Skating Forward

     Wires dangle above me. I reach up to the ceiling of the station wagon and pull at the metal, wrapping the gritty silver around my fingers. The air conditioning blasts heat, which smells like last year’s anatomy class—full of dying cats and factory chemicals. Bits of plastic foam fall from the ceiling, where Ryan was here and Make LOVE not WAR and various expletives are carved. My legs are stuck to the hot leather, my auburn hair is scratchy in its high ponytail, and my eyes stare straight ahead. Dust-covered children and gas station pumps and barbed wire fences blend together, forming one continuous strip of ever-changing images. My lashes flutter, but I can’t close my eyes. I’m hypnotized by this desert town.

     Stella grips the wheel with one hand as she flips through the radio stations. Country blasts for a few seconds, a cheesy ballad about how our love just wasn’t right, then the Jeep fills with rap. Finally, she settles on Latina pop. The song is fast, full of trumpets and men yelling in words I don’t understand. The chorus is jumbled and I feel lost in its secret language and overlapping Mariachi instruments.

     “Mel, pass me the cigarettes,” she says. I lean forward, yellow dress crinkling as I flip through her magazines and various half-chewed packs of gum, searching for the pack of Marlboros. I grab two from the carton and stick one in her mouth, passing her our purple lighter.

     “Thanks,” she mutters, lips clenched around the cigarette. I don’t respond.

     As I breathe in tar, I try not to think about what I’m leaving behind. I’m here and home is there and between us is a long highway surrounded by dusty plains and car dealerships. That part of me is gone.

     I toss my dead cigarette butt out the window, the warmth still tingling on my fingertips, and look back as it flips over and over in the hot breeze. Suddenly it disappears into the orange dust.

     I reach back into the bag and grab a magazine. Superficial words in my lap and mysterious words in my ears, I feel lost in this car, these planes of sand, the endless bare blue sky above me. And we drive forward, trapped in our seatbelts, towards a new life.

     We pull over. I lean my head back against the scratchy headrest, bracing my neck, as the car bumps over the ash-colored gravel of the gas station. The Chevron sign glimmers above us in the twilight, red and blue shining bright in the sea of dust and stucco homes and pale faces.

     “You hungry? I’m gonna get some Red Vines,” says Stella into the rear-view mirror as she coats her lips with purple gloss. They look like shining bruises.

     “Can you just grab me a plain coffee? I’ll fill the tank.” I grab the door handle, skin burning from the stinging hot metal, and flick it open. I reach down for shoes and see my heels, pale pink and splayed out on the carpet. I pull them on and stretch my legs out of the car. It’s the first time I’ve walked since last night, and my ankles creak as they bend towards the ground. Dust coats my crimson feet as I make my way to the pump.

     As Stella flirts with the pimply cashier, her laugh radiating through the glass walls, I glance down at the gold cell phone resting in my dress pocket. Nineteen missed calls.

     Stella slams out of the food mart, transparent white bag hanging from her thin wrist like a jellyfish drifting through open water. Every couple seconds, she reaches down to run her hand over her red silk dress, which trembles in the warm breeze.

    “Here,” she says, thrusting an icy bottle in my hand. I glance down at the sweaty plastic and see that it contains some sort of caramel mocha blended milk beverage.

     “Shotgun!” Stella calls as she hops into the passenger’s seat.

     I take the driver’s seat and pull off my heels again, tossing them into the backseat abyss of purple fuzzy blankets and grease-stained burger bags and crumpled cardigan sweaters and golden necklaces and the few other articles of clothing we grabbed last night. Barefoot, I press down on the gas.

     We drift. Each town brings the same restaurants and gas stations, the same cement buildings and yellow trees brimming with moonlight. I clutch, shift, accelerate, focusing on the road instead of the vibrating phone that tickles my leg.

