Eternally North by Tillie Cole Page A

beautiful pairs
of white leather, pink-wheeled roller skates I had ever seen. Not
blades, but real quad boots like they use in Starlight Express .
    Tearing up, I ran over
to a smiling Tink and grabbed them from his hands, stroking the
skates like Gollum with the shiny, all-powerful ring. My precious.
    When I had composed
myself, I grabbed my super-thoughtful bestie and hugged him tightly.
    “They are gorgeous,
just like my old beauties that that bastard bully, Stephen James,
threw in a cesspool when we were fifteen.”
    “I know, I saw them
on eBay and just had to get them for us. You never did get over
losing your pair.”
    “Losing them? They
were ripped from me, and with it a piece of my tender heart, and
flung into the stinking, smelly depths of Spooks Woods' shit tip,”
I sniffed, remembering the overwhelming hurt on that fateful autumn
day.
    “So? You ready to try
them out?” he teased.
    “OMG! Yes!”
    “So, where are we
going to put the speed of these babies to the test?”
    “I was thinking a few
laps of Stanley Park and then post-skate lattes at Starbucks?” he
suggested.
    “You’re on like
Donkey Kong, my fabulous fairy!” and we raced out of the door.

Chapter 9
Skater-gate Scandal
    Roller skating in the
park was beautiful and breath-taking. The wind whipped through my
hair, the snow-capped Rocky Mountains dominated the view, and my
senses were heightened. A real ‘I’m alive’ moment.
    In our excitement over
our new kinky, kitsch boots, Tink and I were flying through the park
at unnatural speeds. The only other people around that early on a
cold Saturday morning were hard-core joggers and a few dog-walkers.
We couldn’t tell if they were annoyed at the two of us or admired
the sight of our obvious glee as we glided and soared, overjoyed at
being reunited with our favourite teenage pastime. If we’d have had
a bottle of cider in our right hands it would’ve been perfect.
    Tink and I breezed
around the path surrounding Elbow River hand in hand, pulling each
other forward and swapping sides. My diva of a partner got a little
bored of the mundane ‘flat’ routine and began to experiment with
some Dancing on Ice moves he had recently seen on ITV One. He
began humming the tune to Torville and Dean’s gold medal-winning
Bolero and started spinning me around whilst picking up a dangerously
high velocity.
    I was giggling at his
antics and never even thought to look at the floor as we raced down
the hill or considered what could be coming our way around the sharp
bend. As I expertly pushed out of a spin, my foot slipped, and kept
slipping. Tink grabbed me around the waist and we kind of shuffled
awkwardly against one another, shrieking and screaming in a soprano
pitch… and that was just the fairy!
    Unsurprisingly, with
our pink plastic wheels we couldn’t gain any grip, any traction; we
were going down and down and boom! We were taken out by an
unseen force and we hit the ground hard, my wrecking ball of
destruction now situated heavily on top of me, pinning me to the
floor and crushing my chest. I couldn’t really take much else in as
a dull throbbing in my head was making me lose focus.
    “What the fuck?”
exploded the deep voice of my human tackling-machine. I then heard a
similar ruckus to my left.
    “Oh my God. I’m so
sorry! Wait, Tink? Is that you?” exclaimed a gentle voice next to
me.
    “Well, well, well.
Nice to see you again, mister, but if you were that keen to get on
top of me you should have at least asked me out to dinner first, you
cheeky scoundrel,” Tink replied.
    The other voice laughed
shyly. "If you’re being serious, then that, I can do."
    "Oh, really? Then
it's definitely a date, mister," Tink confirmed, with excitement
in his voice.
    Too disorientated to
make sense of what the hell was happening, I decided to just give in
to the sleep that was looming, and it all began to go temptingly
dark. I could hear bits of talking around me, most prominently Tink
giggling and