The town of Purcellville, Virginia, purchased the Bush Tabernacle in 1947 from the Quakers after they all died out or got tired of making furniture. It had been a place of worship since 1903. The Quakers would sit around in a circle in deep contemplation, and then, when God struck, each stood up on their chair and proclaimed their realization to the rest of the congregation. Now the building is known as the Purcellville Roller Rink, and the only circles here are the ones people do on their roller skates.
Admission is six dollars and includes skate rental, half-price on Wednesdays. The open skate floor is surrounded by half-walls, exactly the right height to sock you in the gut (or worse!) when you careen into them at high velocity. To the right of the skate area is a collection of mismatched seating arrangements; everything from plushy tweed couches you'd pilfer from your grandmother's attic to folding chairs with metallic corners and trip-inducing splayed legs. Skaters have the option to aimlessly skate about in circles or weave between the unpadded pillars. A heavy green velvet curtain covered in pungent dust blocks off a rarely used stage along the north wall. They've attempted to modernize over the years, getting rid of the Pac-Man machine in the corner and putting in an Xbox, but the place still has the same century-old wood-lacquer smell of a hardware store. Generations of wheels have passed over the floors, drawing deep, counterclockwise ruts into the wood.
Every Friday, Bush Tabernacle hangs up its skates and becomes the Teen Center: a place for kids in their awkward years to learn the ropes of their burgeoning independence. You can play basketball, video games, four-square, socialize, and stay up past ten p.m., all without your parents' oversight. I understand that many of the kids at the Teen Center actually go to smoke weed out behind the Tabernacle, where they had their own brand of holy revelations.
As middle-schoolers, Mia and I were too refined for the Teen Center. We preferred the rink on Sundays instead, when we had the place to ourselves. Back then, everyone always said Mia's name and my name in the same breath. We were inseparable. The teachers loved us and gave us special treatment, always making sure the two of us sat together. In the first grade, Mrs. H. told my mom she was going to keep her eye on us. "Those two are going to rule the world one day!" she said.
We were best friends. We invented being best friends and did it better than everyone else.
The rink was walking distance from Mia's house. We'd strap on our rental skates and barrel around, bouncing off the walls, breathing in that honey-lacquer-dust smell. Pushing myself off the floor covered my hands in a layer of grime that I could only wash off after a good shower. We would see who could skate the fastest, who could stop without crashing. Sometimes, she'd skate backward (she was always better at that) and I'd spot her, warning her when she was about to run into a wall. It took a lot of practice to skate well, and even more to skate at the same pace, looking out for each other. When I was there, I felt like an Olympian on ice, skating like it was more natural than walking.
When we got tired, we dodged the folding chairs and collapsed on the couches, passing our middle-school rumors between us with holy importance. "A boy told me he loved me," I confessed once, and she nodded in patient understanding. This was our own Quaker sharing-of-revelations. "I don't think he meant it. He said it after I handed him the stack of papers Mr. Johnson asked to pass around. ‘Thanks, love you,' just like that."
"He was just trying to mess with your mind," she said. Mia always seemed to be the more mature one, even if she was a year and five days younger than me.
"Well, it's working," I said. Back then, it didn't take much for boys to get in my head. If any of them made eye contact with me for too long, I'd fall in love. I'd like to pretend things have changed, but they haven't.
I wiped the sweat off my brow, fixed my ponytail, and then pushed off the couch. "Race you to the water fountain!"
In high school, we didn't go to the rink as often. Skating was for little kids, judging by the clientele of the birthday parties that plagued the place. Besides, we had far less free time. Mia and I had both applied for a special science magnet program, but she was the only one accepted, so she spent half her time across the county at another high school. A wedge of jealousy threatened to get between her and me. What happened to being inseparable? What happened to conquering the world together?
I kept it to myself the best I could. Mia was the emotionally mature one, I needed her more than she needed me. Although, one evening when we were hanging out at her house, in the middle of a conversation about the ever-present drama between classmates, she burst into tears and sprinted into her closet. Turns out, she had stayed up until three a.m. every night that week to keep up with her homework and school and extra-curricular activities, and it was crushing her from the inside.
"The worst part is, no one's making me do any of this," she choked out. "I just feel like I have to, or I'm not good enough."
I wasn't sure how to help her. Mia's family was big and full of geniuses—trying to stand out didn't just require getting all A's, you had to reinvent the universe. I'd grown up with her siblings as if they were my own, yet I would never truly know what that pressure was like.
"If you could do anything for yourself right now, what would it be?" I asked. We ended up going across the street, to the roller rink, to skate out our problems at high speed.
Eight years have passed since those Sundays in Bush Tabernacle. We went to rival colleges and started new chapters of our lives; chapters without each other. It's hard to keep track of a rising star while you're trying to live your own life. Mia was burnt out on science and decided international politics was how she would change the world. I was studying engineering and writing. Rather than change the world, I wanted to escape it and build a new one.
