Roll with the Punches (14 page)

"You mean a compound arm
fracture
?"

"Whatever. Come on. Please? Cleo told me to find subs." She nodded at a skinny, dark woman on the track. The one whose poodle I'd run over. "Do you want her mad at you again?"

God. That woman was not to be denied, if you wanted to live. "Uh …"

"That's Cleotantra, our captain. Call her Cleo or she'll hit you."

"Why do you take her bullying?" I asked.

Cathy shrugged and shifted her feet. "Well, I guess I tripped Panty-Silea a little, and I may have threatened Queen Malevizent some. Which may be why they aren't here. Hey, they were eyeing my boyfriend."

Rough crowd. I really didn't want to be anywhere near Cleo or Cathy, but to help Cathy avoid another Cleotantrum, and out of my own sheer idiot curiosity, I put on the gear and joined them. In the Simon Says drill, the coach ordered us to march in place, then jump, then get low, then lie down, then shuffle left, then run on our toe stops, then drop to a knee, then get low again, and on and on. Of course, I had to do ten pushups for acting without Simon's command. But it was fun.

After that was the snake drill. We went single file around the track and took turns weaving in and out of the pace line, finding holes to wiggle through. Boy, those girls could be dense. I was way too big to fit through their tiny gaps. Then we split into two groups, where one group practiced linking up in a long line to "corral" the members of the other group to the outside of the track so one girl could get by on the inside. That was so cool. I wondered if I might enjoy this after all.

Then, to bring me back to reality, the coach called, "Blood and thunder!" and everybody on the track stopped skating and started knocking the hell out of each other. I had a little fun pushing folks around until I got knocked to the outside of the track and landed flat on my butt. Two girls tumbled toward me, swearing like sailors. The spectators laughed as the girls bounced right off the rail and back into the fray to battle it out until only Cleo stood victorious over our fallen, bruised bodies.

She taunted, "Are you pansy-asses rolling on the floor laughing? 'Cause I figure whatever body part you just landed on is what you're thinking with today! Get up!"

Cathy, horizontal at my feet, wiped her face. "When the banked track goes up again, the whole game'll be way faster. Then when you get railed, it'll really hurt." She gave a big smile.

The coach called a break. In the ensuing exodus, I said to Cathy, "Listen, this has been fun, but I gotta go. I need …"
To buy a steel head
.

"Cathy!" A skater glided by with a tight red bustier and
Wonder Woman
on her helmet. "Am I not off-the-chain divine?"

Cathy rolled her eyes. "Orgasmatronic. Every teenager's wet dream.”

Wonder Woman stuck her tongue out and flipped us off. "And you pink piggies are their nightmares."

Cathy stuck her tongue out at her, then led me off the rink and outside the building to stand under the neon sign on the asphalt, where Amazons lounged on the hoods of cars holding ice packs to various body parts. The chat ran to badass Mongol gang boyfriends, bike trips, and Facebook quotes. One girl flicked cigarette ash on my shirt front as I passed. Cathy poked the girl’s midsection hard, then led me to a tall, lean girl with dark bleach-striped hair, big, dark eyes, and a stud in her lower lip.

"
Rhonda, meet
Largot Fonteyn.
She’s like Iranian.
Like a
p
harmacist.
Just lost 90 pounds on one of those like reality shows by skating every day."

"Except when I’m on the rodeo circuit." Largot half-smiled and blew out smoke. After all that dieting, her chest was concave.

Cathy pointed across the parking lot at the red-haired giantess, the python lady whose huge arms could probably lift my father. "And that's our Queen Hippollydda of the Amazons. We call her Hippo," Cathy said. "She just went to the flat-track exhibition games in Sweden and destroyed their team.”

"Is she Swedish?" I said, thinking I wouldn't want to meet that stony expression over a sale table at Macy's.

"Nah. Mail carrier in Fullerton," Cathy said.

I frowned. "What's flat-track?"

"Most leagues play flat so they can play on any blacktop. Us too, until we find another place to set up our banked track. We lost our lease on the barn.”

"What's your league?" I said, edging toward my car.

"The Orange County Roller Queens. Duh.”

Hippo walked by and bumped Cathy's chunky butt right into me. I braced for a fight, but Cathy just righted herself, looked up, and yelled, "Death to the Irritations!"

Nearby, black-clad guys with bulbous beer guts and cigars hooted.

