When my derby league is nine months old, I realize my season here is almost over. They’ve grown up now; they can do this themselves. They look to me for reassurance once in a while, but their dependence on me is mostly in their heads. I realize I’m not doing them any favors by stepping in whenever they get confused or upset. It’s time to back off.

I feel that same old restlessness setting in, the feeling I always get when I don’t have my shoulder to the wheel, when I’m not rolling a boulder uphill.

I’m going to Portland, for real this time. I’ve been working on Operation Hobo (my project in which I aim to fit everything in my car) all year, but I kick it up a few notches. The employees at Goodwill know me now. I give away paintings, furniture, anything I can possibly live without.

Meanwhile, more in need of a distraction than ever now that my derby league is running more or less fine without me, I go on a date despite what a bad idea that is for someone in my state of flux.

I walk into a bar, just like it’s the start of a joke, mainly because it usually is.

There he is, already waiting at our table: the one solitary guy who survived the OKCupid elimination process. His name is Andy. He has a dog who is also named Andy, which is just one of the many reasons I have found myself unable to rule him out.

I’m late, flustered. But he looks up at me idly, like we’re old friends and I’ve just come back from the bathroom. Nothing in his face reminds me that I am made of meat. I approve of this.

We talk for hours, pleasantly if not avidly—this is not a story of instant chemistry, exactly, but it goes well enough. It’s the wee hours of the morning before we both stand up. I’ve confessed to seeing what I could find of him online and mentioned that I saw pictures of him on crazy high-tech stilts. As he walks me to my car, it is revealed that said stilts are, in fact, in the back of his car. Which is how I wind up wobbling around a parking deck at 3 AM, on stilts, in borrowed kneepads, making a complete fool of myself while giggling uncontrollably.

Right before I stand up on them, he holds out his hand in that same mild way. He’s not timid about it, but he isn’t hungry either—just thoroughly bemused. I take his hand without having to think about it, and he pulls me up onto my stilts, and right then is when I know for sure I’ll see him again. It’s November 17.

He lets me work my way over to him from my guarded perch on the couch over a series of marathon hangout dates. He sets mugs of tea down in front of me, lets me think it over. I can stay, or not; I can sleep in the guest room, or not; he doesn’t seem to mind one way or the other. This drives me completely crazy, but in the best possible way, because it’s not an act. He isn’t playing hard to get. It’s just my decision, like I said I wanted it to be.

No one has ever been clever enough to wait for that before, to leave me stewing on my side of the table until I’m willing to take responsibility for what’s going on, until I’m willing to show my cards.

I am impressed.

Besides, he owns a T-shirt of the grim reaper riding a unicorn and he knows the difference between rifling through something and riffling through something. Who am I kidding.

I concede the existence of our relationship via a Kindle presentation that includes a diagram of a bee’s knee, and that’s that. It’s December 2.

In the next few weeks, I look like hell. I’ve taken the walk of shame and made an entire lifestyle out of it. Half of the T-shirts I wind up wearing to dinner aren’t mine. I smile stupidly at other people, at my own hands, at cans of beans in the grocery store.

I try to hide what’s happening, but my mother is smug regardless. She can tell I’m getting my ass kicked. She has never seen a loudmouth with so little to say.

I bring over some yoga pants, a toothbrush. I’m casually given a drawer in the bathroom and the code to the garage.

A package comes to the door one afternoon: it’s a present for me. I pry it open, examine it. It’s an entire dictionary of the word “fuck,” a word that I’ve likely uttered more times than just about any other.

I have to sit down with it immediately, astonished. He laughs knowingly at the look on my face when I crack it open.

There is a bird called the windfucker. This is yet another thing I didn’t have before that I have now.

I stop talking about going to Portland. He starts talking about where he should look for work now that his contract is expiring.

