Catching Up On Skates

Who: Skye and Kyle
When: After school
Where: Skating rink

It turned out that there was a certain point where your brain could only deal with so much fear and frustration and upsetting things like that before the breakers trip (that or the fuses blow, and the former was preferable to the latter) and it all just kind of shut down on you. Skye had reached that point and she was doing her absolute damnedest to ignore the ghosts/spirits/general weirdness that was wandering throughout not only Marquette but the entire bloody world. Maybe further. Maybe there were space ghosts. Well, either way she just wasn't processing anymore weirdness right now and she was off doing her own thing in her own clothes (old, scuffed up blue jeans, a long-sleeved black shirt, and a blue flannel over shirt that was warmer than it looked - nothing like the clothes she was 'supposed' to wear as part of Chrissy's crowd, and she'd changed into them after class) and her aunt's skates. Everything else could just go to hell in a hand basket; Skye was determined to skate at least once before the world ended. Maybe even stop without using a wall or gravity. Or that would be a sign of impending doom, though, probably.

So she did up the neon pink laces on the skates and stepped carefully out onto the ice.

Kyle was at the skating rink, despite practice having been canceled for some reason Kyle didn't quite understand. There were rumors going on around about ghosts? But Kyle was starting to think that the whole town was starting to go off it's rocker. He hadn't seen shit and Halloween was over, so he was thinking that the pranks or hoaxes, or whatever they were, needed to stop. He went to the rink anyway to practice on his own and he was skating out onto the ice when he spotted a familiar face. He grinned and skated up to her, coming to a graceful stop beside her.

"Fancy meeting you here."

Gravity was, on occasion, Skye's enemy. So a little surprise like that on thin blades of metal on a very slippery surface gave gravity the opportunity to send her sprawled out on her back with the blades of the skates pointing up instead of being horizontal with the ice. In this case, it was Kyle. She blinked up at him, in a slightly confused way. "You've grown taller?" Then Skye shook her head and did the second hardest thing in the world on a pair of skates next to stopping: getting up. Skye ended up on her rear once more before she managed to get to her feet. "Ahem. Hi. How are you?"

Kyle made a grab for her to keep her from falling, but he wasn't quick enough and she fell on her ass. He bit the inside of her cheek to keep from laughing, knowing he shouldn't be so entertained by the poor girl fumbling around. She managed to get herself up on her skates again, prompting Kyle to grin. "I'm, uh, good! How about yourself? Not in too much pain, are ya?"

"Nah. I doubt I'll even bruise. Thank you for asking though. Is there a practice today? I thought I'd heard that it had been canceled - I can come back another time." Skye frowned a little, looking for the other members of the hockey team, and relaxing slightly when she didn't see anyone else coming out onto the ice. She grinned a little sheepishly, rubbing the back of her neck, and looked down at herself. Mentally, she cringed. "Or I could go hide and we could both pretend you didn't see me in my cowgirl outfit."

"Nah, it was canceled for some reason," Kyle said, scowling briefly. "So I decided to come and skate around a bit myself." His eyes drifted down her body, taking in her clothes. He chuckled and looked up again, skating backward a bit, but not far enough that he couldn't talk to her. "Your cowgirl outfit looks cute... all you need is a cowboy hat, right? You wanna skate with me for a bit?"

"I have a stetson at home." Skye admitted. "And please! Once I start moving on ice, gravity tends to leave me alone a bit more." She grinned a little sheepishly. "A bit more. Stopping usually requires a wall or something, too. But I can mostly skate, at least." In fact, she took a couple of faltering glides towards him until she found the rhythm again and started to look more like a skater and less of a mess.

Kyle skated with ease, grinning as he watched her. "Next time where the stetson. That'll definitely get you noticed. What made you want to come here alone?" Not many people liked ice skating alone. Or going to the movies alone... or any kind of activity that was more fun with two or more people. Of course, Kyle was there alone, but that was more because he didn't want to get rusty with the hockey team.

Skye shrugged. "Why not? It's not as if I have any close friends to invite skating with me anymore." Besides Chrissy, who wasn't exactly alive anymore, and Aaron, who'd moved, Skye really didn't have anyone she could spontaneously ask to do anything with. And Aaron hadn't been all that good of a friend, either. He'd just been there. Skye suddenly felt really lonely, and really homesick. She sighed.

He was confused at first by what she meant, before he realized she had been friends with Chrissy. "Oh... hey, I'm sorry about that. How're you doing?" Kyle asked, falling into skating beside her, rather than in front of her. "Since it happened and everything."

