The Less Miserables Enter a Contest (2)

(Cont.)

For the next two weeks, Hector changed everything.

He stopped running lines. Instead, he broke his contest sequence down into components and drilled each one separately. Kickflip off the six-stair: fifty attempts, minimum, before he moved on. Frontside boardslide on the ledge: fifty more. Nollie shove-it on flat: fifty after that.

He bought a small notebook from the Eckerd on Battleground Avenue—ninety-nine cents, spiral-bound, the cover already bent from sitting in the display—and started keeping track. Each session, he wrote down what he'd worked on, how many attempts, how many lands, what went wrong when it went wrong. The handwriting was cramped and messy, smudged with sweat and grit, but readable.

July 22. Kickflip. 50 attempts. 31 lands. Problem: back foot drifting too far toward heel edge on approach. Fix: consciously place ball of foot on tail before pop. Feel the position before you move.

July 23. Kickflip. 50 attempts. 36 lands. Better. Still catching slightly late—board already descending when feet make contact. Need to watch board during rotation, not where I'm going to land.

July 24. Boardslide. 50 attempts. 28 lands. F**. Keep leaning too far back on approach, overcompensating for the ledge height. Almost caught my shin twice. Need to commit forward, not backward.*

July 25. Boardslide. 50 attempts. 34 lands. Getting there. Locked in solid but dismount is sloppy—popping off with too much weight on back foot. Adjust.

The entries became a ritual. Every session started with reviewing what he'd written before, looking for patterns in his failures. Every session ended with writing down what he'd learned, even if what he'd learned was just "still sucks, keep drilling." It felt strange at first—like school, almost, like homework, like the kind of thing that had nothing to do with skating. But it also felt like something else.

Like control. Like having a map when everyone else was wandering blind.

The others thought he'd lost his mind.

"Dude." Dusty sat on the bowl coping, watching Hector reset for what had to be the fortieth kickflip attempt of the afternoon. The sun was brutal, the concrete throwing heat back up like a second sun, and everyone else had retreated to the shade. "You've been doing this for like two hours. Don't you want to, I don't know, actually skate?"

"This is actually skating."

"This is actually insane." But Dusty didn't leave. Just sat there, watching, his expression somewhere between concern and curiosity. Like he was waiting to see if Hector would crack, or if whatever he was doing would actually work.

Tanner was less patient. By day three of Hector's new routine, he'd stopped coming around when Hector was drilling.

"It's like watching paint dry," he said to Zara, loud enough for Hector to hear, not quite looking at him. "He does the same thing fifty times. Fifty! I counted! Who does that?"

"Someone who wants to win," Zara said, but even she sounded uncertain.

"Winning's not that serious. It's just skating. It's supposed to be fun."

Hector heard them. Filed it away in the same mental drawer where he kept his father's skepticism and his mother's worry and all the other voices that told him this wasn't real, this wasn't important, this was just a kid with a board wasting time he should be spending on something practical.

He kept drilling.

The thing was, Tanner wasn't wrong—not completely. There was something lost in this approach, some spontaneity sacrificed on the altar of repetition. The joy of just skating, of letting your body move without a plan, of trying whatever trick popped into your head just to see if you could land it—that wasn't something you could schedule. It happened or it didn't.

But there was also something gained. A confidence that came from knowing—really knowing, not hoping—that you could land a trick when it mattered. A foundation you could build other things on top of.

By the end of the first week, his kickflip success rate had gone from sixty percent to eighty. By the end of the second week, it was closer to ninety. He could feel it in his body now—the motion settling into his muscles, becoming automatic, requiring less thought with each repetition.

The boardslide took longer. Ledges were unforgiving—you were either locked in or you were on the ground, and there wasn't much in between. But by the Friday before the contest, he was landing eight out of ten, and the ones he missed were close.

The nollie shove-it was the hardest. There was something about the motion—popping off the nose instead of the tail, rotating the board behind you instead of in front—that his body kept resisting. It felt backward. Wrong. Every successful land felt like an accident, like he'd gotten lucky rather than done something right.

So he drilled it harder. Fifty attempts became seventy. Seventy became a hundred. He skated until his ankles ached and his shins were bruised from catching the board wrong and his shoes were held together with nothing but Shoe Goo and stubbornness, and then he skated some more.

---

The contest was held in the parking lot behind All-City, with a makeshift course set up using borrowed rails, a funbox, and a kicker ramp someone had hauled in from Greensboro. The asphalt was rough but rideable, marked with spray-painted lines to show the course boundaries. Maybe forty spectators, mostly skaters and their friends, plus a few parents looking uncomfortable in the August heat, standing in whatever shade they could find with water bottles and worried expressions. A boombox on the registration table was pumping out Cypress Hill, the bass distorted but recognizable, the volume loud enough to feel in your chest.

Hector paid his ten dollars with a crumpled bill he'd been saving for two weeks, pulled from the jar in his closet where he kept the money from mowing lawns and folding fabric and doing whatever odd jobs he could find. Ten dollars. A significant amount. Gone now, handed over to a guy with a beard and a SLAYER shirt who gave him a number to pin to his chest.

Fourteen.

"Heats start at noon," the guy said. "Three runs each. Best run counts. Good luck."