We realize we have an awkward problem: if Andy gets a job here, he’s stuck here for quite a while, where I don’t want to be. But if he gets a job elsewhere, surely I can’t just come with him after a month of dating. That would be ridiculous. Right?

An opportunity presents itself in Phoenix. Unwilling to say what I mean, I make up stories about the bloodthirsty zombie gnomes that plague the city. I send him pictures of the Brown Cloud, Phoenix’s seasonal haze of pollution. I also casually mention that I hear the West Coast is really nice this time of year, or any time of year.

A job comes up in California. He asks me what I think.

I pause. “San Francisco is one of my favorite cities in the world,” I say.

He understands the way I talk around things. He decides he’ll take it if they’ll have him. It’s December 21.

While we’re waiting to hear about the job, an enormous opportunity arises for the roller-derby league: the chance to play a real arena, something many leagues never accomplish. It’ll be a massive undertaking of ticket sales and advertising and frantically trying to find a halftime act, and we only have a few weeks to pull it off.

We decide to do it, because we’re insane, as per usual. Plus, we plan to donate 100% of the proceeds, so we figure we can raise a little money for cancer research.

Andy hears back about the job, and it’s a go: we’re moving to California.

It is January 14, almost our whopping two-month anniversary.

I don’t want to get married or anything, though. “I like to wait for the big three-monther for that,” I tell him.

Never in my life will I have whistled louder or longer through a graveyard than I’m about to, and I’ve traversed some very large metaphorical cemeteries in my time.

On January 22, the big bout comes. We have nearly given ourselves ulcers scurrying around with the planning, and I’m just frantically hoping we pull the whole thing off, as we’ve slapped the entire event together with duct tape and a prayer; up until the last moment, we aren’t even sure our event insurance has been approved or whether we’ll have to cancel.

By now, everyone has heard that I’m moving to California with some guy I barely know and they’ve barely heard of. People are startlingly supportive, probably because I clearly already know this is the worst idea ever, which seems to reassure them that I won’t be crushed if it doesn’t work out. It dawns on me that people don’t so much mind foolhardy romantic decisions as long as you don’t sugarcoat those decisions into some kind of fairytale. Most people politely fail to mention those hundreds of thousands of times I swore I’d never live with anyone again. This is nice of them.

The biggest thing everyone is hung up on is how on earth I’m going to manage to get all the way to California in a car. I find this both hilarious and sadly poignant. I keep telling them, “It’s just like a road trip, but longer.”

I’m announcing this bout, just like the last one. When I signed up for it, I didn’t realize it would be good-bye, but it’s one hell of a way to go.

Three thousand people come to see us. Many of the faces are familiar, family members and friends who are seeing roller derby for the first time. When the game comes all the way down to the last moment, the entire stadium roars in a way that will later put goosebumps on my arms when I’m reviewing the footage.

Oh, and in the end, we do manage to raise a little money for cancer research. In fact, when I see the total, I exclaim, “Holy SHIT!” and then hastily check to make sure my microphone isn’t on. (It isn’t.)

We present the total while cancer survivors in the stadium stand up and everyone within a mile radius of that giant check weeps into their shirtsleeves, myself included.

It is one of the proudest days of my life.

When the whole thing is over and the stadium is nearly empty, I pull my earpiece out and marvel that I’m really done; I will stay for the one-year anniversary party, but right now is really the moment that I am done with this endeavor, that I can rest. I spend the afterparty with my head on Andy’s shoulder, exhausted.

We drive Andy and some of his stuff out to California. As we cross the bay bridge and San Francisco rolls by, we can’t stop laughing. Thanks to the wonders of Glympse, my family watches from home as we cross that threshold, and they cheer me on via text message. We hang out our heads out the window, amazed at the gorgeous weather and even more amazed that some people are actually wearing gloves and hats as if it’s cold outside; as two people who grew up in a place where the inside of your nose freezes in the winter (quite a weird feeling, if you’ve never experienced it), we find this hilarious.

