3. Nia

3

NIA

She drops the bomb on me, casually skating away like she didn't just destroy my reality.

Lonnie is dead. Lonnie is fucking dead.

Lonnie, the only person in this entire world I felt closer to than family. Lonnie, the one who cared for me without judgment, who tolerated all my adolescent bullshit, who pulled me from the path I'd catapulted myself down, heading nowhere fast. Lonnie, who protected me when my mother tore me to shreds. Lonnie, who sent me off to college after my injury, who told me to take time to heal before I hurt myself worse than before.

Lonnie, my voice of reason.

Lonnie, who I came home for.

Who I spoke to three months ago, with the promise of seeing each other again.

Six weeks. I lost six weeks in a hospital, recovering from a head injury. Almost two to wake up, and four more to rehab.

And in that time, I lost everything.

The buzzing in my brain intensifies, my heartbeat far too labored from the narcotics traveling through my veins at rapid speed. Skating high seemed like a fun idea. Skating twenty-seven laps with two crushed Roxys in my nose under five minutes was borderline suicidal.

Star is saying something, but I can't hear her past the chaotic noise inside my own head. My feet move beneath me, confusion, need for clarification, and an unforgiving pattern of self-deprecation already taking root within. As if swept by a current, I'm pulled in only one direction.

I feel a squeeze on my wrist, and I find Lady Yaga's hand tight around me. "Just let her cool off." The words are barely audible, but the shaking of her head is clear as I read her lips. "Harvey's kind of intense."

It's not enough to hold me back.

I have to talk to her.

Shaking off one of my oldest friends, I make my way to the locker room. I'm drawn to this girl, and I can't explain why. Pausing at the door, I look back to see only anxious faces watching me. I roll my shoulders, raising one hand to the wall to combat the lightheadedness fighting to take me down.

With a trembling fist, I knock.

"Fuck off," she barks immediately from the other side.

"I'm coming in," I announce, like it would somehow make it better.

The girl named Harvey is sitting on a bench, legs spread wide with her elbows resting on the tops of her thighs. Her head is dropped, a dark spot staining the concrete where her sweat drips from her clasped hands to the floor.

With her helmet off, I can see her short blonde hair, trimmed close around the ears and the back but long in the front, spilling over her eyes. I think they're green, but I'm not sure. They look red now. An eclectic array of anime tattoos cover her muscled arms, down to the scorpion on her hand.

Her chin raises slowly, her eyes narrow and hard, scrutiny burning from them as they gaze into me.

She's fucking breathtaking. Every sharp edge of her features is softened by the glow of her skin and the fullness of her lips. My heart drums faster when the furrow in her eyebrow grows deeper.

"What the fuck do you want?" Her nostrils flare, the silver hoop glinting in the light.

Standing here now, I am well aware that my brain has abandoned me to my stupid decisions.

"Lonnie is dead?" They're the only words I can manage coherently.

She doesn't say anything, but the confirmation isn't necessary.

"When?" It becomes harder to take each inhale fully, my lungs struggling to do the work.

"Little over a month ago."

The words feel like cinder blocks around my skates; my knees buckle and beg to drop.

I brace myself, holding onto the wall and feeling the weight of them on me. "I-I don't understand. I just spoke to them?—"

"Don't you have friends you can talk to about this?" She's already up, skating towards the door, her shoulder bumping against mine and nearly knocking me the rest of the way down.

The door slams behind her, leaving me with the echo of her words in the damp room.

I let go, falling to my knee pads and letting the tears roll down my cheeks. Everything is wrong.

This isn't the life I was supposed to come back to.

This wasn't part of the plan.

Everyone has cleared out, only Star staying behind, knowing me well enough to suspect when a breakdown is imminent.

"You okay?" She tilts her head to the side.

I shake my head but skate toward her anyway, with no attempt to stop on my part as I crash into her. She's strong enough to take it, lowering her center of gravity and wrapping her arms around me in an embrace. The tears fall, as if dehydration hasn't already set in from the buckets I've sweat and the pills I snorted. A wailing spills from my chest that I don't recognize as my own.

My friend holds me, sinking to the ground while letting me have this moment of mourning without judgment or rush.

I cry until it's no longer sustainable, until the tears burn my skin and my throat begs for water. It's not enough to make me move; it's only when the cold floor registers beneath me, when the headache begins to settle in, that I dry my face and stand.

Minutes pass, and I've gone silent, my lips splitting and cracking when Star finally speaks again.

"What's your plan? Come stay with me tonight?"

I look up at her, nodding with no hesitation. I've been staying at Lorraine's dinky old motel on the side of the highway. It's fine—nothing smells and it's cheap enough not to leave a big dent in my savings, which is just enough for a couple of months until I can find a job.

In a big city, a BA in social work is a guaranteed promise of a job. Out here in Devil Town, though, where I detoured my entire life for what I can only label as a "call from the universe" to come home? I'll be lucky to find work at a coffee shop, let alone in my designated field.