Hector found a spot in the shade by the chain-link fence, set his board down, and started stretching. His dad had thought he was crazy when he'd asked to borrow the truck this morning—For a skateboard contest? That's not a real thing. That's not something people do. But he'd given him the keys anyway, the way he always did when Hector asked for something small, something that didn't cost money, something that was just time and trust.

He could see the other competitors warming up. The Winston-Salem crew in their matching shirts, their matching shoes, their matching confidence. A few kids from Charlotte he didn't recognize, with boards that looked newer than his. A couple of locals from Greensboro who skated the DIY spot near the train tracks, older kids with tattoos and torn jeans who looked like they'd been doing this forever.

Twenty-three skaters total. Twenty-three kids who all thought they had a shot at those shoes.

The bleached-hair kid from Winston-Salem was running his kickflip again. The same one Hector had watched him drill two weeks ago at Deadwood, the same approach, the same motion. It looked automatic now, his body moving through the trick without any visible thought, the board rotating and catching like it was part of him.

Hector looked down at his own gear. His dad's old backpack, the straps fraying at the seams. His water bottle with the faded Gatorade label, refilled from the tap that morning. His shoes held together with Shoe Goo and stubbornness, the left toe cap hanging on by what felt like faith alone.

Different starting lines. That's what Dusty would say. But they were all ending up at the same finish line, and the judges didn't give points for where you started.

Dusty appeared with two bottles of water, handed one to Hector. "You ready?"

"I don't know."

"Come on. You've been practicing for two weeks straight. I've never seen anyone practice that much for anything."

"The Winston-Salem kids practice more."

Dusty looked over at them—the matching shirts, the matching shoes, the easy confidence of kids who had real support behind them. Then he looked back at Hector.

"Maybe. But they also have a sponsor and a real park. You've got Deadwood and a notebook." He shrugged. "Different starting lines, you know? You're not competing against them. You're competing against what you could do last month."

Hector didn't answer. He was watching the bleached-hair kid land another kickflip, perfect as always, the board rotating and catching with mechanical precision.

"That's not how the judges see it," he said.

"Forget the judges. How do you see it?"

Hector thought about the notebook in his backpack. Three weeks of data. Hundreds of attempts. The slow, painful arc from landing a trick sometimes to landing it almost always.

"I see a lot of work," he said finally. "And I don't know if it was enough."

"Only one way to find out." Dusty clapped him on the shoulder, the same gesture he always used when words ran out. "Go show them what Deadwood kids can do."

---

His heat was third. Eight skaters, three runs each, sixty seconds per run.

The first run, Hector choked.

Not completely—he landed the kickflip off the funbox, but his feet were too far back and he had to step off, one hand touching the ground to keep from going down entirely. The boardslide was clean, locked in and slid smooth, but it wasn't enough to make up for the kickflip. The nollie shove-it was ugly, barely rotated, saved only by a desperate foot adjustment at the last second that probably looked even worse than bailing would have.

He walked off the course with his jaw tight, not looking at anyone. His heart was pounding and his hands were shaking and his mind was running through everything he'd done wrong, cataloging the failures like entries in his notebook.

First run. Kickflip: sketchy, stepped off. Boardslide: clean. Nollie shove-it: ugly. Overall: garbage.

"That was good!" Tanner yelled from the fence, his voice carrying over the Cypress Hill still pumping from the boombox. "You landed stuff!"

It wasn't good. It was exactly what he'd been trying to avoid—sketchy, improvised, the kind of run that looked okay to casual observers but would never score well against kids who'd actually prepared. Against kids who didn't choke when the pressure hit.

Second run. He took a breath. Visualized the line the way he'd been practicing it for two weeks, the same line he'd run a hundred times in his driveway and at Deadwood and in the parking lot behind his dad's duplex. Same approach. Same speed. Same motion.

He pushed off.

Kickflip: clean. The pop was solid, the rotation was tight, his feet caught the board at the apex and he landed bolts, rolling away smooth like he'd done it a thousand times. Because he had. Because that was the point.

Boardslide: clean. He hit the ledge with confidence, locked in immediately, slid the full length without wobbling, popped off at the end with his weight centered.

Nollie shove-it: not perfect, but close. The board rotated a little off-axis, not quite the full ninety degrees, but he adjusted mid-air and landed it rolling, no step-off, no hand down.

Better. Way better. He could feel it in his body—the difference between hoping a trick would work and knowing it would work. The difference between casual and deliberate.

Third run. By now, the nerves had faded. He wasn't thinking about the judges or the other skaters or the shoes in the window or what his dad would say if he came home with nothing. He was just skating. Just doing what he'd done a thousand times in his driveway, in the heat and the quiet and the streetlight flicker.

Kickflip: clean.

Boardslide: clean.

Nollie shove-it: clean. Finally. The board rotated exactly ninety degrees, his feet caught it exactly where they were supposed to, and he rolled away without a single adjustment, without a wobble, without anything but the pure execution of a motion he'd practiced until it lived in his muscles.

He heard Tanner screaming something. Heard Dusty clapping. Didn't look at them.

He was too busy replaying the run in his head, noting what had worked and what could still be better.

(Cont.)