The skate palace was in the kind of town where every kid had the same haircut. I looked around for a friendly face but saw only strangers. A boy still in leg pads from football practice slid by me on his knees. A girl was juggling with Skee-balls. A kid got his hand trapped in the claw machine. Across the skate floor, through the food court, past the curved orange seats you can’t find any place but a place like this, and through the red-trimmed kitchen window, I was hit by a flash of light. It came from the gleaming blade of a pizza cutter. Here was a face I did recognize. It was Pavel, back from college, viciously slicing pizzas. His arm and the blade rifled in and out of sight in time with the music blasting from a Walkman clipped to his belt, which played Slipknot, or Tool, or Deftones, or house music from his homeland. He was lost to the world. A boy launched one of Pavel’s slices skyward and stuck it to the blade of a ceiling fan. A kid clearly skating for the first time hit his head on the floor and knocked himself unconscious. One loose cigarette rolled out of the DJ booth and onto the floor where kids took turns jumping over it.

I went over to the arcade and put a quarter into The Simpsons. Someone had stolen the baby Maggie and Marge Simpson, armed with a Sanitaire Vacuum, was charged with her safe return. I approached a sly looking gangster in a purple suit and smashed his skull in with the vacuum. He crumpled under Marge’s blow. Her strength was primal. She pulled at her tower of blue hair and screamed over the corpse in the street.

“Where is Maggie! Give me back my baby you bastard!”

I felt a tap on my shoulder. Another sly gangster in a purple suit, part of the infinity, materialized from the void and strangled Marge to death. I felt a tap on my shoulder again. I turned around and saw Hooting Helen Henderson staring at me through her gigantic black framed glasses. This was the second face I recognized. She was wearing a pair of rented roller skates made of dirty leather and scuffed polyurethane wheels.

I stood there trying to remember who she was. This is a problem I have. I forget the names of people I’ve met, probably because I spend so much time inside my own damn head.

But they remember me. Why? Who knows? Maybe my antics are out of the ordinary. I also have a strange name. My name’s Fran Chow, and it’s strange because I’m not Chinese and neither is anyone else in my whole entire family. When teachers call my name for the first time and see the face that belongs to the hand that’s raised they pause for a second like they want to ask a follow-up question but don’t want to say something offensive.

“It’s just a family name,” I usually say.

How we became Chow is a long story. The short version is my great great, great grandfather was a deserter in the Civil War. Nowadays we call this “dropping off the grid” and it’s much more difficult to do now than it was back then before the internet, phones, CCTV, credit cards, and so on. What side of the Civil War he was fighting on isn’t discussed in our family so you can probably take a guess. Anyway, when he finally emerged from whatever hole he crawled into he made up Chow off the top of his head. Like I said, it was easier back then.

So standing there before me was Hooting Helen, mouth moving but no words coming out. What was going on? I looked around for clues. Waves of kids were leaving the floor, tearing off towards the candy machines, towards air hockey, towards the Simpsons video game to try Homer’s luck at saving his youngest child, who was possibly already dead. Homer was drunk on beer and fought with his bare fists. I saw a boy in a tank top skate up to another boy and punch him square in the dick. The lights dimmed. Girls huddled around. Slowly, two by two, people trickled back onto the floor.

Far away a soft voice called to me swinging in the moonlit reflection of a wide flat pond.

It said, “Do do doot dum, do do doot do doot do dum.”

The few skaters on the floor joined hands. It was Mariah Carey. It was a Couple Skate.

I looked around for the nearest exit but found none. I was having trouble keeping track of where I was. Myself at this moment in time. I looked down at Hooting Hellen whose mouth had stopped its hooting for a moment. It started moving again. The poor girl must be repeating herself. I looked up at the ceiling and saw my reflection in a convex safety mirror.

“Are you dumb?” I asked my convex self.

“Fran, hey Fran, do you want to skate with me?”

Hooting Helen Henderson had glasses and red hair and freckles and was a bit chubby but she wasn’t an ugly girl. She will grow older, her body will change in beautiful and mysterious ways, she will sleep with men or women in college, perhaps a great number of them. She’ll meet someone who loves her in the way she always dreamed of being loved and she’ll love them too. And they’ll get married and have many children that they’ll load into an SUV or four-wheel drive crossover and take them to school, to church, to the grocery store, and Hooting Helen Henderson will be happy.

But that was the Hooting Helen of tomorrow and not the Hooting Helen of today. Today all that mattered was that Hooting Helen was not in the top ten or eleven girls who all the boys agreed were universally attractive. Helen was on the fringe. And if you were on the fringe you might as well be a piece shit in the dirt.

“So Fran, will you?” she asked again. The thought of how many times she repeated herself made me feel ill.

It’s usually better to get on and hurt someone’s feelings a little then wait till later and hurt their feelings a lot. I learned this lesson too late. That’s why one day I paid rent on three places with three different women. I ended up losing a pet bulldog named Grout to one, a finger to another, and the few remaining scraps of my dignity and self-respect from all three.

Like I said, I learned all this too late, which is why I looked down into the eyes of Hooting Helen, who was outside of the critical top ten universally hot girls, who had red hair, whose glasses were thick, and whispered to her in a voice as quiet as a church mouse, “Okay,” and we slowly rolled out onto the skate floor, my hand clutched in her hand, which was now slick with sweat after having to ask me three or even four times before I finally opened the hole in my face.

