How It Goes

“A green tree and another loose with orange leaves” by Aaron Lelito

What I’d said to Mom in the store was true: Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater was my favorite game, or at least the one I spent the most time in front of, and what was love if not that? In the case of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, love meant sitting on the massive leather couch in Jake’s basement across the street, my eyes tracking the animated skater riding around an abandoned warehouse. The game was Jake’s, and so he mostly played, and I mostly watched. I kept quiet, not wanting to interrupt his focus. He looked fragile to me, sitting cross-legged there on the basement floor, like the smallest sound or touch might break something in him. So I kept my mouth shut, even if I saw something before he did: a pole he could hurt himself on, or one of the letters he was trying to collect (S-K-A-T-E). I sat as still as I could, too, because the couch made sounds whenever you moved, and in the silent seconds after a song ended but before the next one started, I held my breath. 

Jake would line up soda cans and snacks in a neat row beside him like they were watching him play, too. The pantry in his kitchen was stocked with boxes of individually-wrapped snacks, whereas we bought the big value bags that tumbled out and smacked you on the head when you opened a cabinet. “It’s the same exact shit. Jesus,” Mom would say when my brother and I complained about the generic names, watching her portion Market Basket Cookie Factory cereal into plastic baggies for us to take to school.

I’d gotten to actually play the game twice. The first time was when Jake’s mom came home, slamming a bag of groceries down on the counter upstairs. “Jacob Gregory,” she yelled down the stairs, and Jake looked down at the controller. We both knew he’d been found out, for some academic infraction or other, and it was time to repent. Having lived across from Jake since forever, this was not an uncommon occurrence. And since I was already there, and his mom sounded tired from her shift, she didn’t make me go home, so I stayed in the basement and played while Jake sat at the kitchen table with whatever book it was he was supposed to have read by now. 

The second time was when Jake’s friend Kyle was over. “You know there’s a multiplayer mode, right?” Kyle said. But Jake only had one controller, so he went first, then passed it to Kyle. After they each had a turn, Kyle turned around to face me on the couch behind them and asked, “You want to go next?” 

“She doesn’t want to play,” said Jake. 

But I said, “Yes I do,” and Kyle handed me the controller. Jake looked at me like this wasn’t the right answer, but he wasn’t going to say anything in front of Kyle. 

“They have a girl character if you want to be her,” Kyle said. “Elissa Steamer. My brother says she’s a badass.” He didn’t say the “ass” part out loud, just mouthed it while pointing to his butt. “He also says he’d like to get 30 minutes alone with her, if you know what I mean, but that he’d have to get a good look at her face first to know whether to keep the lights on or off.” In the game, you controlled your character from behind them, so you only saw the back of their head and body. Kyle shrugged like he did not, in fact, know what his brother meant. 

“No, I’m being Tony Hawk,” I said.

Jake had been hanging out with Kyle a lot lately. Kyle had just moved here so his dad could work at the same hospital as Jake’s mom, and his dad said maybe Jake could spend some time with him this summer and teach him how things were done around here. In the fall we’d start middle school. Class lists had just come out, and Jake and Kyle were going to be in the same class. For the first time, I’d be in a different class from Jake. I decided that day that I liked Kyle, but they started going over to Kyle’s house more after that.

***

Seeing that my opportunities to play Pro Skater would be limited for the time being, I decided to take matters into my own hands. I had $50 of Christmas money left, but even though it was enough to buy the game cartridge itself, I didn’t have the console or controller at home. The real thing would have to do. 

Mom hadn’t said anything in the store, standing there in front of the cheapest skateboard they sold in the “Bikes & Wheels” aisle at Toys “R” Us. She only looked from me to the box, which pictured five or six boys all padded up with helmets, knee pads, and elbow pads skateboarding down a tree-lined sidewalk. It wasn’t because we were on the boy side of the store. Mom didn’t care about that kind of thing. She just had that look on her face like she couldn’t believe she tossed out her cigarette just to come in here and look at this shit.

When I got the thing home and out of the box, I headed out back to the driveway. Mom yelled something about a helmet, so I grabbed my brother’s off the porch and put it on. It was too big for me, covering the top half of my vision with a black bar, but I snapped the clasp anyway. I didn’t want Mom to say anything else about the skateboard, and I definitely didn’t want her yelling at me about it outside in case Jake came home.