     Stella’s snoring, long breathes breaking like waves each second. Mouth open, she looks more serene than usual, more childlike. I want to sing her a lullaby, like when we were young and I was the mommy and she was the baby. I remember the days when our parents would sit out in the backyard and drink beers while the cousins played together inside. Stella and I would lock ourselves in my room away from the screaming younger cousins and create Barbie palaces or act out commercials or create homes, each of us a character in the imaginary family. I miss that.

     We’re in a larger town now, with strings of lights dangling from tree to tree along each street. Suddenly, on the right, a teal building looms over the highway. ICE RINK is painted on one of the walls. I slow.

    I glance back and forth between the frosted windows of the building and the paved road, which glows under the moonlight. Wrinkling billboard photos of children figure-skating unravel from the brick walls. Their smiles are old, gray, and yet they radiate above me. I can almost feel myself sliding onto the ice, air crisp and cold, blades digging deep. I suck in my breath and spin the wheel, turning us into the vacant parking lot.

     Stella’s leaning against the window, glass acting as her pillow. If I wake her, I know she won’t understand my need to touch the ice, to feel the water frozen in place. She never understood things like skating in circles, swimming in lanes, running laps—she always said they were mundane. Even as children, I remember the looks she gave me when Aunt Sue picked me up from the rink. Her eyes crawled up and down my tight pink dress, pupils perpetually critical. I remember the middle school teasing, the competitions she refused to attend, the day I quit.

     The car’s still on, rumbling, giving the illusion that we’re moving forward. I flip the key, and suddenly the engine is quiet. The air conditioning stops. All I hear is the whir of the hot night breeze outside and an airplane passing, its wings piercing through clouds. Then everything is silent.

     I crank my window open, then pull at a lever to release my seat down down down. I reach behind my head into the piles of clothing. After fumbling around for a few minutes, I find the shoebox. It’s made of cardboard, coated in a thin layer of red plastic, and still open from when I tossed them in.            

     I found them last night in the dark of my closet. Heart pumping in my chest, I’d been grabbing clothes and shoes and makeup when I felt something sharp pierce my palm. I bit my tongue in pain, afraid of waking my parents, who were sleeping behind the paper-thin wall to my right. After a couple minutes of rummaging through bits of fabric from former sewing projects and old sneakers caked in mud and American Girl magazines long forgotten, I found the perpetrator—one of my figure skates. I tracked down the other one and stowed the pair in a shoe box, adding it to my trash bag of possessions for California. I didn’t think I’d need them so soon.

     For now, the box remains shut. I just grip it to my chest and push open the door, pink heels strapped to my feet, and quietly close Stella into the car. I cross the pavement, heat and darkness engulfing me, towards the green brick.

     The front doors are clamped shut. There’s a glass door around the side, with a neon pink “Employees Only!!!” sign taped on the inside. After fiddling with the doorknob, like in the movies, I still can’t get it open. Locked. I continue to the next wall, where a brown, unmarked door seems to connect to some sort of closet. I lean against the wood, and surprisingly, the door creaks open. I step into the darkness and stumble towards the ice.

     Pitch black all around me. Nervous, I shuffle forward, tripping over rods and brooms and pieces of wood. My arms are in front of me, box tucked into my armpit, and I feel like one of those zombies in the Scooby Doo movies I used to watch with Stella when we were kids. Their arms would bend forwards, eyes white and peeling, backs straight like planks. They always seemed so lost to me, stuck dead in the world of the thriving. I can’t believe what I’ve become.

     My hand hits cement. I let my body fall against the wall, gripping the brick as I shuffle to the right, feeling for a door. I feel trapped in the darkness, like a fish moved from a tropical reef into the tank of someone’s suburban home. I can’t find a way out. Suddenly, my nails scratch against metal screws, and I feel wood. I rub the door, searching for a knob, and finally find a bar. I pull it down, push the door, and step into glowing blue.

