Mighty Millie Novak, page 1
chapter 1
The next five minutes were going to determine everything about my future—or at least, my future in roller derby, which was all that mattered.
I wiped the sweat off my face with the hem of my T-shirt, took one more puff from my inhaler, and skated back onto the track. My muscles were warm from the previous hour of drills and skills, and my mind—well, it was as clear as it was going to be, all things considered. The only thing left? The dreaded 27 in 5.
“Get it, Mighty!” Pumpkin shouted from the sidelines. She’d already done hers, skating 29 easy laps in five minutes, and was now sitting on the edge of the rink, unlacing her skates. I smiled at her weakly, glad for the encouragement but at the same time wishing she wouldn’t watch. The fewer witnesses, the better.
I’d gotten the required 27 laps a few times in practice, but that was practice, when the pressure was off. And it had always been close. Today it seemed less likely, given my nerves, my exhaustion from the rest of the assessment, and the effort it took to push away thoughts of my parents’ announcement this morning.
Stork rolled onto the track and lined up behind me. Great. Stork was tall and angular, like her namesake, and her legs devoured the track effortlessly. She would blow past me immediately.
The white of Stork’s mouthguard flashed as she smiled at me. “Don’t be nervous, Mighty.”
I smiled back half-heartedly, not replying, vaguely offended. In what universe would I not be nervous? If I got even 26.5 laps, it meant no real roller derby for me, just more time with the Skatertots, practicing and hoping and dreaming.
“Everybody ready?” The powerful voice of Coach Ann boomed through the rink.
I braced my toe stops on the ground and bent my knees, ready to sprint at the whistle blast. I could do this. I didn’t need to compete with Stork. Everyone was always talking about her speed, complimenting her, saying what potential she had as a jammer . . . wouldn’t they all be surprised if it were me, Millie Novak, a.k.a. Dino Might, who was the fastest? I could be more than just the goofy one, the comic relief. I could be an actual threat on the track. I could—
The whistle blew, startling me. Instead of a perfect sprint on my toe stops to accelerate, I stumbled, slipped, and flung my arms out for balance. Stork smacked into my flailing right arm as she blasted past me, and I tumbled onto my knees. Oh God, there went my chance.
I picked myself up as fast as I could, trying not to panic, and started to skate. Before I could even reach the first turn, Stork was coming around again.
“Sorry about hitting you!” she called over her shoulder as she passed me.
Predictably, Ann and our other coach, Cleo, immediately shouted, “No sorries in derby!” in unison at Stork. But I was glad she’d apologized.
I’d done the math yesterday: I needed to average 5.4 laps per minute. I kept count in my head, though Ann’s count would be my official score. When Cleo called out the end of the first minute, I had barely done five laps. Not enough. I needed to speed up. Despair crept in, and I tried to outskate it.
Two minutes in. My lungs burned, my thighs burned, and I’d only done a little more than ten laps. Had I used my inhaler before I started? Suddenly I wasn’t sure. What if I had an asthma attack right now? What if—
I nearly collided with A. Dora Bell, a skinny, wobbly girl with enormous glasses.
“Sorry!” I shouted to Dora.
“No sorries in derby!” the coaches yelled.
Three minutes down. Sweat dripped from under my helmet and stung my eyes. My legs quivered.
“Keep doing your crossovers, Mighty!” Ann shouted. “You need to pick up the pace a little.”
I crossed right leg over left, right leg over left, again, again, again. My legs trembled. I kept moving. I tried to ignore the fear rattling in my brain, tried to ignore the sound of Stork’s lap counter yelling, “Twenty laps already? You’re crushing it, Stork!”
Oh, it was hopeless. I’d never wanted anything as badly as I wanted to be an official member of the Prairie Skate Juniors, but how could it happen, given my speed today? Maybe I could beg Ann to let me redo it. Maybe I could even tell her about my morning, that my parents had announced their long-time-coming divorce just two hours before I hit the rink. How could Ann not take pity on me then?
There was a shout from the opposite end of the track.