We go to the beach, we drive around town, and then we find an apartment. When we’re sitting in the leasing office, I wonder for the billionth time just what the hell I think I’m doing.

I sign on the dotted line and fly back to Illinois to finish Operation Hobo.

I go to the league anniversary party in a car that already has everything I own in it, packed and ready to go for the next morning. I fight tears while my rollergirls say incredibly nice things about me. Walking out to my car from the party, I look up at the night sky and feel my first thrill of this-is-really-happening excitement about leaving the next morning. Just a few more hours.

But when morning comes, I don’t feel excited at all. I feel downright awful, frankly, almost incapacitated with doubt and anxiety. I have forgotten this part, how it feels to really say good-bye. I can scarcely bear the sight of my mother crying in the driveway, and for a minute I want to just call the whole thing off. But I program my GPS, pull into the street, drive away, and proceed to sob brokenheartedly all the way through Illinois. I’m not sure why I expected anything else.

Everything is going to be fine—much better than fine, actually. I’ll settle into the Bay Area, get a job, and walk to work each morning while reminding myself that today is a stunningly beautiful day—not because I’m grouchy, but because on my spot on the bay, almost every day is stunningly beautiful, and you forget to notice that after a while if you aren’t careful. I’ll learn my way around the trains, the streets. People will ask me for directions, and my ability to answer them will please me enormously.

Six months from now, California will feel like home.

Awhile after I get there, Andy will tell me about something he did when he was little, when people were being mean to him. It will be a funny story, but I’ll also feel an anger rise up in me. Is someone being mean to a wee version of Andy sometime back in 1983? Because I will claw my way back in time and rip their limbs off. Don’t think I won’t. Don’t you even TRY it, 1983.

A beat after that flash of rage has subsided, I will recognize that protective instinct for what it is. Andy will have become one of mine. He will have become home, too.

On my way west, I don’t know any of that yet. But as the miles roll by, I start to feel a little lighter. When I get to Iowa, I merge onto I-80, the road I will be on for the next 1,789 miles.

I turn the music up, and I start to sing.

THE END

Thanks to the amazing David Vernon for all images except the cheering little boy (courtesy of Hillary Wasson) and the photobooth collection (courtesy of a couple of dorks in San Francisco).

If I knew how we got from there to here, I think I really would write a book about it. But as time has passed, the nights at the rink, the hours of board meetings, the legal paperwork, the radio interviews, and the photo shoots have mushed into a frenetic blur interspersed with beeps from my stopwatch.

I had never worked so hard in my life, I can tell you that. I doubt any of them had, either. I didn’t do any of this myself, of course; this is just my story.

Most people, even those who hit the gym regularly, have no idea what their bodies are really capable of. It takes a coach or a personal trainer to help you understand just how easy you’ve been on yourself and just how much work goes into that killer set of abs that is always going to elude you if you log your twenty minutes on the elliptical machine and call it a day. People don’t realize what they can do. Women, especially, don’t realize what they can do in an arena of life that didn’t make much of a place for them until Title IX showed up in 1972.

And as someone who has suffered mightily as both a long-distance runner and a rollergirl, I can vouch for the fact that it really, really hurts to find out.

In roller derby, thirty minutes of jogging is not exercise. Thirty minutes of jogging is a warmup. The three hours after that is exercise.

A lot of skaters dropped out, of course. On their way out the door, none of them said, “You want me to do how many jump burpees? ON SKATES? Bitch, you crazy,” but several of them were quite obviously thinking it. The exhausted, stubborn remainder of them gritted their teeth and stayed with me through jogging intervals, sprint laps, push-ups, wall sits, and endless other tortures. They would sing through the drills, or they would scream at each other to keep going.

One woman puked at every practice and still refused to quit. Two skaters broke their ankles, one shattering it so badly that the doctor couldn’t believe she hadn’t been skydiving.

