Chapter Two:

Amy Goes Rolling

With Mrs. Komori creating me from thin air and her own childhood, and Emily gone with her friends so much, I learned to amuse myself.  How I chose to do that was with a pair of inline skates I found in Emily's closet.  If I wore three pairs of socks, I could wear the skates and stumble around in them out on our driveway to my heart's content. Mrs. Komori saw me one morning, and took me to Toys-R-Us and bought me an inexpensive pair my size, plus some pads and a helmet and I took to skating right away, as if I’d been born with wheels on my feet.

Since I weighed about as much as if I'd been carved from balsa wood, flat surface skating came easy for me. Looking for a challenge one afternoon, I tossed on the last remaining pair of my humungous boy's pants and a tee, my helmet and knee pads and headed the empty parking lot that passed for the local skate park. 

Where those same skater punks who harassed me hung out when they weren’t propping up the dry fountain at the mall or huffing glue.

When I first got to the skate park and saw them there, I almost turned around and went home.  I could feel fear, palpable and strong, like a clammy hand around my chest and stomach, squeezing.  I trembled with adrenaline, ready for fight or flight.  Somehow, I forced myself to stay.  I just made sure I kept as far from them as possible without rolling on the sidewalk.  It wasn’t long before they noticed me gliding around by myself at the far end of the lot.

First came giggles, then coughs.  After that didn’t work, they started upping the ante with nasty sexual remarks that got louder and more pornographically detailed until they caused my face to burn.  But they directed their most vicious remarks at my inline skates.

Scared to the point of almost peeing in my pants by them, I still showed up day after day, just to prove something to them and myself.  I skated through a shitstorm of verbal abuse.

“Look at that stupid bitch,” one kid would say and I’d fume and try a 360—or even a 180-- crack up and land with a loud, “OOF!” and a clatter of plastic, narrowly avoiding the shattered beer bottles glittering diamond-like on the lumpy asphalt.  If I hadn’t had that helmet, I would have scrambled my brains.

The umpteenth time I destroyed myself in one of my spectacular, sprawling, incredibly painful falls, one of the kids ironically called me “Maki,” after an aggressive skater who had recently been on ESPN.  His buddies had no idea who she was, so he explained it like this:  “She looks like that fuckin’ Maki off that rollerblading shit.  Did you see that the other day?”

“Fuckin’ rollerbladers, dude.  Get that weak shit outta here.”

“I’d fuck that Brazilian chick, though, dude.”

“Why don’t you fuckin’ go home and play with your precious little Barbie dolls, Maki?” another one said.

“Why don’t you go home and play with your precious little dick?” I told him.  I got up with my head turned away from them so they wouldn’t see my shameful tears, wiped them away on my shoulder.  I looked down at my bony brown forearms, my dumb arms with little pills of rubbed-off skin and shiny red blood droplets starting to bead up among them, then over at him with narrowed eyes and the boys all reacted with mock fright, trying to embarrass me more.

But as the days went by, I learned a lot of the intimidation they’d aimed at me was from their own internal insecurities.  They could glide around on their skateboards and do ollies and kick flips and 540s, and curse and spit and call me a stupid girl and a rollerblader, but they weren’t actually going to do anything physically.  They were too scared of each other and their opinions to risk humiliation if I proved to be a little wildcat or something.  They weren’t even trying to break me, I realized.

They were trying to break me in.  Finally, one of them actually talked to me like a human being.

“Hey, Maki,” he said from under his blond hair, his eyes squinting at me, his head at an angle.  He held his skate deck under his arm, and I could see blood running down from his elbow in bright rivulets, a startling crimsom against his pale skin.

“What?” I said with an exasperated snort.

“Where you from?”

“Cali,” I lied.  “My name’s not Maki.”

“Oh?  What is it?”

“Ma—my name is Amy.”

“How come you do rollerblading?”

“It’s not rollerblading. Roller Blades is a brand name.  These are…”  Actually, I didn’t know what brand my skates were.  El Cheapo Grandos from Toys-R-Us or something.

“Whatever.  How come you do it?  You’re like the only kid I know who does it.”

I decided to play it tough, with a thundering in my chest making me feel anything but.  “What makes you think you know me?”

He kind of smiled, his upper lip rising to show perfect white teeth, the results of his parents’ belief in high-priced orthodontia.  About an hour later, he’d broken out all the front ones and his mouth was a huge red smear that made everyone forget about his damaged elbow.  He cried like a baby and I threw up twice before his parents came to take him to the ER or dentist or wherever.  But by the time that happened, I was grudgingly accepted as part of the tribe.  The girl who was into the lamest, most weak-ass shit anyone could be into, but with her own little niche nevertheless.

Later that summer, someone built a wooden vert and I set about learning how to do what I learned the aggressive skaters called “pumping it,” which sounded nasty but was anything but.  Since everyone around me was a skateboarder, I had to figure it out for myself from skating videos and magazines.  Starting in the middle, I rode up, back down, up, back and forth like a timid old lady re-learning how to walk after rehabbing a broken hip, trying to go higher and higher while everyone waited, their impatient energy making me push myself.  It was scary as hell at first, but once I gave into gravity and started tucking into the drop, I found myself going high and higher up the vert walls.  Pumping on a vert.  Now I was almost skating for real.

