There’s no way I’m going to tell this doctor anything. Ever. He prods at me to talk to him, assuring me that he’s just here to help. Each time he asks a question, I respond with, “Why? So you can tell my mom?” He says that since I’m a minor, my parents have a right to be a part of my care. “Care” he calls it. Like anyone around here cares about anybody but themselves. He can say whatever he wants, it doesn’t change the fact that he lied to me and betrayed my trust. I hate doctors. They never listen to me. Not like anyone could, with my mom always shouting over anything I say. With all that education, you’d think they could distinguish her fantastical tales from reality. Most things, she just makes up for attention. It’s like she wants it to be hard to be a parent. Some kind of demented competition.

Being a vegetarian is easier said than done. We don’t cook at the apartment, so most days I have cereal for breakfast and fast-food for lunch or dinner. My dad and I only take a break for one meal a day, most of the time, now that he’s started letting me stay at work for the whole shift, so long as my homework is finished. There’s a McDonalds inside Mountasia. I get fries most days. They know me, so they’ll make me a grilled cheese if I ask. Some days, Kim or Paul or Brandon will offer to take me to lunch and we’ll go somewhere with vegetarian options. Rattlers, where Kim’s sister works, is a barbecue restaurant. When we go there, they’ll make us a big plate of veggies and baked potatoes. The meat does smell good, though.

Brandon is the DJ at the skating rink. Sometimes, we go across the street for fries and milkshakes from Fosters. I’d never thought to dip my fries in the shake until he showed me. From now on, this is the only way I want to eat fries.

He knows I’m sick of sitting in the break room and invites me back to his booth to learn how to work the equipment. On the rear wall are tall, aluminum racks with different pieces of electronic gear, each shining red or green with illuminated LED lights. He shows me how each of the metal boxes in the rack operates a different light system. They’re all controlled by a console at the front of the booth, looking out over the polished wood floor. The console has controls for the music, as well. Brandon teaches me how to cue up a song on one deck, using the headphones, then mix it into the next song, creating a seamless transition. It’s not like being a radio DJ. He doesn’t talk between songs. In fact, he only uses the microphone to announce birthdays, couples’ skates, or to alert the skate guards to any trouble.

He clicks on the microphone and, turning the clipboard around from the counter in front of him, tells me to make a dedication for the next song, pointing it out on the list with his pen.

“Th-this n-next song. This next song goes out to…Tiffany from, uh, David,” I stammer.

“You’ll get it, man. Just keep practicing.” He pats me on the back and I recoil. I guess it’s normal. Friendly touching. I’ve only really seen it on TV and it seems so awkward. Like how they say each other’s names all the time. In real life, nobody says your name every time they speak to you. Most of the time, I only hear my name when I’m being yelled at. Just the sound of my name makes me uncomfortable.

Pointing toward the entrance, Brandon nudges me to look. Coming around the corner, to our section, is Mark-Paul Gosselaar and Alfonso Ribeiro. I’ve seen both of them on TV. In real life, they’re much bigger. Not taller, but, like, more muscles. Especially Carlton.

“You should go over and introduce yourself,” Brandon tells me, giving me a light shove toward the exit of the control booth.

“What? No way, man.”

“Seriously. They come in here all the time. They’re cool dudes.”

Still, I hide out in the DJ booth with Brandon. They’re a bit old for this kind of place and neither of them do any skating. They just hang out, over by the rows of orange lockers, chatting with the random girls who ask for an autograph, before leaving the way they came. I’ll talk to them next time they come in.

After work, Brandon, Tommy, and I play a game of roller hockey on the rink while waiting for my dad to finish counting the registers and doing the daily reports. I know how to skate some, but I’ve never played hockey except by myself in the driveway. Brandon says they play in a league next door, at the ice rink, and I should come some time. I’m definitely not good enough to play in a league. Plus, he’s like twenty. Tommy isn’t so much a hockey player as a trick skater. He shows off some of his moves, grinding the brick wall, doing a flip, and even jumping over a vending machine.