Last winter, our schedules finally lined up. After months of near-misses, rescheduled flights, summer internships and busy schedules, Mia and I were both in the same town at the same time. She invited me to her parents' house so we could hang out like the good old days. When I came over, it was clear we had a lot of catching up to do.
She had new piercings. She was vegan. She was fluent in two languages. She spent the last two summers in Germany, working in a Syrian refugee camp one year and a house that supported women who had been the victims of sex trafficking in another. Mia spent her college years lifting the rock that covered the world's most disgusting problems and scowling at the bugs that crawled under there. College hadn't so much as changed her, but reinvented her into a competent, fearless woman intent on repairing our broken world. And what had I done, with similar resources and a world-class education? I'd grown out my bangs. That had been a big accomplishment at the time.
I sat on the floor of her parent's basement and stared up at the recessed lighting in the ceiling until I could see the purple spot of it when I closed my eyes. I listened to her talk about her amazing, stunning adventures in college and felt a churning in my stomach. Mia had always been an overachiever, sometimes to her own detriment. But she'd come into her own in college. Nothing was holding her back anymore. Not even me, her emotionally stunted best friend who ceased to function the one week we had a fight back in the fifth grade. She didn't need me, but I needed her, desperately.
When it was my chance to talk about myself, I was at a loss for words. What had I done that was worth mentioning? Studying computer science in a saturated market—who cared? And I spent all my time writing, but I only had one poem published? It had been years since I had to stand next to Mia and try to make my accomplishments even sound worthy. I forgot what an ordeal it could be. I think Mrs. H. was right, back in the first grade, when she said the two of us would dominate the world one day. But I think she meant Mia would dominate the world—and it was increasingly clear now that she could do that with or without me.
I fell silent for a long moment, my heart quietly breaking as I realized I no longer recognized my best friend. I wasn't worthy of her anymore. I should stay here on the floor of her parent's basement forever, another piece of detritus left behind as she put away childish things. Maybe one year she'd come home and find me in a box of childhood memories, marvel for a moment at how close we used to be, unchanging like a stuffed doll with only one outfit.
Mia sat up on one elbow to look at me. I desperately hoped at that moment she couldn't see the despair painted inside me. I tried my best to hold still, to not cry, something I'd struggled with my whole life.
"This is going to sound stupid. I know we're adults now…" she said, "but do you want to go to the roller rink?"
Bush Tabernacle had replaced the floors in the eight years since I'd paid for admission, but everything else remained stubbornly unchanged. Traffic still churned counterclockwise, and there was still a mess of kindergarten birthday parties and half-wall crotch casualties. Admission was still only six bucks, but that was nothing to us now, juniors in college with internships and paychecks. Even the music was the same; at one point, they started playing "Like a G6" by Far East Movement. Did Purcellville not discover Ariana Grande yet, or were they still using the same playlist from 2011? As the song blared, I finally had a lot more context for the lyrics now that I'd ventured slightly out of my sheltered, Catholic girl bubble. Poppin' bottles in the ice, like a blizzard. When we drink we do it right, gettin slizzard. No, those lyrics were not about getting Slurpees with your friends at 7-Eleven like I'd always thought. Maybe I should have gone to Teen Center as a kid, even if it was just for educational purposes.
I laced up my skates and looked around at the place, still overrun with incompetent primary schoolers, the teenager behind the concession stand still texting and sneaking stolen M&M's into their mouth. As dusty and rundown as this place was, I belonged here, an unchanging relic of Mia's childhood, something for her to recall in her memoirs after her extraordinary second term as President of the United States.
Even without practice, I could skate like it was easier than walking. Mia could still cruise backward as well as she could forward. We crashed into those couches after about two hundred high-speed laps, feeling sweaty and accomplished.
Looking at Mia sitting on that ancient couch, with rented roller skates and a can of Fanta in her hand, I saw shades of my best friend again. I couldn't blame her for being accomplished; in fact, that was the one constant I could rely on. She was still living her life like a backward skater, recklessly stunning the world. I loved her and wanted to keep up with her, but I'd accepted the role of plucky sidekick, of her moderating foil, long ago. It was all I could do to be there for her, spotting her to make sure she didn't fall. We were still us, just with a new lacquer coat and a fresh set of wheels.
"Any boy drama in your life?" I asked her, cracking open another soda from the concession stand. When we drink we do it right. Not mixing rum and Coke, but Fanta and Coke, a recipe we discovered as kids. God, we were still as straight-laced as the Quakers.
"Gosh, no. I think I'm going to stay single for a while, learn more about myself," she admitted, "That anti-sex-trafficking work in Germany made me realize that men are just really, really terrible."
"I'll drink to that," I said, holding up my soda can. All those years after the Quakers abandoned it, we were still having worldly revelations in the Bush Tabernacle.
We clinked our drinks together, finished them off, and helped each other up for another lap.