"That's what I call the Irvine team. The
Iridescence
." Cathy sang this last word like a scornful second grader. "Bunch of Barbie dolls. Their damn beads and spangles always catch on my fishnets. In the Orange County Roller Queens League, we also have the Garden Grove Veggie Girls (real nice people), the Santa Ana Whirlwinds (and believe me, that team has some badass chicks). Then there's the Mission Viejo Nuns (wimps—we always beat them), the Dana Point Decadence, and …. oh, the Tustin Patooties are new, so they're still pretty small. Man, their best jammer can't even—"

"Jammer?" I said, realizing how little I knew about this sport.

Cathy had been vaccinated with a phonograph needle. "The jammer's like the quarterback, small and fast. She has to lap everybody once, then she makes a point for like every member of the other team she gets past again. Blockers are like linebackers, trying to keep the jammers from like getting through the pack. We have like five jammers. Cleo, Panty-Silea, me, Merrie Queen of Snottz and sometimes Queen E. Lizard Butt. You know, Queen Elizabeth? Ha-ha." She pointed at a group of team members who I couldn't see. "Anyway, the Patooties' jammer sucks, but the Irritations have pretty good jammers: Beady Eyes, Flirty Fringe, Mean C-Quinz and their new captain, Gold Diggeressa? Geez. That little cheater. I hear her team members hate her, but they can't compete without her."

"Talkin' about me?" A tall, skinny mocha girl with a big mole on her neck, a lot of piercings and some African heritage shot past with a wide grin and slapped Cathy's butt as she took off toward the restroom.

"That’s Kween Viktorious, our mean machine blocker. She and Hippo are our best hope against the Irritations. Last time we bouted with them, our girls took out two of their best blockers." Cathy's eye crossed even more when she smiled.

Short, scrappy Cleo slouched nearby in her practice uniform of micro-miniskirt and holey tank top, smoking, seeing no one, yet intent on some inner vision of victory.

"How long have you been on the team?" I asked, edging toward my car.

"Long enough to get three broken arms, a broken nose, and a dislocated knee.”

When we reached my car, Cleo signaled Cathy, who said, "Oh, shit. See ya later." She skated back to join Largot by the door.

I sat in my driver's seat to unlace my skates. Nearby, girls were laughing about some hijinks they had pulled on the Garden Grove Veggie Girls the night before, involving cheese whiz, eggs, and condo windows. I looked up as a twenty-something pulled off her orange helmet.

"This helmet is crap!" she yelled.

A freckled woman who I'd hip checked twice on the track held a helmet labeled
Queen E. Lizard Butt
. "Sorry. Can’t wear anything else until you pick a derby name."

"But I don't know any goddesses," whined the younger woman.

Queen E. Lizard Butt pointed at her helmet. "Goddess, queen, superhero, whatever."

"Oh? You mean I could be Princess Diana?"

"With some cheesy, sexy twist. Like Princess Die, you know,
D-I-E
?"

The twenty-something looked uncertain. "Or maybe Princess Dye-Job."

This was sad. I had to bite my tongue not to yell out the million and a half goddess names that leapt to my tongue.

Dye-Job played with her cell phone. "How about Princess Hand-Job? Or maybe Die-Bitch?"

My skates off, I stood and chimed in over the door, "You need goddesses? Athena, Aphrodite, Demeter, Gaia, Hecate, Hera, Hestia, Ishtar, Isis, Parvati, Shakti, Venus, Vesta." Which I couldn't help delivering in alphabetical order. "And Titans: Phoebe, Rhea, Selene, and Theia. And don't forget the Furies: Alecto, Megaera, Tisiphone. You know, daughters of the night, avengers of bad hospitality …"

They stared.

I shrugged, "Never mind. I—um—write, so I collect character names …"

"You write?" E. Lizard Butt said, coming closer.

I nodded, picking up my skates and tossing them in the car.

"What do you write?"

"Uh, books. A couple …" Man, the whole
Memory Wars
debacle was so fresh, I hadn’t yet figured out how to answer this question without my stomach knotting itself into a ball.

"We have a writer's group here after practice," E. Lizard Butt said. "We need new members."

"Very funny," I smirked. "Pull the other one." I smiled at the thought of roller derby literature featuring tattooing, piercing, and bloody emergency room melodrama.

Hippo, standing nearby, had recruited Cleo and three more friends, who now moved toward us in a solid wall, their thick arms crossed and sullen. Hmm, good derby move.

Cleo scowled. "The group is for team members only, Lizzie. Not posers, or idiots who run over people's dogs.”

