Lose This Skin

Her name is Indiana. Funny, you think. If you had to imagine the state, embodied as a person, she would be it. Freckled shoulders round as hay bales and long red hair straight as a state flag. She has freckles on her hands, too, dots so miniscule yet vast that looking at her always brings you the same feeling: a cornfield at night, grass cool on your naked back, Milky Way a white swirl close enough to touch.

But when you approach Indiana, in the hallway before class one rainy afternoon, you see only miles of frosty distance in her pale eyes. She cocks her hip, waits.

Hey, you begin. What’s—

Here, she says, and hands you a penny that’s fallen from her backpack onto the bottom of her locker. Keep the change. She arcs a red-brown brow, waits for you to reply, and when you don’t, she flips her hair and walks away.

You used to think that you were free as a baby cub, that you were playful and soft to the touch. You used to think the world had a fence around it, and that fence would protect you. Inside the fence you would get fed, and you would be safe and happy.

These days, you know that’s not true. You do not believe anymore that you are a baby cub. The thing that you are is something different, something with bristly fur and sharp teeth. A candle burns inside you, and every time someone blows out the flame, the wax splashes, hot against your lungs, and your teeth grow fangs.

On this day, you watch as Indiana walks off down the hall, opens a classroom door, and disappears. You decide not to go into class. It’s an easy decision, the first of many such easy decisions, the first of many times you will skip class. You walk toward the exit, hands balled into fists. You want to slam a locker to hear the metallic clunk. You want to tear down a flyer just to bite into the world that’s bitten into you.

You stand alone on the front steps of your school. It’s midday, gray and wet, a yellow school bus idling on the curb. The driver looks at you. You look at him. You lift your shoulders into squares, something you have been practicing, perfecting hardness until you get it right. The driver turns his head.

You move along the sidewalks, raindrops plunking into your scalp. At the promenade, you grip the black railing that overlooks the East River. From where you stand you can see the Empire State Building, the Chrysler, silver skyscrapers that beckon with promises you can’t yet name.

You wish you’d had something clever to say to Indiana. You wish you weren’t a virgin. You wish you weren’t short, like your father. You wish you weren’t shy. You wish, sometimes, that your hair was blond.

Hey, man! someone yells.

You turn, see three boys zigzagging down the pathway on skateboards, their rolling wheels growing along the asphalt. One of them has tattoos all the way up his arm. The other two don’t look that much different from you–brown-haired, skinny white boys wearing hi-top Converse, blue jeans, white tee shirts with band names on them, black sweatshirts unzipped. You realize they are shouting to each other, not you. They do not see you.

You stand motionless, your small white claws tucked under the black straps of your backpack, watching as these wild gorillas skate past you, one with his arms straight up, the other speeding down the promenade and then popping up, coasting, flying.

In an instant they are gone, only the gravelly trails of their wheels still humming in the wet air. You turn back to face the water, its choppy gray waves.

It is 1987. You are thirteen years old and now know three things to be true: First, the world beyond school is big and ripe and waiting to be plucked. Second, Indiana McCallister is going to be sorry she ever turned her back. Third, you need a skateboard.

*

It is your father who disapproves the most. Who worries the most. He asks you, Isn’t it dangerous, that thing? He asks you, You don’t ride it in the street, do you, Michael? He tells you to wear a helmet, begs you to wear elbow guards, shin guards. He sighs dramatically, says, I’m just worried about you.

He touches your face and you flinch. Your parents often make you flinch. The way your father caresses your face with his fingers, holds the back of your neck—he’s like a girl sometimes in his neediness, his hunger for affection. Then, in other ways, he’s not a girl at all. He wakes up too early in the morning and drinks too much coffee, and his forehead is creased with worry lines that don’t go away. He’s just a sad, sad man.

You say, Yeah, dad, I’m fine, don’t worry about it.

I do worry, he says.

I know you do, you say, and give him one of your most boyish, understanding smiles.

Oh, Michael, he says. My little boy.

Your father: He’d once wanted to be a professor, a scholar. From as far back as you can remember, he’s been teaching you about film, how to watch a film, how to think about a film, how to read a film. You know more about Sergei Eisenstein and the Marxist dialectic, more about Leni Riefenstahl and German propaganda cinema, than any thirteen-year-old boy on the planet. He had wanted to be an intellectual of influence, your father. But he couldn’t be, and so he drives a taxi.

Your father’s taxi smells of sweat. It smells of hard work. It smells of old people and hot leather and hair grease and cologne. It smells of stale bagels and old coffee and the papery sour smell of money.

In the backseat of your father’s cab, you have often stared at his hack license. There is his driver number and the license expiration date, along with the photo of his face. In the photo he looks stunned, as if surprised to find himself in front of a camera, and a little bit confused, as if he cannot quite understand why he’s there. The photo is clipped to the seat, shielded with Plexiglas, smudged with the oil of thousands of strangers’ hands.

Promise me you’ll be careful, your father tells you, staring hard at the skateboard propped at your knee.

Of course, Dad, you say. I’m always careful.

 

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To read this story in its entirety, please purchase a copy of Issue #22, which will be released in December 2025, or become a subscriber to the magazine.