“Look at this degenerate,” Mark-O said, looking up from the tattered paperback he was reading only to reach across the counter and punch Derrick in the dead center of his chest.
“At least I haven’t made a career of it,” Derrick said, which made Mark-O smirk.
Claire left them to their macho ritual and disappeared into the skate park—a cathedral of wood, concrete, and iron, every inch of it tagged by spray paint and stickers. It was her chance to have a space to herself for a few moments. To know that she was completely alone, completely safe.
Soon enough, of course, Derrick would come in and kick his board to the ground. And while he rarely talked to Claire when they skated, getting lost in his own past—in the joy she knew he felt every time the board was under him—a small part of her heart dropped every time he came into the room and that rare seclusion ended.
Depending on the day, other skaters would trickle in, some of them skipping school just like Claire. Eventually the entire room echoed with the metallic grind of trucks against rails, the wooden slap of boards, and the laughter, the laughter, the laughter—always rising up above the music, no matter how loud.
Claire put her board down and stared into the empty skate park, trying to visualize her path, her “line” as Derrick called it. When she first started skating, she’d get stuck in one spot for five, ten minutes, trying to figure out which direction to go—which path wouldn’t lead to a collision. Derrick always said skating meant claiming your place in the room, claiming your line, whether you were good or not.
She put a foot on the board, took a deep breath, and pushed off.
When she heard other people talk about the important things in their lives, the big things like family and friendship and love, they always described it as a feeling. Something electric and pulsing with life. You felt it in your ears, your heart. And maybe she had felt that before, when she played basketball. The thrill of a made shot. A last-second victory.
But skating was different. It emptied her and made the world quiet. Manageable, if only for a few moments at a time. When she inevitably fell, everything came back so powerfully, Claire was unsure if it was the rush of sound or the impact of the fall that took her breath away.
This time, she was up for only a half a minute before she fell, harder than usual, her helmet smacking against the concrete floor with a hollow pop that echoed across the cavernous space. She laid there for a second, watching her board continue dutifully on its original line when a voice said, “Oh, shit. Are you okay?”
No moment in her life passed without Claire being hyperaware of anyone and everyone who entered into an enclosed space. She sat with her back to the wall at restaurants, got on the bus or train last. If someone moved or reached into their jacket to pull out gloves, a book, anything, she would jump like the planet had lurched off its axis.
So, she knew Derrick was still talking to Mark-O. This room should be empty.
The voice called out again (breathing, breathing), but she could barely hear it now. The storm shot toward her like a missile. When a tall, rangy boy with long hair appeared at the top of one of the vert ramps, everything just stopped.
He slid down the ramp on his knees, picking up her board in one fluid movement as he stood up and walked toward her. She tried to yell for Derrick, but her voice stuck in her throat like a ball of ice.
The boy—he must’ve been close to her age—smiled nervously, holding the board out toward her. But Claire was essentially cowering below him (breathing, breathing), unable to move except her eyes, which darted around the room, up and down his body, looking for an escape, a threat, anything.
“Whoa—are you . . . guys! Guys.”
The boy looked back to his two friends, who were now standing at the top of the ramp, watching. One by one they slid down the smooth plywood, laughing as they walked toward Claire. The first boy seemed trapped now, too, as if her fear was a live wire that conducted through her body, paralyzing anyone who dared to get close.
The three boys looked no different than the countless skater boys Derrick had always called friends—no different than the ones who gave her casual glances when she managed to make it across the park without falling. The same boys who laughed at stupid jokes, using their sarcastic shorthand against each other like a straight razor.
The first one said, “I think she’s—I think there’s something wrong with her.”
This made the other two laugh.
“Don’t listen to what anybody says, Dark. This is exactly how you get a girl to go out with you.”
The kid—Dark?—knelt down in front of Claire slowly, hands out like you’d approach a cornered animal. “Are you here alone?”
This only made his friends howl with more laughter, but he ignored them. His eyes—deep blue and a striking contrast to his dyed-black hair and equally black clothes—were fixed on her. Claire tried to swallow, to push against the storm, but it was rising higher and higher and higher until it was just her nose and mouth above the water, barely pulling in air.
(Breathing, breathing.)
“Whoa. Hey . . .”
One of them went running to the lobby.
The other knelt down next to Dark. It might’ve been thirty seconds, maybe thirty minutes before Derrick and Mark-O came sprinting toward her. The five of them stood around her, asking questions, saying her name.
Looking like they’d seen a monster. Something worse.
Chapter Three
CLAIRE SIPPED WATER AS DERRICK TALKED TO THE BOYS. She could hear him telling them the basics. The broad strokes. He whispered, but it didn’t matter. She knew the story better than anyone.
It was right at the beginning of the day and it sounded like popcorn. She was pressed against two other students—Eleanor, her teammate for nearly ten years, and a freshman she didn’t know—under one of the giant metal staircases that had only been installed at Ford High School in the last five years.
She huddled beneath the metal as the popcorn (pop-pop-pop) went off around her, the sound slowly being overthrown by something new—a storm rushing into her ears. A silence that was neither quiet nor peaceful.
The next thing she remembered was screaming, throwing fists and kicking feet—they’d always told them to fight back—as the police tried to pull her out. Adrenaline rushed back into her body in one sudden jolt. Almost a year later, she could still feel the pain of that exact moment. The moment she became something different, something outside the rest of the world.
Of course, Derrick wasn’t saying that.
He’d use words like processing and healing and the event. She didn’t know if he dodged the real words—four dead, broken, school shooting—as a way to protect her or to protect himself. Either way, the three boys looked like they’d seen a ghost. And maybe they had. Maybe she wasn’t real anymore, and all of the past year was nothing more than a kind of residual energy, electric impulses. Leftover brain activity.
Derrick gave one of the kids a fist bump, which probably seemed cool to him in the moment, but made all the boys laugh under their breath when he turned toward Claire. He came over and picked up her board, fiddling with the trucks and checking the grip tape. When he was satisfied with it, he put the board back down and looked at his hands for a moment, as if he didn’t know how to fix them.