FFXIAH Linkshell Ni

Robert had trouble letting go of those thrilling days of yesteryear when you were too young to drive and too old ignore the opposite gender any longer... Luckily, there was a place where young people's hormones could run wild...the skating rink! It had everything a pimply faced geek could ever want... bad music, smelly rental roller skates, and dim lighting. You could smoke cigarettes and arm wrestle and act tough and get in fights and awkwardly try to hit on girls...

There wasn't a posted age limit but nobody drove a car there, by the time you were a sophomore in high school everyone else had moved on... except robert.

Which concerned people more and more as time went on. Junior year he is still hanging out with the teenyboppers. Later on he was one of those seniors that spent WAY too much time impressing the freshmen girls... I didn't hang out with him much but I was friendly with almost everyone.

By senior year I was working full time, already wearing *** groves in my favorite bar stool and even cashing my pay checks there.

I remember this one friday we were headed over there to grab some steak sandwiches and a pitcher of beer and robert and I were the last people in the room and I invited him to come along....

and he declined saying he was going to the skating rink... I thought maybe he was going to pick up a younger sibling, but no. He was dead serious. He went there every weekend he said...

So I get to the bar and grab my stool, the waitress points at me and says "steak sandwich platter honey?" and I nod. I can see she already has my carton of lucky strikes set aside and is filling up a pitcher before I even ask for it...

My friend bob notices my furrowed brow as I settle in and asks what's wrong. So I ask him in a low tone if he knows about robert still going to the skating rink... and it turns out I am the only one who hadn't noticed robert's unusual attachment to our beloved junior high hang out.

Jesus...

The general consensus was that robert had at some point either "lost it" or perhaps never had it to begin with. Either way there was no reaching him and it was only a matter of time before he was doing twenty long for statutory.. At some point, that I was unaware of, he had been branded a creep and was avoided at all costs by my peers... I didn't get the memo.

As it turned out, I was the last one to notice a lot of things....
that had been happening all along, just below the surface of our weird little high school. The kinds of things nobody likes to talk about. My train was leaving the blissfully unaware station and headed for stark reality and all points beyond...

choo choo