But Lori had promised her Vince wouldn’t be there. Apparently he’d stopped coming to the rink just after she had. Maybe she was the only reason he came out skating at all, but she wasn’t thinking about that. She was just keeping an eye on all the other kids laughing and running into the rink for Skateblast Saturday Fun Night.
So far, what Lori had told her looked to be true. The rink was safe. It was hers again.
She stood a little straighter. A shock of nerves ran through her when she saw Lori making her way up the street with MaryAnn and Roger behind her. But Vince wasn’t with them.
“Sorry,” said Lori with a big grin as she wrapped her arms around Dee’s shoulders. “You been waiting long?”
Dee shrugged. “Not really.”
“This fool,” said MaryAnn, and she elbowed the tall boy leaning over her like a wilting willow, “changed his shirt about five times.”
“Hey,” said Roger, who was fingering the edges of his fro even as he spoke. “You said you like your man looking sharp.”
The two began to bicker. Lori rolled her eyes and gave Dee a conspiratorial grin. Dee laughed, and the two of them headed arm in arm up to the counter to pay their admission. They were still early. The floor was only starting to fill up. In an hour it’d be full of gliding bodies, all a blur under the strobing, tinted lights.
Dee and Lori sat side by side on a bench. Dee pulled the red laces of her skates snug, flexed her ankles and toes and stood. Three weeks she had been avoiding the rink. She hadn’t gone so long without skating since the previous summer when she’d caught bronchitis.
She stepped onto the slick surface with practiced ease, one foot and then a push with the other. She was a long way from the tiny girl she used to be who couldn’t get onto the rink without clinging to the wall. She was already pacing ahead of Lori, Roger and MaryAnn, but she didn’t look behind her. They’d catch up.
She let her momentum carry her into the bend at the end of the rink and then crossed the right foot over the left to glide through the turn. She’d missed this. Skating was so much easier than avoiding Vince. They didn’t have any classes together, thank God, but he seemed to be everywhere anyway. She’d stopped going to the library, too, because she didn’t want to take unnecessary chances. Which meant most days she got through school as quickly as possible and then booked it for the bus home.
But Vince was a good guy, a really good guy, so he wasn’t trying too hard to seek her out. It was probably driving him nuts that he didn’t know why she’d cut him off and wouldn’t explain. She couldn’t remember a single day since they’d met that they weren’t talking in between classes or hanging out in the library at lunch or hanging out after school.
Her dad had asked last Sunday why he wasn’t over watching American Bandstand with them, which she thought was the greatest injustice. He was always fussing about that walking-stick boy with the bad haircut hanging around their house like he didn’t have anywhere better to be—and he was full of it, because a couple times Dee had run upstairs and caught them talking about basketball enthusiastically when she came back down. “Well, at least he’s not over here eating all our food like usual,” her dad had said, even though he was always the one who reminded mom to set an extra plate.
Lori and MaryAnn reached her at the far end of the rink. “Where’s Rodge?” Dee asked, perhaps a little too quickly. She tried to look nonchalant, but Lori had already detected the small note of panic in her voice.
“Some of the guys showed up,” said Lori, and made eyes at the lockers. They could plainly see Roger at the center of a group of boys, laughing and elbowing each other. Vince was still not present. “Girl, you should just move on,” Lori continued. “Look, there’s Tony. He’s so tall and fine. Go see if he wants to skate with you.”
“I don’t want to skate with anybody,” said Dee with a bright, overly sweet smile. “I got you guys.”
MaryAnn laughed. “Uh-huh! That’s not what you were saying a month ago. It was just Dee and Vince.” She said it in a melodic, drawn-out way, brushing Dee’s shoulder with her own, fluttering her eyelashes.
“Vince and Dee,” Lori added from Dee’s other side, mirroring MaryAnn and ignoring Dee’s scoff. “I’m surprised you remember our names.”
“I still don’t get why you’re mad at Vince,” said MaryAnn. “What he do?”
Dee sighed, because she didn’t know how to answer that. Because Vince hadn’t done anything. And because MaryAnn was always one step behind, a little out of sync. She didn’t have to explain these things to Lori. Somehow, Lori always just knew what the problem was without Dee having to tell her.
“It’s not about what Vince did,” said Lori. Dee could feel the playful smirk on her face. “It’s about what Dee did.”
MaryAnn leaned in. “What’d you do, Dee?”
“You didn’t see them holding hands during the couples’ skate?” said Lori. “They were skating all close and slow, the lights were dark and we were just watching, and then outta nowhere Dee just let go and took off in the middle of the song. You didn’t see all that?”
“Nooo!” gasped MaryAnn. “You did that, Dee?”
“Man, shut up, Lori,” said Dee, and she shot ahead of them. She could hear Lori and MaryAnn calling after her, but she rounded the next bend, zigzagged smoothly between other skaters and didn’t look their way.
It reminded her of last time. She and Vince were in their own world, but she’d come out of it when she heard Lori and Roger’s boys snickering behind them.
And yet, even now, she wondered why she had let go of Vince’s hand. Was she embarrassed? Was she not ready for what their friends would say about them? What they would expect? Was there even a way to prepare for any of that?
Dee met Vince Ramirez almost a year ago, when he showed up in her biology class at the beginning of the spring semester. Dee and her classmates had been curious about the Filipino kid starting classes in the middle of the year. But he’d found his stride and fit in seamlessly, and soon he became background like most of the boys in Dee’s class.
A few weeks later, Vince showed up at Saturday Fun Night at the local rink. The DJ played hits by Donna Summer, James Brown, and Ecstasy, Passion & Pain, sodas were free with a slice of pizza, and Dee and her friends went practically every week. Roger invited him. They had become friends, because Roger was friends with everyone and it was only a matter of time.
“Hey, Dee, you met Vince?” said Roger. “He likes Soul Train, too!”
“So?” Dee laughed. “Everybody likes Soul Train.”
But they talked. About the Bee Gees, Archie Bell & the Drells, and Chaka Khan. About Soul Train and American Bandstand. And that Monday, in biology, they kept talking. The following summer was a blur of poring over vinyls in the record store, riding their bikes to the library, the newsstand and the snowball stand next door. They chewed candy and popcorn while Dee told Vince about the novel she’d read that week and Vince showed off his stack of comics. And every Saturday night, there was skating.
Until three weeks ago, at least, when she’d let go of Vince’s hand and left him on the rink floor like a jilted lover, which
