This Will Only Hurt a Little(14)
Lacey had dibs on a boy named Trey, who was seventeen, short and stocky with a mop of curly hair. He was fairly dopey-looking and seemingly not terribly bright. Kendra loved Jacob, who was tall and skinny and I think the youngest of the boys, closest to our age. I picked a boy named Charlie, who had short black hair and was kind of a nice, quiet guy. For a while, we would just hang out in the parking garages and watch them skate and practice their kick flips or whatever. And then it got to the point where we would get in Charlie’s car and drive around and hang out in deserted playgrounds or parking lots or strip malls. We got away with our parents not knowing where we were by telling them we were going to the movies. I must have supposedly seen Free Willy about four thousand times. To this day, I have not seen it once. I assume the whale lives, right?
I was nervous as summer rolled around, because I was going to a fancy performing-arts sleepaway camp in upstate New York. Emily had gone to it for the last two years and loved it, and we had convinced my mom and dad to pony up and send me too. I wasn’t nervous about the sleeping-away part. I was nervous that while I was gone, Lacey and Kendra would achieve the goal of making boyfriends out of those high school skater boys and I would be left behind. A few nights before I was supposed to leave, I was with Kendra at the rec center, where kids tended to hang out at night. By this point, I had bought Etnies, a skate shoe, and had started wearing bigger jeans and baby T-shirts. My style was for sure evolving into skater girl. I had just never gotten on an actual skateboard.
As some of the guys from our high school, Josh and Doug and Jason—did their best attempts at tricks, Kendra and I sat by and made fun of them and laughed.
“You think you can do it better?” Doug asked. “You girls do it.”
Kendra and I jumped up, defiant.
I watched as she stepped gingerly onto a board while Doug held her hand. Kendra was one of those girls who had a perfect flat tummy and a mouth that turned up on the sides so it seemed like she was always smiling. I was always jealous of the fact that she could wear Calvin Klein underwear out of her pants and look like Kate Moss. When I did it, it looked like a mistake.
“No fair!” I shouted, giggling. “I want to skate too!”
Josh Ableman shrugged and handed me his board. I got on and skated literally no more than two feet—maybe—when the board flew out from under me and I fell to the ground.
FUCK.
I knew immediately what had happened because of the year before. Except this time it was my other knee. I grabbed it with both hands as everyone raced over. Then I gritted my teeth and tried my best not to cry in front of the boys.
“Kendra, you have to call 911,” I said, trying to sound calm. “I dislocated my knee. Fuck. And my mom. Call my mom.”
You guys. I don’t know what to say here. It’s insane. Like literally what in the actual fuck?? Since we’ve already been through so many injuries and it’s only chapter five, I’ll give you the CliffsNotes on this one. Ambulance shows up, Mom arrives insanely pissed ’cause I’m leaving for camp in two days, I’m horrified and embarrassed, I cry, the boys are freaked out, Kendra feels terrible, Josh Ableman wants to make sure I’m not going to sue his parents (not a joke—WHY IS EVERYONE SO CONCERNED ABOUT LITIGATION?!). A hot paramedic (HOW ARE THEY ALWAYS HOT?) tells my mom I’ve dislocated my knee (AGAIN), but this time, I may have cracked my kneecap in half when I fell, which means I’ll need surgery.
AND SCENE.
Emily came over the next morning, so disappointed we wouldn’t be going to camp together. My mom spent most of the day on the phone, talking to the doctor and scheduling my surgery. Then calling the camp to get them to defer my tuition until the following year. Meanwhile, I lay on the couch and watched Saved by the Bell reruns, my braced leg propped up on a pillow. I had knee surgery a few days later. It was supposed to be arthroscopic, but they ended up having to cut my knee open and put a pin in it, just below my kneecap. The next few weeks I spent on the couch or at physical therapy. Kendra and Lacey came over to visit me a bunch and regaled me with stories of the hot skater boys and the headway they were making with them. I was super jealous and ready to get back to that mall so I could hang out with those boys too. I hated being left out because of my stupid knee.
“Trey is having a party,” Lacey told me one afternoon. “We have to go!”
“I can’t even really walk. And I have this huge brace on, how are we going to go?”
“Kendra talked to Charlie,” she said. (My Charlie. Ugh. Of course. Kendra was so hot. I’m sure that Charlie wanted nothing to do with me and my broken knee.) “And he said that if we get dropped off at the mall, he’ll pick us up. We’ll just tell your mom we’re going to the movies.”
My mom agreed that it seemed reasonable to go to the movies, and she dropped us off at the theater that night. But to be honest, I didn’t feel great. I mean, I’d had major knee surgery two weeks earlier. I was embarrassed about the brace but still I just didn’t want to miss out. (Are you sensing a theme here?) We waved goodbye and walked into the mall, waited ten minutes, and then went back to the parking garage to wait for Charlie. He picked us up and took us to the party. When we got there, Kendra and Lacey took off and I sat on the ground in a corner and tried to put pillows around my brace so that people wouldn’t really notice it. Some high school girls asked me about it and I tried to be cool and say I fucked it up skateboarding. I mean, technically that was true.