But hey, it’s roller derby. You get your x-rays, you post them proudly on your Facebook profile, you let us pimp your walker for you, and you come back as soon as you can.

Meanwhile, I learned to build a derby track out of painter’s tape. I helped draft attendance policies, and disciplinary policies, and policies about how often we were allowed to change all of our other policies. I chased off creeps who wanted to hang out at the rink and leer at us. I spent hours on the phone talking individual players down off the ledge. I scrambled to come up with hurdles as quickly as my skaters managed to jump over the last one I had put in front of them. I sat up at night, coming up with drills and tests and rewards to keep people motivated, the most popular one being this magnet:

One of these would later be abducted, though we all still received updates from the stolen unicorn’s Facebook page until November of 2010, when the trail went ominously cold.

Along the way, those skaters, the ones who wore their mouthguards upside-down and their toe stops backward, learned to fall. Then they learned to skate. Then they learned to skate harder and faster and farther. They learned how to skate in packs until they could skate close enough to click wheels occasionally, all without kicking one another in the shins or reflexively grabbing one another’s shirts when they stumbled.

Then they learned to hit.

We lost a few skaters at that stage, but the rest of them? I couldn’t have talked them out of it by then.

We built it up, piece by piece. One on one. Two on two. Two on two with one jammer. Three on three with one jammer. Three on three with two jammers. Eventually, so predictably and yet so impossibly, the day came when we were ready to try four on four with two jammers …

… or, as it is more commonly known, roller derby.

They pulled on their pristine, sparkly helmet covers, which had just arrived in the mail and thus did not yet smell of sweat and fear. They lined up on the line, and I said “beep!” (we were not yet advanced enough to have a ref staff armed with real whistles), and off they went, around the track: game on.

Just like that, they were playing roller derby. They were rollergirls.

Don’t ask me what I expected. I imagine that people who spend months and months gestating a baby can relate. When it finally falls out into someone’s hands and screams for the first time in its life, I’m willing to bet that most people don’t think, Well, of course. Instead, I’d put my money on Holy shit, it’s a BABY!

I was no less astonished. Holy shit, it’s a derby league!

I can’t tell you how strange it has been to watch those lumbering, timid skaters develop to the point that any one of them could totally kick my ass. This must be what it’s like for parents whose children grow taller than they are, richer than they are, smarter than they are. It’s this strange mix of wistful jealousy and all-consuming pride, but mostly the latter.

If I had a wallet, it would be full of dozens of pictures like these (taken by the amazing David Vernon and used with permission), and I would point at each of them in turn while bragging about all of them to anyone who could listen, including innocent grocery-store patrons and anyone unlucky enough to share an airplane with me.

When we booked our first home game, we weren’t sure whether anyone would come. As coach of the entire league (which had split into teams), I couldn’t sit on one bench or the other, so I signed on as announcer, being the only person not already playing or reffing that night who understood the rules.

The night before the game, we hammered our sport floor into place with rubber mallets until two in the morning. The day of the game, our scoreboard broke, we couldn’t find the key to the venue’s bathrooms, we bought way too many concessions, the track we had laid down wouldn’t stick to the floor, and I carried my toothbrush around in one hand for forty-five minutes as a barrage of questions kept me from managing to stop talking for long enough to actually use it. (You will be relieved to hear that I did get to use it eventually, even if I was interrupted by a few nervous dry-heavers.)

Right before the doors were scheduled to open to the public, I decided to steal a peek outside to see whether any brand-new roller derby fans had lined up yet.

When I stuck my head out the door, my ex-husband (who had not only shown up to support me, but had gotten one of the first spots in line) was hugging me before I had managed to close my gaping mouth. The line behind him wrapped all the way around the building and out of sight.

My hometown, that place I had originally dismissed as being too small to offer me anything of interest in my life, had completely sold out its first roller-derby bout.