My breakthrough was when I managed to do a 180 without falling to my knees and sliding down amid the same mocking, egalitarian laughter that greeted the boys’ crashes.  With that figured out, I got higher and higher up the vert walls with every run until one spectacular afternoon I reached the coping… and went above it.

I shrieked with joy!

And because I was so light, I could throw my bird-weight body up until I felt almost as if I were flying and not care if I broke my neck.  I’d explode upward into the sun, these crazy high-pitched sounds coming out of my lungs and throat in a completely involuntary reaction.  It felt so good, I almost wet my pants.  I was reusable like the space shuttle, launching myself over and over, rising ever upward.  Total fucking rapture!

As soon as everyone saw how massive my airs were, they re-nicknamed me Ayumi, after another Japanese professional skater-- not that I was anywhere near her class—because it was closer to my real name. 

This time I didn’t mind having a nickname because I was actually becoming better at riding the vert—and everyone enjoyed my sliding, crashing failures at doing anything more than a 180, although I tried and tried to do 360s and once even a flatspin-- than most of the local posers on their skateboards.  There were a few hardcore guys who were miles better than the rest, of course.  But fear of bodily harm kept the rank and file somewhat in check, whereas vert rash made me feel strong again.

Badass in a way I'd never even felt when I had XY chromosomes.  Kinda.  To an extent...

Once I’d proven I could skate with the woodpushers and take their shit, the boys started getting other ideas about me, and that was definitely not something I wanted or needed. I had just about reached a point where, when I skated, I could almost forget I was girl; suddenly, I ran into a reminder of it, as big as a billboard and as brightly lit.

"Hey, Ayumi," my new friend Patrick, he of the newly-repaired grillwork (his smile still wasn't quite the same as it had been the day he first dared talk to me), said as I painted flowers on his skate deck with a paint marker, my tongue sticking out from concentration.  I could feel his hot breath on my bare neck and I was vaguely considering brushing him away as if he were a fly or gnat.  He was leaning way over, getting a little closer with every breath.

"I'm doing this, dude," I told him softly.  I intently formed a petal.

"I finally got a fuckin’ Playstation for my birthday.  Wanna come over?"

I was about to say, “Sure,” when Patrick did something that made me shy away like a skittish kitten.  He reached out and started stroking a tuft of my hair behind my ear in this flirtatious way, with the backs of his fingers against my neck.  As I squirmed, I looked up at him and he had this sex-creep expression in his eyes that set me off in a major way.

"Fuck you!" I snarled.  I threw the marker at him, pushed him on his ass. As I skated away, I could feel his and everyone else’s admiring looks all over me as they poked loud, braying fun at Patrick for liking boyish Ayumi the way guys like girls, and at me for getting so freaked out about it.  All I could think was, Don't look at me like that! Don't think those things about me!

I stopped, wheeled around, balled my fists on my hips and jeered, "Fuck all you little Playstation-playing pussies!"

Immediately, everyone shut up. They looked so stupid, like a bunch of dressed-up chimps, I started laughing my ass off. I felt like Emily all of a sudden.

Patrick wasn't quite so friendly the rest of the day, and there weren't so many one-of-the-gang put-downs directed at me.  I got a wide berth.

A few girls had just started coming around the vert, so I hung with them when I wasn't up.  We chatted about skating and general topics like school and music.  It didn't last long.

The Patrick incident had flamed out one of the engines, but the next thing sent the Amyplane right into the mountain.  This girl flat out told me, "Geez, Amy, I wish you were a guy-- you'd make a cool boyfriend."

I grinned like an idiot and just about melted into the gutter and down the storm drain.  It was flattering but as I chewed my lower lip trying to think of something to say back, I fractured.  Apparently, I was more brittle than Patrick’s teeth.

“I-I better go,” I said.

“Why?”

“I just have to.”

“You’re back early,” Emily called from her bedroom when she heard me come in.

Finding her home perked me up a little.  I thought, Yeah!  It's about damn time I got her to myself!  I quickly threw my skates and helmet on the floor in my room, pulled off my knee pads and pants, changed to shorts and went to talk to her about everything that had been happening lately.

She and Darla were sitting on the floor, their backs against the bed, both of them holding scissors, colored construction paper scattered around them.  Darla gave me a look, a jack-o-lantern stare, a mysterious flickering behind her eyes.

I backed out quickly, alone with my troubles.  I took a shower, wrapped myself in a towel and plopped myself on my bed with my hair wet.  I could hear Darla and Emily murmuring to each other right through the wall.  I tried to force some tears, hoping I could squeeze out the hurt the way I would a big ol’ turd, but nothing happened except a few dry sobs.  That ended my first stint as an aggressive inline skater.  I just didn’t have the heart to go back to the skate park and face those kids.  I couldn’t be anyone’s girlfriend.  I couldn’t be anyone’s boyfriend.  I couldn’t be anyone’s anything.