One Last Time (Loveless Brothers 5)

“Woo!” I shout back at her.

“Great! Again,” she calls, and I skate back to the other side of the gym, take a deep breath, and start the drill over.

There was a time in my life when I thought I knew how to roller skate just fine, and that time was a week ago when I impulse-bought several hundred dollars’ worth of roller derby gear so I could join the Blue Ridge Bruisers, Lainey’s team.

Yes, buying expensive shit because you feel bad is a total rich girl move. If I were a perfect person I would’ve donated it to a children’s hospital or something, but I didn’t, because it turns out I’m deeply flawed.

Besides, if I were one of my sisters, I’d probably have bought a car or a pet tiger or something.

I stop before I hit the pads again, this time using my other foot. Lainey’s now skating up and down the court in a giant figure eight, shouting encouragement as I stop over and over again, thighs shaking a little harder each time.

Finally, I give up and just smack into the pads. They don’t smell great, but I stay there for a moment anyway, unsure if I can move backward without falling over.

“You need a break?” Lainey says, coming to a perfect stop right next to me.

“I’m not gonna be able to walk tomorrow,” I tell her, and she laughs.

“You can make it to the bleachers,” she says. “Need a hand?”

Gingerly, I push off the pads and skate backward about a foot without falling over. Somehow, I make it to the wooden bleachers, grab onto the bottom one, and land on them in an ungainly heap.

“After my first skating bootcamp session I called in sick to work the next day,” Lainey admits, slowly skating backward across my field of vision. “Had to reschedule a ton of appointments, and I sure hated myself for it the next week, but I wasn’t sure I could get up the stairs to my office.”

I shift slightly and manage to put both feet on the bench in front of me, then sprawl backward onto the bench behind.

“My foot muscles hurt,” I whine. “What the fuck?”

“Skating uses different muscles than walking, or running, or yoga,” she says. “It’s gonna hurt.”

“How many more skills do I have to learn?” I ask, staring up at the caged lights on the ceiling.

The building that’s now Sprucevale Middle was built in the 1940s as Sprucevale High and hasn’t really been touched since, so it’s retained all of its seventy-year-old high school glory.

Such as expanding wooden bleachers that have, according to legend, crushed at least one student to death. It’s probably not true, but it’s probably fun to whisper about when you’re twelve.

“Let’s not focus on that,” Lainey says, gliding by again. “I think it’s best to focus on the skills you’ve already acquired.”

“There’s so many left that you won’t even tell me how many?”

“It’s not like I know a number,” she says, looping back. “Besides, some recent studies have shown that people are more likely to excel at a new task when asked to reflect on their accomplishments, rather than —”

I groan, cutting her off.

“Next is skating backwards,” she says, skating past me, backwards. I finally muster enough energy to unclip my helmet, put it down next to me, and rest my sweaty head on the bleachers again.

“Is that hard?” I ask, still sprawled.

“Only at first,” she says, gliding to a stop. “The first time you do anything is hard. It was hard the first time you did an inverse rainbow dolphin or whatever in yoga class, right?”

I lift my head up enough to just look at Lainey for a moment, trying to imagine what pose she thinks is called an inverse rainbow dolphin.

“Where you go over backwards?” she says.

“A backbend?”

“Delilah, I know it’s named after some animal and a state of mind,” she says, hands on hips, trying not to laugh.

“I’m not saying I’m opposed to practicing hard things,” I say, finally pushing myself up to sitting. “I just want to complain about how hard they are.”

“Fair,” she says, and starts spinning in a circle.

For a long moment, I watch her spin, arms out, locs held away from her face in a spiky ponytail. I’m head-to-toe in protective gear but Lainey’s just got her skates on, probably because she doesn’t fall on her ass every time she turns around in these things.

She spins. I put my skates on the bench in front of me and look at them: bright teal with pink laces and pink wheels. If you’re gonna buy roller skates on a whim, they may as well be visible from space.

“How many butt tattoos do you think there are?” I ask Lainey, who stops spinning to face me. For the first time, she wobbles slightly.

“Do you mean in the world, or with Seth’s name on them?” she asks, rocking from skate to skate. “In the world? Millions, probably. You’ve got one.”