“I wish someone’d talked me out of this one,” she says.
After Mindy leaves, I clean.
I clean everything. I wipe down every surface. I practically wrench the tattoo chair apart. Scrub the floors, the walls. I autoclave everything I can find that can go into an autoclave, just for the hell of it.
As the smell of bleach rises through the air, so thick that I prop the back door despite the temperature, I think over and over again: this is why.
And I think: I’m glad he left.
This is what happens. It’s never been a butt tattoo before, but it will always be something: a lipstick in his medicine cabinet. A joke from one of his brothers. A knowing look in the grocery store.
Some reminder that I’m a name on a list. One of fifty, or sixty, or a hundred. Another notch on a bedpost riddled with them.
When there’s nothing left to clean in the back room I move to the front and get to work: vacuum, mop, wipe. I pull the cushions off the couch. I grab the Windex and painstakingly clean every inch of the big plate glass windows in the front, both arms aching by the end.
And when I’m finished I look out through them, onto the quiet streets of Sprucevale at nine o’clock on a Thursday night, and I think: Bird.
He hasn’t called me that in years, not since we were actually dating, not since before the hotels and the fuck fest weekends and the fights. Not since we were young and naïve and in the kind of wild, breathless, relentless, all-consuming love that’s only for the young and naïve.
I don’t know why he started again and I refuse to think about it tonight. I’m just going to leave the shop, get takeout on the way home, and then watch the relentless pleasantness of The Great British Bake Off until I’m numb enough to go to sleep.
I shut off the lights, close the doors, lock them behind myself. My breath fogs into the clear sky as I make the short walk to my car. Get in. Crank the heat.
Look through the windows, stars barely visible beyond the orange glow of a street light. I’ve got no idea where scorpio is, or when it’s visible, or what it looks like.
But I flip the sky off anyway, then drive home.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Delilah
I watch the glossy wooden planks fly by under me, scuffed with years of sneaker marks. My Nineties Girl Rock playlist is blasting from a Bluetooth speaker, though given the way that Veruca Salt is getting lost in the vast space of the middle school auditorium, I’m not sure blasting is the right word.
“Try not to hit the pads this time!” Lainey shouts.
“Right!” I shout back, and shift my weight to my left foot, dragging my right behind me at what I hope is a ninety-degree angle.
My inner thighs scream. My outer thighs scream. My quads and glutes and calves and lower back all scream as I grit my teeth and keep my core as stable as I can to keep from spinning out like last time.
About a foot before the blue pads bolted to the gymnasium wall, I come to a stop.
“Yeah, baby!” Lainey shouts.
I put both skates back on the floor and take a deep breath. I’m tempted to lean against the wall, but I’ve got wheels on my feet right now and frankly I don’t trust any angles besides straight up and down.
“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.”