I stepped onto the skateboard and felt it jerk forward, nearly throwing me backward onto the pavement. Once I got my balance, I began by sort of scooting around, my left foot on the board and my right shuffling alongside in short, uneven strides, like I would on my Razor scooter. I tried to picture the game in my mind. What was the easiest trick? An Ollie, I guessed. All you did was crouch down and then jump up, keeping your feet in contact with the board. Right arrow plus triangle button. It wasn’t worth very many points, but then again, our driveway looked nothing like the graffitied warehouse in the game, so I figured it was the best I was going to do for today. I closed my eyes and went for it, rolling forward a little before launching straight up. Instead of coming with me, though, the board kept going, and I landed on my side with a hard thud while the board headed for the garage door, barely making a sound when it crashed. I looked down. I’d scraped the hand I fell on, and there was a small tear in the knee of my jeans. Mom was going to kill me.

Feeling tired and hot, I crawled onto the grass and lay on my back, grabbing blades of grass by the fistful and tugging gently upward. I tried to see how hard I could pull without breaking them, like otherwise I might float up and away into the clouds. It was just something I did that felt good. I didn’t know why. “Laying there like she’s dead again,” Mom used to say when I’d do this.

***

I hadn’t really thought about starting middle school until I was lying there. My brother was already done with middle school, but he didn’t talk about it much because he didn’t like school. He did like one of his teachers, Mrs. Lowry, because she helped him out a lot with his reading. She even came to our house a few times back when Mom was really sick. But Mrs. Lowry was retired now, which meant she was too old to work. I asked Mom if she was retired since she didn’t work, and she just laughed and said, “I’m definitely tired, that’s for sure,” squeezing me into one of her too-hard hugs. 

But I imagined that middle school would be pretty much the same as elementary school. There was still recess for the first year at least, and I’d hang out with Jake and Kyle then. We’d also have lunch together, plus a few classes like computers and health. Health class was really called “Empowered Choices,” but no one called it that, according to my brother. They kept the boys and the girls together for the sex part, which some parents got mad about, but they got different bags to take home at the end (the boys got deodorant and a condom, and the girls got a period pad and a little book called Loving Being a Woman). The different bags were the only part Mom was mad about. She said that was no way to teach people about those kinds of things. I thought maybe she was going to take the condom away, but she said that wasn’t what she meant and let my brother keep it.

When had Jake gotten Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, anyway? Was it his birthday back in September? Maybe, though if he’d asked his mom for it another time, she probably would have got it for him. I thought back to last summer, when we were really into Beanie Babies. Jake had almost all of them, and his mom kept them in a big black plastic bin in his room. We’d dump the bin out onto the floor, then arrange the Beanie Babies into a scene on the bed. Most of the time, it was a courtroom. We’d pick one to be the judge, then line up some others for the jury. 15 or 20 to be in the audience. The pillow was the witness stand, and a few lawyers would gather around there. Most of the roles changed depending on the crime, but it was always the Princess Diana bear who was on trial because the clear display case Jake’s mom kept her in made a perfect jail cell. She was limited edition, and at least once a week, Jake’s mom would say, “Look at me. You see this bear? You don’t ever take her out of this box. This is my bear. She’s going to be worth more than you can count to someday. Do you understand me?”

Even Jake’s mom would get into the game, though. She’d come home late from work with a pizza and see us kneeling next to the bed like the couple times a year when she’d make us go to Mass, and she wouldn’t say anything, but the way her face looked made me feel like we’d been caught doing something bad, like maybe we were getting too old for this game. But then she’d bring out some paper plates for the pizza, pour a glass of wine from the box in the fridge, and sit down on the floor with us.

She always had the best ideas because she fell asleep to SVU every night. If Princess Diana was on trial for abusing her disabled daughter, she’d say, “But you have no evidence. Don’t you know you can’t build a case unless you have evidence? The kid is retarded. I mean, mentally challenged. Whoever’s really molesting her could have told her to say it was the mom. I bet the mom has some boyfriend. I bet the boyfriend did it, that son of a bitch.” Being a nurse helped too. We’d be questioning Diana about where she was the night someone broke into her elderly father’s house, shoved him down the basement stairs, and stole his dead wife’s jewelry. “He must have fallen!” Diana would cry out, tears streaming down her purple bear face. “He had a bad hip!” And Jake’s mom would smack her hand down on the floor and shout, “Just look at the X-rays again! The proof is right there. Nobody falls down the stairs and ends up with that many broken ribs unless they were pushed. Isn’t that right Diana?” Diana said nothing, just put her head in her paws and sobbed. “How could you do something so heinous, Diana?” The crimes committed by Princess Diana were always heinous, according to Jake’s mom. And we’d all laugh so hard that she’d spill a little of her wine and not even get mad. Then she’d sigh and say, “I shouldn’t even joke about that. It’s not even fucking funny. Rest in peace, Diana,” and she’d cross herself and go off to bed.

But we hadn’t played that game in a long time. The black bin was gone, probably moved into the hall closet, and now only Princess Diana in her jail cell remained, on a shelf above the TV in the basement, watching me watch Jake play Pro Skater. 