Way far away, a hundred people back, a tiny squeaky person was waving her arms and jumping up and down. It was my mother, and I’m sure the surrounding crowd was amused at the sight of their microphone-clutching announcer jogging along the line to get a hug from her mommy.

“Can you believe this? Can you believe this?” she just kept saying as we danced around. I really couldn’t. I kind of still can’t.

Holy shit, you guys. It’s a derby league.

A few days after my new roller-derby league’s first practice at the rink, I moved into my new apartment, a decrepit studio roosted atop the tiny row of shops on Main Street. My mother had been right: it was exactly the sort of outdated decor I’d find endearing, complete with hideous linoleum. (Floral and geometric? How exotic!) The place had no shower and a kitchen sink that sprayed water in three different directions (none of them “downward,” sadly). But my parents had kindly applied a stunning new paint job to it, and I noted its crystal doorknobs, arched doorways, deep cast-iron tub, and built-in cabinetry with approval.

I scored this wee residence for a pittance of $500 a month, including heat and water.

At the time, I was trying to take a picture of my bike, not my apartment. That’s probably obvious.

This felt like home, for sure. It was the realm outside those walls I was less certain about.

In the movies, smaller-town life is often portrayed as charming and quaint, and it certainly can be. Take the airport, for instance. You can just … park right there, in the lot in front of it, like it’s Target. Finding your gate shouldn’t be too hard, either—there are only seven of them, lined up in a row. The most awkward part will happen once you’ve been led outside to your plane, as it can be difficult to clamber up that funny metal staircase-on-wheels while clutching your carry-on. (It helps to pretend that you are the president of the United States, or perhaps a very successful 1960s musician.)

So yes, it’s quirky. It’s endearing. But sometimes, it’s also heartbreaking.

When I was young, someone I loved, someone I associated with sweet tea and summer and perfectly buttered mashed potatoes, turned away from her stove, looked me up and down, and asked me to promise her that I would not grow up gay. I sat there, perched on one of her kitchen chairs, and I promised.

She did not ask me to promise that I wouldn’t grow up black, but I’m guessing that’s only because I was a safer bet on that one.

I think it’s probably easier to pass judgment on the Midwestern universe if you don’t associate it with lightning bugs and pie, but trust me, I’m painfully aware of its shortcomings. The only two black kids at my high school dated one another in the most foregone conclusion in prom history. A few Latino kids roamed the halls as well, always together; we referred to them collectively as the Spanish Armada. I was in my twenties before I realized that Buddhists were not in the habit of worshipping a fat golden idol, as I had been taught.

And then there was the “hell house,” the Christian version of a haunted house offering its patrons a montage of all the misdeeds that can send one to eternal damnation, including the infamous abortion scene. Let’s not forget “Heaven’s Gates and Hell’s Flames,” a popular play I attended completely unironically as a teenager, which depicts Satan yanking people into hell, including small children who had died in a car accident after choosing to go fishing with their father instead of attending church with their mother that Sunday.

If none of that impresses you, I can tell you that when a bride I know chose an ivory dress for her wedding, she was asked, with great concern, how anyone would know she was a virgin. I guess she was kind of asking for it, though, strutting around in a color the manufacturer had labeled “Candlelight” like some kind of two-penny whore.

By the time I returned last year, things had gotten better, and yet.

I froze when I heard the phrase “openly homosexual” used to imply audacity, and I excused myself entirely when someone my age dropped the n-word at a party (though I wasn’t surprised; on a previous visit home, a young man at a similar gathering had explained to me it wasn’t that he was racist—it was that Mexicans were lazy). I just quietly hoped for the best when one of my skaters would acknowledge that her boyfriend or husband, the same one who would call her ten times an hour anytime she left the house without him, felt threatened by her desire to pursue their own interests. I tried to control my temper when people asked me whether any of my skaters were gay.

“Some people ask if we’re a bunch of lesbians,” one skater told me worriedly.

