In the moments before she blows the whistle, my mind is a cacophony of instructions: lead with your hip; bend your knees and drive up; finish contact with your shoulder; hitthroughyour opponent’s body, controlling position until they’re out of bounds or on the ground.
And then there’s also the white noise of my personal frustrations humming beneath it all.Be careful, Carson. Go easy, Carson. Be safe, Carson. Don’t get hurt, Carson.
And none of those warnings are about this drill.
But as soon as Violet blows the whistle, my mind quiets. There’s no hesitation, no second-guessing, no last-minute nerves. I hear that sound, and my body responds on instinct, like I’m some kind of roller derby sleeper cell, the whistle calling me to action. I angle my inside skate toward Jax and lunge, shooting across the track. Just before we collide, I bend my knees and spring upward. I connect with Jax’s hip, the upward motion rocking them onto their back wheels. I follow through with my shoulder, shrugging into their chest until their skates go out from under them. Jax lands ass-first on the floor.
“Hell yeah!” they shout from behind me, because my momentum has carried me down the straightaway.
“Nice one, Carson!” Violet calls from the middle of the track.
I skate back and offer Jax a hand, unable to wipe the smile off my face.
Violet skates over. “Jax, don’t forget to bend your knees to absorb a hit. You’re tall, and the instinct to pop up when someone comes at you is gonna end that way every time. In gameplay, you can use those long legs to make you a more difficult target.”
“Will do, Coach.” Jax nods, giving Violet a little two-finger salute. Then they turn to me. “Again?”
Hell. Yes.
By the end of practice, I’ve got Velcro burns on my arms from rubbing against everyone’s elbow pads, a fresh bruise is blooming on my outer thigh from landing on Mercedes’s skate wheel, and my quads are screaming at me from all the skating and hitting.
But I’ve put every single one of my fellow freshies on the ground.
“Fuck, it feels good to be right,” Violet says as we’re packing up. I’m physically exhausted, but my mental energy is off the charts. I’m positively glowing from the experience of hittingpeople and doing itreallywell. “I knew the first time I saw you that you were gonna be a killer blocker.”
“Well, I have a good coach,” I tell her.
“Do not inflate her ego,” KO says as she shoves her skates into an old WFIU tote bag.
“My ego is a self-sustaining organism, thank you very much,” Violet says with a grin, then turns back to me. “But seriously, you did great. Next practice we’re going to start running gameplay drills. The first freshie scrimmage is going torule.”
Our fresh meat training culminates in a full regulation scrimmage at the beginning of July, a little more than three weeks away. The freshies will be divided into two teams that will be rounded out by a few of the vets. We’ll play two thirty-minute halves, after which we’ll get drafted onto one of the league home teams. After that, we’ll get to start practicing with our teams and getting ready for the fall season.
I’m dying to play a real game.
We finish packing up and file out of the rec center. Violet holds the door open for me, and as I walk out past her, she lets out a low wolf whistle. “Truly, your ass is incredible.”
I blush. “Dan’s actually teaching me to lift weights so I can hit harder,” I tell her shyly. I’m not used to such direct compliments about my body.
Violet’s eyes go wide. “Please tell me you’re doing more than working out with him. Or that you’re also doing cardio with him? Sorry, my brain isn’t functioning properly. Imagine I said something clever that amounts to, ‘Please tell me you’re fucking him.’”
I grin, because this is the kind of conversation I want to have about Dan. Not ones full of warnings to be careful and go slow. I want to squeal about the hot man who wants me and can do unspeakable things to my body.
“Not yet,” I tell her, my excitement burbling out of me in a frantic string of words. “But we’re definitely fooling around. Or we did. Once. Last night. And we would have gone further, but my mother showed up for a surprise visit, so that interrupted us.But he told me he definitely wants to sleep with me, and long story short, I think I might have some idea what blue balls feels like.”
Violet stares at me, mouth agape. “Good lord, woman. No enhanced interrogation tactics are needed on you, huh?”
I blush. “Sorry. It’s new, and I’m kind of excited about it.”
“Don’t be sorry! I love this for you,” she says. We stop at her old Toyota, and she pops the trunk and drops her gear in. “Just promise me you’ll guard our strategies a little better. I don’t want some Cincinnati honeypot pulling a con on you to find out about our jammer strategy.”
“Scout’s honor,” I say, holding up three fingers in a mock salute.
“Good girl.” She slams the trunk, then turns. “So what now? Where are you off to?”
I think of my mom on the couch in my—my—living room. I can already picture the look she’s going to give me when she sees the angry red marks on my arms and the purple skate wheel bruise on my leg. The way she’s going to wrinkle her nose at how my sweaty crop top clings to my skin. I look at Violet, with her purple hair and her septum ring and her constellation of tattoos. Violet, who thinks my body is perfect just the way it is. Then I gaze around the parking lot, where the vets are all loading up. At KO, who sometimes requests permission to slap my ass “as a sign of respect.” At the rest of the players and their short shorts, their tattoos, their piercings. Even the skaters with no body mods carry themselves like they’ve got them.
Not my crowd?