"You still live with your mom?" I smile, remembering how Star's mother had been the first person to supply us with alcohol underage.

She chuckles like her mind went to the same place, dropping her arm over my shoulder as we skate toward our things still on the benches. "Yeah, but she's a cranky grouch now. All those White Russians ended up giving her cirrhosis. She didn't do too well after the liver transplant."

"That's… terrible." I drop to the bench, undoing the laces on my skates and removing each piece of my protective gear. "Are you sure I should come by?"

"Yeah, definitely. She'll be stoked to see you; she still talks about the night you got hurt." She slings her bag over her shoulder, always much faster at removing her skate garb than me.

Grabbing my helmet off the bench, she gives it a once over. A giant smile stretches from ear to ear as she appreciates the fact that her To Punish and Enslave Decepticons sticker is still proudly displayed on it. It's been nearly a decade since she first slapped it on there, just moments after I completed my first speed test and became a Jammer for the Devil's Dames Derby League.

She tosses the helmet in my skate bag and slings it over her shoulder, not taking any arguments from me as I try to convince her to let me carry it myself.

"Girl, you look like this bag would knock you the hell over—no offense." She side-eyes me. "Is there a story behind why you look like the Grim Reaper, and where that scar on your head came from?" Gesturing to the shaved half of my head, she emphasizes where it cuts its way from my temple all the way past my ear.

I take a deep breath, knowing I can't hide the truth from my friend, but that she'll make far too big of a deal about it if I don't. "Stella…" I try deflecting with the use of her government name.

"You don't have to tell me now." She lifts her hand up to stop me from possibly lying, the thing I taught myself to do when the truth is too uncomfortable to stomach or share. "When you're ready, yeah?"

"Yeah," I agree with a nod.

I try to argue my way into showering at the rink, for my own personal need to be clean as soon as possible, but Star is against it, promising me that her bathroom at home would be far more accommodating.

I hate feeling like a burden, but I'm trying this new thing where if someone offers, I won't turn down their help. Maybe one day, I'll grow enough spine to ask for it.

A laughable concept to anyone who truly knows me.

Star knows me, and she spent the entire ride back to her house eye-ing me suspiciously.

"What happened to your car?" she finally asks, referring to the once crushed and then half-uncrushed metal near the driver's side.

"I hit a tree a few weeks back." I shrug it off like it's nothing, my fingers wrapping tighter around the wheel of my beat-up Subaru.

"Looks like you tried to become one with it. How the fuck is this car even running?" She laughs, toying with the sound system, only to find that it doesn't work.

"I know, it's tragic," I explain with a huff, "but East End Garage got it running for me with a used engine."

"Damn." She gives up, leaning back into the passenger side. "Is that what happened to your head?"

"Stella," I warn, not ready to fish that bottle from the ocean quite yet.

"My bad. Looks wicked, though." She stares at it some more, a grimace painted on her face.

The reality is, how am I supposed to talk about something I can't explain? Something I haven't fully processed, that changed the entire fabric of my being. How do I try to make someone understand that I'm not supposed to be here, but somehow, I just am?

Every doctor said I was a miracle, that even waking up shouldn't have been enough, because my brain activity had been so low, they expected a vegetable.

But I'm here.

Somehow.

The drive back to her house is filled with silence when it should have been filled with memories and catching up. I missed my friend. Stella—StarScreamer—was one of my closest friends in grade school, and when Lonnie Green opened Skateland, we were the first two in line for tryouts.

Right now, it feels like there are miles stretched between us, forged from years apart and distance.

We pull into her driveway. The early 1990s style craftsman home is just as I remembered it: white siding stained by time and a picket fence that looks recently power washed. My brain buzzes with regret, second thoughts and insecurities drowning me with the need for reassurance, the kind I desperately sought from Lonnie.

She opens her door and begins climbing out, the action turning on the motion sensor outdoor lights that force her dog to appear at the window. Even his bark is recognizable.

"Jesus Christ, Monty is still alive?" I laugh, shocked that the miniature poodle is still kicking it this long.

"He'll be sixteen this year, don't worry, he's only a little incontinent." She grabs her bag from the backseat and then reaches for mine.

"Actually…" I start. "I was thinking I'd come by tomorrow?" I lift a hesitant brow her way.

"I don't think you should be alone tonight, Ant?nia." She gives me a look filled with parental concern, a look that says she knows better.

"I have all my things at the motel, and I have to run a few errands before I fuck off for the night anyway." I try my best to awkwardly fumble my way out of this one, but Star gives up first, knowing that I can't be forced into any social situation I don't want to be in.

Even if it's just a simple sleepover at a friend's.

"Tomorrow, yeah?" She holds me to it, shutting the passenger side door but leaning into the still-open window.

"I promise." I grin, nodding her way.

I need to crumble tonight. I need to shred down every fiber of my being, decompose and come back into my own by tomorrow morning, and there is only one person in town who can help me do it.