After that day, I spend every day in the DJ booth, helping Brandon cue tracks and work the lights. It’s nice that he has the same days off, Tuesday and Wednesday. The girl that works the other two shifts, Pam, isn’t so friendly and probably wouldn’t want to share the little space with me all day. When I’m not in the booth, I’ll get a pair of skates and circle the floor with Tommy, Lindsay, and Tawny, the three skate guards. It doesn’t take long to become a good skater when you do it every day. I get a P.E. credit if I skate for at least five hours a week. I’m doing that much in a day.

My new friends start inviting me out after work. At first it’s hard to talk my dad into it, but in the end, I’m sure he’d rather I wasn’t hanging out at his job for fourteen hours a day. When the owners randomly stop by, I have to hide out in the break room before they see me working.

Some nights, the whole group of us, whoever doesn’t have to work, will go bowling and then out to Denny’s or IHOP. Other days, I might just go hang out with Brandon at his place and shoot pool. Once, even, he and Tommy took me to a head shop. That was pretty cool. Their friend runs the place, so he let me in, even though I’m not eighteen. I just wasn’t allowed to buy anything. I wanted to get this poster of Pink Floyd album covers painted on the backs of girls around a pool, but they said I couldn’t make any purchases – not just pipes and bongs.

Even at work, we have a lot of fun. Sneaking around like ninjas with the cans of liquid nitrogen that the janitors use for removing gum from the carpet, trying to spray each other. Or, when we can’t get those, popping one another with wet towels. The game gets more and more elaborate, fraying the ends of our towels and tying little knots in them so it’ll sting more.

It’s six o’clock on a Thursday when the day shift leaves and the night shift comes on. Tawny is getting off and offers to take me home if I don’t want to hang out here all night. Weeknights are dead here. Only three skaters on the floor. My choices are to sit here and do nothing or to go back to the apartment and do nothing.

I climb into the front seat of her lifted Chevy pickup and turn to look at her as she unties the bun, letting her long, golden hair down around her shoulders. She takes off the black-and-white striped referee shirt that all skate guards wear, revealing a wide, purple sports-bra. Her shoulders and back have not one distinguishing mark. No moles. No freckles. No scars.

Turning out of the parking lot, the truck barely acknowledges the speed bumps. We cross the railroad tracks and make a right on the main road.

“Do you live by the school?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never seen the school. We just go back and forth to Mountasia.”

“Okay. I’ll show you where we go to school.” She means her, Lindsay, Tommy, and whoever else lives on this side of the Santa Clarita area. There’s another high school in Saugus for the kids that live closer to the freeway.

Turns out, I do live near the school. At the street before mine, she turns left and then, in another block, right, into a parking lot. It’s nothing like the school I go to. The school I used to go to. These are wide, multi-story buildings of brick and concrete, situated right next to each other. No fifteen-minute walks in the rain between classes here. I wonder what they do with all their free time.

Tawny parks the truck and turns the lights off. “I like you,” she says, turning to face me.

“Thanks. I like you, too.”

“Do you like, like me?”

“Um, yeah, I guess.”

“Okay, good,” she says, sliding across the bench seat until she’s right next to me. She climbs on top of me, straddling my legs to face me. She kisses me and I kiss her back. We make out until my tongue hurts. She tastes like cherry chapstick and mint gum. When I take a break for air, she climbs off of me, sitting beside me, using one hand to unzip my pants. I’ve had a hard-on since she took her shirt off, back in the last parking lot. She leans across the seat and puts her head in my lap, putting my erection into her mouth and moving her head up and down until, eventually, I release my load and she swallows. I’ve never had a blowjob before. I think I like it better than sex. Not that I know much about that, either.

I offer to return the favor, but she says she’s fine and starts the truck. Whew. I wouldn’t know what to do, anyway. Do I put my tongue inside of her? Maybe I should ask her to show me. Or, at least, explain it.

