Page 34 of False Start

I didn’t look at the corner. Couldn’t look at the corner. My demons lurked there, waiting for me to falter. Waiting for me to succumb.

I kicked harder, my slides longer and on my heels now, as jam skating mixed with skate park moves. My momentum careened me dangerously close to the wall, but I didn’t care.

I stopped or I didn’t.

I’d break or I wouldn’t.

And if my recklessness brought me pain, I welcomed it.

The laser lights blurred, the music grew muffled, and the shouts from Mayhem’s bout crept into my head. The hungry look in her eyes. The quick shift of her gaze finding tiny gaps. Her body low, tight, and powerful as she exploded through barriers with unrelenting force beyond the physical propelling her.

The air tore from my lungs. I lunged harder, faster, memories taunting me.

Tempting me.

A memory—fuzzy at the edges—but the central scene unfolding with devastating clarity scrubbed Mayhem away and now Lana burst around a corner, heading to the outside to zip past the pack as lead jammer. One point, two points, then a third. A shoulder from out of nowhere lifting her clean off the floor, suspending her in air, before sending her sliding into the wall.

The impossible angle of her head as she took the brunt of the collision at the base of her neck.

Her still body in a heap. Gasps of onlookers filling the air.

My own whispered prayer when I didn’t even realize I knew how to pray anymore.

When I was sure because of my past sins, God had stopped listening.

Another slide, the drag of my wheels and the force of my body putting impossible pressure on my ankles. Sweat running down my forehead into my eyes.

My brother’s angry voice, the word traitor on the tip of his tongue before he slammed the door and went with our father.

Barreling across the floor again, my vision blurring, my gut squeezing bile into my throat, the screams of my sister when the police showed up at our apartment and told us our father and brother were gone.

You’re the oldest, son. It’s your job to protect them when you go.

He’s our father and you’re a traitor.

Our daughter will never walk again and it’s all your fault.

Voices filled with venom and despair reverberating through my skull snatching the thread of peace I’d struggled so hard to hold on to.

I can’t protect anyone.

“Hey, watch out!”

The crack of wood echoed through the air. My thighs burned with the force stopping my lower body dead. My upper body kept going, the benches on the other side of the wall a flash of color as I flipped over the side and landed flat on my back on an unforgiving commercial carpet, the only thing between me and the concrete underneath. My teeth rattled in my skull. A pulsating throb took root inside me as I struggled to suck air into my lungs.

“Fuckin’ A, dude. Are you okay?”

I grabbed my chest, still working on moving air. “Shit, that hurt a lot less when we were sixteen,” I gasped out.

Jackson barked out a laugh as he yanked the frame of the wall back and forth. “Everything hurt less when we were sixteen.”

I craned my neck to look up at him, grateful that I could still move it. “I’ll cover the damage. Is it bad?”

“Nah, you’re probably lucky it was already loose after some troublemakers rammed one of their buddies into it last week. Already have it scheduled to get fixed after Christmas.”

“So you’re saying the leeway softened the blow?” Because it sure as hell felt like I hit concrete before I definitely landed on concrete.

“Something like that.”

I pushed up onto my elbows and took a deep breath of commercial carpet that no longer smelled like shampoo now that I’d decided to bump and grind against it. “Doesn't feel like it.”

Jackson reached out a hand and helped hoist me up. “Dude, whatever you were outrunning, did you win?”

“I never do.”

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