***

After two weeks of practicing in the driveway, I could almost do a perfect Ollie. I had my routine worked out by then. Each morning I’d watch at the front window for Jake’s mom to back her car out of the driveway with Jake in the passenger seat. I figured she must be dropping him at Kyle’s on her way to the hospital because he hated going to work with her, and she didn’t like it much either. The second they passed the corner duplex was my cue to get out there.

I’d asked Mom to take me to the library (she’d seemed pleased and said, “Now there’s that little bookworm I know”), and I’d checked out a book called Skateboarding: Book of Tricks, along with my summer reading books for school and Tony Hawk: The Autobiography. I studied them in my room on the hottest afternoons with the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater soundtrack, which the library had on CD, playing in the background. 

“Unexpectedly cool,” my brother shouted from somewhere else in the house when he heard the music. His girlfriend Alex was over that day. A few minutes later, Alex called me from down the hallway and told me to come into my brother’s room. When I got there, she and her friend Lacie were sitting on the bed next to a bunch of makeup tubes and magazines. I looked around the room for my brother.

“He’s in the kitchen. Sometimes girls just need to talk, you know?” 

I nodded, even though I didn’t really know.

“Sit here,” she said, moving one of the magazines so I could sit on the bed. The girl on the magazine cover had bright red lips and hair blowing all over the place, covering most of her face, and she held her finger up to her mouth like she was telling you a secret. Next to her, it said 200 shocking new ways to drive your man WILD!

“Lacie is doing makeup for the play this year and she needs to practice.” 

Lacie put some powdery stuff on a big brush and started running it over my cheeks. It tickled, and the thought came in my head that Mom might get mad at me for wearing makeup, but I didn’t say anything. 

“Okay so then what happened?” Alex asked Lacie, not bothering to fill me in on what they were talking about.

“We were making out in the basement, and I was so scared we were going to, you know…”

“Did you?”

“No. His mom came home, thank God.”

“Maybe you need to go on the pill, just in case, you know?”

“Maybe.”

I didn’t know what the pill was, or what it had to do with sex, but I knew enough to know that’s what they must have been talking about. Was sex just something that happened to you when you got to be Lacie’s age, like it or not?

I didn’t ask these questions out loud, though. Even though they were both looking at my face, I knew I wasn’t really part of the conversation, and I figured I’d learn it better in health class anyway. Plus I was trying hard not to squeeze my eyes shut every time Lacie poked me with what looked like a stubby little colored pencil. Eventually Alex had to hold my eyes open one at a time so Lacie could draw the line.

They stood up and took a few steps back to see how they’d done. 

“Oh my god she looks so good! She’s like a little doll.”

“I know! She’s such a tomboy, though.”

They didn’t tell me to leave, but it seemed like they were done with me, so I went to the bathroom to look at my face. The makeup looked weird to me, so I tried washing it off with soap and water. A bunch of colors came off on the washcloth, pink and brown and blue, but there still seemed to be just as much on my face, and now I looked like I had a black eye, too. The first thing I thought was that I wouldn’t be going outside to practice my Ollies today because I didn’t want Jake to see my face like that on the off chance he came home from Kyle’s before the sun went down.

I wished I could tell him about Lacie and Alex’s conversation, though. Even though we hadn’t been hanging out much lately, I didn’t think it was weird to share that kind of stuff with him. Jake’s mom had told us a few things about sex, but sometimes she was being serious (she told us once in her nurse voice, all calm and serious, “Sex is when a man’s penis penetrates a girl’s vagina”), and sometimes she was joking (“So do girls have a penis?” Jake asked once, and she said, “No, God comes into their room when they’re born and cuts their wiener off”). Sometimes she didn’t want to talk about things like that at all, like when we watched an SVU episode where a man killed his wife and son because he found out his wife was having sex with the neighbor and he wasn’t the baby’s real dad. Jake asked if sex meant that he’d had a dad once, and she told us to be quiet and watch because we asked too many goddamn questions.

***

The next Monday, I counted 20 Ollies in a row without messing up. On Tuesday, instead of taking my skateboard out the back door to the driveway, I went out front into the yard. My brother’s helmet was on the porch. I wouldn’t be wearing it today. 

And I waited. I waited in the grass under the shadow of the house, in the spot where if you turned from the main road onto our street, I’d be just out of sight. Jake wasn’t home. I knew this because it was the first day of middle school orientation, and everyone in his and Kyle’s class was supposed to go today. My class would go tomorrow. According to the letter, orientation would be over by noon. The walk home would be no more than 20 minutes, so I made sure I was in my place by 12:15. 

But 12:30 came, and still no sign of Jake. I started to lose hope. He must have gone to Kyle’s house instead. Kyle who lived on the big house side of town, whose mom stayed home like my mom but wasn’t tired all the time like mine, who had a summer pool membership with guest passes and a brand-new Play Station 2 with two controllers.

