The Less Miserables Land a Gap (1)

Nova's wheels caught on a crack she should have seen coming, and the board shot out from under her like it was tired of pretending. She hit the asphalt palms-first, the grit embedding itself in new skin before she could even register the impact. Third bail this morning. Fourth if you counted the one where she'd stepped off before even trying.

She sat there in the heat, 10 a.m. already brutal, sweat running down the bridge of her nose and pooling where her glasses met her face. The park sprawled around her in various stages of decay—the main bowl with its kidney shape and rusted coping, the snake run choked with weeds pushing through cracked concrete, a warped plywood ramp someone had built and then abandoned to the weather. Beyond the chain-link fence, the old Cone Mills building sat empty, windows broken out, kudzu crawling up the brick like it was trying to pull the whole thing back into the earth.

The park was mostly empty. Just her, that homeless guy on his bench—Rusty, the other kids called him—and a couple of burnouts smoking in a rusted Cavalier at the far end of the lot. Their bass thumped something she didn't recognize. Rusty muttered to himself, hands moving like he was conducting an orchestra only he could hear.

Good. She could fail in private.

She'd been coming here for three weeks now. Twenty-two days, if she was counting, which she was. Her brother Marcus had given her the board for her fourteenth birthday—a hand-me-down Powell with chips along the nose and grip tape worn smooth in patches—and told her the park was behind the old Cone Mills building, past the basketball courts with no nets. "Don't let nobody punk you," he'd said, which wasn't advice so much as a prayer.

Nova picked the grit out of her palms. Little red dots where the pebbles had pressed deepest. The asphalt was hot enough to feel through her jeans, radiating the kind of heat that made the air shimmer and taste like tar. She pushed herself up, retrieved the board from where it had rolled into a patch of weeds by the fence, and walked back to the crack that kept catching her.

The thing about ollies: she'd watched them on the 411VM tape her brother had, the one with Eric Koston doing things that didn't seem legal by the rules of physics. Just pop the tail, slide your front foot up, level it out. Simple. She'd studied the slow-motion footage until the tracking started to go weird, until she could close her eyes and see the exact angle of Koston's ankle, the precise timing of his arms. She'd drawn it in her sketchbook—frame by frame, like anatomy homework. The board rises. The feet stay connected. The body floats.

Her body didn't care what her brain had memorized.

She set the board down, positioned her feet—back foot on the tail, front foot behind the bolts—and crouched. The grip tape was gritty under her Payless knockoffs, the ones that were already wearing through at the toe from three weeks of this. She pushed down. The tail slapped concrete and nothing else happened. The board stayed flat. She was just standing there, pressing down on a piece of wood, sweating through her shirt, alone in a parking lot behind a dead factory at 10 a.m. on a Tuesday when she should have been in school.

She tried again. Slap. Nothing.

Again. Slap. The board wobbled but didn't rise.

Her shins were bruised from where the board had caught her on previous attempts. Her palms were scraped raw. Her glasses kept sliding down her nose and she kept pushing them back up with the heel of her hand, leaving little smears of blood and grit on the lenses.

"Girls don't got the leg strength for that anyway."

Nova looked up. One of the burnouts had drifted over from the car—shaved head, no shirt despite the heat radiating off everything, Monster Energy tattoo green against his sunburned shoulder. He was maybe twenty-five, maybe older, the kind of age that looked worn down rather than grown up. He leaned against the bowl's coping, arms crossed, grinning at her like he'd said something clever.

"Excuse me?"

"Just saying." He lifted his hands, mock-surrender, but he didn't move. Didn't leave. "Skateboarding's more of a guy thing. Physics. Center of gravity's different. Hip structure." He shrugged like he was doing her a favor, delivering hard truths. "Some things are just biology."

Nova had a whole speech in her head. She had Angela Davis quotes memorized and facts about Title IX and a detailed explanation of how "physics" was a word people used when they meant I don't want you here. She'd written an essay for English class last semester about Elissa Steamer, about how the first female pro skater had to hear this same garbage from the same kind of people and had landed tricks anyway. She knew what to say.

But her throat closed up the way it always did when adults—even burnout adults with energy drink tattoos and beer breath at 10 a.m.—talked to her like that. The words stacked up behind her teeth and stayed there. Her hands were shaking. She couldn't tell if it was anger or something else.

"You been out here how long?" The burnout wasn't done. He'd found an audience and he was going to perform. "Three weeks? Month? And you still can't ollie?" He laughed, not mean exactly, but worse—pitying. "Maybe try something else. Drawing or whatever. Girls are good at that artsy stuff."

Nova's face was hot. Not from the sun. She wanted to say something, anything, but the words wouldn't come and her eyes were starting to sting and she would rather die than cry in front of this man, so she just stood there, board under her arm, looking at the ground.