Then I remembered Yvette's list of addresses. So there
was
a writers’ group here? Had Yvette visited it? But I couldn’t picture Yvette with this bunch at all.

E. Lizard Butt was older than Cleo. She answered her in a mother’s patient tones, "But any league member can join. We have a Veggie Girl and an Irritation." She turned to me. "We're writing up short derby stories for a book. You wanna join?"

"Um, I’d love to, but I’m not a member."

Hippo's wall of women closed ranks three feet away from me, pushing E. Lizard Butt behind them.

Cleo bristled. "Forget it. Buy a copy of our book like everyone else.”

"What?" Why were they so defensive? Had Yvette been here and put them on guard as she had me? "Wait." I yelled past the wall of defensive women to E. Lizard Butt, "Have you had problems in your writing group? Has anyone's work been stolen?"

Big silence. Alert postures. Slit-eyed stares.

Hmm. Could Yvette have oozed her way in here and stolen some of their stuff at the same time she was stealing mine? But how could she, if to be a member of the writing group, one had to be a skater as well? Well, maybe she had a friend in the group.

I quickly added, "Other writing groups in the county are having problems …"

"Coming through!" Cathy roared up from behind them and broke through the ranks, revealing the stout Mexican coach in his late forties, walking toward us. Cathy threw my orange helmet at me, and I caught it.

"Hey, Rhonda," She said. "Manny says he needs you to help us like slaughter the Beigetown Irregulars in a couple weeks. Don't you like hate all those damn beige buildings in Irvine? I think they suck
ass
.”

Manny looked me up and down. "You can already skate, and you're not that slow. I timed you before, and you did twenty-five laps in five minutes, the speed most girls take a while to achieve. Not bad."

"I used to race," I said.

He nodded. "You also seemed pretty good at crossovers, T-stops and most of the falls.”

Oh, yeah. I could fall like a champ, but not happily.

He handed me a sheaf of papers labeled
DERBY RULES QUIZ
and continued, "If you fill out this rules test correctly and show me some hops, whips, and the rest of the falls, I'll let you scrimmage just a little tonight. Cathy, help her with the moves.”

He blew his whistle and the other girls went back in, practically sprouting fangs at the idea of having me to kick around some more.

Cathy poked me hard in the gut as I stood there, unsure what to do. "You going to tell your kids you only
watched
the derby? Come on!"

I sighed and sat down with the quiz, and Cathy fed me the answers. Then I went back in, my eyes on the prize of getting to the truth about my book. And making Yvette do ten years in prison for plagiarism, fraud, and excessive cuteness.

As I suited up again, I asked Cathy, "Did anyone talk about an editor named Yvette Winkler coming to visit your writers' group?"

She shrugged. "I only know a journalist named Squashface wrote an article about us that Hippo didn't like."

"Squashface?"

"Not her real name. It's how she looks these days, though." And she dragged me back toward my doom.

I spent twenty minutes perfecting the moves Manny wanted to see. Then, hoping to learn enough at the writers' group meeting to skewer Yvette good, I joined the scrimmage, playing jammer. Blocking would have suited my size, speed and agility better, but nobody thought to tell me that.

Five minutes in, as I was trying to claw my slow, bruised body through the pack, for the second time, Kween Viktorious hip-checked me and Cleo rushed up and J-blocked me hard, dumping me on my butt again, bruising my tailbone and bashing the ribs still bruised from my recent hospital Heimlich right into the wall. Add a few more ice packs to the pile I'd be needing all weekend.

Cleo, a steam roller in the body of a ten-year-old, lapped the whole group again, winning a gazillion points, and put her hands on her hips to end the jam.

On the bench sat chunky Merrie Queen of Snottz, her curly dark head moving to the beat of iPod earbuds. Next to her, E. Lizard Butt yelled into her cell phone: "Get to bed, NOW!" and clipped it back on her belt. Then she put her arm around me. "I’m glad you want to write with us. Cleo got you good, huh? That girl's a menace.”

"Ow. When do you stop falling?" I asked with a wince. As a big girl, I had always hated falling, period. It made me look even gawkier and more awkward than usual, and everyone always laughed. Where a short person who fell could pretend she was just looking for something on the ground, somehow a tall person went farther, made more noise, churned up more wind, and basically attracted more pitiable attention going down. Falling at the rink was at best, embarrassing. At worst, like for poor Panty-Silea, it could mean pain and surgery and hospital time.