The Less Miserables Enter a Contest (3)

(Cont.)

 

He finished fourth.

The bleached-hair kid from Winston-Salem took first—no surprise there, his runs had been surgical, every trick landed clean, every motion automatic. A Charlotte skater took second, a kid with a DC shirt and a deck covered in stickers. Another Winston-Salem kid took third, his runs slightly sloppier than the first but still cleaner than Hector's.

Fourth place got nothing. No shoes. No store credit. No deck. Just a pat on the back from the All-City owner and a "good effort, man" that felt like a consolation prize.

Hector stood by the fence, watching the winners collect their prizes. The bleached-hair kid was trying on a pair of DCs, fresh and white and perfect, the kind of shoes Hector couldn't afford to even look at without doing the math of how many lawns he'd have to mow, how many hours of mulch-hauling, how many pieces of fabric folded at three cents each.

He wondered how it felt. To be that kid, with matching shirts and a sponsor and a real park to skate every day. To have people believe in you enough to invest money in your future. To have resources that didn't require sacrifice, support that didn't come with guilt.

Then he stopped wondering. Because wondering didn't help. Wondering was just another way of standing still.

"You should have won," Zara said. She'd shown up somewhere in the middle, probably after getting bored at Deadwood. "That third run was sick."

"It wasn't good enough."

"It was better than that Charlotte kid. I saw his boardslide. He sketched the landing."

"Judges didn't see it that way."

"Judges are blind."

Hector almost smiled. "Probably."

Dusty wandered over, his Slurpee long since finished, the empty cup crushed in his hand. "You did good, man. Seriously. Fourth place out of twenty-three people? That's legit."

"It's not first."

"No." Dusty tossed the crushed cup into a nearby trash can, missed, picked it up and tried again. "But it's progress, right? Two weeks ago you couldn't land that shove-it clean to save your life. Now you're landing it in a contest. That's not nothing."

Hector thought about that. Thought about the notebook in his backpack, filled with three weeks of attempts and failures and tiny improvements that added up to something. Thought about the way his kickflip had felt on that third run—automatic, effortless, the board moving under his feet like it was part of him.

Fourth place wasn't first. But it also wasn't what he could do a month ago. And next time—if there was a next time, if he could scrape together another ten dollars—he'd be better. That was the thing about deliberate practice. It compounded. Each session built on the last. Each improvement created the foundation for the next one.

The Winston-Salem kid had started with better resources, but he'd also started earlier, with more support, with a real park and a sponsor and matching shirts. Given enough time, enough sessions, enough pages in the notebook, Hector could close that gap.

Or he couldn't. There were no guarantees. Hard work didn't always beat head starts. But at least now he knew the method.

"Yeah," he said finally. "It's progress."

---

That night, after dinner, Hector went outside.

His parents were watching something on the Spanish-language channel, the volume turned up loud enough to hear through the thin walls of their duplex. His mom's laughter carried through the window, mixing with the canned laughter from the TV. The dishes were done—his job, every night, scrubbing the pots and pans while his sister and brother fought over the Game Boy their cousin had given them last Christmas. The air was cooling, finally, the brutal August heat fading into something almost bearable.

Hector set his board down in the driveway. The concrete here was cracked and uneven, patches of grass pushing up through the gaps, nothing like the smooth surface at the contest. But it was what he had.

He positioned his feet for a kickflip.

Not because he needed to practice for anything. The contest was over. There wasn't another one until October, and who knew if he'd have ten dollars to spare by then—October was when the electric bill went up, when his mom started worrying about how to pay for Christmas, when every spare dollar got absorbed by something more important than skateboard contests.

He practiced because he wanted to feel it again. That moment in the third run when everything had clicked—when two weeks of drilling the same motion over and over had compressed into a single, perfect execution. When his body had known what to do without his brain getting in the way.

Pop. Flick. Catch. Land.

He kicked the board up, walked back to his starting spot, and did it again.

Pop. Flick. Catch. Land.

The streetlight flickered on at the corner of the block, buzzing slightly, one of those orange sodium lights that made everything look like an old photograph. Somewhere down the street, a dog barked at nothing. His mom's voice drifted through the window, saying something to his dad about the electric bill.

Hector kept skating.

He wasn't trying to impress anyone. There was no one watching, no score being kept, no prize waiting at the end. He was just a kid in a driveway, doing the same trick over and over, chasing a feeling he couldn't quite name.

But it had a name. He knew that now. The Winston-Salem kids knew it. The pros in the videos knew it. It was the thing that separated people who skated from people who got good at skating.

Deliberate practice. Not messing around. Not running lines. Not trying whatever popped into your head and hoping it worked. Just the same motion, repeated with focus, adjusted with intention, refined until the motion became part of you.

His feet were starting to hurt. His Etnies were held together with hope and Shoe Goo and the stubborn refusal to admit they were done. Tomorrow he'd be back at Deadwood, probably watching Tanner attempt something stupid while Quinn asked questions and Dusty cracked jokes and the summer wound down toward school and schedules and all the things that weren't this.

But tonight, he was here. In the driveway. Drilling kickflips until he couldn't feel his shins.

Pop. Flick. Catch. Land.

Again.

---

One week later.

Hector was at the ledge, working on his boardslide—still refining, always refining—when Quinn appeared beside him.

"Can I ask you something?"

"Sure."

"That notebook you have. The one where you write down all your attempts." Quinn's face was earnest, baby-faced, his cheeks flushed from the heat. He was wearing a shirt that was too big for him, probably a hand-me-down from an older brother, and his board was scratched and worn and held together with the same stubbornness that held everyone's board together at Deadwood. "Does it actually work? Like, does writing stuff down actually make you better?"

Hector landed the boardslide, kicked his board up, and considered the question. He thought about the last three weeks. The hundreds of attempts. The slow, frustrating, incremental improvements that added up to something—maybe not first place, maybe not shoes, but something.

"It makes you pay attention," he said finally. "That's what it does. You can't write down what you're not noticing. So you start noticing more. And when you notice more, you can fix more."

"Huh." Quinn looked at the ledge like he was seeing it for the first time, like it had suddenly become more complicated and more simple at the same time. "I've been trying kickflips for like three months. I've landed maybe two."

"How many times have you tried?"

"I don't know. A lot?"

"That's the problem." Hector reached into his backpack, pulled out the notebook, flipped to a blank page near the back. The pages before it were filled with his handwriting, three weeks of data, three weeks of learning. "Here. Start writing it down. Every attempt. What worked, what didn't. Even if it's just a tally mark for now."

Quinn took the notebook like it was something precious, something fragile. "You're giving this to me?"

"I'll get another one. Ninety-nine cents at Eckerd." Hector picked up his board, positioned himself for another boardslide. "But you have to actually use it. Every session. No exceptions."

"I will. I promise."

"Cool."

Hector pushed off, approached the ledge, popped the boardslide. Clean. Locked in. Slid smooth. The motion living in his muscles now, automatic, the product of repetition and attention and the simple refusal to keep doing the same thing and expecting different results.

Quinn was already scribbling something in the notebook, his tongue sticking out slightly in concentration, the way kids did when they were really trying.

Hector almost smiled—barely, just a slight upturn at the corner of his mouth—and reset for another attempt.

This was how it worked. You learned something, and then you passed it on. The knowledge moved from person to person, like a video dubbed from one tape to the next, degrading slightly with each copy but still watchable. Still worth something.

He landed the boardslide again, perfect, and kicked his board up into his hands.

"Again," he said, to no one in particular.

And then he did it again.
 

End