“The next time someone asks you that, ask them why it would matter if you were,” I responded, once I had managed to quell my inner rage well enough to avoid alarming her with the vehemence of my reply.

The question so common, they even made a T-shirt about it. (The “Yes, Mom, roller derby made me gay” shirt is even better, but alas, it no longer appears to be sold anywhere.)

The promise to not grow up gay, the one I made before I had any idea how horrified my adulthood friends would be to hear of it, highlights the paradox of Midwestern childhood. You want that woman at the stove to be evil, to be hateful, but she isn’t. She is profoundly lovable. They are profoundly lovable. They’ll pull the beaters out of the cake batter and hand them to you to lick clean before shooing you out of the kitchen. They’ll turn on the sprinklers for you to run through, and they’ll put the chain back on your bike even if you’re just the neighbor kid passing by. When the streetlights wake up and call you home, they’ll usher you in and bandage your scuffed knees and scrub your hands soapy clean.

And then, after they’ve passed the plates and broken the bread, they’ll share their wisdoms earnestly, with the pitch-perfect believability of people who have no idea they are wrong.

I was wrong, too, it turns out. I thought I would one day be able to look back on that promise I made as a child and see it as more intolerant than anything that happens anywhere else. I hoped to escape the suspicion and hatred that so many people around me expressed anytime they encountered someone different. These aspirations, of course, conveniently ignored my own capacity for widespread disdain and my own continual compulsion to sort everyone into an Us box and a Them box. Oops.

When I left to find this utopia, the inhabitants of my small town were the nicest people I knew. That’s not so strange; I hadn’t met anyone else. But it would have given me pause, back then, to know that this past year, sixty-nine cities and eleven countries later, I have confirmed that they still are.

I think I might owe them an apology.

These women, my skaters, worked so much harder than I expected, and with an astonishing level of humility and integrity. They weren’t too insecure to accept feedback. Having become used to dealing with the sort of identity-oriented fanaticism that can cause people to defend their choice of bicycle-gear style with rabid ferocity, I couldn’t believe how easily they would accept a suggestion, and even thank me for it.

And holy smokes, they made me laugh. Even their gratitude had a sense of humor, judging from the unicorn head on a stick I was offered as a token of their appreciation.

That picture was taken at a surprise birthday party they organized for me upon realizing that I knew hardly anyone in town besides them. Not a single one of them was vegan, but my birthday cake was. When I had decided to take the coaching position, I had been adamant that I would not tolerate bigotry or discrimination in my league, but in retrospect, I had little reason to worry about it. At practice, it was not unusual to see a Mormon skater standing next to a Wiccan skater standing next to a butch woman in a COUGAR BAIT T-shirt.

The Midwestern stereotype still exists for a reason, of course, but guess what? It’s just a stereotype, and it’s not the only one out there. On average, perhaps big-city folk are less likely to judge you for being gay than their rural counterparts, but an alarming number of them will judge you for almost everything else you can imagine, including visible pantylines and meals at chain restaurants. They are more progressive, but they can also be more shallow and almost exhausting in their hatred of any fashion trend or any style of tattoo or any other gesture that could be seen as conformist or contrived or played out.

I know Midwesterners who would not be caught dead at a gay wedding or at a rap concert. I know city dwellers who would not be caught dead eating at Olive Garden or wearing a scrunchie. In either scenario, the person in question has an overblown sense of impropriety. In either scenario, a sense of prim virtue is maintained. In either scenario, someone has to be inferior.

I mean, really, “the flyover states”? I know people who will defend the rights of animals and ethnic groups and drag queens but will still use that expression in mixed company.

Before the credits rolled on my cinematic year, I didn’t learn that home is where the heart is. I didn’t find where I belonged. I didn’t tear up any plane tickets or stick a SOLD! sign in the yards of any picturesque houses or make any other dramatic declarations that the Midwest is the place to be. Much to my regret, I did not deliver a baby cow and then name it Norman and adopt it, Billy Crystal style.

