Skater Boy 

One afternoon in the early Spring, my friend Arne and I went to Hasenheide to play ping pong at the tables along Flughafenstrasse. It was cold and bright, and the ground was still damp from a rain shower earlier in the day. The tables were full when we arrived, so we decided to wait at the skate park, which is next to the ping pong area and has more places to sit down.

For no particular reason, we had decided to dress up for the occasion. Arne was wearing a blue and white seersucker suit and a beige hat made of some woven cord, which was flat on the top and had a wide brim. I had on a pair of coffee-colored slacks and a jacket made of something that looked like linen. Underneath that I had a sort of phosphorescent button-down shirt depicting a desert at sunset.                 

 The skate park is about the size of a basketball court and consists of a couple of quarter pipes, a rail, several ramps, and some raised concrete blocks. Over to one side is a sort of gazebo thing with a couple of benches underneath it, where everyone parks their bikes and there's usually a couple of people smoking. When we got there the concrete was still wet from the rain before, so most of the skaters were sitting around, congregated in the patches of sunlight. There was a clump of adults with children on bikes or scooters, and a pair of girls sitting on their boards, but other than that it was all younger guys, between their teens and mid-30s.

It was obvious that Arne and I didn't belong to this tribe, and as we walked around the permitter I was aware that I didn't know how to behave; what sort of rules there were for observers, where my eyes should or shouldn't go. I had walked by the skate park countless times while strolling in Hasenheide, and I had often glanced at it out of the corner of my eye, but there was always something that prevented me from actually stopping. Maybe it was that I didn't want to admit, even to myself, that I was curious about something that had no place for me.

Arne and I found a place for ourselves off to the side of the gazebo, where there was a piece of concrete so we wouldn't have to sit in the dirt. Arne set his hat down and slipped off his loafers, and I untied my shoes. The sun was out and there were birds darting between the tree branches overhead.

On the far side of the skate park, opposite Arne and I, a pair of teenagers caught my attention. One of them was taller and had a buzz cut, the other had shoulder-length dark hair and what I took to be asian features, smooth skin, thin firm lips, and sharp cheekbones. The dark-haired boy was holding a video camera, one of those old-school ones from the early 2000s with a hand grip and a little screen that pops out on the side. He would skate slightly behind his friend, holding the camera at waist level, while the boy with the buzz cut manipulated his board, grinding the rail, flipping it up the set of steps.

After a while they switched, the one with the buzz cut took the camera and the dark-haired boy started doing tricks. He wasn't particularly good, as far as I could tell - he fell down a lot, and when he did manage to land his feet on the board it often looked like an accident. But he was beautiful to watch. As he glided over the concrete, the force of the motion drew back his hair and pressed his clothes against his body. When he did land correctly, he would straighten up and smile back at the camera, pleased and at the same time embarrassed by this pleasure. Even when he made a mistake, his movements looked more innocent than anything else.

Watching him, I let myself drift outside of myself for a moment. I felt that I wasn't entirely inside my own body. Maybe I was in a different body, maybe it was the body of a young girl, sitting there in the same spot, next to the gazebo, under the trees. I had picked out clothes that would make me stand out from the others, had arranged my hair carefully, taken extra care with my makeup. My stomach, her stomach, was slightly pinched by the waist of my pants, and I was a bit chilly, but I didn't mind because I felt a sort of electricity being near this boy, watching him move, watching his hair move. He would send himself up in the air and my body would rise slightly, as if the two of us were connected by an invisible wire, and if he looked in my direction I would turn my face to the ground. 

I was outside of myself and also not. I wondered whether I wanted this boy to see me, to notice my own body, which is nothing like that of a young girl. I wondered if I wanted to know what he looked like under his clothes. Did I want to know what his skin felt like, how it would be to wrap my hands around him, to run my finger along his neck. I couldn't tell. The feeling was more ambivalent than it is with women, more like a curiosity than a desire - I couldn't even be sure that it was a curiosity, exactly, so much as a sense of the possibility of being curious, of finding pleasure in the unknown. I did feel as though there was something drawing me towards him, and this caused me to be more conscious of my own body, how I held myself, when I moved how I moved, and how I thought about doing so.

Arne broke the weird spell I was under by announcing that he was going to grab us drinks from the biergarten. He picked up his hat and wandered off, leaving me by myself. I looked down at my pants and noticed a stain on my left leg, something with a reddish color, although the fabric was dark enough that it was hard to tell for certain. I reached into the pocket of my jacket and pulled out a pair of sunglasses; I put them on, leaned back, and unfastened the top button on my shirt.

The two boys were sitting down now, they had been joined by a group of friends and were gathered in a semicircle beside one the set of steps. There were joints going around, and someone was playing music from a portable speaker. The dark haired boy was sitting in profile to me, concentrating on something in his lap that I couldn't see. 

The boy with the buzz cut noticed me staring in the direction of the group and tapped one of his friends on the arm. From behind my sunglasses, I tried to figure out how to hold my head in a way that would make it seem as though I had been looking past them, or just zoning out. But it was no use. One of the boys in the circle, slightly heavyset, with long curly hair, stood up and started walking in my direction. I took my phone out and pretended to be reading something.

The curly haired boy stopped a few feet in front of me and said something in German. I looked up at him and didn't have to pretend to be confused.

"Entschuligung?"

The boy repeated himself, but I still couldn't tell what he was saying.

"Sorry-" I gestured meaninglessly.

"I said, do you want something."

"Do I want something?" I glanced over his shoulder. The dark haired boy was looking in my direction now.

"Weed, pills." He put his hands in his pockets.

"Oh." My mind was blank for a moment. "I'm fine, thanks. Nein, danke."

He shrugged and turned around, walking back towards his friends. I took a deep breath, and realized that my heart had started beating faster. I went back to scrolling on my phone until Arne returned with our drinks.

Clouds gathered overhead while we drank our radlers, and when I was about halfway through, it started to drizzle. Most of the skaters ran for cover under the gazebo or one of the nearby trees. A few kept skating, ignoring the droplets. One of them, a guy in his 40s, fell off the bar and landed in a bad way; he lay on the ground for a few seconds, his face turned up to the rain.

Arne covered his eyes with his hand. His hat wasn't much protection in this weather, and little beads of water had started to run down the side of his face. It didn't seem to bother him though, and I didn't mind it either. It felt good to have the water come down, to see it agitate the plants and make the trees shiver.

The rain kept coming down, and the clouds didn't seem to be going away any time soon, so after a few minutes Arne and I decided to head back to the ping pong tables. It's actually not so hard to play in the rain if you have the right table, the surface changes a bit but you get used to it.

As we walked along the side of the skate park, we passed by the group of teenagers. They were leaving too, strapping their boards to their backpacks, some of them already wheeling their bikes along. The heavyset boy nodded to me as they passed, and I raised my hand in a sort of wave. The dark haired boy was ahead of him and hadn't paid any attention to me as he went by. His friend, the one with the buzz cut, had bumped into him from behind, and now they were laughing and chasing each other down the street.

"What was that about?" Arne asked.

"Nothing. He wanted to sell me drugs."

Arne nodded, digging around in his backpack for the ping pong paddles. The skater boys were all heading away from the park now, moving in a sort of braiding pattern, weaving through one another.

Just for a moment, I felt a slight pressure in my chest, watching them go. I had no idea what their lives would look like after this moment, where they were going next, where they would fall asleep after it was all over. We had been together for a moment and now we were farther apart.

Moses Allan Hubbard is an editor and writer living in Berlin. His work has appeared in print and online at City Paper, Sleek, Lahar, L'Inquita, FU Review, AKA, and others.