Page 12 of Tricks for Free

“Not the worst, not the best,” I said. There was a bench about six feet away. I didn’t feel like going that far, and sat down where I stood, beginning to unlace my shoes. “You?”

“Lots of vomit and sunstroke. It was a vomit-and-sunstroke festival.”

“That’s a bad festival,” said Fern gravely.

Megan just laughed.

It can be easy to forget that gorgons aren’t mammals. The snakes on their heads are a solid clue that they’re not human, but head snakes are so biologically improbable that they don’t flip the “actually a pseudo-reptile wandering around in a vaguely human disguise” switch. Which is, to be fair, not a switch that most people use in their daily lives.

Gorgons are warm-blooded and control their own internal body temperature, but they’re not as susceptible to sunstroke as humans are, and they don’t burn. Even the palest gorgons can sit in the sun for hours without anything to show for it beyond happy snakes. I don’t know where they stand on vomiting, having never hated myself enough to ask, but since Megan regularly fed mice to the snakes on her head, and anything that goes down can come up, I sort of assumed she was capable of vomiting from a dozen mouths at a time. The extrusions of human children probably seemed like amateur hour to her.

Fern and Megan were chatting now, reviewing the minutiae of their days, and while I knew I was being a bad friend by shutting them out, I couldn’t help it. There was so little left in my life that felt like it was normal. This? This was normal.

When I ran from the Spenser and Smith Family Carnival, leaving dead bodies and wounded friends and fire in my wake—leaving my life behind me—I’d taken nothing but what was already in my backpack, which had transformed somewhere along the way into a “go bag,” always ready for the next evacuation. That it had happened without my really noticing probably said something about me that I didn’t want to hear. I’d walked away with a couple of changes of clothing, a bunch of knives, a first aid kit, and my skating gear.

Maybe running away from home with a pair of roller skates, kneepads, elbow guards, and a helmet isn’t the sort of reasonable, rational decision that an adult is supposed to make, and if I’d been in a position to pick and choose what I was carrying, I might have taken a few things out. Like the little house Mork and Mindy had built for themselves from scavenged pieces of the carnival itself, Popsicle sticks and ticket stubs and dead weight that I couldn’t find the strength to throw away.

Sometimes planning is a luxury you just don’t get. I’d found myself in Florida with no clean bras and a pair of professional grade roller skates, and while I couldn’t say it was the best tactical decision I’d ever made, it was definitely the choice that was going to save my sanity.

I slipped my skates over my feet and the ache vanished like magic, replaced by a sense of serenity that I was going to pay for in the morning. That was fine. I was assigned to attend the actresses portraying Lizzie and Laura for the rest of the week, which meant I’d be standing mostly still, not catering to endless guest requests or running back and forth between the stockroom and the floor. I could handle a few bruises for the sake of tonight.

It only took a few seconds to do up my laces, my fingers moving on a swift, practiced autopilot that continued as I strapped on my kneepads and elbow guards, protecting my most vulnerable joints from the inevitable impact with something solid, like the ground, or the side of Princess Laura’s Library.

When I finally looked up, Fern was sitting on the bench, lacing her own skates, and Megan was looking at me sympathetically.

“You did have a bad day,” she said.

“That obvious?” I asked, strapping on my helmet. If my joints are susceptible to impact damage, my skull is even more so. One big advantage of roller derby over cheerleading: we’re allowed to wear safety gear.

(Seriously. Cheerleading is not technically considered a sport, even though a competitive cheerleader is definitely an athlete, and anyway, giving us protective gear so we don’t break our necks after leaping from the top of a six-level pyramid would make us less sexy and all that other bullshit. Because nothing says “hot” like “head trauma.”)

“Yeah,” said Megan. “What would you have done if I hadn’t shown up with the skates?”

“I don’t know. Punched a few walls maybe.” Or gone into the swampy, undeveloped fields behind our apartment complex and thrown rocks at alligators. It wasn’t nice, but it was mutually frustrating for me and the gators, and sometimes misery loves company.

Megan shook her head. “I worry about you.”

“I worry about me, too.”

“No, I mean it. Humans aren’t supposed to function in isolation. You’re pack animals. You need the rest of your pack around you to be mentally healthy.”

I paused to give her a narrow-eyed sidelong look. “I can’t decide whether you’re teasing me about some of the things I’ve said about gorgons or not.”

“Naturalism runs both ways,” she said. “If you can play Animal Planet about my species, I can do the same with yours. You have to admit, I’ve had a lot more opportunity to observe wild humans than you’ve had to observe wild gorgons. You’re like beetles. Your god must love you, because he put you everywhere.”

“Jerk,” I said mildly.

“Monkey,” she replied.

I tried not to let my smile falter. She was technically correct—humans are apes, after all—but all the word made me think of was Sam, and how worried he had to be. Thanks to Mary keeping me connected to the situation, I couldn’t even lie to myself and pretend he no longer cared what happened to me. He cared. He might always care. He just couldn’t do a damn thing about it.

A hand tagged my shoulder. I turned to see Fern go darting down a narrow nearby pathway, waving behind herself as she zipped away. “Catch me if you can!” she yelled, voice trailing off as her speed caught up with the sound.

Shooting Megan an only semi-apologetic look, I took off after Fern, and everything else—my day, my situation, the people I missed and my concerns about the people who were missing me—fell away, replaced by the sheer joy of moving.

My sister, Verity, is only really happy when she’s doing something. When we were kids, our parents used to reserve time-outs for the absolute gravest of crimes, because using them for the little things that all children get up to would have been absolute torture for her. So she wrote lines instead, or did math problems concocted by Grandma Angela (an accountant, and an absolute monster where math is concerned), or raked the yard. Making her hold still was never on the table. My brother, Alex, is almost the opposite. He’s an academic, and the reptiles he studies respond best to patience and pretending to be a rock. Time-outs were almost a gift where he was concerned, which meant he didn’t get them either. Instead, he did dishes and sharpened knives and wasn’t allowed to go back to his room, no matter how much he apologized for whatever it was he’d done.

Me, I fell somewhere in the middle. I loved the feeling of motion, the knowledge that I could run as fast as I wanted, jump as high as my legs would carry me, and count on the strength of the body I had built, one training session at a time, to carry me safely to the finish line. I also loved sitting quietly, saving my strength for when I’d need it, reading comic books and watching movies and arguing with my cousin Artie about who’d be in the objectively perfect X-Men lineup. It was a good mix. I got time-outs. I always came out of them swinging.