'The Roller Derby Girls Skate Circles Around My Teenage Heart' by Travis Flatt

They detune my stratocaster. They flat my Mustang. They butter my fingers. They tear open my bad boy mask and expose my self-image, circle closer and closer like sharks. They gnaw inward, the way certain fungi eat trees. They fog the edges of my mirror, tightening toward the center of my face down to the middle of my mustache where nothing grows. And here I thought I was hot shit.

Before each match, I’ll comb up my pompadour, but by the time I bike to the rink, my hair’s a limp, greasy center part. My leather jacket’s sweat-soaked; my English Leather’s evaporated to the scent of mom’s cats. 

I sit alone in the bleachers, slink past the front row of boyfriends and girlfriends, who recline smoking cigarettes, up past the parents. Say, “Excuse me, sorry.” Sit with little siblings, where the boys pinch the girls, and the girls play with paper pyramids that read the future.

Most evenings, I wake screaming, “That’s the Way (I Like It)” thumping in my ears, stink of the rink in my sinuses—armpit, corndogs—and cotton candy on my tongue. In my dreams, I fight them off with a trash bag of mixtapes through crisscrossing corridors of some labyrinthine high school.

In the fall, they open try-outs. I skate for the Roller Derby Girls. If you can’t beat them, join them; if you can’t charm them, disarm them. I make waterboy. They dress me up as some fuzzy thing with purple spots to pump the crowd between jams. I roll the rink at half time, hands clasped and raised by Roller Derby Girls to roaring applause. That’s all I ever wanted: to be greased wheels on waxed Northern maple, to unself myself and spin spin spin. 

 

 

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