Vanessa was sufficiently sloshed so that she would remember nothing the following day.

“Have you been smoking?” Vanessa said. “You have. I smell it all over you.” She lifted a piece of Trillian’s hair.

“It’s the girls at school,” Trillian said. She looked directly into her mother’s eyes and widened her own slightly. “You should see the restrooms. I can’t breathe.” Vanessa knew she was lying, and Trillian knew that Vanessa knew. But it was a ritual they had to play together every night.

“You can’t go to the rink,” Vanessa said. She ran a dry sponge over the counter, but the crusted grime had been there for so long it appeared she was dancing instead of washing. “I’ve seen the kids who hang around there.” She lifted a glass of clear liquid. “Eight liters every day!” she sang merrily. Though water was what she poured into the glasses of her many friends, Vanessa filled her own pitcher with vodka, neat. Trillian knew this because once, breathless from skating, she gulped from her mother’s glass.

And then she knew she’d found herself. This was God. She was hot and cold at the same time. She was white light. She was home. She was her mother and father and the child she’d not yet had.

For the first time in her life, Trillian felt normal.

“There’s a competition,” Trillian raised her voice into the nasal whine of an innocent who knew nothing of cigarettes or vodka or girls at school who carved initials into their arms and legs and chests. “I am going to win.”

“You’ll get murdered,” Vanessa said vaguely. “Nobody gets popular by winning.” Although at one time her mother could drink anyone under the table, she seemed to be losing her touch. Already, she was fading off. “That’s where the Green River Killer finds his victims, you know.” Vanessa loved books about serial killers, particularly the unsolved cases, and this stretch where they lived had more than its share.

“You shouldn’t obsess about killers,” Trillian said. “It does something to a person’s mind, you know. Reading that stuff.”

“Well, they’re best-sellers,” Vanessa said. “So at least I’m not alone in my perversion.”

The school hallways were a gauntlet of slamming lockers and strangers. Trillian walked past the door to her classroom, then back out the school’s entrance. The guard smiled at her. “Excused?” he asked.

Trillian smiled back. “Running late,” she said. “Skating away.”

It was amazing how easy it was to break into Brenda’s house. Everything inside was white, built on many levels for no reason Trillian could see. She opened the refrigerator and ate one piece of everything: brownies without nuts, triple caramel chunk ice cream, a gulp of chai. In Brenda’s room, she tried on makeup. It was as if she were painting her own portrait, and then she, Trillian, emerged from empty air. She chose a blouse from Brenda’s closet and pulled it on.

One by one, Brenda’s mother, father, and brother arrived home. Trillian sat still and erect in the raised den. As each member of Brenda’s family passed the room, not one looked inside. It was as if Trillian were invisible.

It only took one ride to arrive at the rink. Except for the basement, it had the best skating surface in the world. Before she entered, Trillian stopped, as always, at the Little Chapel of the Field. Though she had rarely been to church, she loved to kneel in front of the chapel and gaze inside. Today, though, the doll-sized space was filled with a body. It was a girl, sprawled beneath a blanket. On the highway, cars roared by. How did she even crawl inside?

The rink was musty and smelled of sweat, feet and bodies, popcorn and hot dogs, burnt coffee. Trillian laced up her skates. The competition wasn’t about how well you skated. Trillian was one of the best skaters there, but now she was outgrowing it. The rink was the transition to parties, to making out, then making love. You rode the outwind of centrifugal force until you felt you’d spin right out of your own body.

She skated the edge. She let herself empty, then drew shapes in her mind onto blank pages.

The DJ started a contest: name the tune he was playing, but Trillian ignored the easy ones. As kids clambered up to claim their candy, their free tickets, whatever, she smiled and tugged at her hair.

She spun, thinking of the perfect butt she’d passed that she’d later retrieve, of the first inhalation. Out of nowhere, skating in the opposite direction, Brenda appeared. “Why are you wearing my blouse?” she screamed as the circle swept her away.

The DJ, perhaps tired of handing out candy to children, played a tune that nobody knew. Trillian knew in the way she sometimes knew things, that nobody in the room would recognize it, and that she, at last, would win.

When the DJ was about to call the tune, Trillian skated to the place below his feet.

“Bridge Over the River Kwai,” she murmured, twisting her finger through her hair.

“You sure?” he said. “How’d you know that? How the hell do you know that?” He leaned out from his booth to stare down at the tall, thin girl with her dirty blonde hair and her bright orange blouse. She was dancing on her skates, arms not reaching for the prize.

Trillian shrugged. “It’s the theme song,” she said. “Just the theme song.”

Before the man could announce the prize, toss her treat into empty swirling space, Trillian skated away. First, she would find Brenda, and together, they would lift the girl from the Chapel and carry her to safety.

Originally published in Front Row Center, a publication of Theatre Latte Da in Minneapolis, solicited by guys I met in a smoking cessation workshop