But I did confirm that kindness and positivity get more done than a subscription to any particular creed or belief system, and that intolerance and bigotry are both more widespread and less uniformly present in any given group of people than a lot of us enjoy believing.

“Man, I bet you’re glad to be out of there!” is a sentiment I hear frequently now that I’ve moved to the Bay Area–a subtle, sometimes anxious request for confirmation that I don’t have a Glenn Beck poster on my bedroom ceiling. I don’t really mind, but I can’t help but laugh at the irony: if I wanted to walk around promising people that I’m just like them and always will be, I might as well have never left home.

We’re not so different after all? Make love, not war?

I guess these do kind of sound like themes from a cheesy movie. I may not be Emilio Estevez, but I don’t call it my cinematic year for nothing. And I have to warn you … it gets worse.

(Ed. note: While a technical grasp of the game isn’t required to read this post, if you’re curious, you can find a quick explanation video here. Go ahead, I’ll wait.)

“I’m shocked you moved back,” my friend Sienna wrote me upon hearing the news. By then, I had grown accustomed to such reactions. Hardly anyone was neutral on the subject. The friends I was leaving behind were deeply skeptical. My childhood best friend, who had helped talk me into coming back home to begin with, was thrilled. My parents were ecstatic.

My soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend was … deeply unenthused, for reasons that I had to admit were obvious at the time, despite how innocently I had presented the idea.

Me, I was just concerned that I had lost my mind.

Have you ever built a roller-derby league from scratch? No? Well, it’s just like building any other sports league: no big deal once you’ve found a practice venue, established an organizational committee structure, secured sponsors, set up a board of directors, built a website, handed out insurance waivers, and so on …

… oh, except for the part where absolutely no one involved has any idea how to play the sport in question.

No one except for me, of course, which was why I had chosen to sign up as the head coach of a nonexistent roller-derby league. Nevermind that I had never taught a group of people how to play roller derby in my life; after moving away, I had played it myself, in an underwhelmingly mediocre fashion, for three years.

I was far from an expert. I just knew more than they did.

So I volunteered, the way I would volunteer on an airplane if some first-aid class I had taken ten years ago made me the closest thing to a doctor anyone could find on board: I didn’t raise my hand because I was confident in my ability to jam the shaft of my hollowed-out ink pen into someone’s blocked windpipe.

I did it because there was no one else, and I did it because roller derby saves lives.

Roller derby had saved my life, anyway. It had taught me not to settle, that I could do more, be more. It had taught me that women are some of the most underestimated, most beautiful, and toughest creatures in the world. It had purged me of prejudices and doubts accumulated over years spent in a local culture that undervalues women who don’t have husbands or families or supreme beings to call their own. It had dragged me down a long, winding staircase from the heights of that stagnant, airless turret of perfectionism that so many women spend their lives rabidly clambering into, and it had bounced me off the floor, over and over again, rattling my teeth in my skull and elbowing me in the throat until I was finally willing to concede that failure is not the humiliating dead end I had been so terrified of, but a necessary catalyst for growth.

I now held so very dear this profound, counterintuitive truth: nothing is better for you than getting the shit beat out of you in public.

I wanted that for everyone I knew: I wanted them to suffer, and to learn, and to grow. I wanted derby to break them open the way I had been broken open. And for once in my life, I saw a clear opportunity to facilitate that for a group of women I had grown up alongside, and I knew that if I didn’t say yes, they might not find someone who would.

So I rented my future apartment, sight unseen, based on a few dim picture messages from my mother. I stood on my boyfriend’s deck in Los Angeles, stared out at the palm trees, pressed the phone to my ear anxiously, and wondered just how huge of a mistake I was making as my mother promised me that she had picked out the perfect apartment.

“You’ll love it,” she told me. “It’s REALLY old.”