The next day, she’s acting kinda weird. Lindsay and Tommy are giving me funny looks, too. Smiling and giggling as they all look at me from behind the skate rental counter. What the hell is going on? When Lindsay and Tawny go on break, Tommy tells me that Tawny told them all what happened last night. Shit. If my parents find out, I’m fucked. Who knows where they’ll send me next. Tommy says it’s cool, only the three of them know and they won’t say anything. When the girls get back from break, he and I sneak off to the parking lot to hide behind his truck and smoke a cigarette. Everyone here smokes, but most of them, like me, try to hide it.

We come through the back door of the arcade to find my dad looking for me. Crap, I haven’t been able to wash my hands and squirt some cologne yet. If he does smell the smoke on me, he doesn’t say anything.

“Hey, we’re leaving early, c’mon.”

I gather my backpack and work shirt from the DJ booth and meet him out at the old Toyota pickup. When we get to the main road, he turns left, the opposite of the way we’d normally go to get back to the apartment. He turns onto the road by Brandon’s house and we continue through the neighborhood, stopping in front of a big, two-story house with a green yard and a sign out front.

“What do you think of this place?” He asks me.

“Umm, it’s fine, I guess. For what?”

“For us. Would you want to move into a place like this?”

“Yes. It would be nice to have my own bed again. Is everyone else moving down here?”

“Well, if you and I can find the right place, we should be able to move everyone this summer, when school is out.”

I mean, I’d rather it was just my dad and I, but if it’s a choice between living here, where I have real friends and fun things to do, or going back to Coarsegold, I’d definitely rather be here. I could even go back to regular school next year. The same school as my friends, even though most of them are seniors already.

We collect some of those magazines with the real estate ads to take back with us this week. In the end, it’ll be up to my mom which house we get. She’s the one always looking to find herself some kind of status-symbol. New house, new car, overpriced clothes. Sofas or towels or dishes that nobody is allowed to use. I just want to leave all of these terrible memories behind.

On the way up our street, the one that leads from my old bus stop to our house, we pass the little blue Pinto going the opposite direction.

“Hey, there’s Jim,” I say, pointing.

When we get back to the house, my dad tells us all to go to our rooms. He and my mom go into their bedroom and lock the door. My brother and I can’t tell what’s going on. Muffled shouting. My dad is saying that their whole marriage is a lie. My mom is crying. An hour or more goes by and we hear the bedroom door click open.

“Kids, get out here! Get your stuff, let’s go!”

“You guys don’t have to go with her,” my dad says. Are we actually expected to make a choice? Our whole lives, we’ve been trained not to think or feel for ourselves and now they are telling us to decide which parent to go with. Nobody even knows what the hell is going on.

I grab the phone from the kitchen counter and run outside, quickly punching in the number for my friend, Corey, and sending his pager our secret ‘911’ code. He’ll be here in a few minutes. They’re still shouting inside. Arguing over who is taking the kids. My brother and sister are crying. I go down the back side of the hill, avoiding the driveway and the view from the front windows, and wait by the side of the road until I hear the roar of the old Ford Maverick coming down the road.

As I’m getting in the front seat, Corey looks at me, trying to figure out what the emergency is. He flips open his pack Marlboros and offers me one. With a shaking hand, I take one out and light it, passing the lighter back to him. After a deep drag, I start to cry. I sob my way through the whole story. I’ve never told anyone what my family is really like, always pretending to have a normal life, like my friends.

We hang around Corey’s house for most of the day and a good part of the evening until I decide I’d better go home and get my beating for taking off. It’ll only be worse, the longer I stay.

When we pull up the driveway, my parents are standing out front, watching. I tell Corey he’d better just drop me off and go. I don’t know what to expect.

“Yeah, you better run, pussy!” my mom yells at him as he backs out. She picks a pinecone up from the driveway and hurls it at his car.

“Geez, stop harassing my friends.”

“Your friends are losers. They’ll never be there for you. The only people who will ever be there for you are your family. Get your ass inside.”

I go to my room and wait. It won’t be long now before I’m being attacked, screamed at and called a loser-piece-of-shit. But the door never opens. There is no punishment. Nothing that happened that day is ever mentioned again.