Free One More Theory About Happiness: A Memoir by Paul Guest Page B

slope. After food, after blistered hot dogs and canned pork beans served cold to us on paper plates, we went down into the garage to find ways to pass the time because, really, we hardly knew each other,appearing once a week to run around in half-coherent fashion and be yelled at by a stranger, some man who acted as though he had power over us, and when the inevitable realization came that we were children, and not him, not him at all, the yelling faded out and the game ended soon enough, just as the day grew warm.
    His son had a skateboard and began surfing down the driveway. A few times before others joined in, rolling to a stop in the gravel, jumping off, tumbling, laughing and running back up the driveway to start it all over again. I watched, laughing, hooting for those who kicked the board’s nose up and ground its tail into the asphalt, stopping.
    I knew this was nothing I was any good at. Boys waved to me from the bottom of the hill while one of them ran back up the hill with the skateboard held out in his arms.
    Come on! One time! Chicken!
    I took it from the boy and considered what to do. I wanted to do it because I loved velocity and plain motion. I loved to watch the movement of the world: cars blurring past our home in hot gusts of wind and boats splitting the waters of a river and the shifting procession of clouds in the summer sky. I felt called to it, always.
    I lay down on the board and pushed off from the launch of the garage, rolling low to the ground, faster than I had expected. All the boys yelped: none of them had expected this.
    My face was inches from the asphalt and my arms hugged the skateboard to my chest. There was now the question of stopping and I had no answer for it.
     
    Later, when the party had ended and our dispersal had begun, I climbed into my mother’s waiting station wagon. It was dark, night fallen fully down in the crisp air. I entered through the front seat, the car’s dome light igniting as I climbed over the front seat and into the back. I was tired, bleary, already tugged at by sleep as I tumbled into the back, propping my boots on the passenger side’s headrest. As she turned to back up, her eyes fell on the ravaged toes of my boots, burned through when I had dragged them like anchors down the driveway.
    The car stopped and she roughly turned the boots to her face.
    “What did you do to these?” she demanded, looking down to where I had fallen behind her seat. “Take them off, give them to me, let me see them now.”
    I shucked them off meekly, terrified and sad: I had not realized what had happened to the boots, how they had been ruined. I’d had no idea.
    Screaming, she threw one. It thudded against the back window. And then the other came down, missing me by inches.
    I gathered it up in my arms and cowered on the floor-board, holding it like a trophy of my own foolishness. We drove home.
     
    That night now seems like a precursor to the morning of my injury, when I did not know enough to avoid damage, when I wanted so badly for my body to be other than it was, but not, if I could have known, what it would become, when nothing could protect me from myself, not even my parents.

chapter NINE
    Junior high dances were loud pageants of melancholia, held in the school cafeteria, darkened, festooned with glittering tinsel, loud with heavy metal, a prelude to the suffocating sway of pop ballads. I went alone but tried to speak to friends, yelling above the decibels. It felt like torture, like something inside me with deep roots was slowly being pulled out.
    The air was dense with noise and hot: the ecosystem of the young. From a corner, I watched couples pair off, draw close when the ballads played. Teachers threaded through the crowd with flashlights, clicking them on when someonedanced too close to their partner, when kissing began. Weak bursts of light winked through every song.
    I longed to join them. To participate in the communal swoon. But in another body. Not the one I