"I don't... I don't know." Skye shrugged. "A lot of the time I expect her to wander in and laugh about the 'stupid gossip'," she made quotation marks in the air with her fingers, "about her dying, but I know in my head she died. I guess the rest of me just hasn't caught up yet." She fell into a lazy rhythm beside him. "How do you deal with that kind of thing? It's never happened to me before."

"Ah, honestly I've never really had to deal with it. I mean, I knew the kids that died, but I wasn't close to them. I was friends with Chrissy... as much as anyone could be friends with her." Kyle frowned briefly, unsure of how he felt about it really. He didn't really like to think about it. "It's pretty fucking tragic if you ask me. I don't think it's anything anyone really needs to deal with and get over right away. It'll take awhile."

Skye nodded and skated beside him quietly for a few moments. "So... how are you, then? Everything going alright with you? I mean it this time - I'm not just covering up the embarrassment of falling on my backside because you scared half the life outta me. I don't think I've managed to catch you in the hallways to say more than two words to you since Kavin's party."

"I'm fine, actually... good. I mean, everything is going alright with me." Kyle grinned at her. "Sorry I scared you. Didn't actually mean to do that. I don't really run in Chrissy's circle, so I'm not surprised we didn't talk much after the party. I've just been trying to keep up with... uhm..." He brows drew together in concentration before he relaxed. "Homework. And hockey and everything. Same old same old. There were those animal attacks in town and everything that kind of kept me inside." Or with Alexis, which was just as good.

"Yeah. One actually got into my house and tried to get my aunt's cat. Kavin ended up finding me in my aunt's car and taking me to his parents place 'cause I didn't want to be there alone. So I skipped school on Monday to fix things up, but there was basically no homework to catch up on because of the whole people dying thing, so..." She shrugged again, which somehow ended up her losing her balance and thumped down on her knees. "...getting better at this!"

That was a lot of information in one seemingly long sentence. When she fell, Kyle stopped and skated in front of her before offering his hands to pull her back up. "You're doing fine. Hope your aunt's cat is okay? And your aunt... er, and you. Which obviously you are, since you're here skating and everything. I'm glad Kavin was there to help you out. From what I saw on the news, those rabid dogs, or whatever the hell they were, were pretty vicious."

Skye figured he was just happily ignoring the ... well, not exactly obvious, just like her, and that suited her just bloody fine. "Cat's okay. Aunt wasn't home." She nodded. She was fully aware that she'd just rambled on like an idiot. Hurray. It was a fight to keep from blushing, and she didn't succeed entirely but at least she managed to keep most of it off her face. "Let's talk about a happy thing. Um. What's happy in your life right now?"

"Happy? Uhm..." Kyle trailed off, trying to think of a good answer to that. He didn't mind her rambling. He knew a lot of people who rambled... and he definitely understood how it felt when your mind wandered away from you. Sometimes his didn't even like to work properly. It was frustrating. "I guess hockey's going pretty well. And I'm dating a cute girl at school. I guess that's a happy thing? What about you?"

"I..." she had to think for a minute. With everything going on that was bad, it was hard to think of something good. "I got to go skating today." She nodded. "I haven't skated in a long time, and I've only fallen twice." Well that was a happy thing! It seemed kind of comparatively lame, but it was really all Skye could think of right now. "I need to do this more often."

"That's definitely a good thing," Kyle agreed with a laugh. "The skating and the not falling thing. It's better than nothing right? You should definitely come do it more often... that's the best way to learn. Hell, even I still fall every now and then..." Even without large male bodies trying to knock him over in their pursuit of a hockey puck.

Skye grinned. "Good to know gravity doesn't dislike me alone. Who are you dating? Would I know her?"

"Gravity's not a fan of most people... some less than others," Kyle teased. He skated around her in one fluid motion before ending up beside her again. "Oh... yeah you might. Alexis? She's on the dance team at school. What about you?" He knew the girl had had a crush on Gabe... at least that was the impression he got the last time they spoke, but he hadn't seen Skye with a guy around school yet.

"An Alexis showed me around my first day, actually. I wonder if it was the same one? And nope. Not on the dance team. Or dating. I'm not sure which that question referred too." She shrugged good-naturedly with a smile. "But either way, it's still no."

"Not many Alexis's in school, so it was probably her. Blonde? Pretty?" Kyle grinned at her confusion. "I meant it in the dating sense, not the dancing one. I'm surprised Chrissy didn't talk you into joining the cheerleading squad before. She always seemed to like having her friends in the same activities as her."