I was lying on my back, staring at the sun until black dots and clear bubbles swirled around in my eyes, when I heard Jake’s laugh from behind the neighbor’s house. I sat up fast. Kids always made fun of Jake when he laughed because it was loud, I mean really loud. But he’d keep on laughing, and then they’d call him a freak, and he’d laugh louder and louder, pointing to himself and saying, “Who, me? A freak? Oh no!” in a wild voice with his eyes crossed and a fake surprised face, until he was screaming and flapping his arms around, and eventually they’d give up and leave. I liked his laugh. 

He and Kyle were turning onto the street now. Kyle said something I couldn’t hear, and Jake laughed again, or started to at least, then stopped himself. I timed it perfectly so that right as they were passing the big bush in front of the corner duplex, I skated into their vision and leapt into the air. But unlike the 20 times yesterday, I did not land flawlessly on my board. I fell forward, hard, on my hands and knees. They were stinging, and when I pushed back on my heels and sat up, there were tiny pebbles pressed into my palms and one of them was bleeding.

Jake and Kyle stood still on the sidewalk a house and a half down the block, squinting from the sun and looking at me. The first thing I noticed, sitting there on the pavement, was that they were wearing the same skate shoes. Jake’s were blue, and Kyle’s were green. Jake’s were too big for him. He must have seen that Kyle had two pairs and begged him to let him wear one. Kyle was carrying a plastic bag from CVS, and Jake held an Arizona iced tea and a can of pizza-flavored Pringles, my favorite flavor.

“What is she doing?” Jake said to Kyle, breaking the silence. Then, after a pause, he added, louder, “She looks like a freak.” He reached into his t-shirt to take his house key off the string around his neck, printed with the name of the hospital his mom worked at. 

“Let’s go.” He ran up the steps, letting the door slam behind him. Kyle hadn’t moved yet. I hid the hand that was bleeding behind me and turned away from him. Although I couldn’t see him anymore, it felt like he was still standing there for several more seconds. Finally, he followed Jake inside, and I heard him close the screen door quietly.

***

That night I told Mom everything. The botched Ollie. Ripping the other knee of my jeans. Jake’s face, and how it had been 22 days since I’d hung out with him, which was more than the number of days left in summer, and then he and Kyle would be in class together and I wouldn’t, and we didn’t even have the same summer reading books. How for a second, one stupid second, I’d wondered if the pizza-flavored Pringles were for me.

I was lying on the living room carpet, pulling up on the fibers as hard as I could, with Mom in her chair by the window, smoking a cigarette. It was getting late, but the sun wasn’t all the way down yet, so we kept the lights off. I’d always told Mom everything, and I still did, but instead of sitting in her lap, tracing the ridges in her face with my pinky like I used to, I’d taken to lying on the floor and looking up at the ceiling while I talked (“living room confessional,” she called it). Eye contact felt too close these days, and I resented all that I poured into her like this, how I handed her all the still-hurting things about my life, and she just took them without ever saying anything (she only spoke when I asked her outright, “If I’d done it right, like I did a million times before, do you think they would have invited me to come inside with them?” and she just puffed on her cigarette and said, “I don’t know, baby girl. I don’t know”). 

Because that was how she listened, in her way where she didn’t react, or even really act like she was hearing you, but you still knew she was. I knew she’d let me go on until the words started coming out too fast and scrambled to make sense anymore, until I felt like I might choke on the snot collecting in my throat, or the hot, stale air in our unairconditioned living room might suffocate me. Until the room was completely dark and there was nothing left she didn’t know.

I knew, too, that she wouldn’t get mad about the jeans, and she’d sew up both knees that night in front of the TV, occasionally laughing or responding out loud to something Letterman said like they were having a private conversation. I knew the next time she saw Jake’s mom outside, maybe taking out the trash or just sucking in the cooler late-summer nighttime air, and Jake’s mom would say, “I can’t remember the last time your girl was over here. It seems like they aren’t attached at the hip anymore like they used to be,” she’d just say, “I guess that’s just how it goes,” and wish her a good night, and not tell her about the thing that happened because I wouldn’t want her to. Maybe some things were still the same, at least for now.

The next morning I woke up with my head aching and got dressed for middle school orientation. I knew it wasn’t a real school day, and the letter said we only had to bring a pencil and paper, but I tried pretending like it was. I’d missed packing my backpack, so I got it out from the closet and thought about what could go inside. And when I walked down the street with my summer reading books, the essay about what I did that summer, and my same Trapper Keeper from last year but new paper inside it, the top of Jake’s head was in the basement window, following me all the way.

Alia Georges is a writer based in the Boston, Massachusetts area.