     The cold falls over me. My bare legs are scattered with goosebumps, skin white under the fluorescent bulbs. I shiver and look out at the oval of ice, blocked off only by short walls. I’ve found the rink.

     They must have cleaned the ice just before closing. The surface is how I always loved it—slick, wet. It had always seemed so fragile like this, as if I could fall right through the surface into a sea of swirling ice cycles and mermaids.

     I sit down on a cold plastic bench and open the box. I pull the white leather over my right foot. The skate immediately forms to my heel, like no time has gone by. I pull on the other, lace them both up, and stand, ankles wobbly on the foam floor. I walk over to the plastic wall and pull one leg over, then the other, and slowly release myself onto the ice.

     I slide forward. I remember when I used to skate on empty rinks like this before school, my coach watching from the sidelines. He’d scream that I needed to go faster, that I needed to have better posture, that I needed to smile more, that I needed to land more quietly, that I needed to get right back up if I fell and do two hundred spins. Now it’s quiet. I feel unbalanced on the ice as I slowly step up and down, body jerky, one hand gripping the wall.

    It only takes a few minutes for my body to remember how to skate. My hips swivel as I make each turn, and I get faster and faster. The cold kisses my bare body. But I don’t let go of the wall.

    As I gain full speed, my hand starts to chafe against the plastic. I know I can skate without the wall, that I can spin like before, in the middle of the ice. But I’m scared to separate, to split from the support like a dividing chromosome. I let go for a second. I hold on again. Then I release and turn towards the center.

     Now, on my own, I skate faster. The skirt of my dress levitates higher and higher, cold sweeping up over my body, but I’m warm deep inside. I breathe fast, each exhale releasing hot air that hits my face as I fly across the ice.

     Last night at prom, it had been like this. Sweaty, I had felt my heart beating loud as I’d danced against boys, whispering goodbye, with graduation in just a few days. I’d gripped my friends’ hands, screaming over the blasting rap about how close we were to the end of high school, how much we’d miss each other. Time had spun forward—until Stella had come and dragged me into the bathroom.         

Black tears dripping down her face, the seconds had ticked by slowly as she’d told me about how she’d caught Ryan with Sarah, how she didn’t want to go home alone tonight to her parents in their separate beds, how she needed to leave now but had nowhere to go. I’d sat quietly, waiting for her to calm down, wiping the tears from her cheeks. These outbursts were fairly frequent throughout high school, and I knew that I had to just listen and agree with whatever she said for the anger and sadness to dissipate.

     “Mel,” she’d whispered. “Let’s just go. Let’s leave now and drive to California and never look back.”

     Drunk with vodka and music and adrenaline from dancing, I’d tried to think as the room had spun around and around. It was a bad idea to listen to Stella, but I couldn’t leave her alone. I was never able to say no. Within minutes, she drove me home, I grabbed my stuff, and we left.

     I feel like I’m flying now, the ice splintering under my skates and releasing tiny drops of water onto my legs. I close my eyes and picture last night. I’d glanced into my parents’ room before climbing out of the hallway window, taking in their quiet faces for one last time. Stella had always said our family was boring, our sets of parents matching the rest of our dull town. I’d nodded along, said yes, condemning everything that had created me—though perhaps the only thing worth criticizing is whatever taught me to mindlessly agree.

     Now, after quitting, leaving, ignoring my voice for years, I’m in this ice rink, alone under the glowing blue lights. Stella always said that skating in circles was pointless, that life should be packed with constant exploration, not repeated trails. But maybe running away from my path has only made me more lost. Maybe I can look at each event in my life, at the ice scraped away from each previous skate around the rink, and see myself against the bare white of the ice as a person, ever changing and developing and learning. I can’t run forever.

     I reach into my pocket and pull out my cell.

     “Mom, take me home.”

     I’m skating forward above the fragile ice, cheeks pink and warm. I slice through the air, leaving a trail of chipped ice behind me to be re-discovered in my next loop.

I’m skating forward.