Skye shrugged again. "She did. I was going to try out, but we never really settled on a date because she was teaching me how to do the fundamentals of it all so that I didn't look like a complete waste of time. And then... yeah. No more Chrissy. And honestly?" Skye looked around like someone might overhear her. "I can barely stand some of the girls that ran with Chrissy. Seriously. We had chickens back at the farm? They sound like them. I am not kidding you. Some of them have about as much brain capacity, too." She muttered.

Comparing Chrissy's friends to chickens definitely earned her a laugh. "I never really thought about them like that," Kyle admitted, still chuckling. "But yeah, I can totally see it. I know it sucks that she's gone, but you're much better off not having to hang around those girls anymore. They're pretty to look at, but they're missing most brain cells, you know? You seem more intelligent than being stuck in cheerleading anyway."

"Awuh, you're sweet!" Skye grinned at him. "I'm not comfortable with them. They like to gossip, and gossip is usually really dumb. But at the same time, I don't exactly have a lot of friends, annoying or not, without them. Rocks and hard places."

"Well, you've got me as a friend... though I'm not any better, I don't think. I can talk about sports and movies. Everything else I don't know much about," Kyle admitted with a sheepish grin. "You're new to town still, but you'll make friends. Hopefully better ones than the girls Chrissy hung out with. There's some pretty decent people in school, you just got to get to know them."

"You don't sound like a hen." Skye said in what was supposed to be a reassuring tone, though honestly it was more like she was trying not to laugh. Oh, this was nice, being able to actually talk to someone! "Though, honestly, we didn't have many chickens. We were a dairy farm."

"Good to know. I'm always wondering if my voice is coming across like poultry." Kyle shot her an amused look. "Dairy farm? Like... milking the cow and making butter and all that?" Sounded boring to Kyle, but it might not be for everyone. He just knew most farms meant work at sunrise and stop at sunset and that would suck.

"And homemade icecream." Skye nodded. "And branding them, selling them, breeding them, feeding the stupid things, roping, inoculating, herding, checking on the calves. Lots of work. But on the other hand, fresh milk, fresh butter, fresh beef - and I guess we could've had fresh cheese if anyone bothered to make that, but no one did. We had enough to do."

Kyle cocked an eyebrow, trying to keep up with everything she was mentioning. "Wow... that's... a lot." He was so, so thankful he hadn't ever had to work on a farm. "So, why did you... move... to Marquette? I mean, if you had a farm and everything?"

"Oh, that's not even half of it." Skye shook her head, grinning. "There was also maintenance, the vegetable garden, the chickens, repairing fences, all that stuff. But I'm in Marquette 'cause of my aunt - my cousin went to college in some other state, and she asked them if I wanted to come and try out a real school. They thought it would be a good idea, so... yeah." She held up her hands in a ta-da! gesture. "Here I am."

"So you chose Marquette and a normal school over the dairy farm?" Kyle pretended to be shocked by her decision. "You're crazy. I think I would have wanted to stay and milk cows all day. Er and repaired fences and stuff." Chuckling, he turned and began to skate backward, though he kept his eyes on her. "Do you think you made the right decision?"

"Never been to a normal school before. It's been interesting." Skye nodded agreeably. "I mean, in spite of everything that happened. And honestly? I kind of miss the cows and chickens and the vegetable garden. And my parents and brothers. And the barn cats. And listening to the songdogs - coyotes - out in the fields at night, y'know? At the end of the north field, we had a pond and that's where we'd skate in winter. And there was forest that just looked like something out of a fairytale in winter." She sighed. "I miss having things to do. I get up at five-thirty in the morning and go to bed late still, but I'm bored almost the entire time."

He could understand that. Being new in town and not knowing many people... when you're used to constant activity and then not having it. Kyle knew he'd go crazy with it. "Why don't you go back home? I mean, if you're bored here and you miss your family and stuff..."

"Because I kind of like it here, too. I'm not really... built, I guess? For the heavy chores at home, and those are the ones that need doing more often then not. And I'm good at math - really good - and at home who am I going to use that with? Making the cows practice their times tables?" Skye shrugged, feeling kind of lost between two worlds with this conversation. "Heh. Find me some cows nearby and I'll teach you how to brand and outrun the suckers, though."

"You could count the chicken eggs," Kyle suggested with a soft snicker. He shot her an amused look at the mental image she had just given him. "You need to know how to outrun a cow? I can't imagine they're that fast, are they?" And he couldn't believe he was having this conversation with someone. It felt surreal, but it still entertained the hell out of him.

"Yeah, you wouldn't think that semi trucks are fast either, but they definitely can be. I'd be way more worried about them kicking you, though. Or anyone, actually." Skye grinned. "They can't stop on a dime, or turn on one, but um... have you ever seen the running of the bulls in Spain on television? Yeah, they can run. And they have a lot of stamina, too."

