The Less Miserables Learn a Flip (2)

She hit 847 attempts on a Thursday, two weeks and three days after she'd started counting.

Still no clean land. Half-lands every session now—one foot on, one foot off, balance lost in the catch. The board was rotating. Her feet were finding it. The trick existed somewhere just ahead of where she could reach.

Attempt 848.

She'd set up on the flatground in the morning, before anyone else arrived, the park empty and the air cold enough to see her breath. She adjusted her feet—back foot on the tail, front foot behind the bolts, the position her body knew the way it knew how to walk—and pushed off. Built three clean pushes of speed, the way Hector had taught her for the contest run: don't pop from nothing, bring momentum into it. Hit the pop. Her back foot pressed the tail down and the tail struck concrete with a sharp crack, and her front foot slid off the nose with the flick she'd been trying to get right for eight weeks—

The board rotated beneath her. A full 360 degrees. Clean.

Her feet found it. Both feet, at the same time, hitting the deck where her feet were supposed to be.

She landed.

She stood there. Rolling. Still on the board. Her brain waiting for the fall that didn't come because she'd already landed, she was still rolling, the wheels making their regular sound beneath her like nothing unusual had happened.

She kicked the board up.

Her hands were shaking. Her heart was in her throat. The Powell looked exactly the same—same chips along the nose, same worn grip tape, same wheels Zara had helped her pick out at All-City four months ago. But she was standing on the other side of something.

She set up and tried it again.

The second one bailed. The third one half-landed. The fourth one—

The fourth one landed.

By the time Hector showed up at ten-thirty, she'd landed two clean ones and felt the shape of a third that she'd lost in the catch. He watched her bail four times without comment, then watched her land one. His expression didn't change exactly, but something in his posture did—a slight settling, the way a person looks when something comes out the way they expected.

"Two hundred and forty-eight attempts," he said. "To your first land."

"Eight hundred and forty-eight."

A pause. "Right."

"When did you land your first one?" she asked.

He thought about it. "I don't remember. It wasn't the number that mattered." He picked up his board. "Keep going."

She kept going.

---

She landed three more that day. Two the next day. By the end of the week she was hitting roughly one out of every ten attempts—not consistent, not clean, but real. Each land was proof of a simple thing she hadn't believed before: her body could learn this. Not because she was special. Because bodies learned.

She started to notice patterns. The lands came easier when she wasn't thinking about landing. When she trusted her feet to find the board without her brain trying to manage every detail. It was the same thing Zara had said about that untracked session—your body knows more than your brain does by now. She'd thought that was just Zara being blunt. Turned out it was also true.

The sketchbook filled up:

Attempts 848-900: 7 lands. Still wobbling on the catch.

Attempts 901-950: 12 lands. Flick timing improving. Landed three in a row.

Attempts 951-1000: 15 lands. 1,000 total. Circled this three times.

One night around attempt 900, she had a biology test coming up and the notes weren't sticking. Cell division. Prophase, metaphase, anaphase, telophase. She'd read the chapter twice and could feel the information sliding off.

She opened her sketchbook to a blank page and drew a cell. Then drew it again. Then again. Did what she did with kickflips—broke it down into parts, drew the sequence, noted what happened at each stage, got it wrong, noted the correction, drew it again. She didn't let herself move to the next stage until she could draw the previous one with her eyes closed.

It took two hours. She got a 94 on the test.

She didn't think too hard about why that worked. She already knew why.

---

Mrs. Patterson called her in again six weeks after the first meeting. This time to congratulate her on the biology grade, the AP Chemistry quiz she'd aced, the overall improvement.

"I knew you could do it when you focused," Mrs. Patterson said, with that same tight smile. "See what happens when you prioritize the right things?"

She paused. Her eyes moved to Nova's legs—long pants, even in mid-October.

"You're still going to the park, aren't you."

It wasn't quite a question.

"Yes," Nova said.

