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“Oh Em Gee,” Sage breathed. “Is it abandoned? Is it safe?”
“Good question,” I muttered, eyeing Harlow as she wiggled excitedly in the passenger seat. “You bring us to a homicide scene, Keaton?”
She smacked my arm.
“Ouch.”
“I could’ve pinched you. Don’t even pretend you’re not ticklish. I know you are.” When I conceded that with a slight eye roll, she grinned. “Okay, it needs a new paint job, but it’s a skating rink. It’s supposed to be a nostalgic throwback.”
Only one other car was in the parking lot, which didn’t help the ghost-town appearance of the short, squatty, concrete-block building. The layers of bricks were painted in colors that were probably bright at one time—red and blue and orange and white—but over time, they’d chipped and faded with the sun, and the purple metal door leading to the inside hadn’t fared much better.
“It’s … something. Don’t know if nostalgic is the right word. This isn’t where you and I used to come skating, is it?”
Harlow shook her head. “That place closed.”
“This is the new one?” I asked.
At my tone, she smacked me in the chest.
Sage unhooked her seat belt and leaned forward, resting her elbows on the center console. “And why are we here?”
“Because this is exactly the kind of thing kids did for fun when Ian and I were your age. The skating parties at school were my favorite thing in the entire year.”
I gave her a quick look. “You kept up on your roller-skating skills?”
She snorted. “No. But how hard can it be?”
Turns out, it was a lot harder than Harlow remembered. We were the only three people on the large, gleaming wood rink, and thankfully, the inside was much nicer than the outside.
Sage was wobbly at first, clutching to the side of the wall as she shuffled on the four bright orange wheels of the tan suede skates. The man working the counter had a seventies and eighties mix playing, the pulsing lights throwing bright, glittering lights along the walls to Abba and a Whitney Houston song that I vividly remembered Sheila listening to on repeat when she first married my dad. I found myself humming along as I did a lap around the rink and caught back up with Sage.
“I’m gonna fall,” she cried.
“Not that far if you do,” I said, skating backward in front of her.
She glared. “How are you so good?”
“I played hockey in high school and was in a league when I lived in London.” As I answered this question, we passed the section of the rink where the half-wall stopped, and Harlow sat on a wide circular seat, lacing up her skates. I spun my body so I could skate forward, catching Harlow’s expression as I did. “Don’t you roll your eyes at me,” I called over my shoulder. “This was your idea.”
“Show-off,” she yelled.
Cutting through the middle of the rink, I paused in front of her. “You forget how to tie your laces? Or are you just trying to set a record for the slowest entry to the rink?”
The answer to that lay in the dangerous narrowing of her eyes. With a laugh, I backed away and slowed when I approached Sage again.
Her tongue was tucked between her teeth as she concentrated, and she cut me a quick, nervous glance when I nudged her arm.
“Try squatting your butt down a little more. Yeah, like that. Now push your feet out a little as you try to glide forward,” I told her. Then I slowed, circling next to her and exaggerating the movement of my feet in the skates.
Sage loosened her grip on the wall, her eyes flicking back and forth from the empty stretch of rink in front of her down to my feet. As I’d instructed, she bent her knees slightly, lowering her center of gravity. It helped, and within just a few short pushes of her skates, she started getting more comfortable.
By the time the next song started, she’d let go of the wall, an excited grin on her face.
“How do you turn backward like that?” she asked, yelling a bit over the music. The guy working smiled as we skated past and fiddled with the mix, easing into some newer songs, and Sage started nodding her head along to the beat.
“Lots of practice, kid.”
“I hate that answer,” she grumbled. “Adults always say that when they don’t want to show you something.”