"Semi trucks? Those things fly down the highway... unless you're talking about some weird farm truck," Kyle said. "But yeah... never thought about cows the way I did bulls... interesting. I'll have to remember not to piss off any cows in the near future." Kyle smiled and shook his head. "See? You learn something new everyday."

"At least we made sure our cows didn't have horns." Skye nodded. "Or else I probably would've been in a lot more trouble and never have gotten here."

"Yeah." Kyle grinned again and then laughed. "I can't believe I'm skating and talking about cows and dairy farms... not that it's a bad thing," he was quick to assure her, "just... sort of surreal."

"Oh, well." Skye blinked, with a little blushing smile. "I guess it's not something people usually talk about. What do people talk about then? Er." She rubbed the back of her neck and looked up at the lights above the rink thoughtfully. "Your team is actually pretty good at hockey."

"No, I'm sure some people talk about it," Kyle was quick to assure her. "Just... not people who don't work on a farm. But yeah... we're pretty good. Sucks with Gabe being hurt and everything, but we're not having a bad season so far. Have you been coming to the games?"

"I've been to all of them so far." Skye sighed theatrically. "I guess I'm just not cool enough for y'all big city folk ta notice lil' ol' me." She teased him with a really dense, silly accent that she was pretty sure no one actually talked with in general.

"Aw, no that's not it," Kyle promised. "I don't really notice anyone there when I'm playing." Hell, the only reason he knew Alexis was there because she was on the dance team. "That's cool that you come to every game though. It's pretty awe inspiring how amazing I am, right?"

Skye had no idea which number Kyle was, actually, and she didn't know what his last name was, and when they were crashing around on the ice it was nearly impossible to see faces. "Definitely. The entire team is great. Um. What number are you?" She blushed, but grinned at the same time.

"Seven," he informed her with a grin. "It's my lucky number so... it seems to work for me. I'm leading the team in goals, you know..." Yeah, he was boasting, but fuck it. If he was good at something, why not boast a little? Especially to a cute girl.

"Okay, tell you what." Skye grinned, eyes lighting up a little. "You and your team not only win the next game but you make at least one goal and I'll owe you a favor. If you don't, you owe me one. Not huge favors, of course. It's just a fun bet. Deal?"

"Hmmm..." Kyle considered that for a moment before smiling. "Yeah, okay. You're gonna owe me a favor, though, you know that, right?" And hey, it gave him even more incentive to score now, didn't it?

"Sure, sure. Now that you've said it out loud, you know you're going to owe me one, right?" Skye gave him a friendly kind of smirk. "The one game all season, I bet."

"You sound sure of yourself," Kyle said, eying her warily. "I guess we'll see. And hey, don't know if you've noticed..." He motioned toward her feet. "You haven't fallen in quite awhile."

Skye grinned. "Why shouldn't I sound confident? It's part of the game. Like bluffing in poker. And yeah, I can skate. I just haven't done it in a long time, that's all. Stopping is another matter entirely, though!"

"I guess you're right. I guess we'll see come Thursday," Kyle smirked. "And stopping's not so hard... the more you do it, the easier it gets. You look like you know what you're doing though. Do you roller skate too?" He didn't know if they had roller rinks near the farm, after all.

"Ha! Yeah, right. If I stop, I go down. Anyway, no, I've never roller skated." Skye grinned. "I'd hate to see me try. Probably end up breaking my neck or something. It would be an accident waiting to happen if I put a pair on, I'm sure."

"It's easier than skating on ice," Kyle pointed out. "At least for me... but that's okay, ice skating is much more fun. Practice makes perfect, or something like that. You seem to do okay on these skates. And if you come here often enough, which you should, then you'll be as good as the guys on the hockey team... skating wise anyway."

Skye laughed. "I doubt that, but it's nice of you to say! Can you imagine me all decked in the hockey stuff, though? I'd look like a marshmallow."

"Nah, you'd look fine. Maybe I'd laugh a bit," Kyle admitted with a grin. "But you know what? It's worth it if it means you don't break your bones, you know?" He checked his watch then and frowned. "I should probably get going... mom'll freak out if I don't get home for dinner." Family dinners were a rarity in his house. "You gonna be okay skating without supervision?" he teased.

"I'll survive somehow." Skye grinned at him and made little shooing motions. "I don't want to be the cause of familial stress. Go, go. I'll see you in school."

He grinned at her. "Thanks for keeping me company." It was better than skating alone most of the time, and if the company was a cute girl? Even better. He waved and headed off toward the edge of the rink to change his skates out, get his things and good. All in all, not a bad afternoon.