The Less Miserables Cross a Line (2)

Two weeks later, Officer Daniels showed up alone.

Not in his cruiser—on foot, walking across the lot in his uniform, hands visible and empty. The Less Miserables watched him come with the wary silence of animals who'd learned that uniforms meant trouble. Skating stopped. Conversations died. Even Rusty went quiet, his hands wrapped around a Styrofoam cup of something, watching from his bench with narrowed eyes.

Tanner's body locked up. Everything told him to run. But he stayed on the bowl's edge between Zara and Quinn, and waited.

"I'm not here to bust anyone," Daniels said, stopping at the edge of the flatground. He was older than Tanner had realized—maybe forty, with gray at his temples and deep lines around his eyes that looked like they came from years of squinting into things he couldn't change. "I just want to talk."

"About what?" Dusty asked, positioning himself between Daniels and the rest of them, his board held loose at his side.

"About the park." Daniels looked around, taking in the cracked concrete, the rusted coping, the warping DIY ramp, the weeds pushing through the snake run. "I know you kids think I'm the enemy. And maybe I have been. But I grew up three blocks from here. I skated this bowl in '82, '83—before the budget cuts killed it."

"You skated?" Tanner couldn't keep the disbelief out of his voice.

"Badly. But yeah." Daniels almost smiled. "Powell Peralta deck, Airwalk shoes, thought I was Tony Hawk even though I could barely drop in without eating concrete. By '85 the city had washed their hands of it. Nobody votes for skate parks."

He looked at the bowl, and for a second he wasn't a cop standing in a parking lot. He was something else—some earlier version of himself that still remembered what wheels on concrete sounded like, still remembered the way your stomach dropped and your hands tightened at the lip of a drop-in.

"I joined the force because I thought I could help," he said. "Protect kids like me who didn't have anywhere else to go." His jaw tightened. "Turns out the system doesn't always let you help the people who need it most."

"I'm not going to pretend the tag didn't happen," he said. "And whoever did it—" his eyes found Tanner, held for a moment, then moved on—"made things harder for everyone. But the city was already looking for excuses. This place has been on their list for years."

"So we're screwed no matter what," Zara said.

"I'm saying there's a council meeting next Tuesday. Public comment period. If enough people show up and make a case for keeping the park open, it might make a difference. Or it might not. But it's worth a shot."

"Why do you care?" Dusty asked.

Daniels was quiet for a moment. The wind picked up, carrying dead leaves across the lot in skittering circles, the dry sound of them scraping concrete mixing with the distant hum of the highway.

"Because I remember what it was like to need a place like this." He looked at Tanner again, and this time his gaze held steady. "I also remember what it was like to do stupid things because someone dared me to. Took me a long time to learn that the bravest thing you can do isn't always the craziest thing. Sometimes it's just standing still."

He turned and walked back to his cruiser, parked on the street outside the lot's entrance. Halfway across the lot he paused, looked back at the bowl one more time—not at them, at the bowl itself, the concrete, the shape of it—and then kept walking. The engine started. He pulled away, and they watched the car until it turned the corner and disappeared.

"Well," Wesley said, breaking the silence. "That was weird."

"That was an opportunity," Dusty said. "And we're going to take it."

---

The burnouts came back on Saturday.

Derek and his crew, Camaro in the usual spot by the fence, bass thumping through the windows, like nothing had happened. Like the past two weeks of cops and clenched jaws and sleepless nights were someone else's problem. Exhaust mixed with the cold air and hung there, a blue haze that smelled like bad catalytic converters.

Tanner saw them from across the lot. His hands balled into fists against his thighs. Two weeks of replaying that night—the dare, the Sharpie, the thirty seconds before the world collapsed. And every time, Derek was there, grinning, handing him the marker. Twenty-two years old, shaved head, snake-eating-its-tail tattoo on his forearm with the ink faded and blurry like it had been done in someone's garage. A guy who'd been coming around for months, singling kids out, buying them sodas from the Quik-Mart, asking about their skating, telling them they had potential—and then the favors started. Hold this for me. Watch my car. Don't tell anyone you saw this. The kids who did what Derek asked got included. The kids who didn't stopped existing.

Tanner had wanted that inclusion so bad he could taste it. Mom in Fayetteville, calling every few months with promises that dissolved on contact. Dad whose name Meemaw wouldn't say. Kids at school who looked through him like he was made of glass. Derek was the first person in months who'd looked at him like he was somebody. And Tanner had done whatever it took to keep that going, same way a stray dog does tricks for anyone holding food—not because the tricks mean anything, but because the alternative is being outside in the cold.

"Yo, little man!" Derek called across the lot. "Heard you got the park in trouble. That's hardcore." He was leaning against the Camaro's hood, cigarette between his lips, crew arranged around him. "Respect."

"So listen," Derek said, pushing off the hood, walking over with the easy swagger of someone who'd never faced a consequence. "I got an idea. You wanna really make a statement? I got a can of spray paint in the trunk. Red. You hit that cruiser over there—" he jerked his chin toward the cop car parked at the far end—"and these pigs will know they can't mess with us."

His crew nodded behind him. One of them drifted toward the trunk.

"Come on," Derek said. "You're the only one with the balls to do it. Tag it again. Bigger this time."

The Sharpie in Tanner's pocket pressed against his thigh. He could feel it through the denim—capped, unused, the one he'd bought to replace the one he'd thrown away, bought with three dollars from raking Mrs. Hinson's leaves because some part of him liked the weight of it there. The promise that he could make his mark whenever he wanted.