“Dora!” Ann’s voice was high and panicked. “Are you okay?”
I risked a glance to see what had happened. A. Dora Bell was lying on her back, a few feet off the track. She must have fallen and slid out of bounds. I started coasting to a stop, but Dora raised her arm and gave us a thumbs-up, then rolled over and clambered to her feet.
Thank God. I didn’t want Dora to be seriously hurt, even if—the sneaky, selfish part of my mind noted—the coaches would surely have called off the 27 in 5 and I’d get a redo another day.
I brought my focus back to my laps. I could at least finish with dignity and get as close as I could. With one minute left, I was just shy of 21 laps. I wasn’t fast enough to get six more laps in a minute, but I’d hustle, get the best score I could.
“Twenty-two laps, Mighty!” Ann yelled. “Only five to go! You can do it!”
What? She must have counted wrong! I was at 21, with six left. But the excitement in her words fueled a new fire in me. So what if my thighs quivered and my calves ached, so what if every breath in my lungs burned like fire, so what if my vision was blurred with sweat? There was only a minute left! I pushed harder, harder, harder.
When the whistle blew, I was immediately crushed in hugs from all sides. Ann, Pumpkin, and Dora—now in shoes—were cheering and jumping and squeezing me.
“Twenty-seven and a half laps!” Ann said in my ear. “Oh, Mighty, I’m so proud of you! You’ve come so far since May!”
Now was the time to tell her she’d miscounted, that I was only at 26.5 when the whistle blew. Dora’s accident must have distracted Ann and made her lose count. My heart sinking, I guided Ann away from Dora and Pumpkin, so I could confess privately.
“The thing is . . .” I sighed.
Someone behind me caught Ann’s eye. “And you! How many laps did you get?”
Stork skated up, executing a neat little hockey stop next to me. “Thirty-one. It felt pretty good.” Her face was flushed red, but otherwise she didn’t look tired at all. “How about you, Mighty?”
I bit my lip. Now or never. Time to confess. I shrugged, then grinned. “Twenty-seven and a half! Success!”
What really was the difference? Was I less safe on the track because I was a little slow? No. It was arbitrary, really. A lot of derby leagues didn’t even require the 27 in 5 anymore, I’d heard. So how much could it really matter?
I followed Stork off the track, then sat on the ground next to my gear bag to take off my skates. Pumpkin dropped down and sat cross-legged next to me, chattering about the earlier part of the assessment and how she felt Cleo, the coach who’d assessed her, hadn’t been fair.
“I mean, half-plows? We were told full-plow stops were on the assessment, not half-plows!”
I was grateful for her rush of words, and nodded along, agreeing at all points.
Every practice, all summer, there had been a constant tightness in my chest that had nothing to do with my asthma. So many girls, and it seemed all of them were more athletic and confident and normal than I was. But for some reason, in the last two weeks of Skatertots, Pumpkin had decided we were friends.
Pumpkin—Pumpkin Slice Latte—was a self-proclaimed rink rat who’d grown up skating every Friday night. She was new to contact drills, but her skating was smooth and confident. I’d made her laugh during the increasingly challenging practices—cracking jokes at my own unathletic expense, imitating Cleo’s drill sergeant barking and Stork’s earnest perfection—and that had been enough to earn me her friendship, apparently. Having someone to stand next to during warm-ups, someone to roll my eyes to during a particularly tough drill or a show-off move from Stork, someone to whisper and joke with during long, boring announcements from the coaches—it made that tightness in my chest ease.
“I thought your half-plows looked fine,” I said, yanking my elbow pads down my arms and shoving them into my bag. Some girls had complicated methods of keeping their gear clean: spritzing sprays, clipping pads to the outside of the bag so they could air dry, shoving scented sachets inside. It seemed like too much trouble, so I’d ignore the issue until my dad would eventually offer to throw my gear in the washer for me.
Maybe I’d need to start washing it myself. My dad was planning to move out, my parents had said this morning during the eerily calm joint announcement of their divorce.