We moved around the floor. We didn’t speak. Suddenly, all around me, I saw only faces I recognized. They sprung from the walls like reptiles. Dirk Smith was skating with Jen, who was number eight or nine depending on who you asked but definitely in the top ten. Ramón was with Katy, who was number six and the only girl who could make me laugh. Jeff Krupiak, who couldn’t beat me in basketball, was with June Rodgers who was easily in the top five, and Morris and Kevin were skating with Gabbi Thomas and Leslie Lin, who were the hottest Black and Asian girls in school.

Mariah wailed on. Some fourth graders started shooting spitballs. Scott Wallce and Mason Clark took turns screaming FUCK as loud as they could to see who would get in trouble first. And coming into view, in slow motion, like destiny, was the impossible grin of Joey Sperduto.

He was hanging onto the trio of Bobby Pickle, Mark Malone, snickering and whispering bullshit to one another while stealing quick glances at me and Hooting Helen. But while Malone and Pickle made at least a small effort to be discreet, knowing very well I had a psycho-streak, Joey squared his hips in my direction, put his hands on his knees, and gave me a head on smile like I was a program on his family television set.

Joey Sperduto didn’t have a single friend I was aware of. He was too pathetic in gym class, walked too duck footed, and dressed too nice for an elementary school boy, foregoing sneakers for leather shoes that zipped up on the sides like ones our mothers would wear. Basically, Joey was trying to get comfortable with who he was but was doing it in a way too uncomfortable for anyone to suffer through. So Joey’s way of trying to fit in was to become a hanger-on, duck-walking from group to group attempting to be interested in what they were interested in, or in this case, laugh at what they were laughing at.

The other thing to know about Joey Sperduto is that he had what we call a face you could punch all day. And it took every ounce of control I had not to do just that as Mariah’s voice faded, as the couple skate ended, and as Joey rotated his hips to keep both eyes on me as slid by.

I let Hooting Helen’s hand drop the moment the song was over. I didn’t even lead her off the floor. She muttered a meek “see you later, Fran” and skated towards the bathroom, probably to go into a stall to cry. I thought about doing the same thing, but decided what I needed was to get out of there immediately, away from the hilarious stares and smiles I felt all over me like fire ants.

I took off towards the exit, and how different my life could have been if I didn’t hear that vaguely feminine voice calling my name in the distance.

“Chow! Hey Chow!”

I turned around and saw Sperduto squared up on me like we were doing a football drill. I remained silent.

“Hey Chow!” said Sperduto again, “Is Hooting Helen your girlfriend?”

Bobby Pickle and Mark Malone howled at the moon and slapped each other on the back.

Sperduto was wearing brand new rollerblades his mother bought him that week hoping maybe they would unlock a few friends for her poor baby Joey. And he would get to go to a birthday party that wasn’t just a courtesy invite for every student in the class or maybe have a few nice boys sleepover and stay up late eating pepperoni pizza and watching movies in the rumpus room her new husband Steve just renovated.

I grabbed Joey’s arm and swung him around trying to make sure he never smiled again, and it was these freshly greased wheels that sent him whizzing into the snack bar at freight train speed. And when he hit a plastic food tray discarded at just the right angle leaning against a pair of basketball shoes Sperduto went flying like a tossed fish through the red trimmed window and into the kitchen towards Pavel and his gleaming pizza cutter.

Everything was quiet as I heard Pavel cut something that definitely wasn’t pizza. An alien object soared over my head and hit someone’s mother in the chest.

“What is that!” she yelled. “What is that!”

From inside the kitchen Joey Sperduto let out a scream like he was being held to a branding iron. A boy with a baseball hat pulled down over his eyes sat alone in a booth studying a cheese fry.

“I think that’s his hand that flew over there,” he said without looking up.

I sat down in the booth next to him and looked down at my own hands, studying the lines on my palms. In them I saw the principal’s formless mouth as it kicked me out of school. Saw my mother and father screaming at each other over sloshing martinis. I saw our basement ceiling while I laid on the couch for a whole summer. I saw five different schools in four years, then my bags stacked by the door on the morning of my eighteenth birthday.

I saw a job in a warehouse in Utica, on a tug-boat dredging the Delaware, a barbershop in Orville, Ohio, cleaning yoga mats in Austin, Texas, and emptying trash cans at the Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport.

I saw the fine blonde hair across your belly as the morning sunlight hits you through cheap curtains blowing in the breeze. The turquoise bed in room 102 of the Red Roof Inn where we lived for six months. The radio stuck on four o’clock. The red splotches on your neck. The picnic table behind the motel where a small grassy hill rolled into a ditch and beyond that where deer would come out in groups of two or three to stand there and look at the trees guarding the setting sun as I looked on most nights smoking cigarettes, thinking about the latest fuckup.

And long after you deleted me from your memory, I saw our baby girl with thinning hair sitting alone in her car as I got off the last bus of the night with no bags and no money.

And as I sat down on one of those curved orange seats you can’t find any place but a place like this I thought about how much can happen in the span of a Mariah Carey song. Or how long it takes for Bart and Lisa Simpson to save their poor baby sister.

Bart coolly approaches the last remaining purple gangster hanging from a telephone pole, strung up with his sister’s jump rope. Bart listens as the last bit of life drains from the gangster’s face. He whispers into his swinging ear,

“Cowabunga, motherfucker.”

He swings his skateboard down hard and breaks the gangster’s neck.

Down the street away from the violence Lisa swaddles Maggie and speaks to her with love. Maggie looks up at her sister, her eyes swell with pride. She struggles to lift her head, so Lisa brings her closer. When their noses touch Maggie reveals to Lisa secrets about life and their place in the universe. She speaks of the healing powers of conversation, the importance of meals as sacred communions, and to resist the urge to shine bright neon lights on every bruise or blemish covering your soul. Lisa listens intently but ultimately hears nothing. Maggie has a binky in her mouth.