His hand twitched toward his pocket. His pulse climbed. The Sharpie was right there, the same weight as the one that had started all of this, the cap smooth under his thumb through the denim. Three seconds, maybe less. Pop the cap. Cross the lot. Make his mark. Derek's crew was already grinning, already arranging themselves into the audience formation he recognized from that night—the loose semicircle, the cigarettes lifted in anticipation, elbows on the Camaro's hood. They'd done this before. They'd do it again, with him or with the next kid desperate enough to audition.

And then he looked at the park.

At the bowl, where Zara was sitting on the coping with her board across her knees. Not yelling. Not egging him on. Just watching, her face still and careful, like she was waiting to see what he'd do. This was the same Zara whose voice had cracked three days ago, who'd turned away so nobody would see her face break. That Zara and this one didn't look like the same person. Something had gone quiet in her, and the quiet was heavier than any of the sharp words she'd thrown at him.

At the cops, still parked at the far end, still filing reports that could end everything.

At Dusty, paused on the flatground, one foot on his board, not moving, watching from across the lot with his arms at his sides. At Hector, sitting on the retaining wall ledge with his notebook open on his knee, pen stopped mid-sentence. At Nova and Quinn and Garrett, scattered around the park in their usual spots, all of them still now, all of them watching.

At the Cone Mills building, and the cracks in the concrete, and the graffiti from kids who'd been here before him—names and tags and proof that people had existed in this place, had made it theirs even after everyone else gave up on it.

Derek was still talking. "Come on, man. Don't be a pussy. What're they gonna do?"

Shut it down, Tanner thought. They'll shut it down. And he'd be the reason. Again.

He could feel the pull—the old pattern, the magnetic drag of the dare, the part of him that would rather be reckless than invisible. It was physical, like the moment before a drop-in when your weight shifts and your body wants to go and the only thing keeping you on the lip is the decision to stay.

He stayed.

"Nah," Tanner said.

"What?"

"I said nah. I'm good."

Derek's face flickered. "You scared?"

"Probably." The honesty surprised him—it came out before he could dress it up, before he could make it sound tougher or funnier or like anything other than what it was. "But I'm not doing it."

"Man, I thought you were—"

"I know what you thought." He turned his back on Derek. Walked toward the bowl. The lot had never felt so wide—fifty feet of cracked asphalt between him and the coping where Zara sat, and every step of it exposed, every step visible to Derek and his crew and the cops and everyone. His legs were shaking and his hands wouldn't stop trembling and he could hear someone behind him say pussy in a voice meant to carry, and the word landed like a slap between his shoulder blades. Then laughter—not much, just enough. The kind of laughter that's meant to follow you.

He kept walking.

Zara was still on the coping when he reached the bowl. She didn't say anything. Didn't congratulate him. Didn't tell him he'd done the right thing. She scooted over, making room, and Tanner sat down next to her and stared at the cracked transitions and listened to his own breathing and waited for the shaking to stop.

Behind them, the Camaro's engine roared to life. The bass thumped once, loud and aggressive, and then faded as Derek and his crew peeled out of the lot, tires barking on the cold asphalt. The sound grew thin, tinny, and then it was gone, replaced by the wind and the distant highway and the scratch of Rusty's shopping cart wheels on concrete as he repositioned his bench.

"That sucked," Tanner said.

"Yeah," Zara said. "It did."

She didn't say anything else. Didn't need to. They sat there, side by side on the cold coping, their boards across their laps, watching the lot where the Camaro had been. The tire marks were still visible on the asphalt—two dark streaks curving toward the exit. Already fading.

After a while, Dusty skated over and dropped into the bowl without a word, and the sound of his wheels on the transitions filled the silence with something better than talking. Then Hector, running a clean line along the far wall. Then Quinn, tentative, sticking to the shallow end but moving. One by one they came back, reclaiming the space Derek had tried to make his, and the park started to sound like itself again.

---

That night, Tanner sat on the bowl's edge alone.

Past curfew. The cop patrols had thinned—sporadic now, one car instead of two, and gone by nine most nights. The lot was empty. Just Tanner and the concrete and the stars, more of them visible than he ever noticed during the day, the light pollution pushed back by the late hour and the cold that had chased everyone else inside.

He could hear the highway from here—a steady wash of sound, tires on asphalt, the occasional downshift of a truck heading for the interstate. Closer, the tick of the cooling concrete as the day's warmth left it. The world going about its business without him in it.

He had the Sharpie in his hand. Uncapped it. The ink smell hit him—chemical, sharp, the same smell from three weeks ago when his hand was shaking and Derek's crew was cheering and thirty seconds later the world caved in. His fingers were cold. The concrete under him was cold too, leaching the warmth out of him through his jeans, but he didn't move. Something about the cold felt right. Felt like the temperature the moment deserved.

The bowl wall in front of him was bare concrete with a few old tags fading in the weather. Names of kids who'd skated here before him. Proof they'd existed. He could read some of them in the dim light—SKETCH '89, half-erased by weather. A faded anarchy symbol. Someone's initials inside a heart, the heart lopsided, the whole thing barely visible under a layer of grime.

He could write something. LESS MISERABLES, in big block letters. Or TANNER WAS HERE. Something that said I was in this place and I was real.

His hand moved toward the wall.

Stopped.

He sat there for a long time, the marker warm in his fist, the wall close enough to touch. The stars moved. The highway hummed. A train horn sounded somewhere east, long and low, the kind of sound that carried.

He capped the Sharpie. Stood up. Walked to the trash can by the lot entrance and dropped it in.

The metal lid clanged shut. The sound echoed off the Cone Mills building and came back smaller, thinner, and then it was quiet.

Tanner picked up his board and walked home.

- END