Mrs. Patterson blinked. The smile held, but there was something behind it now—a hesitation, a small confusion, the machinery of her certainty turning on something that didn't fit. How could both things be true? How could the grades go up if the park was still taking time?

"Well," she said finally. "Keep it up."

Nova walked out into the October afternoon. The light was coming in at that fall angle, golden and long, the air finally cooling into something that felt like the season it was supposed to be. She could see Deadwood from here, the edge of the bowl just visible beyond the school fence.

She had fifty attempts before dinner.

---

November 12, 1995.

She stood at the top of the six-stair, looking down at the landing.

Nobody had asked her to try this. Hector did it, Dusty did it, Tanner attempted it with varying levels of disaster. But nobody expected Nova to step up to a six-stair with a kickflip. She was the girl with the notebook and the diagrams, the one who'd earned her place through patience rather than courage. That had always been fine with her.

Today she wanted to know if she could take it bigger.

The afternoon was cold, the concrete hard in a different way than summer concrete—less forgiving, more sound. Their breath made clouds. Tanner had Meemaw's pager clipped to his shorts even though there was nobody to page him right now and everyone knew it. Garrett had his hands in his pockets. Quinn was rocking back and forth on his heels the way he did when he was waiting for something.

"You sure about this?" Dusty asked. He was holding a cherry Slurpee he'd forgotten to drink, watching with the kind of careful neutrality that meant he was actually worried.

"No," Nova said. "But I'm trying anyway."

She walked back twenty feet to give herself room.

The six-stair: she'd counted the steps three times, walked down them and back up, felt the distance with her feet. Four feet of air at the bottom, maybe more. Enough time to rotate a kickflip. She'd done the math. She knew what the landing would feel like and she was doing this anyway.

She pushed off. Three pushes—the contest stance Hector had drilled into her, momentum built before the pop. The stairs came up faster than she expected, the way they always did no matter how many times you prepared, and her brain started running—

She told it to stop.

Trusted the twelve hundred attempts. Trusted the body that had learned through repetition what the brain couldn't figure out through thinking. Trusted the half-inch foot adjustment Hector had made back in May, when she was fourteen years old and couldn't even ollie, when a burnout with a Monster tattoo had told her she didn't have the right kind of body for this. Trusted all of it.

Hit the edge of the top stair and popped.

The crack echoed off the nearby buildings, sharp in the cold air. Her body launched and her front foot flicked—automatic, the motion her feet had made a thousand times—and the board rotated beneath her, grip tape flashing gray against the November sky.

The stairs dropped away below her.

Her feet found the board. Both feet. The landing hit hard—harder than anything she'd landed, the force traveling up through her ankles and knees and spine in a wave that bent her legs deep before she caught herself—and for one terrible instant the board wanted to shoot forward out from under her—

She stayed on.

She rolled out, crouching low, arms out for balance, the board's wheels humming on cold concrete, and she was still on it, still moving forward, still standing.

Behind her: Tanner making a sound above and beyond words. Garrett's single sharp clap. Quinn saying something too quiet to hear. Zara's voice, flat with controlled surprise: "H**.*"

Hector said nothing at all. His silence was the highest form of witness.

Nova kicked her board up and turned around. Her legs were shaking. Her ankles already aching in a way that would become real pain by morning. She was grinning hard enough that it felt like something she'd done to herself.

"Again?" Dusty said.

"Again," she said.

---

She landed two out of five that afternoon. Then she went home, ran cold water over her ankles until they stopped throbbing, and added a page to her sketchbook.

November 12, 1995.

Kickflip down the six-stair: 5 attempts, 2 lands.

Total kickflip attempts since September 15: 1,247.

Below it, she drew herself at the top of the stairs—small, wiry, glasses, board under her arm, looking down at the landing not with fear but with the particular attention of someone taking accurate measure of a problem they intend to solve.

Below that, one line:

Next: heelflip.

She closed the sketchbook and went to sleep.

- END