"Nah."

The voice came from behind her. Nova turned. A guy about her age, maybe sixteen or seventeen, walking up from the snake run with a board under his arm. Brown skin, backwards cap, forearms flecked with what looked like concrete dust. His Discman was clipped to his shorts, the Deftones bleeding out of his headphones loud enough that she could hear the guitars from ten feet away. He had the build of someone who worked—not gym muscles, but the kind you got from hauling things, lifting things, showing up.

He positioned himself between Nova and the burnout without looking at either of them. Just stood there, pulling a skate tool from his pocket, adjusting his trucks like he'd wandered into the wrong conversation by accident. Like the burnout wasn't even worth acknowledging directly.

"She's learning," he said to no one in particular. "Everybody learns. You didn't pop out the womb landing tricks."

The burnout's grin flickered. "I'm just saying—"

"You said it." The guy still wasn't looking at him. Still adjusting his trucks. "Now you're done."

Something shifted. The burnout straightened up, and for a second Nova thought there might be a fight—the guy with the Discman was younger, smaller, clearly not looking for trouble, but he also wasn't backing down, wasn't even acknowledging the size difference. He just kept working on his trucks like the conversation was already over.

"Whatever, man." The burnout pushed off the coping, started walking back to his car. "I was trying to help. Some people can't handle the truth."

He was halfway across the lot when he turned back, pointed at Nova. "You'll see. Give it another month. You'll quit."

The guy with the Discman didn't respond. Didn't watch him go. Just finished with his trucks, pocketed the tool, and finally looked at Nova.

"I'm Hector," he said. "You been trying the same way every time?"

Nova's throat was still tight. She nodded.

"Show me."

She didn't move. Part of her wanted to tell him she was fine, she didn't need help, she'd figure it out on her own the way she figured everything out on her own. That was the story she told herself—smart kid, independent, doesn't need anybody. But her palms were still bleeding and her legs were tired and she'd been doing the same thing for three weeks and getting the same nothing. And the burnout's words were still ringing in her ears: You'll quit.

She set her board down. Positioned her feet where she thought they should go.

Hector crouched beside her, squinting at her stance. He smelled like sweat and concrete dust and something faintly metallic—WD-40, maybe, from the trucks. Up close she could see his hands were calloused, nails chipped, the kind of hands that had been working since before they were done growing.

"Your front foot's too far back," he said. "And you're thinking too much."

"I'm not—"

"You are. I can see it. You're running through steps in your head like a checklist." He reached out and moved her front foot half an inch forward, just behind the bolts. "There. Now don't think. Just pop."

"But I need to—"

"You don't need to anything. Your body knows more than your brain does. Trust it." He stood up, stepped back. "Pop."

She bent her knees. Took a breath. Slammed the tail down hard—

And felt it. For half a second the board lifted off the concrete. Her feet stayed connected. She hung in the air, maybe two inches up, maybe less, before gravity caught up and she came down hard and the board shot out from under her again. She stumbled, caught herself, didn't fall.

But she'd felt it. The board had risen.

"There," Hector said. "Again."

---

She tried again. And again. And again.

The sun climbed higher and the heat got worse and Hector didn't leave. He didn't say much either—just watched, occasionally moving her foot back into position when it drifted, occasionally saying "closer" or "not yet" or just nodding. He made her try on different patches of concrete. Made her try without looking at her feet. Made her try while he counted down from three so she couldn't overthink the timing.

Around 11, she landed one. Shaky, ugly, barely off the ground, but she'd popped the tail and her feet had caught the board and she'd rolled away still standing. The board hadn't shot out. She hadn't face-planted.

"See?" Hector said. "You felt that?"

She nodded. Her heart was pounding but not from exertion. Something had clicked, some tiny alignment between what her brain knew and what her body could do.

"Again. While it's fresh."

She tried. Bailed. Tried. Bailed. Tried—and landed. Cleaner this time. Still ugly, but cleaner.

"Good." Hector pulled his headphones down around his neck. The Deftones bled into Sepultura, something heavier, drums like gunfire. "Now do it ten more times. I'll count."

"Ten?"

"You want to remember how this feels tomorrow? Do it ten times. Twenty's better. Fifty's best. But start with ten."

She did ten. Landed six of them. Her legs were shaking by the end, calves burning, but she'd landed six out of ten and that was more than she'd landed in three weeks combined.

An engine noise cut through the heat. A burgundy Civic pulled into the lot with bass thumping loud enough to rattle the mirrors—Pearl Jam's "Corduroy" competing with the distant burnouts' music. A kid was hanging out the passenger window, yelling something she couldn't make out.

Hector glanced over, lifted his chin in acknowledgment. "Garrett and Tanner," he said. "Tanner's a lot. Don't let him get in your head."

