Ben got pretty hung-up on Allie. He only got to see her at the skating rink, but the bitch who ran the foster home dropped all the kids there once a week, so that was cool. The best part was when she skated backwards and wrapped her arms around his neck, her head and soft brown hair lain on his shoulder, during the slow couple skates. Bon Jovi’s “Bed of Roses” usually playing, a yellow or green glow stick stuck in her laces. He melted. It was all that much harder when Allie ran back to her ex after he dropped the girl he’d flaked on Allie for.

She hadn’t felt quite the way Ben did.

He tried it again with the girl he went out with next, got her to drive them to the rink just for that…though he hadn’t said it in so many words. She couldn’t backwards skate though, or much at all. They had to roll awkwardly next to each other, Ben clumsily pulling her along, out of synch with the music’s flow. It just didn’t work.

He broke up with her soon after.

David S. Atkinson is the author of Apocalypse All the Time, Not Quite so Stories, The Garden of Good and Evil Pancakes, and Bones Buried in the Dirt. He is a Staff Reader for Digging Through The Fat and his writing appears in Literary Orphans, The Airgonaut, Connotation Press, and others. His writing website is http://davidsatkinsonwriting.com/