The Less Miserables Lose the Day (3)

(Cont.)

 

The Slurpees were cold and too sweet and exactly what Quinn needed.

They sat on the curb outside the Quik-Mart, eight kids in a row, cups sweating in the heat. Vernon had given them his usual suspicious look but hadn't kicked them out. Small victories.

"Okay," Tanner said, brain freeze apparently making him philosophical. "Real talk. What was everyone's best moment today?"

"Winning," Hector said.

"Besides that. Something that actually matters."

"Winning matters."

"You're impossible." Tanner pointed at Quinn. "You. Best moment. Go."

Quinn thought about it. He could say landing the shove-it in front of everyone—that had felt good, the surprise on their faces, the proof that he could actually do something. But that wasn't quite right.

"This morning," he said. "When nobody was here. I was just skating by myself, and I lost track of time completely. Like, hours went by and I didn't even notice. And when I finally looked up, I realized I'd learned something without trying to learn it."

"That doesn't make sense," Tanner said.

"It makes perfect sense," Nova said. "When you're so focused on something that everything else disappears. You're not thinking about what you're doing, you're just doing it. And time goes weird."

"That sounds like drugs."

"It's not drugs, dumbass. It's like... a brain state. My brother told me about it."

Dusty was nodding slowly. "I've felt that. When I'm skating a line and everything just clicks. Like I'm not deciding what to do, I'm just doing it."

"Same," Zara said. "Usually when I'm pissed off about something. I'll skate for hours and not realize it until it gets dark."

"The anger probably helps you focus," Hector said. "Blocks out all the other stuff."

"Thanks, Dr. Hector."

"I'm just saying."

Quinn listened to them talk, feeling something warm settle in his chest. This was new—being part of the conversation instead of on the edges of it. Having something to contribute that people actually listened to.

"The thing I don't get," he said slowly, "is why it only happened today. I've been coming here for months. Why didn't it happen before?"

Nobody answered right away. The traffic hummed on Spring Garden. Vernon's silhouette moved behind the Quik-Mart window.

Then Garrett, who'd been quiet through most of the conversation, spoke up.

"Maybe because nobody was watching."

Quinn looked at him. "What do you mean?"

"When we're all here, you're always looking around. Checking if people are seeing your tricks, seeing your bails. You're skating for an audience, even if you don't realize it." Garrett shrugged, the motion small, almost apologetic. "Today you were alone. No audience. So you could just... skate."

The words hit Quinn harder than he expected. Because they were true. He did skate for an audience. Every attempt was partly for himself and partly for whoever might be watching, judging, deciding whether he was good enough to belong. Even when he was alone, he sometimes imagined the others watching, imagined their reactions, shaped his skating around what they might think.

But this morning, there had been no one to perform for. No one to impress or disappoint. Just him and the board and the concrete.

And he'd gotten better faster than he had in months.

"Huh," he said.

"Deep thoughts from Garrett Ledford," Tanner said. "Mark your calendars."

"Shut up."

"Never."

The conversation drifted to other things—plans for tomorrow, complaints about school starting soon, an argument about whether Pantera or Sepultura was better. Quinn half-listened, his mind still turning over what Garrett had said.

No audience. So you could just skate.

Quinn finished his Slurpee, the blue raspberry staining his tongue. The sun was getting low now, the shadows long, the heat finally breaking into something bearable. In an hour or so, everyone would drift home—to empty houses and double shifts and the small, grinding pressures of lives that didn't leave much room for skating.

But right now, they were here. Together. And Quinn felt like he was finally starting to understand what that meant.

---

He went back the next morning.

Same time—9:30, a little earlier than yesterday. Same empty park. Same perfect sky, although the storm the news had promised was building in the west, clouds stacking up like something about to collapse.

Quinn set his board down on the flatground and pushed off. Not toward any particular obstacle. Just moving.

The nervousness was there—fainter now, but still present. The voice in his head that asked what he was doing, whether he was wasting his time, whether he'd ever be as good as the others. The noise that never really went away, just got quieter sometimes.

He didn't try to silence it. Didn't fight it. He just started skating.

Shove-its first. The ones he'd learned yesterday. They came easier now—muscle memory kicking in, his body remembering even when his brain didn't trust it. He landed three in a row, then four, then five. The motion starting to feel natural, starting to feel like something he could do instead of something he was trying to do.

The sixth one was perfect. Clean rotation, feet landing on the bolts, rolling away smooth. He didn't have to think about it at all—his body just did what it had learned to do.

Then he tried something new. A shove-it off the curb—the higher one, by the loading dock, maybe six inches of drop. Bailed the first attempt, the extra height throwing off his timing, his feet reaching for the board too early. Bailed the second, overcompensating, reaching too late. Landed the third, ugly but real, one foot on the board and one foot half off, but he stayed on, rolled away.

He went back and tried it again. Cleaner this time. Again. Cleaner still. The adjustment happening automatically, his body calibrating to the new height without his brain having to figure out the math.

Then a frontside shove-it, the one he'd only half-learned yesterday. The board rotating the other direction, his body having to reverse everything it had just learned. Bailed the first five—three from over-rotation, two from under-rotation. Landed on the sixth, barely, his back foot catching the edge of the board at the last second. Kept trying.