My brother, Ben, and I had suspected it was coming—they’d fought constantly our whole lives, and yet, this past summer, a quiet had fallen over the house, an unsettling sense of otherwise-inexplicable peace. But it was one thing to sense it and another thing for it to actually happen.
“Don’t feel bad, your half-plows were okay, too!” Pumpkin said cheerily, misreading the look on my face.
“Anyway”—I tore my mind away from the mess of my family—“if you’re a jammer, you won’t even need to do plow stops, you’ll just have to skate fast.” Jammers were the ones who scored the points and, frankly, got all the glory.
“Me? Are you kidding?” Pumpkin laughed. “No thanks. Jamming sucks.
“All right, fair.” Any time I’d tried jamming during Skatertots practices, I’d been instantly exhausted and demoralized. Pumpkin was right. Not that that stopped my fantasies of glory and adoration and screaming fans.
I shoved the last of my pads into my gear bag, zipped it shut, then sat on the carpet with my knees tucked to my chest. A noise from the back of the rink drew my attention—one girl, a halfway decent skater I didn’t know by name, was crying. Another skater, Seitan Worshipper, put an arm around her. Their voices carried over to us.
“Hey, you did your best. It was a tough assessment.”
It was clear the crying girl thought she wouldn’t make the team. How many laps had she gotten? I looked away from the scene.
Pumpkin caught my eye, winced, and leaned in close to whisper.
“If I don’t make the team, I’m not doing another session of Skatertots. Screw it. I’ll just have fun at the rink with my friends, where no one is judging me.”
What would I do if I didn’t make it? Would I stay in Skatertots if my only friend was gone? Imagining it made my stomach hurt.
“Hey.” Pumpkin jerked her chin to the left, drawing my attention to the two people approaching us.
Ann and Cleo were still holding their clipboards, faces carefully neutral. Ann spoke quietly. “Can you both stick around for a few minutes?”
We nodded. My dad was probably already outside in the car, waiting for me, but I wasn’t feeling especially charitable toward either of my parents at the moment. He could wait.
“Meet us in the side room in ten.” The coaches moved on.
Pumpkin grabbed my arm, her nails digging in. “Oh my God, this is it, isn’t it? We made the team!”
I grinned, her enthusiasm contagious. “I think so!” It was official, then: I’d take that 26.5 to my grave, even if it gave me an ulcer to have to live a lie.
chapter 2
Pumpkin was right! We were rookie members of the Prairie Skate Juniors! I half-skipped, half-ran through the rink’s breezeway and out the door, swinging my gear bag.
Then I spotted my dad waiting for me in the car, his eyes looking down at his phone, and reality drenched me like a wave. Ugh, the divorce. There was so much more coming. Awkward conversations, custody decisions, my dad packing and sorting and moving—all perfect opportunities for my parents to argue and for me to be thrown in the middle of it. For the millionth time today, I wished Ben weren’t away at college.
“How’d it go?” my dad asked as I collapsed into the passenger seat.
“Intense. But amazing.”
“Yeah?”
“I made the team!” I couldn’t help but grin, despite my trepidation at the inevitable divorce garbage.
“Congrats!” He held out one hand for a half-hearted high five, keeping his eyes on the road as he pulled away from the rink. I indulged him and smacked his hand. “When’s your first practice?”
“In a week. And the Juniors practices are supposedly way tougher than Skatertots. So we’ll see if I survive.”
“I know your mom has had concerns about safety, but that’s just her being irrational. I’m sure you’ll be fine.”
I ignored the random dig at my mom. It barely fazed me at this point.
“There were only five open spots, from girls who went off to college or were old enough to leave Juniors and try out for charter.” Prairie Skate’s 18-and-up charter team players were the real rockstars of the league. I could barely bring myself to look at them when they occasionally wandered into the rink during Skatertots practices, in case I did something embarrassing and drew their attention. “I can’t believe I got one of the spots.”
“Well, I’m sure you earned it.”
