All Planned Out

Twelve (Charlotte)

I don't know what Stuart was ever talking about.

We had two, or maybe three, laps of the park since our arrival. Montana had yet to so much as frown in my direction, even as more and more people arrived and started clogging up the space around us. Most of them were older kids, probably college aged, though a gaggle of middle schoolers had also taken up residence at a set of picnic tables by the entrance. Not a single one of them had a skateboard, and most of them looked even less coordinated that I would be if I tried to do anything like what I was filming Montana doing.

It had not taken us very long to find a groove. She would stop, point at me and then off in a direction across the park, weaving her hand up, down, and side to side in a silent attempt to explain to me what she was about to do. After the first two or three passes, it wasn't hard to translate these movements into where I needed to rush to find the best possible angle to shoot. Once in position, it was only a matter of me making sure to frame her properly as she skated toward me and then delicately chase after her as she passed, dodging and ducking other skaters as we went. Because I hadn't remembered seeing too many people in the background of her videos, I tried to keep the space around her as clear as I could. By that third lap, it was basically an impossibility, and I caught myself zooming into closeups of her face, feet, or the rest of her body in an attempt to keep her as much in focus as I could.

"I think we should take a break." She said after coming down a little too hard from a hop over a curb. "I'd like to see what you've got on there."

"Uh, sure." There had been a few moments early on where I had been nervous that she was going to have another fall, or worse, but after ten or fifteen minutes of watching her smoothly skate, all those fears vanished. Now, as I held out the camera for her, they all came rushing back with a vengeance.

"No, not here." She gestured across the park to an open picnic table. "Let's go over there so I can sit down."

"Okay." I nodded, but before I could take a step she was up on her board and skating off, only to stop after about a dozen feet and turn back.

"Sorry." Her face almost looked red. "I'm used to Stu just running off. He might be a puppy but he's also at least a couple percent gazelle."

"At least a couple." I mimicked, and she smiled as I caught up.

In the forty-five seconds or so that it took us to reach the table we didn't say a word to each other, but just the knowing that Montana paused to wait for me so that we could make the trip together had my heart fluttering. She kept one foot on her board and the other pushing herself along, kicking it around next to the bench so that, as she sat down, she could sit both feet sideways across it and let it glide back and forth beneath her.

"So, let's see what you did."

I handed over the camera and then immediately let my attention wander back over to the middle schoolers. At the end of one of the benches, two girls were sitting with one on the other's lap. I couldn't help myself. I stared them down. I couldn't tell if this display was one of affection or just because the table was full of people and they both wanted to be included. They weren't looking at each other or touching each other in any way besides one girl's butt on the other's legs. There were no discreet, or obvious, plays at handholding or quick glances of the bottom girl's lips grazing the top's neck.

Would I have even known that was a thing that could possibly feel amazing in eighth grade?

I continued to stare, not because I was still waiting to see some kind of empirical evidence that tinier lesbians than me exist in the world but that I just could not, under any circumstances, pay attention to whatever it was Montana was doing as she looked over the footage I had shot.