The car parked in the shade of the one tree that grew along the fence, and two kids got out. The driver was clean-cut compared to everyone else Nova had seen here—newer clothes, hair that had seen a comb recently, the kind of posture that suggested regular meals and a curfew. The passenger was wiry and buzzcut, scabs on his knuckles, a chipped front tooth that showed when he grinned. He was already running toward the bowl before the car was fully stopped.

"Yo!" the wiry one—Tanner—shouted. "Yo, Hector, you see this?" He pulled something from his pocket, held it up. A pager, black plastic. "Meemaw got it for me. In case of emergencies." He made air quotes. "Don't tell her it's mostly for when my mom calls drunk from Fayetteville."

The clean-cut one—Garrett—shook his head, walked over to where Nova was standing. His sneakers were Vans Half Cabs, newer than anything she'd seen at the park so far. "Hey. You're new?"

"Three weeks," she said.

"Garrett." He held out his hand. She shook it, surprised by the formality. "That's Tanner. He doesn't have volume control."

"I heard that!" Tanner had already dropped into the bowl, his board barely holding together, wheels making a sound like tearing fabric on the rough concrete. "I'm supposed to be loud! It's called charisma!"

Hector looked at Nova. "You should keep practicing. Before you lose the feel."

But Tanner had already climbed out of the bowl and was walking over, eyes bright, sweat soaking through his too-big jersey. "Wait, wait—you're teaching her? What's she learning?"

"Ollies."

"Ollies? Over there?" He pointed at the flat patch where Nova had been practicing. "That's boring. She needs stakes." He jogged over to a crack in the asphalt—bigger than the one Nova had been tripping on, maybe three inches wide, dark with old tar. "Twenty-five cents says she can't clear this."

"Tanner." Garrett's voice carried a warning.

"What? Pressure makes diamonds."

Nova looked at the crack. It wasn't much wider than what she'd been practicing on, but it felt different with Tanner's eyes on her, with Garrett and Hector watching. Her hands started shaking again.

"I don't have twenty-five cents," she said.

"Then you owe me if you bail." Tanner grinned. "Come on. One try. You land it, you're cool. You bail, you owe me a quarter next time."

Before she could answer, another figure appeared at the edge of the lot. A girl with a buzzcut half-hidden under a dirty beanie, nose pierced with what looked like a safety pin, jeans torn at the knees. She was carrying her board like a weapon, stomping across the asphalt like she'd had a fight with someone on the way here.

"Who's this?" The girl looked Nova up and down. Not hostile exactly, but measuring.

"Nova," Garrett said. "She's learning."

"Learning what?"

"Ollies."

The girl snorted. "For real? How long you been coming here?"

"Three weeks."

"And you can't ollie yet?"

Nova's face was hot again. The burnout's voice echoed in her head: Girls don't got the leg strength. Now this girl, who clearly could skate, who had probably heard the same garbage and pushed through it, was looking at her like she was a waste of time.

"Zara." Hector's voice was quiet but firm. "She landed six out of ten just now. First time she's landed anything."

Zara raised an eyebrow. "Six out of ten?"

"Clean."

Something shifted in Zara's expression. Not friendly, exactly, but less dismissive. "Show me."

Nova looked at the crack Tanner had pointed out. At the four of them watching her. At the burnouts still drinking in their car, probably laughing about the girl who thought she could skate.

She positioned her board. Set her feet the way Hector had shown her—front foot just behind the bolts, back foot on the tail. Don't think. Just pop.

She pushed toward the crack, building speed. The tar line approached. She crouched, slammed the tail—

And cleared it. Barely. Her wheels caught the far edge and she wobbled, arms windmilling, but she stayed on. She'd cleared it.

Tanner whooped. "Yes! I owe you nothing and you owe me nothing! That's a win-win!"

Even Zara almost smiled. "Not bad," she said. "Your pop's weak but you committed. That's the part people usually can't do."

"Again," Hector said. "Do it again while you remember."

She did it again. Cleaner. And again. By the fourth time, she wasn't even thinking about the crack—she was just ollieing over it, the same motion she'd been practicing all morning, the same motion she'd failed at for three weeks before something clicked.

When she finally stopped, breathing hard, legs shaking, the sun was directly overhead and her shirt was soaked through. Zara was sitting on the bowl's coping, watching. Tanner was attempting something dangerous on the DIY ramp. Garrett was on the phone in his car, arguing with someone about a curfew. Hector was running lines in the snake run, smooth and silent, like the concrete was water and he was swimming through it.

Nova sat down in the shade of the fence and let her heart rate come down. Her palms were scraped raw. Her shins would be purple tomorrow. But she'd landed something. She'd cleared something.

From his bench, Rusty called out in her direction: "They all fall before they fly."

She didn't know what that meant. But she wrote it down in her sketchbook anyway.

(Cont.)