The clouds crept closer. The wind picked up, warm and damp, carrying the smell of rain and the distant rumble of thunder. Quinn barely noticed. He was too busy chasing that feeling from yesterday—the one where time disappeared and his body knew what to do without being told.

It took longer to find today. Thirty minutes, maybe forty. The noise kept interrupting—thoughts about yesterday, thoughts about the S.K.A.T.E. game, thoughts about whether he was doing this right or doing it wrong, thoughts about what Garrett had said about audiences, thoughts about whether thinking about audiences was itself a form of performing for an audience. His brain didn't want to be quiet. It wanted to analyze, to compare, to judge.

He tried a frontside shove-it and bailed, his foot catching the edge of the board wrong, the board shooting sideways into the weeds. Tried again, thinking about foot position, about the exact angle of the scoop, and bailed worse—the board didn't even rotate, just slid out from under him. Tried again, forcing himself to stop thinking, telling himself to stop thinking, which was itself a form of thinking, and bailed again.

He stood there for a moment, frustrated, the noise louder than ever.

Then he took a breath. Stopped trying to be quiet. Just started moving again—pushed, turned, carved, felt the board under his feet without trying to do anything with it. Let his body remember what it felt like to skate without a goal.

He tried the frontside shove-it one more time—

His brain went quiet. His body took over. And he was skating—really skating, lost in the motion, the world shrinking down to just the board and the concrete and the next trick.

Time disappeared again.

---

When the first drops of rain hit the concrete, Quinn finally looked up.

The sky was dark. Not sunset-dark—storm-dark. The clouds he'd been ignoring had rolled in while he wasn't paying attention, and now they were directly overhead, fat and gray and ready to burst.

He'd been skating for four hours. It felt like twenty minutes.

The rain came faster, big drops that splattered on the concrete and turned the asphalt dark. Quinn grabbed his board and ran for the picnic shelter, the one with the sagging roof that barely kept anything dry. He made it just as the sky opened up.

He sat on the rotting bench, breathing hard, watching the rain turn the park into a blur of gray and silver. His clothes were soaked through, shirt clinging to his skin, shoes squelching with every shift of his feet. Tomorrow they'd be stiff and uncomfortable, and his mom would ask where he'd been, and he'd have to explain that he'd been skating in a rainstorm because he lost track of time.

But he was grinning like an idiot, and he couldn't stop.

Four hours. Gone, just like that. Swallowed up by something larger than himself, by a state of focus so complete that the whole world had narrowed down to concrete and wheels and the simple mathematics of motion. And he had new tricks to show for it—or at least the beginnings of new tricks, the sketchy first attempts that would eventually become clean lands if he kept at it.

His notebook was still in his backpack, dry somehow despite everything—he'd shoved it to the bottom before the rain started, some instinct protecting the thing Hector had given him. He pulled it out, flipped to a new page, and wrote with a pen that was starting to skip:

August 6, 1995. Deadwood. Alone. Storm came in.

Shove-its: maybe 100 attempts? Lost count. Landed most of them by the end.

Frontside shove-its: 50-ish attempts. Landing about 1 in 4.

Tried a shove-it to manual. Bailed a lot. Landed two, kind of.

New theory: stop counting. Just skate until time disappears. That's when the real learning happens.

He stared at what he'd written. It didn't look like Hector's notes—neat and methodical, with diagrams and percentages. It looked messy. Incomplete. Like the thoughts of a kid who was still figuring things out.

But maybe that was okay. Maybe figuring things out was the whole point.

The rain showed no signs of stopping. Quinn leaned back against the shelter's wobbly support beam and watched it fall, turning the bowl into a lake and the snake run into a river. Tomorrow the concrete would be slick and dangerous, and everyone would complain about the weather, and skating would be impossible until things dried out.

But right now, in this moment, Quinn felt something he hadn't felt in a long time.

Happy. Just happy.

The rain kept falling. Quinn kept watching. And somewhere in the back of his mind, he was already planning tomorrow's session—more shove-its, maybe, or something new entirely.

It didn't matter what, really.

What mattered was showing up.

Footsteps on wet concrete. Rusty settled onto the other end of the bench, rainwater dripping from his matted beard, his clothes soaked through. He didn't say anything. Just sat there, staring at the storm like it was the most interesting thing in the world.

After a long silence, he spoke.

"They all fall before they fly," he said. His voice was rough, distant, like he was talking to someone who wasn't there. "That's the secret. You gotta fall a thousand times. Then one day, you don't."

Quinn looked at him. "Thanks, Rusty."

"Don't thank me yet." Rusty's eyes were far away, focused on something Quinn couldn't see. "You got a long way to fall still. But you'll get there."

He fell silent again. The rain kept falling. And Quinn sat there, waiting it out, thinking about falling and flying and the strange magic of hours that disappeared without permission.

He'd come to the park yesterday morning as a kid who was still learning to skate.

He was leaving as something else. Something harder to name.

Someone who'd found the thing that made time disappear.
 

End.