Having committed myself to the cause, for better or worse, I jumped from flight to flight to snag available seats and make it there for their first practice, scrambling from Los Angeles to Denver to Chicago and finally, with little time to spare, to Peoria, where I threw my luggage in my parents’ basement, climbed into the car, and proceeded to get lost as I searched for a rink that, judging from its elusive address, was surely located far from anything resembling a main road, in some sort of large barn that it shared with various livestock.

When I finally found it, after circling a few fields and cursing and wondering where everyone was hiding all the streetlights, I walked through the door, and I saw my skaters for the very first time.

This is where I confess something to you.

After expressing her initial shock, as related earlier, my friend Sienna had made an additional comment that stands out in my memory:

“It sounds like a movie. ‘Home is the last place she expected to find herself.’ Or some such voice-over announcement.”

Standing there in the rink, I realized with some dismay that I MYSELF had become that highly deluded voice-over announcer, having somehow erroneously decided I was the main character of some sort of feminized Mighty Ducks spinoff.

I had gotten divorced and was starting over from scratch, so this opportunity was, what, the sports team that would give me a reason to get out of bed again and put the meaning back into my life? Cue notions of myself as the grizzled character who greets the audience initially by rolling out of bed in some dingy motel and reaching for the whiskey on the nightstand, but who has redeemed herself completely by the end by resurrecting her past failures into a triumphant legacy, bringing out the best in humanity with a passion and finesse that makes the Stand and Deliver guy look like some kind of amateur.

Ooh, and let me guess, this character will also use her same old hometown as a lens through which to view the ways in which she has changed and the ways in which she remains ever the same, and then, for good measure, she’ll meet a love interest when she least expects it?

Who on earth was I kidding?

No matter how embarrassing it is to admit, I have to tell you that from the moment I had first considered the entire venture, despite my genuine anxiety at the enormity of the task, a certainty had been breeding among my less rational neurons that I was actually, deep down in my soul, Emilio Estevez circa 1992.

(You can sort of see the resemblance if you squint really hard, like “all the way” hard, while also picturing his face.)

This painfully optimistic notion had gained steam with every decision made and every mile traveled, building a momentum that had carried me here.

And as I stood there in the rink that first night, that certainty cackled at the absurdity of its own hubris and flew away, having plonked me down into uncharted territory and left me for dead.

Most of these skaters weren’t wearing helmets or any other protective gear. Some of them barely knew how to skate, hanging on to the wall as they made their way along. Their knees were bare. Their wrists were bare. They looked so strange to me, these wobbly and vulnerable apparitions, these Skaters of Shattered Patellas Future. (They flailed their arms dramatically, of course, like any self-respecting specter of my folly would.)

After I had strapped on my gear and buckled my helmet under my chin, I rolled out onto the floor. They gathered around me in a semicircle and waited for me to say something.

“Where’s your gear?” I asked them.

“In our skate bags,” one of them answered, gesturing to the benches that were piled with bags of their gear, which was presumably preventing compound fractures remotely, through the powers of inanimate telepathy.

“Well … go put it on,” was my astonished answer. No one moved.

“Go put it on now,” I clarified, at which point they offered the most lethargic human interpretation of “hustling” ever seen outside a nursing home, ambling over to their bags at a geriatric pace and swapping life stories with one another while they put their helmets on backward.

That gnawing doubt bit down even harder. I had abandoned Trader Joe’s, and so I could do what? Fail spectacularly, is what, doubt whispered around its mouthful of my poor tender limbs. And then die penniless and alone, probably.

Doubt is annoyingly prone to non sequiturs.

I breathed in, I breathed out, and I reassured myself that while I clearly was not 1992 Emilio Estevez after all, I had, at least, just figured out where to begin:

LESSON 1: Kneepads are for knees.
Hence the name.

LESSON 2: Hurry the fuck up.
You’re wearing wheels on your feet for a reason.

We started from there. Somehow, even without the benefit of a director or a script or our own team of hack writers, we started from there.