I swallowed, thinking, 26.5, 26.5, only 26.5. How many other skaters deserved this spot more than I did? The memory of the crying skater popped in my head.
“I hope I do okay. I hope . . .” I trailed off. I didn’t know how to articulate all the things I hoped.
My dad paused. I could see the shift in his face the moment he decided it was okay to change the subject. “When we get home, we have some household things to do. I’m going to start packing. And you really need to clean your room.”
“Ah.” I fiddled with the seat-belt strap, pulling it loose and then tightening it again. “If you’re moving out, isn’t my messy room Mom’s problem now?”
He tilted his head and looked at me, his eyes stern.
“Kidding.”
We rode in silence for a few minutes, until nerves made me break it. “So . . . yeah. I’m on the team. For real.” I’d seen the Juniors skaters around the rink this summer, occasionally helping at Skatertot practices. They were confident, fearless, wild. Their sheer badassery on the track took my breath away. Becoming a member of the Prairie Skate Juniors was like getting a new, better identity.
“It really is great, honey. Nice job.”
Unbidden, the memory of Ben making the varsity baseball team when he was my age rose to my mind. My dad had whooped loudly, immediately called a bunch of our relatives to share the news, and insisted we go out to dinner to celebrate.
I shifted in my seat, wishing I could open the car door and jump out.
Of my parents, my dad supported my participation in roller derby more than my mom did. But he still didn’t take it seriously. I wasn’t sure if he was expecting me to eventually give up and retreat to my bedroom with my laptop and my headphones and my zero real friends, or if he just didn’t think of derby as a real enough sport to be worth caring about.
“So Mom thinks I’m going to get hurt?” Yes, I had the self-awareness to know I was deliberately pitting him against my mom so he would further praise my accomplishment today. I just didn’t have the self-control to stop myself. “Does she want me to quit or something?”
A deep breath from my dad, then a sudden silence. Censoring himself. “Your mother might think that, but I don’t. Don’t let her nonsense get in your head. Keep playing.”
I debated responding with “No kidding, I just made the team, of course I’m going to keep playing.”
I debated telling him how transparent it was that he was only being supportive to gain points against my mom.
I debated telling him about the 27 in 5, how I couldn’t stop thinking about my false result and worrying I didn’t really belong on the team.
Finally, I sighed, said nothing, propped my feet heavily on the dashboard, and shut my eyes.
That night, my mom sequestered herself in the bedroom to talk on the phone with her sister, and my dad retreated to his home office to pack boxes of boring legal books. The house maintained its silence, still unnerving after an entire lifetime of my parents’ constant arguing.
I curled up burrito-style in a blanket on the couch and watched Whip It! The roller derby in the 2009 movie was way different from what we did at practice—they played on a banked track, sloping upward from the inside of the track to the outside, for starters—but it was still derby. I’d watched the movie a million times since I’d joined Skatertots four months ago. Tonight, I half-watched while searching my phone for pictures of dyed green hair. My hair was currently a faded orangey pink, brown roots starting to show. It might be fun to switch to green, one of our team colors.
Guess what? I texted Ben. I made the Prairie Skate Juniors! You’re going to have to come watch my games, like I did for you. You know what an enthusiastic fan I was.
I smiled as I sent it. I had famously once fallen asleep at a baseball game of Ben’s.
Anyway, loser, text me back. I’m bored.
I scrolled through more photos of gorgeous green hair, idly noting things I liked, imagining how they’d look on me. Waiting. A few minutes later, a notification buzzed, and my heart leapt. Ben! But no, just an automated email reminding me of some late schoolwork. Deflated, I deleted it and went back to scrolling.
Ben and I were very different, and he always gave me a hard time about, well, everything, but he accepted me, let me hang out with him and his friends, and made me a part of his life. It wasn’t fair, really, that he was away at college. He should have stayed nearby and gone to school in the Chicago suburbs instead of down in Champaign, so I could still hang out with him. Okay, I hadn’t actually expected that, but I certainly would have appreciated it.
